Left-wing party sets up emergency committee to reform troubled party

The interim head of the Unified Progressive Party (UPP) set up an emergency committee Wednesday to revive the left-wing opposition party as it reels from a primary fraud scandal.

"We will immediately embark on activities to reform the party,"

Kang Ki-kab, chairman of the UPP's emergency committee said in a news conference. The five-month-old party also plans to name outside figures as members of the committee in coming weeks.

However, the move is unlikely to end the internal strife as the party's mainstream faction vowed to boycott the committee in protest at online voting by the party earlier this week.

The party voted Monday to set up the emergency committee and endorsed a resolution calling for the resignation of 14 people who participated in a primary to run for the April 11 elections as proportional representation candidates.

Only six of the 14 candidates were elected as UPP lawmakers under the proportional representation system, which allocates seats to parties according to the numbers of votes they receive. Three of them did not participate in the primary but were recommended by the UPP.

Kang said he will try to meet with the candidates who ran in the rigged primary, to ask them to resign.

"Even if I (need to) kneel down and beg, I will persuade them to ensure they voluntarily resign sometime soon," Kang said in an interview on local SBS radio.

Yoon Geum-soon, who won the primary and was elected as a lawmaker, resigned earlier this month. Two other lawmakers-elect, who belong to the mainstream faction and took part in the primary, have refused to step down.

The two lawmakers-elect -- Lee Seok-gi and Kim Jae-yeon -- have allegedly espoused North Korea's guiding "juche" philosophy of self-reliance. The mainstream faction is loyal to the East Gyeonggi Coalition, an alleged pro-North Korean bloc that some say was dissolved a decade ago. (Yonhap News)