The National Intelligence Service’s (NIS) “Development Through Truth About Past Incidents Committee” has decided to look into seven cases in recent Korean history about which there remain various suspicions, including the bombing of a Korean Air jet over the Indian Ocean, the Dongbaengnim (East Berlin) Foreign Student Affair, and others relating to earlier transformations of the NIS. One feels a sense of how much the world has changed when a state agency that once upon a time wielded omnipotent power and never hesitated to perform fabrications and deviant operations for the security of past regimes takes the initiative in digging into the truth behind various cases. The NIS was the “big hand” that orchestrated human rights abuses by the government, and so one hopes that it engages in inquires that are substantive, thereby allowing things that have been hidden in the dark or distorted see the light of day.
The committee says it has chosen cases that have been held suspect by a wide spectrum of society and cases about which civic groups and families of the deceased have challenged official versions of events. Its basis for selection and final choices are appropriate. Some say the case of the choice of the forced “donation” of the Buil Scholarship Foundation and the forced sale of the Gyeonghyang Sinmun are is a targeted attack on Grand National Party (GNP) chairwoman Park Geun Hye. Those are considered typical instances of oppression towards the press and businessmen by an authoritarian government, and it should be noted that the individuals involved have continually appealed their cases. There are approximately 90 cases in recent history about which various questions remain, and one would like to see the NIS engage in preliminary inquiries into each of them and then commence on full-scale investigations if deemed worthwhile, just as it has promised to do.
It remains to be seen whether the committee’s activities will produce results that are proportionate to its ambitions. The NIS should be given the benefit of the doubt about what it says it will accomplish because it has easy access to documentation and because it says it will encourage voluntary testimony from its former employees. On the other hand there exist limits to what the inquiries will be able to do because they lack their own legal foundation and because limited staff and budget funds.
It is important that the NIS be determined about this. On this occasion, as it looks back at conduct it never should have engaged in with the people’s taxes, it might as well author a real book of confessions. Current and former employees need to be ready to go through a painful process of rebirth. That alone would be the path to receiving forgiveness and achieving reconciliation. The membership of the National Assembly, for its part, should refrain from painting over questions of past history and produce the right kind of legislation on inquiries into past history so that the work of uncovering the truth has legal backing.
The Hankyoreh, 4 February 2005.
[Translations by Seoul Selection (PMS)]
[Editorial] NIS Must Write Book of Confessions |
