On 21 September, in the South Korean half of the demilitarised zone near Paju, Gyeonggi Province, a mine planted by North Korean soldiers exploded, injuring three South Korean soldiers. There is a version of South Korean politics in which this remains the story: North Korea planted a mine, it blew up, three soldiers were hurt, and the question is what happened and why. That version is not the one being lived. Instead, for the past week and into the Chuseok holiday, the country’s parties have been fighting a two-front war over two other questions: who pushed the investigation back until after the holiday, and how an opposition-aligned lawmaker found out when it would happen.
The story so far. On 26 September, Han Dong-hoon, an independent lawmaker, held a press conference outside the Ministry of National Defense in Yongsan, Seoul, and made a specific allegation: the UN Command had demanded a swift on-site investigation, but the South Korean military had objected, and the joint probe had been scheduled for the 29th — after the Chuseok holiday had passed. The implicit question was pointed: in a rain-swept minefield, evidence does not wait politely through a long weekend, so who decided it should?
The ruling Democratic Party’s first response, delivered by spokesman Cho Gye-won on 1 October, was the bureaucratic one: the investigation was agreed with the UN Command’s armistice commission and conducted ‘according to the manual,’ he said, and since this was a probe near the Military Demarcation Line, prior safety measures were ‘a matter of course.’ On 4 October, though, the response changed register entirely. Cho issued a commentary addressed to Han and titled, essentially: ‘Representative Han Dong-hoon, the question stands. How did you know the operation schedule?’
Cho accompanied this with new detail, from bodycam footage, about why the probe took the time it took. ‘The entire site was a minefield,’ he said. ‘The reeds had grown to head height. The mine detector only works if the grass is cut to 3 centimetres; that requires three passes with a cutter. The corridor it secures is one metre wide. If you are supporting an injured soldier, you have to walk out sideways.’ Into that terrain, Cho said, Han had demanded immediate entry on the grounds that evidence was being washed away. ‘It was a demand that put soldiers’ lives up as collateral,’ Cho said. ‘For Han, the safety of young soldiers was apparently never a consideration to begin with.’
Then the counterattack. Han, Cho said, publicly disclosed the DMZ entry operation on 27 September — a day before it was to occur — and the DMZ is, after all, a place North Korea watches. A leaked schedule, he argued, created a serious potential threat to the safety of the operation’s personnel; the disclosure was, in his words, ‘a clear act of leaking classified information’ that endangered the investigation team itself. And here is the piece the ruling party plainly loves: ‘Even the ruling party’s own secretary on the National Assembly’s defense committee didn’t know the timing,’ Cho said. ‘So how did he know it?’ Han, Cho demanded, should reveal how he learned the schedule, comply with the defense ministry’s review of possible legal action, stop using the military for political strife, and apologise to the injured soldiers and their families.
Han responded on Facebook, and did not take up the offer to explain himself. Instead he returned to the first question: reveal, he wrote, ‘the culprit who, after we were attacked by a North Korean mine on the 21st and the UN Command demanded an immediate on-site investigation, refused and allowed the investigation only on the 29th, after everyone had finished celebrating Chuseok.’ He added: ‘President Lee Jae-myung — is that right?’ Then came his alternative polling question. ‘Do you think the public is more curious about “how did Han Dong-hoon find out?”’ he wrote, ‘or about “who pushed the on-site investigation past Chuseok?” and “why can’t the Lee Jae-myung government say a peep to North Korea?”’ His verdict: ‘The Democratic Party still hasn’t come to its senses.’
What is pleasing, in a bleak way, about this fight is that both sides have selected a perfectly legitimate question, and neither question answers the other. It could be true that the probe followed the manual, and that heading-high grass and one-metre corridors made immediate entry dangerous, and also true that someone decided the evidence could wait through the holiday — and someone told a lawmaker about it. The party in power has chosen to litigate the leak; the lawmaker has chosen to litigate the delay; everyone is confident the public shares their curiosity and no one else’s. One thing, though, is not in dispute: the date of a sensitive operation inside the DMZ was in public circulation before it happened. The only argument left is about which half of that sentence is the scandal.