On Saturday the board of directors at the Jeongsu Scholarship Foundation tried to elect a new director in the wake of the resignation of Grand National Party (GNP) chairwoman Park Geun Hye, but board members were unable to agree and a decision will have to wait until the next meeting. They say, however, that among the candidates there were people who served as prime ministers during the Yusin and New Military (Sin'gunbu) dictatorships. The reemergence of elements from the military dictatorships is anachronistic, and it makes you wonder how genuine Park's intention to step down from her position is.
Among the candidates were Nam Deok U and Sin Hyeon Hwak, both people who rose to prominence because they won former president Park Chung Hee's favor. Both men served as deputy prime minister and minister of economic planning under the Yusin regime, and they took turns being prime minister during the New Military. Nam is even the head of Park Geun Hye's supporters organization. When that came to be known the civic groups in Busan that have been calling for the normalization of the foundation and to the union at the Busan Ilbo, which Park owns 100 percent of, both had strong reactions. The concerns that Park might try to manipulate things from behind the scenes only to make her return when the time is right turned out to have real basis.
It is clear that these two former prime ministers are under Park's influence, and the fact that they were discussed as possible replacements is plenty of reason to suspect she wants to secretly control the foundation. If she has a proxy in that position her resignation was nothing more than deception and it is the same as if she never resigned. It is most unfortunate that such suspicions remain, especially when you remember how the reason citizens called for Park to step down was because they wanted to see the foundation truly reborn and made to genuinely give something back to society.
Again there will have to be renewed interest in reform at the foundation. The process through which property offered the state landed in the hands of a dictator is going to be revealed, and as that happens it will be returned to society. It should be operated openly, transparently, and independently even before then. It would also be worth considering a plan through which civil society participated in the operating of the foundation, so as to make it more true to the public's interest by setting right the wrongs that were committed in the past.
The Hankyoreh, 7 March 2005.
[Translations by Seoul Selection (PMS)]
[Editorial] Jeongsu Foundation and the Public Good |
