The special committee charged with investigating the Sewol ferry disaster that claimed more than 300 lives continues to be fraught with political wrangling among its members, raising doubts over whether the committee will be able to complete its task in due time.
On Monday, the committee passed a resolution to investigate the Blue House’s response to the Sewol ferry disaster after four members walked out, threatening to resign. The four, recommended to the committee by the ruling Saenuri Party, walked out of the meeting when their proposal that specifically excludes a probe into President Park Geun-hye’s whereabouts on April 16, 2014, was rejected.
An intense debate took place at the meeting over the resolution that would initiate an investigation into how the Blue House responded to the Sewol ferry sinking. At the heart of the debate was whether it would include investigating Park’s whereabouts on that day. Members aligned with the Saenuri Party claimed that it would be unconstitutional to investigate Park, while those aligned with the majority opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy said discovering Park’s whereabouts and the actions she took was crucial to the committee’s fact-finding mission.
In passing the resolution, the committee specified that the president’s whereabouts should not be excluded from the investigation. Indeed, the probe into the Blue House’s response on that tragic day may naturally lead to a probe into Park’s whereabouts. It would be unnatural, then, to preclude an investigation into Park’s whereabouts without even having started the probe.
Investigating Park is a highly controversial issue over which even legal scholars are split. There are those who take the view that it would be unconstitutional to investigate Park as there is no causal relationship between her whereabouts and the ferry accident. On the other hand, there are legal scholars who argue that Park’s whereabouts can be investigated if it can be beneficial to discovering the facts of the Sewol disaster.
The irony in all of this is that the fact-finding committee has become yet another arena for political squabbling between the Saenuri Party and NPAD. The committee that should be independent, unfettered from political considerations, was, from the very beginning, mired in politics.
A Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries document that was uncovered last week showed the ministry giving directives to the Saenuri Party-aligned members of the Sewol investigation committee. The document gives point-by-point instructions on how to respond when items related to the Blue House come up for discussion. The directives appear to focus on preventing a probe into the whereabouts of Park on the day of the disaster.
Why are the government, the Blue House and the ruling party so anxious to prevent an investigation into the so-called “president’s seven hours”? Why shouldn’t there be an accounting for the hours between 10 a.m., when she was first informed of the accident, and 5:15 p.m., when she visited the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters and asked if it was difficult to find the students, who were said to be wearing life jackets?
It is likely that questions about Park’s actions and whereabouts will arise as part of the investigation into the Blue House’s response to the disaster. In fact, what actions Park took that day cannot be separated from the Blue House response, as Park is in command of the Blue House. To preclude a review of Park’s response to the disaster may very well result in an incomplete investigation and the country would not have learned anything from it.
