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Sunday, September 21, 2014
President Park Abuses Power in an Attempt to Stifle Unfavorable News Reports
http://thenewspro.org/?p=7505
President Park Geun-Hye in the cabinet meeting, photo from the Presidential Office
President Park Abuses Power in an Attempt to Stifle Unfavorable News Reports
Og Lim
President Park Geun-Hye in the cabinet meeting, photo from the Presidential Office
A few days after President Park Geun-Hye lashed out in the cabinet meeting against “insulting remarks about the president that were going too far”, a team of 5 prosecutors from the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office raided the home of one of the reporters from NewsPro. On September 19, prosecutors descended on metempirics Jeon’s (the reporter’s pen name) house in Gumi, a city located about 280km southeast of Seoul. They searched the house for a few hours and took with them a laptop computer that belongs to Jeon and a few other items. The prosecutors apparently wanted to find clues to the whereabouts of Min Seong-chul, a Japanese translator at NewsPro, who translated the article written on President Park’s absence during the 7 hours of the Sewol disaster by Kato Tatsuya, a Seoul correspondent from the Sankei Shimbun.
At that time Jeon’s wife was home alone to answer to them. When asked if translating a news article is a crime they answered her that it can be. Afterwards the prosecutors met with Jeon near his work to question him. They asked him how he was involved with NewsPro, what his position and role there were, and specifically if he had any knowledge regarding Min. They also wanted to know any details regarding the administrative people at NewsPro; their names, personal information, phone numbers, etc. Jeon was told that he might be summoned later to the Prosecutors’ Office for further questioning.
In the article in question, published on August 3, Kato Tatsuya talked about the seven-hour absence of Park at the time the ferry Sewol sunk, killing over 300 passengers, mostly high school students. Citing a column by the South Korean conservative newspaper Chosun Ilbo and the discussions at the National Assembly he said a rumor was being circulated that Park secretly met with a married man during this time. Kato even gave the name of the man. Accused of defaming the president by a conservative civic group and the presidential office Kato has been summoned by the prosecution for questioning a few times and has been banned from leaving South Korea.
Regarding these actions the global media community has shown its deep concerns over the restricted status of freedom of speech in South Korea. The Reporters Without Borders has recently called on, “the authorities to drop the charges against Kato and to lift the restrictions on his movements”, saying that, “it is completely normal for news media to ask questions about the actions of politicians, including the president.” The Japan P.E.N. Club also said in a statement on September 16, that, “freedom of expression should be guaranteed completely and to the maximum.” It added that South Korean actions, “can lead to virtual restriction of freedom of speech and expression, which forms the basis of democracy.”
A complaint against translators is even more absurd and nonsensical. A translation of a news article if it is true to the original articles without any distortion of facts, should not be viewed as a wrongdoing let alone a crime. And actually Kato’s article had been translated and posted on his own blog by Cho Kab-Jae, a South Korean conservative blogger a day before NewsPro posted its translated article online. It appears that Cho has not been a target for a complaint nor has he been questioned by the prosecution so far.
Then why are they attacking NewsPro? Are the South Korean government and its officials really trying to restrict freedom of speech and expression and the right for the public to know the truth? Are they afraid of South Koreans finding out how President Park and her administration are viewed and criticized by foreign media? Do they truly believe they can scare people off this way? We need answers.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Democracy Sunk with South Korea’s Authoritarian President
On Sept. 22, President Park Geun-hye of South Korea will deliver her first speech to the United Nations General Assembly, most likely about peace — global security and the conflict between North and South Korea — and human rights. But her utter disregard for the Koreans’ safety and fundamental rights, as revealed through her words and conduct after the Sewol ferry tragedy, leads us to strongly oppose her further deceiving Koreans and the world — especially when addressing the United Nations, an organization committed to preserving peace and justice.
