South Korea’s current conservative government is closing in on the former president, and he is under attack on several fronts at once.
On the one hand, there have been several crude attempts to harass him, using illegal methods, and these have been blocked by the courts. While Moon Jae-in took no steps to prevent NGOs from protesting or putting pressure on their opponents, Yoon Suk-yeol is acting strictly according to the law. First of all a court rejected an application from Conservative activists to lift the police ban on them holding rallies in the village of Pyeongsan, home of the former president. As readers will remember, as soon as Moon Jae-in retired, his Conservative opponents started organizing round-the-clock rallies outside his house in order to annoy him. As part of the harassment campaign, they have been shouting insults at him through loudhailers, causing a considerable nuisance not only to his family but to local residents.
On the other hand, the investigators are working on all the court cases that had been vetoed by the previous administration.
Firstly the prosecutors have started investigating a whole series of cases related to the “blacklist scandal,” which relate to allegations that the Moon Jae-in administration had forced the resignation of a number of heads of state bodies appointed under the administration of Park Geun-hye, Moon Jae-in’s predecessor. To be fair, the new administration is also trying to oust officials appointed by the Moon Jae-in administration, but it is doing so more subtly, without dismissing them outright.
Among those at the center of the criminal cases relating to the blacklist scandal are the former Industry Minister Paik Un-gyu, the former Environment Minister Kim Eun-kyung, the former Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyo and the former Minister of Science and ICT Yoo Youn-min.
The next group of cases is related to various abuses of authority. For example, on July 28 a search was conducted at the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family as part of an investigation into claims that civil servants in that ministry had helped the then ruling party to develop its campaign promises, in breach of the law prohibiting civil servants from using their position to engage in activities that may have an effect of the results of an election.
It is also worth mentioning the investigation into the closing of a nuclear reactor. On August 22, 2022 prosecutors conducted a search of the presidential archives for evidence concerning possible violations relating to the previous administration’s early shutdown of the Wolseng-1 nuclear reactor and its forced repatriation in 2019 of two North Korean fishermen accused of murder.
As readers will remember, the reactor was shut down ahead of schedule as part of Moon Jae-in’s attempt to phase out nuclear power, and the Energy Minister and a presidential secretary for industrial policy were charged with abuse of authority in connection with the shutdown.
In October a specially established group of prosecutors focusing on financial crimes began to investigate corruption allegations relating to the government’s solar energy projects. This investigation was begun in response to findings by the Prime Minister’s office, which identified 2,267 instances of violations (fraud, tax evasion etc.) related to solar power projects under the Moon Jae-in administration. These violations resulted in the misappropriation of some 261.6 billion won (183.2 million).
Another scandal relates to the Saemangeum Offshore Wind Farm, which was launched in October 2018, and in which Moon jae-in took a particular interest. It has apparently been sold to a Chinese company via an intermediary at a knockdown price.
The Democratic Party has described the actions of the police and prosecutors as a political vendetta managed by Yoon Suk-yeol, and has called on the government to close the investigations. But there is no avoiding the fact that the Moon Jae-in administration, on the pretext of fighting institutional wrongdoing and corruption, launched investigations into Park Geun-hye and Lee Myung-bak, which led to the arrests of both former presidents and more than 200 other individuals, mostly senior civil servants.
Yoon Suk-yeol also rejects the Democrats’ claims that the investigations into officials from the last administration are politically motivated, arguing that the Moon Jae-in administration also launched investigations into alleged violations by previous governments.
This argument is supported by the “police troll farm” case. And then there is the military intelligence service controversy. In June 2018 the Moon Jae-in administration accused the Defense Security Command of planning a coup. Allegedly the DSC planned to deploy tanks on Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Square and in front of the National Assembly to control crowds. Acting on instructions from the president, investigators questioned more than 200 people, but at the first instance all the suspects were cleared on wrongdoing, and it turned out that the “tanks on the streets” plan was simply a description of the procedure in the event of unforeseen circumstances arising should the president be impeached. Nevertheless, without waiting for the results of the investigation, Moon Jae-in ordered the military intelligence service to be restructured. The restructured intelligence body, the Defense Security Support Command (DSSC), has also been accused of wrongdoing – spying on the bereaved families who lost relatives in the 2014 Sewol ferry tragedy to gather information on their reactions to that disaster. Under Moon Jae-in senior prosecutors spent 14 months investigating those allegations, without finding any proof, although the head of the DSSC, a three-star general, committed suicide following the aggressive investigation.
The new administration is trying to act in accordance with the law, and those convicted include both supporters and opponents of Yoon Suk-yeol.
On July 28 the Supreme Court confirmed the suspended sentences imposed on Baek Jong-chun and Cho Myong-gyon, both former members of the presidential administration, for destroying records from the 2007 inter-Korean summit in order to cover up the offer made by then president Roh Moo-hyun to his North Korean counterpart to move the de facto western marine border between the two countries further to the south. That scandal first broke in October 2012, when a deputy from the Senuri Party, then the leading opposition party, alleged that during the negotiations the late president had proposed redrawing the de facto border.
On October 19, a district court acquitted Park Heong-joon, Mayor of Busan, of making false statements in the campaign season before last year’s by-election, ruling that there was no evidence of wrongdoing. Park Heong-joon was charged with falsely denying media reports that back in 2009, when he was head of President Lee Myung-bak’s public relations team, he had been involved in the surveillance of environmentalists protesting against a major river restoration project by the National Intelligence Service (NIS). In its subsequent report, the NIS stated that it had informed Park Heong-joon about the surveillance, and prosecutors then charged him with violations of electoral law. In its ruling, the District Court held that awareness of the surveillance was not the same as involvement in surveillance, especially since the NIS documents contained no proof of Park Heong-joon’s involvement in its activities.
On September 20 the Seoul Central District Court imposed a six-month suspended prison sentence on Khang Hyo-shang, a former deputy from the Conservative Party, for divulging diplomatic secrets, specifically the details of a telephone conversation between the leaders of South Korea and the USA in 2019. Khang Hyo-shang was accused of leaking details of the subjects discussed in a telephone conversation between the then Korean president Moon Jae-in, and his US counterpart Donald Trump, which took place on May 7, 2019. He had obtained this information from a diplomat working in South Korea’s embassy in Washington.
But the corruption allegations are not the only threat facing the former president. In the next article the author will tackle a more serious allegation, which relates to the “North Korean issue.”
Konstantin Asmolov, PhD in History, leading research fellow at the Center for Korean Studies of the Institute of China and Modern Asia, the Russian Academy of Sciences, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
