hankyoreh

The Statue of a Girl of Peace in front of the former Japanese Embassy in Seoul. (Yonhap News)

In April 2009, I interviewed Choi Yul, president of the Korea Green Foundation. That was just after the prosecutors had indicted Choi without detention on the charge of embezzling money donated to the Korea Federation for Environmental Movements (KFEM). The media was even reporting that Choi had used the embezzled money to fund his daughter’s studies overseas. When I asked him whether the prosecutors’ claims were true, he responded as follows: “I loaned some money to the KFEM when it ran low on funds for a building project and paid myself back at a later point from the donations. That was a typical practice since civic groups frequently didn’t have enough money.”

“When I joined the civic movement in the 1990s, the important thing was our activism, and we were negligent in how we handled financial matters. That was a mistake, and we’ll have to fix that in the future. But I don’t think current [accounting] standards should be used to judge the civic movement at a time of greater financial hardship,” Choi added.

Nobody would deny that it was Choi’s dedication and diligence that helped Korea’s environmental movement became established. Choi acknowledged that he was so busy traveling around the country and dealing with environmental issues that he didn’t have time to worry about money matters. Such considerations led the court to acquit him of embezzlement. “Choi didn’t use the money for his private gain; these [irregularities] appear to be the result of civic groups’ unprofessional bookkeeping methods,” the court said in its verdict.

However, Choi was found guilty of taking money to resolve a grievance for the head of a construction firm. That conviction came on appeal, reversing an acquittal in the district court. Park Jie-won, then a lawmaker with the Democratic Party, criticized that reversal during the National Assembly’s audit of the Supreme Court, arguing that it didn’t make sense for the district court’s acquittal to be overturned despite the lack of additional evidence. That was small potatoes compared to the prosecutors’ brash claims in the press about a founding father of the civic movement pocketing donations.

The allegations surrounding Yoon Mee-hyang, former chairperson of the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, remind me of the consternation I saw on the face of Choi Yul in our meeting 11 years ago. This incident shows that Korea’s civic movement still faces many of the same challenges: meager finances, dedicated activists who are too preoccupied to abide by accounting rules, political hit pieces by conservative papers out to smear the entire civic movement, and desperate appeals to defend the cause.

Unfortunately, there’s little evidence that activists learned much from the awful ordeal that Choi suffered because of his sloppy accounting more than a decade ago. The title of my interview with Choi when it ran in the Hankyoreh was “Civic groups’ focus on activism leads them to neglect money matters.” It’s distressing to think that the very issue that Choi lamented back then is still recurring, and still unresolved, in 2020.

We all have our share of responsibility for this situation. Choi pointed out that “most civic groups don’t have the resources to hire a competent accountant.” The government is responsible for its stinginess in directing public resources to foster the nonprofit sector, and Korean society is responsible for assuming that participation in civic groups is volunteering, and not a livelihood. Civic groups in particular deserve blame for failing to pay attention when Choi sounded the alarm. That’s why those watching the Korean Council’s press conference on May 11 found themselves asking why civic groups haven’t acquired transparency to match their dedication despite the shocking changes that Korean society has undergone over the past 10 years.

The times have changed, and someone ought to take the responsibility demanded by that change. It’s undeniable that one reason the Yoon Mee-hyang scandal has blown up as it has is because Yoon was elected to the National Assembly as a proportional representative for the ruling party. It was presumably Yoon’s election that prompted former comfort woman Lee Yong-su to call her press conference. Yoon has responded to the controversy by saying that her service in the National Assembly will be her witness. Considering that this scandal is being fueled by a no-holds-barred political campaign that accuses not just the ruling party but the entire progressive movement of hypocrisy and immorality, Yoon may well think that the only way to win is to stand her ground.

While behind bars in 2013, Choi Yul received the Chico Mendes Award from the Sierra Club, a world-renowned environmental organization. The organization praised Choi for defending the civic movement against the government’s inappropriate attempts to suppress it. What’s important now is to help the comfort women movement recover from the serious damage it has suffered and move forward once more. The reason that the Together Citizens’ Party chose Yoon as a proportional representative is partly because of her individual energy and efforts over the past 30 years, but even more so because of the brilliant achievements of the comfort women movement, which is symbolized by the Korean Council. Considering the larger cause, I can’t help wondering whether a proportional seat in the National Assembly is really something that must be defended at any cost. Perhaps it’s time to ponder what a truly responsible attitude would be.

By Park Chan-su, editorial writer

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