More than five months have passed since the Sewol ferry tragedy, but Park still refuses to take full responsibility of the incident as the president. She also has been bluntly ignoring the families’ desperate pleas for a meeting with her, as if Sewol never sank. One of the victims’ father, Mr. Kim Young-oh — known as “Yoomin’s Dad” — went on a 46-day hunger strike, eventually stopping for his second daughter, to have a meeting with Park and to demand effective Special Sewol bill — which would initiate an independent investigation into the disaster with legal mandates to prosecute anyone found culpable — so he can learn the truth about why his daughter Yoomin and 303 other people drowned in the cold sea, crying for help. And yet, Park has never visited Kim or even mentioned anything about him. To this day, the police restrict the families from marching to the Blue House, although foreign tourists are warmly welcomed to visit the fortress.
All we ask is that Park keep her promise she made with the families and to all of us Koreans. Did she forget that she comforted the families, telling them to come to her whenever they need her help? Does she know she promised them Special Sewol bill will be made? Did her tears mean anything?
We, the Korean community at UC Berkeley, are passionate about this urgent international issue because Park is eroding the very essence of democracy in Korea. Power comes from the people, and she was elected as a president to dedicate her trusted authority in working for the people’s safety, happiness and better lives. But she is overwhelmingly abusing this power by neglecting what people need her to do and whimsically doing whatever she wants to do. Her recent warning during the cabinet meeting that the “offensive remarks regarding the president representing the people are going too far” further exposes her illusion of herself as a supreme ruler who reigns over the people and thus cannot tolerate those who criticize or oppose her. It is she who is “hurting the stature of South Korea” and globally embarrassing the Koreans, not the people who are demanding that she do what she was elected to do.
Before speaking to the world leaders about peace and justice, Park needs to acknowledge that a nation has a fundamentally indisputable responsibility to ensure the safety of its people. Park failed to meet this most basic and cardinal duty as a president, and this must not be overlooked. Three hundred and four lives died at sea. It is not that “they could not be saved”— they were not saved. The parents, who desperately want to know why their sons and daughters never returned from the field trip, are still fasting and sleeping on the streets to request for a meeting with the president.
Today, Park’s leadership is urgently needed more than ever. The National Assembly is in a frustrating deadlock because the current ruling party, Saenuri party, is recalcitrantly blocking the passage of the Special Sewol bill. Bringing the truth of Sewol to light is the peace and justice that Korea needs immediately, and Park must act boldly now as the president of Korea.
Yae Chan Lee and Mili Yoon are fourth and second year students, respectively, at UC Berkeley.
Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org or follow us on Twitter: @dailycalopinion.
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
South Korean court convicts ex-spy director of interfering in elections
By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org
A former director of South Korea’s intelligence agency has been convicted in court of directing intelligence officers to post online criticisms of liberal politicians during a presidential election campaign. Won Sei-hoon headed South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) from 2008 to 2013, during the administration of conservative President Lee Myung-bak.
Since his replacement in the leadership of NIS, Won hasfaced charges of having ordered a group of NIS officers to “flood the Internet” with messages accusing liberal political candidates of being “North Korean sympathizers”. Prosecutors alleged that Won initiated the Internet-based psychological operation because he was convinced that “leftist adherents of North Korea” were on their way to “regaining power” in the South.
The illegal operation took place during the 2012 presidential election campaign, which was principally fought by Moon Jae-in, of the liberal-left Democratic Party, and Park Geun-hye, of the conservative Saenuri party. Park eventually won the election and is currently serving South Korea’s eleventh President. The court heard that a secret team of NIS officers had posted nearly 1.5 million messages on social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, in an effort to garner support for the Saenuri party candidate in the election.
On Thursday, a court in Seoul sentenced Won to two and a half years in prison, which was much shorter than the maximum five-year penalty he was facing if found guilty. In reading out its decision, the court said on Thursday that “direct interference [by the NIS] with the free expression of ideas by the people with the aim of creating a certain public opinion cannot be tolerated under any pretext”.
