hankyoreh

Dec. 1. (Blue House photo pool) 　

President Park Geun-hye and the Blue House are denouncing the leak of a Blue house document containing allegations that Chung Yoon-hoi was meddling in the affairs of state. The leak presents a threat to national stability, they say.

But compared to her behavior when the Saenuri Party (NFP) leaked the transcript of the 2007 inter-Korean summit - a top-secret Blue House document - during the presidential campaign in 2012, her response is imbalanced and reflects a double standard, observers say.

Park’s position on the current leak stands in stark contrast to her defense of the Saenuri Party when it leaked the transcript. On that occasion, Park had advocated the public’s right to know.

“Leaking Blue House documents cannot be tolerated as it undermines the stability of the country. When the person responsible for this inappropriate behavior is identified, measures will be taken to make an example of them, regardless of their rank or position,” Park said during a Blue House senior secretariat meeting on Dec. 1.

On Nov. 28, Blue House spokesperson Min Kyung-wook bashed the leaked document that the Segye Ilbo newspaper had reported on. “It’s just a bunch of groundless rumors cobbled together from stock market newsletters,” Min said.

In effect, the Blue House is saying that leaking a document containing groundless rumors is a serious offense that undermines national order.

But during the presidential election in 2012, Park’s campaign exploited the leak of the top-secret transcript of the 2007 inter-Korean summit to attack her political opponents.

After Saenuri Party lawmaker Jeong Mun-heon and others leaked some of the content of the transcript, Lee Jeong-hyun, then-public relations officer for Park’s campaign, argued that the transcript should be made public.

“This is a grave issue that touches upon national security. The transcript should be made public with no caveats in the interest of the public‘s right to know,” Lee said on Oct. 16, 2012.

Park herself addressed the issue during the first televised debate, which was held on Dec. 4 of that year. “Making the transcript public through legal means would satisfy the public’s right to know,” Park said.

In short, Park justified the leak of the document on the grounds of the public‘s right to know.

In the end, Nam Jae-joon, who was director of the National Intelligence Service at the time, declassified the transcript and made public the full text in June 2013. This was in the teeth of strong protests from the opposition party, which had expressed concern that publishing the document could damage the national interest and harm South Korea’s credibility overseas.

But Kim Tae-heum, floor spokesperson for the Saenuri Party at the time, welcomed the move. “I hope that this will be an opportunity for the public to learn about the historical facts,” Kim said immediately after the unauthorized publication of the document.

Saenuri Party lawmaker Kim Moo-sung, who was in charge of Park‘s 2012 presidential election campaign, was brought before the prosecutors after he read part of the transcript during a campaign rally in Busan on Dec. 14, 2012. But the prosecutors accepted Kim’s unvalidated claim that he had received the text of the transcript not from a classified document but in a stock market newsletter and closed the case.

Both the inter-Korean summit meeting transcript, which was deliberately released by the Park administration, and the internal audit into the activity of Chung Yoon-hoe, whose release took Park by surprise, are Blue House documents.

Admittedly, the two documents are completely different in terms of their content. However, it is contradictory for Park to advocate the public‘s right to know in regard to publishing the inter-Korean summit transcript (which, as a diplomatic document, is supposed to be kept secret) while blocking the public’s to know by bringing charges against a newspaper that ran a story on a document raising allegations of behind-the-scenes political manipulation inside the Blue House.

The inevitable conclusion is that Park‘s calculations were based purely on her political advantage.

Members of the opposition party have been concentrating their attack on Park’s double standard.

“President Park defended the leak and publication of the inter-Korean summit transcript because the public had the right to know. The supposedly fair and impartial prosecutors are helpless, and the media is more worried about being punished than about the public’s right to know. This is a serious problem,” said Moon Hee-sang, chair of the emergency committee for the New Politics Alliance for Democracy (NPAD), on Dec. 3.

Jeong Se-gyun and Park Ji-won, who both sit on the emergency committee with Moon, also criticized Park’s behavior. “Which is more serious, leaking the transcript of the inter-Korean summit meeting, or leaking the document about Chung Yoon-hoi?” said Jeong.

“The transcript of the summit is what the Blue House should have kept secret. The Blue House should not be trying to hide documents that the public needs to know about,” Park said.

By Son Won-je, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]