By Jun Ji-hye
The reasoning used among the rival political parties to pass a motion to enable disclosure of the original minutes of the 2007 inter-Korean summit kept in the National Archives was to settle controversy on whether late President Roh Moo-hyun disavowed a national sea border or not.
The motion was passed on Tuesday by an overwhelming majority in favor at the National Assembly.
The National Assembly sent an official request for disclosing summit records to the national archives Wednesday. The archives head should comply with this within 10 days.
But many obstacles still lie ahead, among them whether parties will put confidential information in the public domain, and if they do so, how this will be done.
Legislators are also expected to make different interpretations of the summit’s content, which will deepen the controversy regarding Roh’s ambiguous comments that the “Northern Limit Line (NLL) should be overhauled.”
Both parties requested that lawmaker’s be given access to the minutes of the summit, including recorded tapes, reports of pre- and post-summit arrangements and all other relevant electronic documents. They also asked the national archives to produce copies of this material and submit them to the Assembly.
However, the stance of the archives head Park Kyung-kook is quite different. He made it clear that he will only allow a minimal number of legislators to access to the material.
“We will discuss with party chairmen the designation of a range of records to be disclosed,” he told reporters, adding that lawmakers will have to visit the archives to read material.
Till the deadline of the disclosure, Park and the legislators will likely be in a collision course over the process of opening the records and the scope of disclosure.
Whether lawmakers will present the material to the public is also debatable.
The archives head also said that even after lawmakers look through the material, making it public would be a clear violation of law. Anyone who reveals the content of confidential documents can face up to three years in prison or the suspension of professional qualifications for seven years.
However, legislators, especially those from the DP, want to open the records to the public, stating that most information has been already leaked to media and ordinary people.
“The records were already no longer confidential. Opening originals to the public will become possible if the two parties and the archives head reach agreement,” said Rep. Kim Kwan-young, the DP spokesman.
Some say that if two parties agree to disclose the records to the public, they can do it in the National assembly because any statements made there are protected by parliamentary privilege that exempts them from civil or criminal liability.
What the DP expects from the original records with all appended material is comments of the then working level authorities as well as Roh’s. The party believes that this could prove the argument that Roh just tried to secure the border in a peaceful way and did not offer to give up the NLL.
Park Sun-won, Roh's secretary for unification, foreign affairs and security who accompanied Roh to Pyongyang, earlier disclosed a notebook that he used during the summit period and argued: “Roh wanted to establish a peace zone in the West Sea without touching the NLL.”
However, this intention could easily be lost if the rival parties have different interpretations of the content of the summit and become locked in dispute over which content they have to make public.
Instead of releasing the archived material that is strictly protected by law, some members of the Saenuri Party want to open recorded tapes stored in the National Intelligence Service (NIS) to the public. This is because it would be a comparatively easy task that could be done if the NIS head, Nam Jae-joon, decides to declassify them.
But the DP has long claimed that the NIS-kept material also consists of duplicates of original material, so the possibility that this has been manipulated cannot be ignored.