hankyoreh

Speaking at an official get-together October 1 with members of the National Assembly, Kim Hoe-seon, the vice chief of the National Intelligence Service, said South Korea “will be unable to take one step forward towards becoming an advanced nation without eradicating pro-North leftist elements within.” It would be hard to write off his comment as a mere slip of the tongue given the context in which he said them. It looks like he was clearly revealing his views and intentions regarding the so-called “public security incidents.”

This is a man who heads up the NIS’s domestic security section, so it could be that he is more hardened in his views than others. Even so, those views should fit within the general consensus of Korean society; if they go beyond that framework there are always excesses and negative side effects. What he said was extremely dangerous because, even for an NIS official, it denied the agreed direction our society has taken for the past few decades.

For starters, his choice of lexicon when saying “pro-North leftist elements” is highly irrational and political, much like the word ppalgaengi (“Commie”), both having been used by the military dictatorships and public security organizations long ago. Back in the day, public security agencies would openly make statements to the effect that they had to “crush the Commies to let the country live” and seemed to have said things like that thinking it would make them the true organs of the state. It was thinking like that which inspired a confrontational attitude between North and South, and we remember from experience how internally it led to human rights abuses and social conflict within South Korean society.

Once you say that the country “will be unable to take one step forward towards becoming an advanced nation without eradicating pro-North leftist elements within,” it becomes possible to assert that everyone who calls for the immediate collapse of the North Korean government is absolutely good and everyone who opposes that happening is engaging in “acts advantageous to the enemy.” Indeed, there actually are people among the ultra-right who really think that way. Most South Koreans, however, agree that it would be more desirable to change the North slowly, through inter-Korean cooperation and reconciliation. It was based on that consensus that the South pursued the sunshine policy for the last ten years and, officially, the administration of President Lee Myung-bak maintains the tone of that policy.

Having certain far-right individuals making extreme statements and having the NIS official responsible for domestic security issues thinking the same kinds of things, and openly speaking about them while on a massive “public security investigation,” is an entirely different issue. You are forced to worry just how much suppression of freedom of thought and excessive public security cases there are going to have to be for Korea to become an “advanced” country. It is not right to put a man with a Cold War mindset, one decades old, in charge of domestic security in a 21st-century state intelligence organization. Kim should accept responsibility for his statement and resign.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]