hankyoreh

By Seong Yeong-cheol, staff reporter

Members of Park Geun-hye’s election camp are pushing to reassess the 1961 coup that put her father Park Chung-hee in power as well as his administration’s Yushin system in the 1970s.

Key members of Park’s camp, including New Frontier Party (NFP) chairman Hong Sa-duk and political development committee members Lee Sang-don and Park Hyo-jong, are saying that people should withhold judgment on the coup and Yushin system, and leave the matter for history and individuals to decide.

Analysts said the decision appeared to have something to do with Park’s own unswerving stance. During a hearing five years ago, she called the coup a “revolution to save the nation”. And while she declared at the time that she was “still mortified and sorry to the people, and the families of people, whose lives were lost and who suffered hardship due to unfortunate events in my father’s era,” her recent announcement of her candidacy did not contain any such statements. Observers said this shows her historical views have actually moved backwards from five years ago.

An NFP official said, “What her camp is doing seems to be a reflection of her wishes.”

“It looks like the aspects having to do with her father Park Chung-hee are a kind of ‘Maginot Line’ for her where she’s not going to change her position no matter what anyone says,” a party official said.

Some said this may reflect the determination that she can take a more aggressive approach on the controversy over her father’s legacy now that her political stature is higher than five years ago.

During an appearance on a CBS radio program July 11, Lee Sang-don explained, “In the ‘60s and ‘70s, people used the terms ‘military revolution’ and ‘coup d’etat’ to describe the events of 1961, but by the ‘90s there was a reassessment, and it was determined that ‘revolution’ could be interpreted as having a positive sense, so it was just called a ‘coup.’”

Lee also made a similar statement on July 6. “From the standpoint of that time, it was definitely a military revolution, but you can’t really just disparage it as a simple coup in terms of historical development,” he said at the time.

Park Hyo-jong delivered his own reappraisal of the events of 1961 in an appearance on KBS radio the previous day, saying, “There are two sides to May 16 - it had the character of a coup and the character of a revolution.” Park previously co-chaired the New Right Textbook Forum, which advocated describing the coup as a “revolution” and teaching about the positive aspects of the Yushin system.

Lawmaker Yun Sang-hyun, who heads up the camp’s public relations team, ventured the opinion that the matter of the coup “should be left for history to judge.”

But some within the NFP expressed concern about these recent moves.

A second-term lawmaker said, “The Park Chung-hee administration does deserve a lot of praise for the industrialization and modernization it achieved, but it did clearly come to power through a coup that brought down a lawful government.

"Whitewashing that fact, it could promote negative feelings toward the industrialization legacy and foster the mistaken impression that it’s okay if the process is illegal as long as the results are positive," the lawmaker added.

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