“박정희 충성혈서 日장교 다카키 마사오” NYT

뉴욕타임스가 통합진보당 사태를 전하며 박정희 전대통령이 과거 충성혈서를 쓰고 일본군장교로 복무한 과거를 언급했다.


뉴욕타임스는 6일 A섹션 11면에 통합진보당 해산심판 청구 소식을 전하며 이번 사태가 박근혜 대통령 취임후 제기된 대선스캔들의 관심을 돌리기 위한 것이라는 야당주장과 함께 박정희 전대통령의 친일 행적을 소개했다.

 
  
 

 
타임스는 지난해 12월 TV로 방영된 대선 토론회에서 통합진보당 이정희 대표가 일본 식민 지시대에 만주에서 일본군 중위로 복무한 박정희 전대통령의 일본 이름을 폭로했으며 이는 한국 보수주의자들 사이에서 금기시 되어온 사실이라고 전했다.


이와 함께 지난해 TV로 생중계된 대선토론에서 “일본에 충성혈서를 써서 일본군 장교가 된 다카키 마사오. 한국이름 박정희…뿌리는 속일 수 없습니다”라고 한 이정희 대표의 언급을 기사의 맨 마지막에 소개했다.

 
  

 
타임스는 한국의 경제 성장을 이룬 박정희 전대통령이 보수파 사이에 광범위하게 존경받고 있지만, 그의 친일행적은 일본에 의한 피해의식이 국가적 정체성의 일부이자 친일파라는 딱지가 친북인사보다 더 심하게 비난받기도 하는 한국에서 박근혜 대통령의 정치적 약점으로 남아 있다고 지적했다.


이어 “1961년부터 1979년까지 박정희 전대통령의 철권통치 기간중 반체제인사들은 북한편을 들었다는 이유로 고문받거나 때로는 처형까지 당했지만 한국이 민주화가 되고나서 다시 열린 재판에서 무혐의가 되기도 했다”면서 “이정희 대표는 박 대통령이 아버지의 독재시절로 회귀하고 있다고 비난했다”고 덧붙였다.


신문은 박 대통령 취임후 지난 대선에서 야당후보들에게 온라인 비방작전을 펼친 혐의로 전 국정원장이 재판을 받게 되면서 박 대통령과 집권당을 코너에 몰았넣었다며 지난 9월 이석기의원 등 통합진보당원들에게 이례적인 반역죄를 적용하고 진보통합당을 해산하기 위한 법적소송을 벌이는 것이 치졸한 정치공작이자 탄압이라는 야당의 비난을 받고 있다고 전했다.


뉴욕타임스는 헌법재판소가 아홉명의 판사 중 여섯명 이상이 통합진보당이 ‘기본적 민주질서를 위반했다’고 판단하면 해산시킬 수 있다면서 그럴 경우 통합진보당 소속 여섯명의 국회의원이 의원직을 상실할 것인지는 분명치 않다고 말했다.


뉴욕=노창현특파원 newsroh@gmail.com

 
 


<꼬리뉴스>


South Korean Government Seeks Ban on Small Leftist Party




SEOUL, South Korea — The government of President Park Geun-hye asked the Constitutional Court of South Korea Tuesday to disband a small leftist party accused of supporting North Korea at the cost of the South’s national security.


Since its founding in late 2011, the United Progressive Party has been the lightning rod for criticism from Ms. Park’s conservative Saenuri Party. Several of its key members, including the lawmaker Lee Seok-ki, were arrested in September on charges of plotting an armed rebellion against the South Korean government in the event of war on the divided Korean Peninsula.


The government’s decision was adopted at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday and quickly endorsed by Ms. Park, who was on a visit to Europe. It is the first lawsuit of its kind. No political party in South Korea has been shut down by the government or a court decision since Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s dictatorial founding president, forced the closure of a leftist party in 1958.



