hankyoreh

Unification Ministry spokesperson

By Choi Hyun-june, staff reporter

At the briefing room on the third floor of the Seoul Central Government Complex, at around 10:30 am on Nov. 22, Unification Ministry spokesperson Kim Ui-do was reading out a statement, a message to North Korea about anti-government agitation in the South and the detention of South Korean citizens. Along the way, he said something quite odd.

“North Korea has been misrepresenting even people who deny South Korea’s Constitutional order as ‘forces for democracy,’” Kim said. “In doing this, it is basically admitting that it has been manipulating a particular group here.”

The “people who deny the Constitutional order” was a reference to the Unified Progressive Party (UPP), which the administration in Seoul submitted a disbandment request to the Constitutional Court for last month. When journalists asked Kim if he was talking about the UPP, he replied, “North Korea called them ‘forces for democracy,’ and there’s already been a request to the Constitutional Court for a hearing to disband them.”

Kim’s claim, which came more or less out of nowhere, is inappropriate in many ways. To begin with, we still do not know for a fact that the members of UPP are “people who deny the Constitutional order.” There is a good deal of disagreement on this issue among politicians, and the Constitutional Court hasn’t made any decision. This is not a matter for a Unification Ministry spokesperson - the equivalent of a bureau director and someone with no authority on the issue - to jump to any conclusions on.

Kim’s comment that North Korea “admitted manipulating” the party by “misrepresenting it as ‘forces for democracy’” is nothing more than malicious slander. An expression of positive opinion toward a party cannot be taken as evidence of manipulating that party. It is not the place of a ministry mouthpiece to slander a party like that just because it is facing a dissolution hearing in the Constitutional Court.

After reporters responded with a flurry of questions about whether Kim was thinking of the legal issues or political situation when he made his remarks, the ministry belatedly backtracked and said he was “not singling out any specific party.”

When inter-Korean relations have been bad, North Korea has tended to use excessively provocative language to slander Seoul. Recently, it likened President Park Geun-hye to a Sapsal dog. Seoul has always responded with the proper restraint and an insistence on decorum. It is this kind of generosity that defines the dignity of the South Korean government. Kim’s inappropriate remarks are tantamount to answering North Korean slander with Pyongyang’s own brand of slander.

The ministry said that the statement had gone through discussions with the proper offices before Kim delivered it. Hopefully, he will disclose just which offices were involved. The public needs to know which organization or organization leader allowed such a distasteful discussion to take place - or gave the actual order.

A government official said, “This statement was announced after consulting with the NIS and the Blue House, so it must reflect the will of those institutions.”

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