It started with disabled people wanting to take the subway. After a wheelchair-bound man fell to his death on a Seoul subway stairwell in 2001, Park Kyung-seok started campaigning. Other disabled people soon joined him in calling for improvements to public transport to ensure that the chairlift accident at Oido Subway Station was never repeated.

Park founded Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination and launched the high-profile “Right to Move” campaign. But before their campaign reaped results, another woman died in a similar accident some years later.

Wheelchair user Park, 52, has held four hunger strikes for the cause, one of which lasted 39 days and almost claimed his life. He headed demonstrations, sit-ins and shaved his head in protest to demand more rights and protection for disabled people with much success.

Mass movements of disabled people onto trains and buses halted public transport and forced the issue of disabled access and rights into the public domain.

Protesters first endured angry shouts of “cripple” when they first chained themselves to buses to make their point. But eventually the government pledged to install more elevators in subways, and to make 50 percent of all city buses step-free.

SADD now includes over 170 smaller disabled people’s organizations, including a 15,000-member group for parents of disabled children.

Park also runs the Nodl night school in Seoul, which provides classes for 50 disabled children and employs 30 teachers, some of which are disabled themselves.

Park said life was improving for disabled people in Korea, but still more needs to be done.

“In the past few years, the disabled in Korea have struggled to survive, to have an independent living,” he said. “The disabled have struggled every day, to move, to use transportation, to be educated, to protect the minimum human rights of disabled people living in institutions.”

For more information go to www.sadd.or.kr

By Hamish Macdonald
Intern reporter