“The platform of the United Progressive Party pursues a North Korean-style socialism,” Justice Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn said at a news conference. “We determined that its activities, such as a treason plot by its core elements, followed North Korea’s strategy to revolutionize the South.”



By law, the Constitutional Court can disband a political party if six or more of its nine justices agree that the party “violated the basic democratic order.” It remained unclear whether the six lawmakers affiliated with the United Progressive Party will lose parliamentary membership if their party is disbanded.



Lee Jung-hee, head of the party, the country’s third-largest, accused Ms. Park of returning to the dictatorship of his late father, President Park Chung-hee. During Mr. Park’s iron-fisted rule from 1961 to 1979, dissidents were tortured and sometimes executed on charges of plotting against South Korea on the North’s behalf, but the charges were often thrown out in retrials in a democratized South Korea decades later.



“This is a rude anti-democratic violation of the Constitution, which guarantees the freedom of political activities,” Ms. Lee said. “This is a blatant and shameless political revenge.”


Ever since Ms. Park took office in February, South Korean politics have been rocked by a series of ideologically driven political scandals.



A former head of the National Intelligence Service is now on trial on charges he ran a team of state intelligence agents that carried out an online smear campaign against Ms. Park’s rivals ahead of the presidential election last December, calling them servants of North Korea. The scandal pushed Ms. Park and her conservative ruling party into a corner.



Opposition lawmakers accused Ms. Park and her party of trying to divert attention from her election scandal by moving against the minor United Progressive Party, first with the arrest of its members on highly unusual charges of treason and now with a lawsuit to disband their party.


The recent scandals showed that South Korean politics remains deeply divided and volatile over North Korea six decades after the Korean War of 1950-53 ended without a peace treaty. They also raised questions about how freely people can talk about North Korea in the South, where the government blocks access to North Korean websites and people are still arrested for resending Twitter posts of North Korean propaganda materials.



The United Progressive Party, with six seats, represents a minor force in the 299-member National Assembly. The main opposition party regarded it as too radical and kept it at a distance.


But the political firestorm over its fate reflects a larger struggle between liberals and conservatives in South Korea. The liberals stress the “nation” and reconciliation with North Korea, while the conservatives place anti-Communism at the center of their identity. The strife between the two camps intensified with the election of Ms. Park, whose father remains a godlike father figure among conservatives.


Some of the United Progressive Party members feared that if there were another war on the peninsula, conservatives would round up leftists for mass executions, “as Jews were once rounded up,” according to the transcript of a secret meeting of party members in May that was submitted to the court for the trial of party members on treason charges. Avoiding such a fate was cited as one of the reasons of plotting an armed rebellion.

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The far left party’s platform calls for “rectifying our nation’s shameful history tainted by imperialist invasions, the national divide, military dictatorship, the tyranny and plunder of transnational monopoly capital and chaebol,” the latter referring to South Korea’s giant family-controlled business conglomerates which began expanding its influence under Ms. Park’s father. The party wants to end the American military presence, dismantle South Korea’s “subordinate alliance with the United States” and unify the North and the South.



The conservative ruling party has long accused members of the United Progressive Party of subscribing to North Korea’s ideology of juche, or self-reliance, and has called for its disbandment.


The leftist party also included the most vocal critics of Ms. Park. At a televised presidential debate in December, its head, Ms. Lee, blew the lid off a taboo among South Korean conservatives: mentioning the Japanese name of Mr. Park, who served as a lieutenant in the Japanese imperial army in Manchuria during Japan’s colonial rule of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Although Mr. Park is widely revered by conservative South Koreans for building the Korean economy, his colonial-era record remains a political handicap for his daughter in South Korea, where the sense of being wronged by Japan remains an essential part of national identity and being labeled pro-Japanese is sometimes a worse accusation than being pro-North Korean.


“Takaki Masao, the man who wrote his allegiance to Japan in blood and became an officer of the Japanese army: Do you know who he is? His Korean name is Park Chung-hee,” Ms. Lee said. “You can’t hide your roots.”