hankyoreh

South Gyeongsang Province

There are many interpretations circulating of former President Roh Moo-hyun’s intentions of suicide on May 23, including Roh’s feelings that prosecutors had made the investigation political, and feelings of remorse to his support base. Nobody knows the real reason why he took such an extreme measure, however, several are attempting to deduct former President Roh’s intentions from remarks delivered by his close aide.

Some observers are suggesting antipathy against prosecutors could have played a big part motivating intentions of suicide. When his elder brother Roh gun-pyong was arrested on charges of bribery late last year, former President Roh had responded by keeping silent or with short comments. However, he largely protested against prosecutators’ investigations when the investigation of Taekwang Industrial Chairman Park Yeon-cha’s tax evasion case turned into a bribery and illegal government lobbying investigation spanning two administrations. During the investigation, Roh’s relatives and his close aides began being questioned, one after another.

Former President Roh began to express publicly that the investigations were being used as a form of political retaliation after Kang Keum-won, an old supporter and the president of Chagnshin Fabric Co., was arrested on charges of tax evasion. On April 17, Roh emphasized that president Kang had been targeted because he was a supporter in a post uploaded on his personal website, “The president has suffered just because he is close to me.” Mostly, Roh had been enraged by prosecutors’ behavior and that contents of the investigations had been leaked to the press in order to humiliate Roh.

As a public sense of Roh’s integrity, a value he had cherished and run his presidency on, collapsed, Roh expressed feeling that he had become a burden to the movements for democracy. In his last post written on his website on April 22, he said, “Roh Moo-hyun can no longer symbolize the value of what you pursue. I am now in a slough where I cannot escape. You should throw me away.”

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