The Seoul Metropolitan Government provided leftist civic groups with a venue for a joint event where some participants echoed North Korea’s arguments and effectively advocated its nuclear weapons. The Seoul mayor even delivered a congratulatory address.
The groups ran a contest of opinions on the April 27 South and North Korean Summit, and the award ceremony took place in the municipal government building on July 7. In the ceremony, prize winners presented their works. Most of the winners were in their teens and 20s.
Some winning works disparaged modern Korean history, publicized the North Korean view of history, promoted the North Korean regime blindly and denounced the US.
It is unbelievable that this kind of event took place in none other than the Seoul City Hall in the capital of the nation.
A prize-winning essay argued that “the division of Korea into South and North and dictatorship in South Korea which lasted from Presidents Syngman Rhee to Chun Doo-hwan stemmed from the monopoly of South Korean state affairs by the US and traitors.”
“North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said (in the summit) that the North and the South must be united back again because they are from one blood, use the same language and share one culture. That is the Korean unification I have thought of,” the essay said.
A prize-winning video by two middle school students lists advantages of Korean unification, and among them is North Korea’s nuclear weapons, which will make a unified Korea a nuclear state.
One cannot but be struck dumb at the group’s audacity of selecting this ill-guided view as a prize winner.
What situation are we in now?
The international community has been trying to get rid of North Korea’s nuclear weapons, which threaten the survival of South Korea.
Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon, on an overseas business trip at the time, sent his congratulations in a video message, saying, “I am very pleased that the meaningful event was held in the Seoul City Hall.”
Organizers of the contest are pro-North Korean groups that claim on the surface that they promote Korean unification through South-North exchanges and cooperation.
Peaceium, a civic group that cited the prize winning works, held a lecture by Shin Eun-mi, a pro-Pyongyang Korean-American author, in 2015. Its board includes Hwang Seon, who gave birth in Pyongyang after entering the North in 2005 illegally. Hwang was sentenced to six months in prison in 2016 for violating the National Security Law by promoting the North Korean regime.
Another co-host, a coalition of progressive university students, demonstrated in front of the US Embassy in Seoul two months ago calling for the suspension of all US-Korea military exercises.
The municipal government reportedly said it had offered space to the groups because it thought the event was not political and that Mayor Park sent a congratulatory message because its purpose seemed to be well intentioned.
The excuses fall short of convincing. If the city government checked out what the groups had done, it would have guessed easily how the event would go.
Even if dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang is now underway and the tone of inter-Korean relations has turned conciliatory, it is hard to understand City Hall providing a place for an event in which participants denigrated the legitimacy of South Korea and viewed North Korea’s nuclear weapons as national assets.
Naturally, Korean unification is imperative, but one must not try to gloss over the essence of the brutal regime in Pyongyang, which tramples on the human rights of its residents and executes political dissidents publicly.
The city government should review how it came to allow the event to take place in its building, hold those concerned responsible and take steps to prevent a similar incident.
