Prosecutors from Seoul and Daejeon separately conducted search and seizure operations at the Presidential Archive last week to secure materials on two major controversial events during the Moon Jae-in administration. With recent bad memories of political reprisals under the pretext of righting past wrongs, there are concerns that this could mean the beginning of a new round of retaliation after a change of power. They seized presidential documents related to the premature closedown of a nucle

Viewpoints Aug. 25, 2022

During an open debate before he was elected chairman of the main opposition People Power Party last week, Lee Jun-seok said he made “several hundred million won (several hundred thousand dollars)” through cryptocurrency trading. Later he reported spending just 30 million won ($27,000), seemingly from these earnings, for his intraparty leadership campaign. It is no surprise that the 36-year-old prodigy in Korean politics who majored in computer science and economics at Harvard Unive

Viewpoints June 17, 2021

By the time this edition of The Korea Herald is delivered to readers, the winners of the April 7 mayoral by-elections in Seoul and Busan will have been decided. There was a weeklong blackout of opinion polls before the vote, but popularity figures of major contenders in the last surveys had been so lopsided that few had doubts about opposition victories in both the capital and the nation’s second-largest city. The ruling Democratic Party of Korea was fundamentally disadvantaged in these e

Viewpoints April 8, 2021

Han Myong-suk was the indisputable symbol of the feminist movement on the left side of politics in this country. A daughter of a war refugee family from North Korea, she started as a student activist at Ewha Womans University, joined a Christian pro-democracy movement and then turned to leftist politics under the influence of the man she married. Her political career that took her to the titles of the inaugural minister of what is now the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, the minister of

Viewpoints March 25, 2021

Watching the worsening turmoil in Myanmar, where the death toll from the brutal police control rises day by day, South Koreans see flashbacks of their own streets four decades ago. Pro-democracy demonstrators were killed by the hundreds in the rebellious city of Gwangju and in the capital, Seoul, until the military finally withdrew from politics in the 1980s. Democratic governance has developed, with rightist and leftist groups exchanging power almost regularly. No blood was spilled on the pav

Viewpoints March 11, 2021

Academic freedom is universally recognized and constitutionally protected here like the precious freedom of expression and the freedom of movement. Then what about an academic paper on the World War II “comfort women” written by a Harvard University professor, who defined them as “willing prostitutes who carefully negotiated the terms of their contracts.” Whenever there arises controversy over the past and present plights of those old Korean women who were sexually abuse

Viewpoints Feb. 25, 2021

Last week, the Korean National Police Agency announced a major personnel reshuffle, involving almost all of its 550 superintendents, the core of the police force. Printed in fine letters, the names and their short and long new titles occupied nearly half of a newspaper page. The 2021 reassignments of senior police personnel had to be more extensive than in previous years because the KNPA was making a new start with a new organizational structure in three tiers, namely the National Police Agenc

Viewpoints Jan. 28, 2021

While all people had their souls tied with the daily outbreaks of COVID-19, a major reform in the law enforcement system was stealthily carried out in South Korea. Ordinary people are not well informed of how the changes will affect their lives while they are a matter of much concern for those who play with political power. The primary theme is “prosecution reform,” designed to reduce the powers of prosecutors to mere writers of indictment from what was described as the almighty th

Viewpoints Jan. 14, 2021

South Korea’s 21st term of the National Assembly is the Behemoth of the 21st century -- it can do anything, bad things mostly. The Book of Job in the Old Testament describes it: “When the river rages, he is not alarmed; he is secure, though the Jordan should surge against his mouth ... “Can anyone capture him by the eyes, or trap him and pierce his nose?” (40:23-24)　 The new representative body elected in the general election on April 15 has acted in the fashion of a

Viewpoints Dec. 17, 2020

Have South Korea’s armed forces become stronger under the Moon Jae-in administration, or weaker? Those who believe our military power has grown over the past few years cite the 5-7 percent annual increase in the defense budget, much of which was used to purchase high-performance weapons. Yet others point to the low morale and loose discipline of military personnel, as revealed in frequent news reports. Some analysts attribute this hardly proud state of the 610,000-person armed forces to

Viewpoints Dec. 3, 2020

Confusion in the US presidential election passed two weeks since the Nov. 3 voting with Donald Trump still refusing to accept Joe Biden’s victory despite the final electoral votes of 232 and 306. Korean President Moon Jae-in called President-elect Biden for 14 minutes last week to congratulate him on his win. The New York Times summed up: Trump falsely maintains he would have won without widespread voter irregularities. In fact, top election officials across the country have said that th

Viewpoints Nov. 19, 2020

Former president Lee Myung-bak was back in the Dongbu Prison on the eastern outskirts of Seoul last Monday with the Supreme Court’s final sentence of 17 years. He was ordered to pay 18.78 billion won ($16.5 million) to the state in “fines” and “forfeiture,” though I don’t know exactly how they are different from each other. By the time he finishes his prison term in 2036, Lee will be 95 years old, if he is blessed with a life that long. He was arrested in Ma

Viewpoints Nov. 5, 2020

An old Chinese saying goes: Cook the dog after catching the hare. This may be applied to the current turmoil in the state prosecution organization involving Prosecutor-General Yoon Suk-youl and Chief Prosecutor Han Dong-hoon who now face open pressure from Justice Minister Choo Mi-ae to leave the service. During the early days of the Moon Jae-in presidency, Yoon and Han were used as the warriors of law in the new administration’s purges on what were left over from the past conservative a

Viewpoints Oct. 22, 2020

Disease control authorities complain that their fight against the coronavirus is most seriously disrupted when people conceal their contact with the sources of infection. These cheaters want to avoid the trouble of a two-week quarantine because they need to continue to work and earn a living. About a quarter of total infections cannot be traced to their origins. In the early days of the pandemic in this country, members of a heavily infected Christian sect in Daegu were blamed for failing to r

Viewpoints Oct. 8, 2020

The nation is faced with a triple crisis. The No. 1 problem, of course, is the COVID-19 pandemic, which over the past nine months has seriously transformed South Koreans’ lifestyles. Next is economic gloom, partly from the impact of the coronavirus and partly attributable to the sloppy leftist policies of the Moon Jae-in administration. And the third and worst is the credibility crisis due to the contrasting words and deeds of politicians. I call it a crisis because it has escalated to a

Viewpoints Sept. 24, 2020