It was too bad that internal confusion here deepened while national security concerns grew with North Korea’s rising nuclear and missile provocations. South Koreans have passed the past year in ever-worsening political turmoil, including a presidential impeachment and under fears of war as the North has tested the patience of the world community by exploding a hydrogen bomb and firing missiles of various ranges one after the other.

During this extraordinary period, people’s political minds were guided more by hate than tolerance. The government installed through a snap presidential election spent its early days mostly in denial of the past, smacking of retaliation for what happened in the nine years of conservative rule. “Chotbul (candlelight) power,” meaning the radical elements whose nocturnal demonstrations prompted the exit of the incompetent Park Geun-hye rule, took position as the guards of the Moon Jae-in administration.

Maybe the external threats have helped cool our heads with our survival instinct. In the nationwide debate on the future of nuclear reactors under construction, a citizens’ jury made the commendable decision to deny the liberal government’s abrupt measures to halt the Shin Kori No. 5 and No. 6 power plant projects that are now about 30 percent complete. It was like fresh air shot into a dark tunnel named the Republic of Korea where the main events in the past months have been the trials of a former president and her helpers.

One Seoul newspaper flashed the headline “People’s reason rejected (government’s) anti-nuclear power fantasy.”

Fantasy could be an unfair term because President Moon had included the phasing out of nuclear power plants as one of his major election pledges during the abridged two-month campaign in the spring. He wanted to satisfy the environmental activists who were among his supporters; he only did not know that halting multibillion dollar projects already underway would involve so many problems, both economic and social.

I just cannot fathom why he gave so high a priority to such a sensitive issue when he had so many other urgent tasks. There have been other matters that I believe are wasting the precious energy of the new government, such as new inquiries into a number of past incidents, namely the 2014 sinking of the Sewol ferry, the death of activist farmer Baek Nam-ki in 2016 and the alleged live firing from an Army helicopter on demonstrators in Gwangju in 1980.

Everyone understands the president is overseeing the current prosecution investigations into the suspected blacklist and white list of cultural personalities made by previous governments to determine financial support by their ideological tendencies. Such past-oriented investigations extend to agents of the National Intelligence Service suspected of having operated teams of internet commentators to influence public opinion.

While North Korea is increasing its nuclear and rocket capabilities, bragging about the ability to hit the continental US with a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile, our president sometimes express his sense of powerlessness under the present circumstances where threats of nuclear attacks are exchanged between Washington and Pyongyang. As calls for independent nuclear armament rise here, the Blue House asserts the infeasibility of even introducing American tactical nuclear arms into Korean territory.

It is suspected that the pacifist president may find some logical consistency between military and industrial denuclearization. Actually, there is much commonality between the two areas of nuclear power, and some experts here advocating Korea’s nuclear armament base their confidence on our advanced technology level in nuclear power generation. Critics even argue that President Moon’s anti-nuclear power policy could weaken the country’s potential to go nuclear militarily in the future.

When the government chose the process of “public debate” to reach a conclusion on the future of the Shin Kori Nos. 5 and 6, the president must have been confident in winning public support for his plan. The untested method was chosen because opinion surveys involving randomly picked people without deep knowledge or concerns about the issue could not produce a clear conclusion, while leaving it entirely up to experts’ deliberation could face the question of democratic legitimacy.

Thus, a citizens’ jury of some 500 people was selected from about 20,000 people who responded to opinion surveys. These men and women chosen to represent all regional, generational and educational criteria were put to exhaustive discussions among themselves and with experts from both pro- and anti-nuclear camps. The state commission in charge of the process headed by a former Supreme Court justice did a good job, resolving initial complaints of unfairness raised from both sides.

We remember the ugly scenes in some public hearing events on important policy issues where groups of people with conflicting interests physically interfered to disrupt those sessions. Worries about such disorderliness were groundless, as the jurors showed exemplary manners enthusiastically participating in all discussion sessions despite the not-so-impressive per diem. For the first time in our democratic history, we saw the possibility of a productive process to reach a conclusion of importance.

There was clear evidence of effect from constructive debates: The difference margin increased from almost even to 19 percentage points in the final vote. The pro-nuclear side’s arguments on the benefits of nuclear power plants and their safety measures with factual data must have been more persuasive than the anti-nuclear force’s stories of fears both real and imagined. If the 299 members of our National Assembly acted as the citizens’ jury in this case, would there be any such change of percentage as debates advanced, I wonder.

Over the past several decades, as the political pendulum has moved between the right and the left almost regularly, liberal and conservative ideologies were silicified into hard dogmas in our party politics. Politicians now only know extreme confrontation, incapable of modification, adjustment and compromise. May we hope that our National Assembly members will learn from the citizens’ jury in their modus operandi, as they are now in the stage of regrouping among the four parties?

The citizens’ jury even showed the art of compromise. While lopsidedly choosing to continue the construction of the two nuclear reactors, they gave a majority vote to the phasing out of nuclear power generation in the long-term pursuit of renewable energy. Contemplating the possibility of a reversal by a future government, some citizen jurors may have just used their votes to save the face of the incumbent. 


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.