Former President Roh Moo-hyun is long out of office but he still can’t help but run his mouth off:
Former president Roh Moo-hyun on Wednesday counseled against betting everything on Korea’s alliance with the U.S. For the sake of peaceful unification of the two Korea’s “it will be good not to lay stress on the Seoul-Washington alliance as a way to deter North Korea,” Roh said in a lecture to mark the first anniversary of the Oct. 4, 2007 Inter-Korean Summit Declaration. “If you try to show off Seoul-Washington-Tokyo relations of cooperation by dragging Japan (into the alliance), it will only cause uncomfortable relations with China and Russia as well as with North Korea,” he added.
Turning to the contingency plans for North Korea dubbed Operation Plan 5027 and 5029, Roh said North Korea and China “probably both have misgivings about those plans.” He pointed out that the plans did not materialize during his term “because we rejected the U.S. suggestions.”
Instead, he stressed the need to build trust with the North to achieve peaceful unification. “I never accepted the (U.S.-led) Proliferation Security Initiative. I discouraged discussion of missile defense programs. I opposed OPLAN 5029 too. I tried to minimize the Korea-U.S. joint military exercises as much as possible. In the six-party talks, I gave the utmost support to North Korea’s position.” [Chosun Ilbo]
Basically by Roh not preparing any occupation plans for the collapse of North Korea which is what these OPLANs refer to, he conceded North Korea to the Chinese if the country was to collapse because if South Korea is not prepared to stabilized a collapsed North Korea, China will.
Also if there was ever any doubt this guy was a North Korean stooge this should put that to rest:
He said whenever participants at international conferences accused North Korea, he tried to defend the Stalinist country “in a rational way.” “In one one-on-one summit, I defended the North for more than an hour,” he added.
So how do you defend “in a rational way” a country that starves millions of their citizens, runs a systematic gulag operation that has hundreds of thousands imprisoned, murders ROK military personnel without provocation, murders a South Korean civilian by shooting her in the back, shoots missiles at other countries, tests nuclear bombs to blackmail other countries for aid, kidnaps both South Korean and foreign nationals, operates state sponsored drug smuggling operations, proliferates nuclear technology to other rogue regimes, etc. etc. etc.
Here is the most dangerous part of his speech that Roh advocated for:
The former president urged a shift in awareness from the government and the citizenry, asking whether it is pragmatism to emphasize the National Security Law, the alliance and liberal democratic values, and stating that if the government sincerely wishes to achieve unification it can concede part of its sovereignty, and must accept that concession is neither surrender nor an act benefiting the enemy. [Hankyoreh]
This guy is serious about giving up South Korean sovereignty to North Korea. Remember he tried to give up South Korean territory before he left office to the North Koreans. So the fact he is now stating that South Korea should work towards giving up sovereignty to North Korea is no joke. It is incredible to think this guy ran the country for five years and many of his like minded cronies are still in the government that new Korean President Lee Myung-bak has been busy trying to weed out.
Robert Koehler has a whole lot more and is “speechless” after reading Roh’s comments.
8:58 am on October 3rd, 2008 1
I have followed this man’s career since he was elected in 2002 on the coat-tails of the anti-American campaign. (See Roh Moo-hyun.)
Why is everyone so disturbed now that he is OUT OF OFFICE? The time for throwing all the stones was when he was IN OFFICE.
Why is everyone surprised what Roh is saying now? He is the originator of the “revisionist history” push? He is trying to establish HIS VERSION of history — and to the leftists it becomes the REAL history. This is pure Roh crud — in the same way he used his “truth committees” to establish the “truth” as the leftists saw it — and then used the “facts” to batter and disgrace honored Koreans long dead while elevating communists to the level of “freedom fighters.”
But things are NOT over yet. The conservatives are after his ilk. Has anyone been keeping a body count of his former aides and ministers? Loads are going down for corruption? They even went after Roh himself over the transfer of Presidential records so he could launch his Deomocracy 2.0 site — and they are only holding off on prosecution because he is a former President.
But while condemning Roh for his past, watch out for the present. His former Foreign Minister is becoming the head of the Korean Red Cross — the funnel for aid to the North. Keep track of his old ministers and watch where they end up. Of course, his old ministers are voluminous as his revolving door policy on ministers amounted to an average time of I believe six-months in office for ministers.
