SEOUL — In three years of teaching English in South Korea, Tony Hellmann says he's seen discrimination both in and out of the classroom.
He knows teachers, he says, who are harassed for having Korean girlfriends. He's met only three black instructors in his time. And he's been denied service in Korean bars.
"I've been told to leave because I'm a foreigner," the 33-year-old Seattle native said.
Now Hellmann is helping wage a campaign against what he views as part of a troubling trend of discrimination against foreigners, this one fostered by South Korean officials: the idea that teachers from abroad routinely use illicit drugs and commit crimes.
A government policy enacted 15 months ago requires nearly 20,000 foreign English teachers to submit to HIV and drug tests, as well as criminal background checks not required of ethnic Koreans.
Many nations, including the United States, require entrants to fill out forms about their sexual and criminal histories, but activists say the situation in South Korea is different because it calls for foreign residents already in the country to submit to compulsory checks.
The tests, ordered by the Ministry of Justice, "reflect a mind-set that foreign teachers are potentially dangerous just because they are foreign," said Hellmann, a spokesman for the nonprofit Assn. for Teachers of English in Korea, which is being launched this month.
Many say the news media here have helped intensify stereotypes faced by the estimated 1 million foreigners living in South Korea.
One 2007 story on foreigners who commit crimes, published in the Chosun Ilbo, the nation's leading Korean-language newspaper, featured a cartoon with three knife-wielding characters chasing down a terrified Korean girl.
In the last year, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea upheld two separate complaints by foreigners -- one that businesses barred black Africans and another that firms set unfair requirements for non-Koreans seeking Internet service.
In a separate case not brought before the board, an African American soldier and mother of one serving in Seoul was recently asked to vacate her apartment after the owners learned she was black.
"We were honest," said a real estate agent involved in the deal, who asked not to be named. "We told her the owners didn't know she was black. When they found out, they wanted her to leave."
