People expressed surprise and satisfaction when police announced that they had made no arrests during nationwide anti-Park Geun-hye demonstrations last weekend. A week earlier, 23 demonstrators were arrested, but most of them were released soon afterward and protests on the two previous weekends were markedly peaceful -- a big contrast to the usual violence that has characterized mass demonstrations here.

One wonders how it was possible that the nation’s mode of public protests changed so drastically in about a year’s time. Only last month, grand funeral services were held for Baek Nam-ki, an activist farmer from South Jeolla Province, after a prolonged controversy over violent demonstrations and police countermeasures. He had been in a coma for more than 300 days, hit by a police water cannon during a demonstration in Seoul.

Now buried at the May 18 National Cemetery in Gwangju, Baek will be remembered by the leftist community as a symbol of police brutality. Police authorities have something to say about the death, but, anyway, he is a victim of the unruly pattern of demonstrations in this country that becomes extreme at the risk of injuries and fatalities.

When a coalition of progressive civic groups organized mass demonstrations in Seoul in protest against the Park Geun-hye-Choi Soon-sil scandal, people feared repetition of the usual physical clash at the scenes of labor protests and “general strikes” of radical unions. Unionized workers and farmers and sympathetic opposition politicians joined the weekend demonstrations at the Gwanghwamun Plaza, but the majority were young students, couples with their children and older people who simply hated their president having been manipulated by a shadowy woman.

Yet, the difference in the composition of protesters alone does not explain the difference between the chaos a year ago that caused the death of Baek Nam-ki and the orderly rallies and marches of the huge crowd in the heart of the capital. Not many would agree, but I believe the peaceful demonstrations in the past few weekends were due to what I would call the “uncritical nature” of the latest mass protests. People are angry at Park’s poor stewardship at the highest office, but they still had faith in the democratic governing system itself.

President Park colluded with Choi Soon-sil and senior presidential secretary An Chong-bum to collect about 80 billion won ($67.9 million) from over 50 large businesses to create two private foundations that Choi used for her personal gain, according to the prosecution’s indictment. Choi’s interference in the appointments of high government positions and even her pressure on a reputed university and sports organizations to secure illicit benefits for her daughter were intolerable. The avalanche of disclosures, however, indicated impacts on limited areas.

People’s dismay at the president’s indiscretion as revealed in her blind trust in unqualified aides and associates was comparable with the disappointment they had in previous presidents who spoiled their later years in office with scandals involving family members and close friends. They are sorry about Park’s incompetence, yet they also regret having elected her president in 2012 with 51.8 percent support.

What the prosecution listed as the offenses the president committed “in conspiracy” with her aides was a novel kind of corruption on a different dimension from previous presidential misdeeds. In the minds of protesters remembering atrocities of human rights abuses, persecution of oppositionists, accumulation of huge slush funds, etc., Park’s faults rather belonged to a softer zone in the spectrum of injustice.

Big business owners must have felt irresistible pressure from the president’s smiles. Officials at the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism were humiliated by the occupation of high offices by outsiders of dubious credentials and students and professors at Ewha Womans University were frustrated by the entry of an unqualified student in their school and her earning high scores despite rarely showing up to class.

These are against their sense of justice, but most protesters were not in the plaza in order to end the great sufferings of the underprivileged. Gwanghwamun during recent weekends saw protests by different people for a different cause, hence in a different manner. I am not convinced that all future mass demonstrations will keep the same level of peace and order if protesters have objections to the governing system itself instead of the president’s leadership.

In 2014, a major conservative newspaper carried a column in which the author quoted rumors about President Park’s romantic involvement with her former secretary Jeong Yoon-hoi in connection with her “unaccounted seven hours” on the day of the tragic sinking of the Sewol ferry. A week later, Japanese daily Sankei’s Seoul bureau chief quoted the part about the Park-Jeong relationship from the Korean newspaper, but without attribution in his online column.

The Japanese journalist was indicted here for defaming the president. He claimed innocence by attributing the speculative information to the Korean daily and then to a local stock market leaflet and eventually won a not-guilty verdict. Jeong had just divorced Choi Soon-sil a few months before these columns were published, alerting rumor-mongers around the Yeouido stock market.

In September 2016, disclosures of the Mir and K-Sports foundations opened the floodgates to stories about Choi and her family, inundating local media with all details of the woman’s close relationship with the president for the past 40 years. Paradoxically, the spotlight on Choi wiped away the veracity of the claim of the romantic ties between the president and the divorced husband of her closest friend, but neither the Korean nor the Japanese newspaper withdrew their articles ex post facto or made an apology to the president.

President Park will perhaps not be able to finish her five-year term either because of the impeachment procedure now being prepared in the National Assembly or by her voluntary resignation. It is also possible she could persist in the Blue House until the opening of the Winter Olympics in February 2018 by resorting to all legal measures to defend herself. In whatever eventuality, she deserves fair treatment by law enforcement, the media and her friends and foes in the political community. Censure must exactly be on a par with the amount of her guilt, no more or no less.

By Kim Myong-sik

Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald. He can be reached at kmyongsik@hanmail.net -- Ed.