Park must show statesmanship to end yearlong brawl
"Punish the heads of government agencies who meddled in elections, and restore constitutional order." These were the demands made at a joint meeting of political opponents of President Park Geun-hye Tuesday. Any foreigners who start watching the Korean news for the first time in 25 years or so might well think that the nation's politics has not changed a bit through all the years.
They are right: more precisely, politics here has gone back to conditions in 1987 when this country was still in the grip of military rulers; or, even much earlier than that, in some ways.
It needed only a single conservative government to nullify all the democratic progress and inter-Korean rapprochement made by four administrations in the preceding two decades.
The Lee Myung-bak administration poured cold water on the fledgling détente between the two Koreas, appointed corrupt, unethical figures to key posts, pushed ahead with massive, environment-destroying public works, wasted chunks of the nation's budget on abortive overseas resource development projects, spied on private citizens critical of the government, and all but certainly interfered in major elections, including the presidential ballot.
When Park Geun-hye became Lee's successor, voters hoped that she would prove to be a "different" breed of conservative. And they were right in part but in a disappointing way: Park is relatively cleaner than Lee but is more determined to push her unilateral agenda and far more non-communicative even than her predecessor.
The nation's first female president is not only loath to acknowledge that she benefitted, knowingly or not, from an online smear campaign allegedly conducted by the National Intelligence Agency against her rivals but is also going all out to politically rehabilitate the legacy of her father, the late President Park Chung-hee, as an effective nation builder and justified dictator.
So she has surrounded herself with figures who supported the senior Park's authoritarian rule, and is trying to shift to state-designated textbooks that justify pro-Japanese collaborators ― even the Japanese colonial rule itself to some extent ― and military rulers, clamping down on progressive unions for teachers and civil servants, and minimizing the ongoing investigations into election maneuvering by state institutions.
We, along with all Koreans who think that Korea's hard-won democracy is in danger, agree with the liberal alliance's three major demands ― dismiss key figures involved in the cover-up of the election scandals, drastically reform the state spy agency, and introduce an independent counsel to investigate the intervention in domestic politics by state agencies.
President Park must accept her opponents' calls ― at least part of them ― to put an end to a yearlong political dogfight, which has kept the entire political community from paying attention to more urgent national issues, such as economic recovery and amending inter-Korean ties.
Park will have an opportunity to do so on Monday when she is scheduled to deliver her first address to the National Assembly. If the president wastes this by countering the opposition's calls as just a political offensive, the nation's politics will fall back even further and stay there for years to come, taking away the valuable national energy for making progress in other areas, too.
President Park must recognize not only her historical standing but also that the nation's mid-term growth depends on how ― differently ― she spends the remaining four fifths of her tenure.
"Punish the heads of government agencies who meddled in elections, and restore constitutional order." These were the demands made at a joint meeting of political opponents of President Park Geun-hye Tuesday. Any foreigners who start watching the Korean news for the first time in 25 years or so might well think that the nation's politics has not changed a bit through all the years.
They are right: more precisely, politics here has gone back to conditions in 1987 when this country was still in the grip of military rulers; or, even much earlier than that, in some ways.
It needed only a single conservative government to nullify all the democratic progress and inter-Korean rapprochement made by four administrations in the preceding two decades.
The Lee Myung-bak administration poured cold water on the fledgling détente between the two Koreas, appointed corrupt, unethical figures to key posts, pushed ahead with massive, environment-destroying public works, wasted chunks of the nation's budget on abortive overseas resource development projects, spied on private citizens critical of the government, and all but certainly interfered in major elections, including the presidential ballot.
When Park Geun-hye became Lee's successor, voters hoped that she would prove to be a "different" breed of conservative. And they were right in part but in a disappointing way: Park is relatively cleaner than Lee but is more determined to push her unilateral agenda and far more non-communicative even than her predecessor.
The nation's first female president is not only loath to acknowledge that she benefitted, knowingly or not, from an online smear campaign allegedly conducted by the National Intelligence Agency against her rivals but is also going all out to politically rehabilitate the legacy of her father, the late President Park Chung-hee, as an effective nation builder and justified dictator.
So she has surrounded herself with figures who supported the senior Park's authoritarian rule, and is trying to shift to state-designated textbooks that justify pro-Japanese collaborators ― even the Japanese colonial rule itself to some extent ― and military rulers, clamping down on progressive unions for teachers and civil servants, and minimizing the ongoing investigations into election maneuvering by state institutions.
We, along with all Koreans who think that Korea's hard-won democracy is in danger, agree with the liberal alliance's three major demands ― dismiss key figures involved in the cover-up of the election scandals, drastically reform the state spy agency, and introduce an independent counsel to investigate the intervention in domestic politics by state agencies.
President Park must accept her opponents' calls ― at least part of them ― to put an end to a yearlong political dogfight, which has kept the entire political community from paying attention to more urgent national issues, such as economic recovery and amending inter-Korean ties.
Park will have an opportunity to do so on Monday when she is scheduled to deliver her first address to the National Assembly. If the president wastes this by countering the opposition's calls as just a political offensive, the nation's politics will fall back even further and stay there for years to come, taking away the valuable national energy for making progress in other areas, too.
President Park must recognize not only her historical standing but also that the nation's mid-term growth depends on how ― differently ― she spends the remaining four fifths of her tenure.
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