Political 'purge or revolution' in Korea

A few hours before his first meeting with President Lee Jae Myung last week, U.S. President Donald Trump wondered on his social media platform about prosecution raids in Korea.

“Seems like a Purge or Revolution,” he wrote. “We can’t have that and do business there.”

The post threw Lee’s aides into a panic. But when he met Trump, Lee appeared to address things and everyone heaved a sigh of relief.

This was not the first time that doubts about a new leader in Korea have been bandied around in the Oval Office. The Kennedy administration thought the military coup here in 1961 was communist. When Roh Moo-hyun became president in 2003, the George W. Bush administration believed he was a radical activist.

Such suspicions were not unfounded. Records showed that, before the Korean War, coup leader Park Chung-hee had been arrested as a communist. As a politician, Roh Moo-hyun was an unknown backbencher but had previously been a labor lawyer.

The difference with Trump, of course, is that instead of turning to aides for clarification, he went straight to social media. Why? Who knows? Perhaps out of habit, or in a deliberate attempt to put his counterpart on the back foot.

So, what was he exactly referring to when he suggested something bad was going on in this country?

He had heard about three things in particular. One was a July 21 raid of the First Master Control Reporting Center at Osan Air Base by prosecutors looking to see if the Air Force had communicated with Drone Operations Command for a drone flight last year over Pyongyang. The prosecutors are part of the team trying to build a case that former President Yoon Suk Yeol had planned an insurrection and that provoking North Korea was part of the plan.

The second was a search and seizure raid three days earlier on the famous Baptist leader, Billy Kim, 91, the chairman of Far East Broadcasting, and Lee Young-hoon, 71, senior pastor of one of the world’s largest churches, the Yoido Full Gospel Church. Prosecutors suspect the Protestant leaders of illegally lobbying on behalf of a Marine commander being investigated over the death of a soldier under his command.

The third was a series of raids on the same day of the Unification Church’s headquarters in Gapyeong, Gyeonggi Province, a building in Seoul and the home of a former head of the Korean branch of the church suspected of giving luxury gifts to the former first lady, Kim Keon Hee.

While the military base raid directly involves U.S. interests because it is jointly operated by Korean and U.S. forces, the church raids drew attention of a different sort because the Yoido Full Gospel Church and Unification Church have both characterized the experience as a violation of religious freedom.

As for why Trump weighed in on these incidents, it is possible he heard of the Yoido Full Gospel Church case from his son, Donald Trump Jr., who attended a service there last November. He may also more likely have been told about the raids from Paula White, a spiritual adviser who heads the White House Faith Office. She is familiar with both the Yoido Full Gospel Church and Unification Church. Trump himself spoke at a Unification Church event in 2021.

In response to allegations that the raids were heavy-handed or amounted to persecution, the prosecution said they were related to ongoing investigations into the former first couple and conducted in accordance with the law.

From that point of view, there is no argument. The problem is that the American — and international — spotlight is now playing on something that is quite normal in Korea and doesn’t seem to bother us, but which we need to address.

That is the quinquennial prosecutorial investigation of the outgoing power-holders for corruption. Every new administration does it. Of course, there needs to be something to prosecute, and Yoon certainly supplied ample reason with his declaration of martial law. But the existence of corruption doesn’t fully explain it.

One underlying reason is that the judiciary is not sufficiently distanced from political power. The other is that prosecutors are motivated by career advancement to go zealously in the same direction, like the bough that bends before the wind actually arrives.

It’s so predictable that I’ll dig this column up five years from now and run an updated version.

Michael Breen (mike.breen@insightcomms.com) is the author of "The New Koreans.” The views expressed here are his own.