The bloodbath is only starting. Roh protected the “juche” followers while in office, but it should be significant that Lee Myeong-bak was inaugurated on 25 Feb and the first “juche” fugitive, Yun Ji-gin, (after 9 years) was arrested on 27 Feb. His wife’s organization was just raided this month — and the raids are going to continue. The NIS/DSC sudden jump into power — along with the arrest of the North Korean spy is only a taste of things to come.
The KTEWU, KCTU and Hanchongryeon are all on the hit list. The KTEWU is the first up now with their stats being published and now an investigation is underway.
Roh did untold damage to his country in his time in office. LMB is trying to reverse this. For the first time, the ROK-Japan will jointly test the waters around Dokdo for radioactivity in 2009, instead of nearly going to war like they did in 2007 under Roh.
As to the military, Roh wanted to replace the Ministry of Defense positions with civilians — those of HIS ilk. He had succeeded in neutering the NIS by putting left-leaning/North Korean supporters into the key positions — and Roh wanted to do the same in the MND. However, the normally conservative MND fought him tooth-and-nail — while Roh killed them with slicing their budget to 2.7 percent of GDP (a drop from the 8 percent of GDP from Kim Young-sam backward). Kim Dae-jung were no friends of the military. Just last week, the Hankyoreh was crying about how the MND had NOT been converted to a civilian monolith as Roh had wanted. Well, things are being reversed very rapidly — and military spending is on the increase. The people that Roh put into office will silently disappear.
Because LMB’s popularity rating is hovering near 20 percent, he must proceed carefully. The leftists are doing everything they can to destabilize the government. Remember that the anti-US beef protests had NOTHING to do with beef or health safety, but only the ousting of LMB and the conservative GNP. The radicals couldn’t win in the election boxes, so they tried to take it to the streets and anarchy.
However, Roh inflated the bureaucracy and mass firings will cripple LMB if he did it in one-fell swoop. LMB is going to be axing a lot of folks — and you’re going to see a lot of it in the future. LMB is using the BAI as his hatchet man to root out the corruption — and because they are Roh appointees, they will heading to the doors. However, it will be all in the name of rooting out government inefficiency and corruption (like the Public Corporations illegally providing free housing to thousands of workers under the Roh administration).
Thus Roh and his leftist supporters have earned the enmity of the conservatives at all levels and they are out their with their axes. Roh is out of office, but the blood bath for him and his followers is only beginning.
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11:57 am on October 3rd, 2008 2
I don’t think people are surprised. Roh got this kind of bashing in the K-blogsphere while he was in office — it is just more of the same from him and more of the same rightful bashing…
Anyway, what is interesting to me about the speech is that, besides directly stating he was giving up major concessions to the North for nothing more than a chance at friendship, and that he was actively working as North Korea’s ally among global leaders,….he is indirectly stating that South Korea’s future lies in actively aligning with China and Russia.
the summary of his words, at least those GI Korea quotes, either point to that — or — that he is a complete and utter dumbass who believes South Korea can cut (severely) limit ties to the US and Japan – and remain standing alone (with the North).
I guess that could be it — that he wants the South to try geopolitical Juche like Pyongyang.
But, if he has any area of his brain that isn’t damaged, by saying SK should cut ties to the US and Japan, he would mean it needs to find other nations to align with — which would be China at least.
And he did specifically say in his advocating cutting ties with Japan that it would please China and Russia….
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2:25 pm on October 3rd, 2008 3
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6:47 pm on October 3rd, 2008 4
Its interesting that all of this occurred within a democratically elected government of the people, and still held up. Now the people of South Korea can say they have tested the waters from both sides and found Roh wanting. His presidency may have served the purpose of forcing people to realize what they didn’t want.
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9:58 pm on October 3rd, 2008 5
According to the NK defector that teaches at my school, Roh’s wife’s parents and some of his immediate relatives are listed in the Communist Party register in Pyongyang.
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8:59 am on October 6th, 2008 6
[...] is another sign that times are changing in South Korea because the former President Roh Moo-hyun in his own words would never have agreed to such a change in Korean defense [...]