The new jail conviction comes right after the defendant completed a 14-month sentence stemming from charges of accepting bribes in return for helping a private company acquire government contracts. However, the court dismissed a related charge that Won’s actions had broken South Korean election legislation, which prohibits direct interference in election campaigns by serving government employees. The dismissal of the charge appears to have spared President Park from having to justify her narrow victory in the 2012 elections.
She has so far remained mostly silent on the subject, saying she did not benefit from NIS’s Internet campaign.
http://intelnews.org/2014/09/12/11321/
A former director of South Korea’s intelligence agency has been convicted in court of directing intelligence officers to post online criticisms of liberal politicians during a presidential election campaign. Won Sei-hoon headed South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) from 2008 to 2013, during the administration of conservative President Lee Myung-bak.
Since his replacement in the leadership of NIS, Won hasfaced charges of having ordered a group of NIS officers to “flood the Internet” with messages accusing liberal political candidates of being “North Korean sympathizers”. Prosecutors alleged that Won initiated the Internet-based psychological operation because he was convinced that “leftist adherents of North Korea” were on their way to “regaining power” in the South.
The illegal operation took place during the 2012 presidential election campaign, which was principally fought by Moon Jae-in, of the liberal-left Democratic Party, and Park Geun-hye, of the conservative Saenuri party. Park eventually won the election and is currently serving South Korea’s eleventh President. The court heard that a secret team of NIS officers had posted nearly 1.5 million messages on social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, in an effort to garner support for the Saenuri party candidate in the election.
On Thursday, a court in Seoul sentenced Won to two and a half years in prison, which was much shorter than the maximum five-year penalty he was facing if found guilty. In reading out its decision, the court said on Thursday that “direct interference [by the NIS] with the free expression of ideas by the people with the aim of creating a certain public opinion cannot be tolerated under any pretext”.
The new jail conviction comes right after the defendant completed a 14-month sentence stemming from charges of accepting bribes in return for helping a private company acquire government contracts. However, the court dismissed a related charge that Won’s actions had broken South Korean election legislation, which prohibits direct interference in election campaigns by serving government employees. The dismissal of the charge appears to have spared President Park from having to justify her narrow victory in the 2012 elections.
She has so far remained mostly silent on the subject, saying she did not benefit from NIS’s Internet campaign.
http://intelnews.org/2014/09/12/11321/
Thursday, September 11, 2014
Former South Korean Spy Chief Convicted in Online Campaign Against Liberals
SEOUL, South Korea — A former South Korean intelligence chief accused of directing agents who posted online criticisms of liberal candidates during the 2012 presidential election campaign was convicted Thursday of violating a law that banned the spy agency from involvement in domestic politics.
Won Sei-hoon, who served as director of the National Intelligence Service under President Park Geun-hye’s predecessor, Lee Myung-bak, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, but the Seoul Central District Court suspended the sentence. Mr. Won had just been released from prison Tuesday after completing a 14-month sentence stemming from a separate corruption trial.
Prosecutors indicted Mr. Won in June of last year, saying that a secret team of National Intelligence Service agents had posted more than 1.2 million messages on Twitter and other forums in a bid to sway public opinion in favor of the conservative governing party and its leader, Ms. Park, ahead of the presidential and parliamentary elections in 2012.
Many of the messages merely lauded government policies, but many others ridiculed liberal critics of the government and of Ms. Park, including Ms. Park’s rivals in the presidential election. Some messages called the liberal politicians “servants” of North Korea for holding views on the North that conservatives considered too conciliatory, prosecutors said.
For the spy agency to “directly interfere with the free expression of ideas by the people with the aim of creating a certain public opinion cannot be tolerated under any pretext,” the court said in its ruling on Thursday. “This is a serious crime that shakes the foundation of democracy.”
