<뉴욕타임스>에 '다카키 마사오' 이름이 등장한 이유는? /프레시안20131107

<프레시안> 2013-11-07 오전 9:45:41

http://www.pressian.com/article/article.asp?article_num=20131107093147

 

<뉴욕타임스>에 '다카키 마사오' 이름이 등장한 이유는?

통진당 해산 청구와 이정희 대표의 '박정희 비난' 이력 보도

 

박세열 기자 

 

<뉴욕타임스> 지면에 '다카키 마사오'라는 이름이 등장했다. 대한민국에서 벌어지는 통합진보당 위헌정당해산심판 청구 사건을 다루면서다. 6일자(현지시각) A섹션 11면이다.

이 신문은 황교안 법무부 장관의 발언 등을 소개하며 해산 청구 대상이 된 통합진보당 이정희 대표의 이력을 상세히 설명했다. 이 대표가 지난해 12월 대선 TV 토론회에서 일제 강점기에 만주에서 일본군 중위로 복무한 박정희 전 대통령의 일본 이름을 폭로했다고 전하며 이는 "한국 보수주의자들 사이에서 금기시돼온 사실"이라고 보도했다.

이 신문은 기사 말미에 "일본에 충성혈서를 써서 일본군 장교가 된 다카키 마사오(Takaki Masao). 그가 누군지 아십니까. 한국 이름 박정희, 당신(박근혜 대통령)은 자신의 뿌리는 속일 수 없습니다"라는 이 대표의 발언 내용을 소개했다. 박근혜 대통령을 직격했던 이 대표의 발언과 이번 사태를 연결짓고 있는 것이다.

▲통합진보당 사태를 보도한 <뉴욕타임스> 기사. ⓒ프레시안

이 신문은 경제 성장을 이룬 박정희 전 대통령이 보수층으로부터 존경받고 있지만, 박 전 대통령의 친일 행적은 한국에서 박근혜 대통령의 정치적 약점으로 남아 있다고 지적했다.

이 신문은 "1961년부터 1979년까지 박정희 전 대통령의 철권통치 기간 중 반체제 인사들은 북한 편을 들었다는 이유로 고문받거나 때로는 처형까지 당했지만 한국이 민주화가 된 후 재심에서 무혐의가 입증되기도 했다"면서 "이정희 대표는 박 대통령이 아버지의 독재 시절로 회귀하고 있다고 비난했다"고 보도했다.

이 신문은 정부의 통합진보당 해산 청구에 대해 이 대표가 "정치 활동의 자유를 보장하는 헌법을 능멸한 반민주적인 행위"라며 "이것은 뻔뻔하고 파렴치한 정치 보복"이라고 비판했다고 전했다.

이 신문은 박근혜 대통령이 당선 직후 국정원의 대선 개입으로 정치적 궁지에 몰려 있던 상황에서 통합진보당에 대한 이례적인 '내란음모' 수사, 정당 해산 청구 등을 통해 선거 스캔들의 관심을 돌리려 한다는 야당의 주장을 소개했다.

 

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New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/06/world/asia/south-korean-government-seeks-ban-of-small-leftist-party.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&partner=rss&emc=rss

 

 

South Korean Government Seeks Ban on Small Leftist Party

By CHOE SANG-HUN

Published: November 5, 2013

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 her 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.

 

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.”

 

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A version of this article appears in print on November 6, 2013, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: South Korea: Government Seeks to Ban Leftist Party