Here is one way to run an investigation. First, decide the answer. Then gather the evidence that supports the answer and skip the evidence that does not, on grounds of efficiency. To be clear, this is not how South Korea’s Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs describes its review of one of the most contested honors in the country. But it is what the ministry’s re-examination of the late Colonel Park Jin-kyung looks like on paper, according to documents obtained from the ministry by an opposition lawmaker and reported by the Chosun Ilbo.
Park Jin-kyung was the army colonel put in charge of restoring order in the early phase of what Koreans call the Jeju April 3 incident, and he was assassinated by a subordinate acting on orders from the communist Workers’ Party of South Korea. In 1950 he received the Eulji Order of Military Merit, and on the strength of that decoration the ministry last October approved his family’s application to have him registered as a person of national merit, and handed the relatives their certificate. Then the politics arrived. Jeju April 3 groups and parts of the ruling camp protested that Park was, in their word, a ‘massacrer,’ and in December President Lee Jae-myung instructed the ministry to look at revoking the designation, Yonhap reported. The veterans minister, Kwon Oh-eul, responded: ‘I keenly feel my responsibility for the great anger this has caused the people of Jeju and the nation, and I will resolve the matter in the spirit of tying up what one has tied.’ In February the ministry cancelled the registration, citing procedural ‘defects,’ and began a fresh review.
The fresh review is the interesting part. According to materials that Park Seong-hun, a People Power Party lawmaker on the National Assembly’s National Policy Committee, obtained from the ministry, officials spent July 30 and 31 on a field survey in Jeju, meeting the Jeju April 3 bereaved families’ association, the association of bereaved families of fallen soldiers and police, and Jeju provincial officials. What they did not do, the Chosun reported, was talk to Han Seong-taek. Han is 97 years old, a retired army major and the last surviving member of the 9th Regiment that Colonel Park commanded; he lives in Jeju, which is to say the investigators spent two days on his island and left without hearing from him. Nor, the ministry confirmed, has its veterans review commission taken his testimony separately. The commission, for what it is worth, does not include a single historian.
You can see the inconvenience. In an interview with the Chosun last December, Han said: ‘Colonel Park never massacred civilians or carried out a hard-line crackdown.’ If the question under review is whether Park was a massacrer, Han is close to the only living primary source, and he is on record saying no. Heard in February he might have been awkward; unheard in July he is merely an oversight. The ministry has now told the lawmaker it is willing to take Han’s testimony, but has not explained why it skipped him during the July trip.
In the field survey in Jeju, they did not even listen to the testimony of Major Han Seong-taek, which refutes the claim that Colonel Park massacred civilians — isn’t this fitting the process to a pre-decided conclusion of cancelling the national merit registration?
Then there is the paperwork. To cancel the registration on its own authority, the ministry sought opinions from five outside law firms. According to the Chosun’s account of the documents, one firm’s opinion asserted that the government had officially renamed the April 3 incident the ‘April 3 uprising,’ which it has not. A second firm supported its argument with a Supreme Court precedent it described as concerning the wrongful designation of an independence activist’s descendants; according to Park Seong-hun, that precedent is actually about the Korea Workers’ Compensation and Welfare Service recovering overpaid industrial-accident disability benefits. Different facts, different statute, everything different really, except that both cases involved the state wanting money or status back.
Park Seong-hun’s verdict: ‘We must thoroughly establish why the ministry had to cancel Colonel Park’s national merit registration through slapdash legal advice that got the facts wrong and even cited the wrong precedent, and hold those responsible accountable.’
It is only fair to note that lawyers cite inapposite precedents all the time, that field trips are short, and that a 97-year-old witness is easy to schedule for later. The question is which way the errors point, and here they all lean the same direction: each mistake makes it easier to reach the conclusion the president had already said he wanted. None of them makes it harder. That is a characteristic pattern, and it has a name, and the name is not ‘re-review.’
The ministry now says it will hear Major Han after all. He is 97. So the timetable matters here in a way it apparently did not in July.