hankyoreh

January 2011. (by Park Jong-sik

By Lee Kyung-mi and Yoon Hyung-joong, staff reporters

The Lee Myung-bak government is rushing through a major military agreement with Japan at a time of heightened anti-Japanese sentiment in South Korea. A Japanese activist recently placed an offensive statement next to a statue of a comfort woman outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul. The police’s weak response to the vandalism angered citizens still unhappy with Japan’s lack of contrition over its colonial era atrocities.

On June 28, a group campaigning for the rights of former comfort women issued a statement slamming the move, saying, “The Lee Myung-bak government has delivered an even greater insult to the Korean public and former comfort women than Japanese right-wingers. After talking only of a humanitarian, rather than a legal, solution to the comfort women issue, it has now confirmed that it is pro-Japanese to the bone.”

Sangji University professor Hong Sung-tae sent out a critical tweet that mentioned “the treacherous Lee Myung-bak-New Frontier Party administration that has recognized the [Japan] Self-Defense Force as a formal military for the sake of Japan”. Democratic United Party senior adviser Chung Dong-young commented, “[The government] has created a paradoxical situation whereby it has joined hands with Japan, the cause of Korean national division, on the pretext of a threat from North Korea.” Im Tae-hun, head of a center campaigning for human rights in the military, claimed on his Facebook page, “The vote to approve the Korea-Japan military intelligence treaty, which grants an indulgence to Japan without them having investigated the truth about victims of compulsory manpower drafting and comfort women or provided compensation, is politically, historically and economically very wrong.”

The attitude of President Lee and the ruling party toward Japan has been the subject of repeated controversy. In September last year, WikiLeaks made public a US diplomatic cable that revealed that, in 2008, the president‘s elder brother, former NFP lawmaker Lee Sang-deuk, had met then-US ambassador to Korea Alexander Vershbow and said, “You don’t need to doubt President Lee Myung-bak’s views, since he is pro-American and pro-Japanese to the bone. Ultimately, President Lee will cooperate well with both the US and Japan.”

Another diplomatic document from the US embassy in Japan revealed that at a Korean-Japanese summit meeting in Hokkaido in July 2008, Lee responded to Japan’s statement that it would mark the Dokdo islets in school textbooks as “Takeshima” by asking then-Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda to “hold back.”

The attendance by Lee Sang-deuk at a party in a Seoul hotel in 2010 to celebrate the birthday of the emperor of Japan, and by then-Grand National Party lawmakers such as Na Kyung-won and Song Yeong-seon of an event to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Japan Self-Defense Force in 2004, have also given rise to controversy over the ruling party’s pro-Japan leanings.

The Lee Myung-bak government also attempted to remove content related to “efforts to liquidate pro-Japanese factions” from the prescribed contents for middle school history textbooks. In February this year, the Ministry of Patriots & Veterans Affairs excluded en masse historical scholars that had taken part in the compilation of a dictionary of South Korean collaborators with Japan, including former Hansung University president Yoon Kyung-ro, from a committee that decided whether to confer titles of national merit, and of what rank.

Concern is high that the government’s pro-Japanese policies are legitimizing Japan’s transformation into a military power and heightening the military crisis on the Korean Peninsula.

Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice issued a critical statement saying, “The signing of the Korea-Japan military treaty is a dangerous act that legitimizes the Self-Defense Forces‘ military activity and will incite the resurrection of militarism.” 50 civic groups, including Solidarity for Peace and Reunification of Korea, held a press conference stating, “The background to Korean-Japanese military cooperation is the US’s strategy to achieve dominance in the Asia-Pacific region. This has combined with Japan‘s militaristic ambitions and the Lee Myung-bak government’s absorption in the Korea-US alliance and policy of antagonism toward North Korea, leading to the railroading of the Korea-Japan military treaty. It is highly likely that this will be followed by a treaty between Korea and Japan on the mutual provision of goods and services, then a joint statement on security. A military alliance between Korea and Japan and a three-way military alliance between Korea, the US and Japan, could then follow. This would create a new Cold War order in Northeast Asian politics.”

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