Empty vault!

No summit minutes found in National Archive; mystery sets off new round of partisan bickering

By Jun Ji-hye

Officials of the National Archives of Korea take an elevator in the National Assembly Thursday to carry boxes containing presidential records of the 2007 inter-Korean summit to the Assembly Steering Committee’s meeting room where 10 selected lawmakers will scrutinize the material. / Yonhap

The whereabouts of the original minutes and tape recordings of the 2007 inter-Korean summit are shrouded in mystery.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers were caught by surprise when they failed to find the records of conversations between late President Roh Moo-hyun and late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il at the National Archives of Korea on Monday and Wednesday.

Their job was to examine the records to find out whether Roh had indeed conceded the Northern Limit Line (NLL) during the summit, a point of major political contention. The NLL is a de facto sea border in the West Sea.

For now, it is uncertain whether a technical glitch or a complicated security system was responsible. The possibility that the records were not stored in the first place can’t be ruled out.

Legislators said they will keep attempting to find the material along with records and archives professionals and will then make a conclusion regarding whether the material exists next Monday.

The ruling Saenuri Party and the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) held a meeting of the National Assembly Steering Committee on Thursday to hear from the lawmakers involved in the search.

“We could not find them. The archive staff said that it does not possess such material,” said Rep. Hwang Jin-ha, a Saenuri Party member of the committee.

The Saenuri Party concluded that the records had never been sent to the archives for storage, while the DP advised against a hasty decision.

People who worked for the Roh government claim that former President Lee Myung-bak could be involved in the mystery of the missing records.

DP lawmaker Woo Yoon-keun said that he was angry at the archives officials for saying that they do not have the records.

“I advised them to make greater efforts to find them,” said Woo.

Hwang and Woo are among 10 selected lawmakers selected to scrutinize the original records at the Assembly.

The records were so far said to be transferred to the archive center and sealed after the late Roh completed his term of office in 2008.

The DP reacted sharply because they expected the disclosure to settle the controversy surrounding Roh Moo-hyun who, according to the ruling party and the National Intelligence Service (NIS), negated the NLL.

Senior members of the DP cast doubts over whether the minutes and tapes really disappeared, saying there might have been a conspiracy orchestrated by the government of former President Lee Myung-bak.

“If nonexistence of the material is confirmed, we have no choice, but to question the Lee administration that has a history of elimination and concealment,” said DP floor leader Jun Byung-hun.

Jun argued that the reason for a “confident” release of the NIS-kept minutes by its head Nam Jae-joon’s decision to declassify them was because they already knew that the originals didn’t exist.

The DP earlier claimed that the minutes the spy agency released in late June were not original and that the NIS might have doctored it.

On the other hand, the ruling party refrained from making any specific comments.

Some members of the ruling party raised a possibility that the Roh government did not transfer the summit records to the archive office.

However, former authorities working for the Roh administration said the situation is beyond their understanding.

“We definitely handed in all records following Roh’s retirement. This is 100 percent,” said Kim Jung-ho who was in charge of managing the presidential records under the Roh government.

He cast doubts that somebody, who will be placed in an unfavorable position if the confidential records are made public, “knowingly evades the disclosure and pretends to be unable to find the material.”

Rep. Yoo Ki-june, a supreme council member of the ruling party, put more weight on the possibility that lawmakers failed to find the records due to technical issues regarding the data search, rather than the possibility of being disposed of by Lee or Roh.

“There is no way such significant material disappeared. In my opinion, the fundamental problem is the management system of the records,” said Yoo. “The archives should have arranged the presidential material more systematically so that they can easily search out whatever they need by keywords.”

Cheong Wa Dae said the minutes would be somewhere in the archives.

The archives submitted copies of presidential material that parties requested to the Assembly Thursday apart from those that they failed to search out.