But though Mr. Won was convicted of violating the law governing the spy agency, the court dismissed a separate charge: that he had violated the country’s election law, which prohibits public servants generally from interfering in elections. In explaining that decision, the court said Mr. Won had not ordered his agents to support or oppose any specific presidential candidate.
That finding spared Ms. Park a potentially serious political liability. Had Mr. Won been convicted of violating the election law, it would have provided fodder for critics of Ms. Park who say that the agency’s online smear campaign undermined the legitimacy of her election. Ms. Park, who was elected by a margin of about a million votes, has said that she neither ordered nor benefited from such a campaign.
Two other former senior officials of the spy agency who had been indicted on similar charges were each sentenced to a year in prison on Thursday, but their sentences were also suspended. Both the prosecutors and the defendants have a week to appeal the verdicts.
The intelligence service has denied trying to discredit opposition politicians, saying that its online messages were posted as part of a normal campaign of psychological warfare against North Korea. It said the North was increasingly using the Internet to spread misinformation in support of the Pyongyang government and to criticize South Korean policies, forcing its agents to defend those policies online.
The intelligence agency was created to spy on North Korea, which is still technically at war with the South. But over its history, it has been repeatedly accused of meddling in domestic politics and of being used as a political tool by sitting presidents. In recent months, courts have acquitted two defectors from North Korea who had been indicted on charges of spying for Pyongyang; the courts said the intelligence service had kept them in solitary confinement for several months, failed to provide the suspects with appropriate access to lawyers and, in one case, even fabricated evidence to build its cases.
The South Korean military’s Cyberwarfare Command was also accused of smearing opposition politicians online before the 2012 elections. Last month, military investigators formally asked prosecutors to consider legal action against the former heads of the command, which was created in 2010 to guard against hacking threats from the North.
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Chuseok for modern Korean families Traditional holiday customs scaled down as family values undergo changes
Family members dressed in traditional hanbok gather for the ancestral rite early in the morning on Chuseok, which falls on Aug. 15 on the lunar calendar. Dozens of dishes are laid out on the table for the rite, prepared by female family members over several days. After the ceremony, family members eat breakfast together. They make up for living apart in different regions by spending time together making songpyeong, a half-moon-shaped rice cake eaten during Chuseok.
Such typical Chuseok scenes are not as common as they were decades ago. Rather than following traditional customs, more people travel abroad during the long holiday. Parents in rural villages visit their children in cities to free them from having to make the burdensome journey home along congested and stressful expressways.
According to a recent survey by Duo, a matchmaking agency, more than 78 percent of 142 married respondents said they would not visit their parents this Chuseok. They cited four reasons: Their parents do not put pressure on them to take the long trip home (31.5 percent), they have already made other travel plans (29.7 percent), they just want to take a rest (14.4 percent) or they don’t want to have to deal with the heavy traffic during the holiday exodus (10.8 percent).
Asked what they planned to do if they were not visiting their parents, they said they would travel (30 percent), eat out (28.8 percent), just rest at home (21.6 percent) or do other leisure activities (9 percent). The survey polled married people in their 20s and 30s from Aug. 24 to 27.
“Traditional Korean family values are changing in modern society. People do not regard ancestral rites and other traditional customs highly anymore. They scale down the traditional practices to enjoy the holiday as they wish to do,” said Kim Yu-kyung, research fellow of the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, a think tank for policy recommendations on health care, family and social welfare.
“Korean families have become democratic. Families are no longer centered around parents. Parents and children have become mutually independent. Each of the two generations choose to enjoy the long holiday in its own style,” Kim explained.
It’s also a sign that the modernization of Korean society is weaning its members off strict Confucian values that have weighed down family members, especially women, who are supposed to cook various ritual foods.
“My mother-in-law suggested we get together a week before the Chuseok holiday. It would have been a huge pressure on me if I had had to prepare food for Chuseok. But it has been an easy and stress-free Chuseok since we all ate out and just had dessert at home. I’m thinking of a trip next year,” a member of Jinheemom, an online community of young mothers, wrote in a post.
