By Oh Young-jin
Assistant managing editor
First, I want to acknowledge the noble efforts being made even as I am writing this column by most of our diplomats to promote our national interests throughout the world from the United Nations headquarters in New York, the war zone in Iraq to any and all of the small little heard-of countries. For that, we offer them thanks from the bottom of our hearts.
So it is regrettable to point out the sorry state our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has been in for some time. But with a sense of justice owed to the majority of our warriors fighting on the global diplomatic battleground, I reluctantly speak because I hope it will make them stop and think.
To give you a heads up, I think that the foreign ministry’s biggest problem is that for some time it has not had a minister with a backbone, someone willing to call a spade a spade and put his neck on the line to stand up for a cause.
The current minister, Kim Sung-hwan, is a case in study not because he is alone in the category of “not-my-fault” diplomats but because he happens to be on watch now.
Kim looks aloof in spite of what is one of the biggest scandals that has ever hit the ministry ― the curse of (no) blood diamonds.
His ministry has been searched by prosecution investigators in the first such instance in its history, with boxes of potential evidence ― computer hard disks and documents ― hauled away.
The prosecutors’ intervention follows the Board of Audit and Inspection’s findings that a senior diplomat had played a key role in rigging the stock price of a Korean diamond mining firm working in Cameroon, CNK International.
Drawing the keenest attention in the CNK scandal is whether any inner-circle members of the Lee Myung-bak administration had dipped into the honey pot and stashed some away for their retirement.
If any of Lee’s people are found to have been entangled in this, it would not be the first or last time. Besides, those at the center of power tend to succumb to material temptations at the end of their tenure.
The real issue here is the erosion of integrity for the foreign ministry that should at all costs resist the pressures and temptations to play a subservient role for a given administration.
After all, the ministries are part of the establishment that provides a sense of consistency that comes despite changes of governments.
Mind-boggling is the fact that a senior diplomat is under suspicion for applying pressure on an embassy in Cameroon to work on behalf of CNK, a private firm, and actively trying to inflate critical information about the potential worth of diamonds believed to be buried in the area. He together with other former senior officials is suspected of pocketing significant monetary gains from the ups and downs of the firm’s stock prices.
It is no less than a betrayal of an oath to the nation whose interests he promised to do his best to protect and promote. More bluntly, it is an act of selling the nation.
Even more shocking is that the ministry supported this diplomat’s untoward action by issuing an official press release.
The senior diplomat in question claimed that the press release was issued with the knowledge of Kim.
So the foreign minister can be held accountable on two counts.
He has failed first to properly supervise his senior officials and secondly showed incompetence in the overall management of the ministry.
Even with the benefit of doubt and being pardoned on both accounts, he can’t be forgiven for his lack of leadership, not disclosing how he will learn from the errors and reorient his ministry so as not to repeat this kind of mistake and start fresh.
That is the least he owes us, the taxpayers.
Of course, he can argue in a typical bureaucratic way that he will do what is necessary in due course after investigations are completed.
Or he may feel under pressure from those in power to remain quiet or believe that he is tied by a code of silence as a Cabinet minister serving the head of state. We know that the Lee administration has placed top priority on the so-called resources diplomacy aimed at attaining energy security, causing some known and unknown hiccups in its implementation.
Kim should bear in mind that President Lee appointed him in his job but it is we the people who gave him the mandate to govern. In other words, we are his boss’s boss and expect his unquestionable loyalty.
For that, he should stop hiding and take a positive role in cleaning up the CNK mess. By doing so, he may rebut my claim that he doesn’t have a backbone. I would be delighted to be proven wrong.