UniFiction Ministry to be abolished?
[Update: The Marmot is giddy about this.]
Had George Orwell lived in modern-day Korea, reality would have mooted his most sardonic fiction. After all, a lying Ministry of Truth is only marginally sillier than a Ministry of Unification whose primary function is keeping the slaves on the other side of the mine fields through the lavish financing of their overseers. Today comes word that president-elect Lee Myung-Bak may put an end to this cruel joke by abolishing the Ministry:
The Unification Ministry has been at the centre of growing criticism that the outgoing government has been too soft on the communist North, pouring aid across the border despite internationally condemned missile and nuclear tests.
Members of President-elect Lee Myung-bak’s team feel it has drifted off course, one adviser said.
“Many officials in the transition team take a negative view of the role and function of the Unification Ministry,” Korea University professor Nam Sung-wook, an adviser to the team, was quoted as saying by Yonhap news agency on Thursday. [Reuters, Jon Herskovitz]
Lee, who thinks he’s going to win big in next April’s parliamentary elections, seems to be leaking this idea as a trial balloon just to play it safe. The most eminently sensible idea is to merge UniFiction into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, given the frequency with which the two ministries seemed to represent the positions of two completely different countries (a suspicion that’s not completely unjustified).
The Ministry of Unification has provided the great majority of South Korea’s aid to the North Korean regime during the last decade. Without that aid, Kim Jong Il’s misrule probably wouldn’t have outlasted years of economic decay, famine, and sanctions; on the plus side, however, it certainly managed to keep the wretched refuse and their begging bowls far from the Prada store in Apkujeong.
If you didn’t see foresee the end of the job that gave “Comrade” Chung Dong-Young his historical legacy, such as that is, then you’ve obviously never seen this picture. Not surprisingly, this idea isn’t being welcomed at the Ministry of Unification:
It quoted Unification Ministry officials as saying they fear the North would see the move as reducing it to just an “ordinary” country.
You can see just how little Lee has to work with here.
Also facing the axe, by the way, is the Ministry of Truth the “information agency” that some newspapers accused of heavy-handed efforts to influence their reporting. There’s nothing inherently wrong with governments exercising a degree of message control, of course, but recall that Roh’s senior presidential secretary for press information didn’t always seem much more liberally minded than her counterparts in Pyongyang:
“So long as the Chosun Ilbo remains the most influential newspaper, no reforms of the government can succeed,” she asserted. She also proposed a drive to double the readership of the Hankyoreh, attributing the daily’s lack of space and shoddy editing to the paper’s poor financial start. [Chosun Ilbo]
Still no word on abolishing the Human Rights Commission, or at least orienting it toward promoting the human rights of those Koreans most in need of a few.
Hat tip and thanks to a friend.
I’ll ask you the same question I asked Marmot’s board, because this all seems like wishful thinking.
How does LMB and the transition committees follow through with their conclusions?
If wishing made it so, you wouldn’t need a website
Can you clarify your question? Do you mean, how can they dismantle UniFiction? If that’s your question, I suppose the answer is to wait for inauguration day and then fire a bunch of people. I don’t think that necessarily requires him to win big in April, and in any event, I think the crushing he gave Comrade Chung means he has the voters’ permission to steer the government back toward the center.
Now, if your question is whether Lee MB will win in April, I’m not so sure about that. As I said at TMH, Lee now MB has bigger problems than an Uri insurgency fighting on in the Cholla Triangle. His efforts to fill the GNP candidate slate with his own cronies have royally pissed off Park Geun-Hye, and she’s thinking about splitting with him. Ordinarily, Lee Hoi Chang might not be much of a threat to Lee MB, but if Lee HC and Park GH both join forces against Lee, he could be in for a rough time.
Now, extrapolate that possibility one more step. One possibility I wouldn’t rule out is that Park GH and Lee HC regain control of the GNP — Park always had more support from GNP insiders than Lee MB did — and Lee MB breaks away and forms a center-right version of Uri. Initially, I think he’d succeed; voters tend to want to give new presidents the chance to govern.
It’s a constitutional question, I suppose.
Park Chung-hee established the National Unification Board in ’69, but it did not become a ministry until ’96. Does the President have complete control over the Executive, or does he need legislative approval to carry through all the changes the transition committees are recommending?
Do any graybeards recall how Unification morphed from Board to Ministry in ’96? I assume it would just be a matter of reversing that process.
As for the coalitional politics within the GNP you’ve described, depending upon the procedure a dedicated minority insurgency can frustrate reforms indefinitely. Roh Moo-hyun’s survival for five years is testimony to that.
Here’s the ROK Constitution, as amended in 1987, and I see nothing in there restricting which ministries the President may or may not create. There’s aspirational language in Article 4 requiring the government to support unification, of course, but nothing saying exactly how to go about it.
Everyone on this site already knows that the ROK Constitution has seldom been interpreted strictly, to put it mildly, even in recent times. In theory, North Korea and its people are governed by the Constitution’s terms and entitled to its protections, including Article 33, for which UniFiction has had a particular blind spot.
I see no constitutional issue, provided government policy actually promotes unification. I could make a better argument that preserving the North Korean regime is contrary to Article 4, but based on my limited reading of Korean court opinions, Korean judges don’t let legal principle get in the way of political convenience.