Still, Chuseok and Lunar New Year’s Day, the two most important holidays in Korea, are highly stressful for many women. The demanding job of preparing diverse ritual foods and meals for in-laws who are gathered for the holidays spawned the medical term “traditional holiday syndrome,” which can consists of carpal tunnel syndrome, with pain in the nerves around the wrists; digestive disorders; and dysmenorrhea, according to Ewha Womans University Medical Center.
“The symptoms occur around traditional holidays. It’s easy to ignore them because those symptoms are just temporary. In the worst case, symptoms may develop into serious diseases,” said Jeon Hye-jin, professor of family medicine at the medical center.
Kim of the KIHASA said stress from traditional holidays would decrease as families become more egalitarian and democratic.
“Korean families are in a transition, from following Confucian values to being more democratic and individualistic. The meaning of Chuseok will change as younger generations get older,” Kim said.
By Lee Woo-young (wylee@heraldcorp.com)
Such typical Chuseok scenes are not as common as they were decades ago. Rather than following traditional customs, more people travel abroad during the long holiday. Parents in rural villages visit their children in cities to free them from having to make the burdensome journey home along congested and stressful expressways.
According to a recent survey by Duo, a matchmaking agency, more than 78 percent of 142 married respondents said they would not visit their parents this Chuseok. They cited four reasons: Their parents do not put pressure on them to take the long trip home (31.5 percent), they have already made other travel plans (29.7 percent), they just want to take a rest (14.4 percent) or they don’t want to have to deal with the heavy traffic during the holiday exodus (10.8 percent).
 |
| Family members gather to make songpyeon, a traditional Korean rice cake enjoyed during Chuseok. (Korea Tourism Organization) |
Asked what they planned to do if they were not visiting their parents, they said they would travel (30 percent), eat out (28.8 percent), just rest at home (21.6 percent) or do other leisure activities (9 percent). The survey polled married people in their 20s and 30s from Aug. 24 to 27.
“Traditional Korean family values are changing in modern society. People do not regard ancestral rites and other traditional customs highly anymore. They scale down the traditional practices to enjoy the holiday as they wish to do,” said Kim Yu-kyung, research fellow of the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, a think tank for policy recommendations on health care, family and social welfare.
“Korean families have become democratic. Families are no longer centered around parents. Parents and children have become mutually independent. Each of the two generations choose to enjoy the long holiday in its own style,” Kim explained.
It’s also a sign that the modernization of Korean society is weaning its members off strict Confucian values that have weighed down family members, especially women, who are supposed to cook various ritual foods.
“My mother-in-law suggested we get together a week before the Chuseok holiday. It would have been a huge pressure on me if I had had to prepare food for Chuseok. But it has been an easy and stress-free Chuseok since we all ate out and just had dessert at home. I’m thinking of a trip next year,” a member of Jinheemom, an online community of young mothers, wrote in a post.
Still, Chuseok and Lunar New Year’s Day, the two most important holidays in Korea, are highly stressful for many women. The demanding job of preparing diverse ritual foods and meals for in-laws who are gathered for the holidays spawned the medical term “traditional holiday syndrome,” which can consists of carpal tunnel syndrome, with pain in the nerves around the wrists; digestive disorders; and dysmenorrhea, according to Ewha Womans University Medical Center.
“The symptoms occur around traditional holidays. It’s easy to ignore them because those symptoms are just temporary. In the worst case, symptoms may develop into serious diseases,” said Jeon Hye-jin, professor of family medicine at the medical center.
Kim of the KIHASA said stress from traditional holidays would decrease as families become more egalitarian and democratic.
“Korean families are in a transition, from following Confucian values to being more democratic and individualistic. The meaning of Chuseok will change as younger generations get older,” Kim said.
By Lee Woo-young (wylee@heraldcorp.com)
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