hankyoreh

Park Min-shik, the minister of patriots and veterans affairs, speaks to the Hankyoreh at his agency’s Seoul district headquarters on May 15. (Kim Hye-yun/The Hankyoreh)

The South Korean minister for veterans affairs said he could state with absolute certainty that the late Gen. Paik Sun-yup didn’t collaborate with the Japanese.

Minister of Patriots and Veterans Affairs Park Min-shik made the remarks in a radio interview with CBS news anchor Kim Hyeon-jeong. “It’s wrong to smear [Paik] as being a Japanese collaborator, which is an outrageous framing of the facts,” Park said.

Critics say Park is stoking national division with his over-the-top campaign to whitewash Paik Sun-yup, which has now reached the level of blatantly disregarding historical facts.

Park reiterated that he’s considering the option of deleting a phrase about being a Japanese collaborator from records on the website of the Daejeon National Cemetery, where Paik was buried upon his death three years ago.

“The commission did its work after the Special Act for the Investigation of Collaboration During Imperial Japan’s Occupation of Korea was enacted under President Roh Moo-hyun, and that’s become the standard in our society. But if you look at the ideology of the eleven people on that commission, many of them had a lot of historical bias. Just because the commission named someone a Japanese collaborator doesn’t make that a historical fact,” the minister said.

Paik Sun-yup was named a Japanese collaborator not by some civic group, but by the Presidential Committee for the Inspection of Collaborations for Japanese Imperialism, a government body that was established by law. Paik was on a list of 705 Japanese collaborators that the commission submitted to the National Assembly and President Lee Myung-bak in November 2009. In other words, Paik’s identity as a collaborator was officially acknowledged by Lee’s conservative administration.

“They say that [Paik] was suppressing freedom fighters, but historical evidence shows there weren’t any freedom fighters in Manchuria. So whoever he was suppressing, it wasn’t freedom fighters,” Park said.

In the past, conservatives would rebut criticism of Paik’s combat against Korean freedom fighters by saying that his deeds in the Korean War more than made up for earlier mistakes. But the veterans affairs minister is now denying the very fact of that collaboration.

Contrary to Park’s representations, the Presidential Committee for the Inspection of Collaborations for Japanese Imperialism designated Paik as a Japanese collaborator because he had participated in Japan’s war of aggression as an officer in the Manchukuo Imperial Army from 1941 to 1945. (Manchukuo was a puppet state in Manchuria established by the Japanese Empire.) The committee gave that designation to those who “actively participated in Japan’s war of aggression as an officer at the rank of second lieutenant or above in the Japanese Imperial Army,” as described in Article 2, Paragraph 10, of the Special Act for the Investigation of Collaboration During Imperial Japan’s Occupation of Korea.

From February 1943 to 1945, Paik was part of the Gando Special Force, which was engaged in suppressing freedom fighters. Paik admitted as much in the Japanese edition of his memoirs: “While our opinions and ideologies may have differed, [the fact remains that] Koreans were suppressing Koreans who were fighting for independence. It’s true that I took aim at my compatriots. Whatever criticism comes my way, it couldn’t be avoided.”

In regard to the description of Paik as a “Japanese collaborator” on the burial records at the national cemetery, Park said he “strongly suspects that such measures were simply taken because of the political atmosphere at the time without any legal grounds.”

But in fact, the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs added the description of “Japanese collaborator” to its own website and the website of Korea’s national cemeteries in March 2019 based on the list composed by the Presidential Committee for the Inspection of Collaborations for Japanese Imperialism.

The ministry reportedly decided to list both the positive and negative accomplishments of generals who had collaborated with Japanese imperialists, while rejecting the repeated proposal made by certain civic groups to disinter the generals’ remains and bury them elsewhere.

Paik is one of 12 generals buried at national cemeteries who are labeled as “Japanese collaborators,” along with Shin Tae-yeong, former minister of defense; Shin Hyeon-jun, former commander of the Marine Corps; and Lee Eung-jun, former communications minister.

“The Korean War was the greatest crisis our nation has faced, and [General Paik] was the greatest hero in overcoming that national crisis,” Park stressed.

On July 5, a bronze statue of the general was unveiled at the Dabudong War Memorial Museum, in Chilgok County, North Gyeongsang Province. Dabudong is remembered as the place where Paik’s 1st Infantry Division repelled an attack by three North Korean divisions in the Korean War, holding the line at the Nakdong River and setting the stage for a counteroffensive.

But Park Kyung-sok, a brigadier general in the army reserves, offered a more nuanced account.

“People often think that Paik Sun-yup single-handedly saved the country in the Battle of Dabudong on the Nakdong River front, but that’s not the case, the graduate of the second class of the Korean Military Academy explained. Park Kyung-sok is himself a veteran of the Korean War.

“There were five ROK divisions and three US divisions on the Nakdong River front. Those eight divisions all pulled together to defend the front. Paik Sun-yup’s role made up one-eighth of the total.”

In 2010, the Lee Myung-bak administration sought to name Paik Sun-yup an honorary “general of the Army,” a five-star position, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Korean War. But that idea was blocked by respected veterans of the Korean War, who pointed out that Paik hadn’t waged the war alone. There was also opposition from Heritage of Korean Independence, an organization for freedom fighters and their descendants.

Park Min-shik also expressed his opposition to a bill that would honor those who contributed to Korea’s democratization. The bill passed the Draft Review Subcommittee of the National Policy Committee with support from the main opposition Democratic Party.

“I will recommend [that the president] exercise his veto power, even if that means quitting my job as minister,” he said on Thursday.

Park has also indicated that he means to revisit the achievements of freedom fighters, declaring on Monday that the government “won’t tolerate fabricated claims about independence activism.”

There are concerns that Park could stoke political division with the ideologically biased behavior he has exhibited in the first month since the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs was elevated to the highest tier of government bodies in early June.

“The younger generation isn’t ideologically oriented, but I get the impression that we’re regressing to the anti-communist attitudes of the Park Chung-hee era,” said Bae Gyeong-sik, a member of the board of the Institute for Historical Studies.

“Tampering with the standards for determining who made substantial contributions to the cause of Korean independence could incite conflict focused on ideological issues,” said Lee Shin-cheol, a research professor at the Academy of East Asian Studies at Sungkyunkwan University.

By Kwon Hyuk-chul, staff reporter

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