Foreign bride’s death

via Khmer NZ

07-12-2010

Shock may not be the word. It is with an extreme sense of shame and embarrassment that most Koreans face yet another report on the family violence leading to the death of a young foreign bride.

A 20-year-old woman would never have married a 47-year-old man with a long ― and very recent ― record of treatment for a mental disorder, had she known about it. It's almost as if three culprits had conspired to throw the Vietnamese wife into a tragic end by denying her that critical information; the unjustifiable selfishness of the Korean man and his family, money-blind matchmakers, and the authorities responsible for their supervision.

It was only this March that Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia asked President Lee Myung-bak to take good care of young Cambodian women married to Koreans, regarding them as Korea's own ``daughters-in-law." The Southeast Asian country once banned marriages with Korean men in protest of the 20:1 group interview-style matchmaking arrangement.

The latest incident, in which the near-deranged Korean husband beat and stabbed his Vietnamese wife to death just a week after her arrival here, indicates not much has changed on the part of not a few husbands-to-be, marriage brokers and even the government officials responsible.

This is unthinkable for a country, which has about 136,000 immigrant wives and four out of 10 farmers mostly marry other Asian nationals.

The Korea Immigration Service said Sunday it would enhance education for would-be husbands and refuse visa issuance for those with criminal and serious pathological records. These are necessary ― if belated ― steps, but fall way short of fundamentally tackling the chronic problem. What matters are not new decrees or laws but how the central and provincial governments implement them to drastically tighten their control on international matchmaking agencies.

In the longer term, the government's handling of multicultural family issues will also need to be checked from the ground up. Most urgent is the proper education of their children, as seen by the fact that the share of biracial students advancing to high schools remains at just 30 percent of the total.

In the best-case scenario, Korea can make the most of the growing multicultural population as a bilingual work force that supports its industry, especially the agricultural sector. In the worst, the nation could let them fall to a disgruntled minority suffering from the shortcomings of two cultures and factors of social unrest like the case of some European countries.

The economy aside, the time has long past for this would-be advanced country to improve the related system to fundamentally prevent the recurrence of such disgraceful incidents. Wasn't a ``nation with dignity" one of this administration's pet phrases, too?