hankyoreh

Why was Chun Hae-sung switched out as the nominee for national security and strategy secretary in the Blue House national security bureau? The “mystery” surrounding the fate of the former Unification Ministry unification policy office head shows just what a mess the nominations process is, and how little communication is taking place in the Blue House. It’s been an ongoing problem since President Park Geun-hye took office, and it’s not showing any signs of improving. If anything, the situation seems to be getting worse.

The very idea of a senior official being tapped for the Blue House from a government ministry, only to have the nomination withdrawn with no explanation just a week later, is something unimaginable in a country where things are run normally. A host of possible explanations have been offered - for example, that Chun’s moderate position on North Korea was to blame - but none of them make much sense. If his “softness” was the problem, he should have been taken out of consideration before the nomination was made. Another explanation that was recently floated is that Chun fell afoul of hard-liners in the Blue House, but the circumstances aren’t consistent with this. In the final analysis, the “oddness” of the nomination is a sign of deeply rooted problems in the Blue House selection system.

Right now, the question most are asking is at what stage Park - the person with the authority to appoint him - received a report that led her to rule him out. No secretary can be nominated or withdraw without a decision from the President. Some have speculated that the nomination was announced without her having signed off on it, and that it was only later that she received another report that led to the withdrawal. This also makes little sense. The nature of Blue House operations is such that no senior foreign affairs and national security secretary could possibly have made the decision to announce a nomination on his own. The “Chun Hae-sung mystery” is also a Park Geun-hye mystery.

A bigger problem than the nomination fiasco is the Blue House’s refusal to produce any plausible explanation for it. Blue House spokesman Min Kyung-wook explained that Chun was “one of the most important and essential figures in the Unification Ministry,” and that he was “sent back because it was decided that it would disrupt the ministry’s operations” to have him tapped as secretary. No explanation at all would have been better than that nonsense. Min might as well have told the public, “Don’t bother trying to figure out our nomination process.”

As has become the norm for cases like this, the Blue House is once again trying to skate over the disaster. There has been no sign of reflection, and no one has stepped forward to take the blame. It’s exasperating to think that we must expect even more nomination fiascos like this from the Park administration.

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