[LINK] South Korea's Upcoming Purges

[rfmcdonald]

Over at Asia Times, Jaewoo Choo offers an interesting examination of of South Korea's upcoming purge of collaborators with Japanese colonial rule and post-independence military dictatorships by Roh Moo Hyun's government in the article "Politics, price of Seoul's collaboration probe". The author argues that the current push to determine the identity of collaborators not only protects a weak government from criticism over economic and foreign policy, but it will weaken South Korean conservatives, who apparently descend from the establishments that survived through collaboration.

Roh's intention is to put the descendants of the pro-Japanese collaborators before the Korean court of public opinion because of their ancestors' wrongdoings. And the "court" is very anti-Japanese. The potential, probably the certain, verdict would be humiliation and loss of face; and while the individuals probably would not be barred from public office or pubic life, they might find the public exposure too painful. Most of the descendants happened to fall in the category of conservatives - who have opposed Roh - in today's Korean ideological dichotomy and political tug-of-war. These are the people who have long cherished the prestige and power established by their ancestors though their collaboration with the Japanese occupiers.

To condemn them for retaining their inherited wealth and status is somewhat like charging the descendants of the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and others in the United States (who plundered its wealth as the nation industrialized) and denouncing their economic and social well-being today by blowing out of proportion their ancestors' illegal and unjust way of gaining their wealth. But even the American robber barons were not like the Japanese occupiers.

Like Shin, the party chairman who lost his job, Roh and his government want the descendants of pro-Japanese collaborators to vanish from the political landscape. They want to confiscate their wealth - this has not been decided - and crush their prestige. It is far from certain, however, that wealth, however ill-gotten and then legally amplified, would be confiscated.

This conflict, a continuation of South Korea's post-war struggle between left and right, will have a significant impact on the country's foreign relations, for it is the conservatives who favour the country's alliances with the United States and Japan. Perhaps, in the medium term, South Korea might shift towards alignments with other countries?