hankyoreh

June 15. (by Kang Jae-hoon

By Seok Jin-hwan, Blue House Correspondent

Korean President Park Geun-hye left for Central Asia on June 16 to engage in “natural resource diplomacy” in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Coincidentally, this is exactly two months after the sinking of the Sewol ferry.

In advance of President Park’s trip, the mood in the Blue House was heavy and confused. “This trip is in the national interest, but public opinion is hostile towards us because we are still recovering from the Sewol tragedy. I am also worried that it will come across as arrogant for Park to leave in the middle of the controversy over her nominee for Prime Minister” said a senior official at the Blue House.

Indeed, everything Park’s administration has done in the two months since the Sewol tragedy appears to have been shabbily handled. Public opinion deems that clear progress has not been made on anything, including: the response to the accident, the preparation of countermeasures, evaluation of the fundamental societal problems undergirding this tragedy and their remedies. Critics are saying despite the song and dance about “national renewal,” a slogan that harks back to the 1970s, Park’s highhandedness and lack of communication have gotten worse.

This is symbolically represented by Park’s recent string of nominations. During an apology to the Korean public on May 19, a little more than one month after the tragedy occurred, she called on Koreans to “come together and move forward.” Park’s recent appointments, which she describes as a “staff shakedown,” have been received as a step backwards from achieving social integration and national unity. Park has put forward hardline conservatives and her associates, choices that do nothing but disrupt social harmony.

Clear indicators include stubborn support of Park’s nominee for Prime Minister, who even members of the ruling Saeunuri Party are suggesting should step down. Furthermore, her selection of reactionary figures for Education Minister and Senior Secretary of Education and Culture is in defiance of the popular sentiment shown in local election results for school commissioners. Park’s decision to retain Blue House Chief of Staff Kim Ki-choon, who has borne the brunt of criticism for the faulty appointment vetting process and for the failures in running the government, is seen in the same light.

On the other hand, progress has been slow in bringing closure to the Sewol disaster and getting to the bottom of its causes. The parliamentary investigation into the Sewol disaster is not moving forward, and nothing is being done to investigate the government’s incompetence and its shirking of responsibility.

It is for this reason that politicians are berating President Park and the Blue House for doing little other than passing the buck and shifting the blame in the two months following the Sewol tragedy. Park has referenced the attempts to apprehend Yoo Byung-eun, former chairman of the Semo Group and fugitive still at large, involving the mobilization of prosecutors, police and military to shift the focus of public discourse. Meanwhile, public calls to hold government organizations responsible for the ineptitude and lack of skill that they showed during the rescue efforts are being ignored.

In the case of a personnel shuffle in the Blue House, supposedly carried out to rectify problematic behavior by public officials, Park appointed hardline conservative figures, missing the opportunity to change her administration’s basic approach to governance by replacing it with an ideological showdown between the ruling and opposition parties, a strategy mainstream conservatives have used every time they are faced with a disadvantageous situation. It is similar to how allegations that the National Intelligence Service interfered in the 2012 presidential election were displaced by a campaign orchestrated by the conservative camps of then President Lee Myung-bak and Saenuri Party candidate Park Geun-hye accusing Roh of “abandoning” the Northern Limit Line with North Korea in the West (Yellow) Sea fueled by a leak of a partial transcript from the 2007 inter-Korean summit meeting.

Since the Sewol tragedy, Park has taken the fight to her critics, appointing a number of former public security prosecutors to top positions, pushing for disciplinary action against professors who called for her resignation, and cracking down on candlelight vigils. On June 11, in connection with the construction of electricity transmission towers in Miryang, seen as a litmus test for conflict mediation, Park’s administration authorized a massive police mobilization to demolish the sit-in camp sites of elderly residents blocking the entrance to planned construction sites.

“Nothing has changed after the Sewol disaster. President Park told bureaucrats to break up the cliques, and then she appointed members of her own clique. No matter how many times the Blue House is told that refraining from angering the people, boldly admitting one’s mistakes, and correcting those mistakes is the way to be praised, it doe not change. It’s frustrating,” one first-term lawmaker with the Saenuri Party said.

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