Sunday, February 28, 2010

Memorial service for murdered Gwangju student.

A memorial service was held on the 25th for the Gwangju National University of Education student killed earlier in the month while on an exchange program in eastern Russia. Some 300 people gathered on campus on Thursday morning:



As is the style in Korea, photographers were quite close (1, 2, 3) to capture all the grief on film:





"Funeral porn" is the indelicate name given to these types of photographs that fill the online news sites each time there's a newsworthy funeral, and demonstrate the importance placed on public displays of emotion and mourning. Yonhap has a two-minute video from the funeral home.

His name is released in the latest articles, and is written on the banner above, and in a comment on the 27th "Pakou" wrote:
I'm super sad. The kid that was killed was a very nice guy. We taught English together this summer in Gokseong. My prayers to his family.

After the murder Gwangju National University of Education said it was halting its exchange programs with Russia; from KBS:
Gwangju National University of Education has decided to suspend its exchange programs with Russia after one of its students was killed by a group of Russian youths last week.

The university said Monday that it decided to suspend its program with Altai State University in Barnaul, Russia, in the wake of the recent incident, adding that it is also carefully reviewing whether to carry out Gwangju’s other overseas exchange programs that are usually conducted during vacation periods.

There is certainly plenty of reason to think the attack was racially motivated, and other articles have said Kang wasn't the first Korean student to be killed in Russia.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Russia??

my Russian are nice..
bad people are everywhere.

my pray goes for Kang's family.

Unknown said...

i mean 'my Russian friends'

1994 said...

Maybe the Korean student bumped into one of them. Not beyond the realm of possibility. You bump into someone in another country and it is a big insult.

Unknown said...

This sort of stuff is not new. It has been going on for years: Foreigners getting beat up or killed all over Russia and Eastern Europe only for the fact they are foreign. In Slovakia, a [white] British colleague and his Slovak girlfriend were beaten up by Skinheads because they were speaking English. African and Asian students are often targeted by skinhead gangs. If a Caucasian let it be known that he is foreign by opening his mouth and speaking a foreign tongue he is also fair game.

They could not pay me to go to Russia, which is far and away worse than Slovakia.