A police detective who worked in the South Korean president’s office filed a report in 2014 accusing relatives and associates of an unofficial presidential adviser of meddling in state affairs.
He was promptly reassigned.
That was just the start of his troubles. After a newspaper reported some of his findings, the detective, Park Kwan-cheon, who worked as a watchdog against graft, was charged with leaking government documents.
South Korean President Park Geun-hye, who is not related to Park Kwan-cheon, accused him of “undermining national discipline.”
He was convicted and spent 16 months in prison.
To opponents of the president, the case confirms that she is just like her father, former South Korean president and military general Park Chung-hee: an isolated, authoritarian leader who uses state power against critics while shielded by a small coterie of advisers.
Park Kwan-cheon is not the only official who paid for raising alarms about the adviser, Choi Soon-sil, a longtime friend of the president who is at the center of the scandal crippling her administration. Other officials were demoted or forced to resign.
At least two people, including a journalist, were prosecuted for spreading rumors that Park Geun-hye had a relationship with Choi’s former husband.
As the scandal grows, even many older South Koreans who revere Park’s father — and who were crucial to her election victory in 2012 — have turned against her. Her approval numbers have dropped to record lows and crowds of protesters have called on her to resign.
“In the end, she turned out to be a dunderhead who couldn’t even separate public affairs from private friendships,” said Kim Ky-baek, 64, who runs a nationalist Web site, Minjokcorea. “What so disappointed conservatives like me is that she tainted her father’s name, rather than honoring it.”
Prosecutors have charged Choi with leveraging her ties to Park Geun-hye to extort millions of US dollars from South Korean businesses; they have also charged one aide to Park Geun-hye with helping her to do so.
News reports have said that Choi held considerable sway in the presidential Blue House and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, despite having no official post or background in policy.
Park Geun-hye has said only that Choi edited some of her speeches.
In addition, Choi’s background — her father, who was also close to Park Chung-hee, led a fringe religious sect — has led many South Koreans to conclude that Choi wielded a sort of cult-like control over the president.
Park Geun-hye denied this.
Such colorful accusations aside, the notion that Park Geun-hye relies too heavily on a few trusted aides — one of whom might one day betray her, like the intelligence chief who assassinated her father in 1979 — has been part of South Korean political discussion for years.
A former Cabinet minister recently compared her advisers with cockroaches, saying that they operated in the shadows.
Park Geun-hye ’s detached leadership style might have encouraged such speculation.
She holds just one news conference a year. Even after apologizing on Nov. 4 for the Choi scandal and agreeing to be questioned by investigators if asked, she took no questions from reporters. Some of her senior presidential aides said they had never had a one-on-one policy meeting with the president.
Her government’s zealous pursuit of ideological opponents has also invited comparisons with her father’s rule. In 2014, it forced a small left-wing party to disband on the grounds that it subscribed to North Korean ideology. A performance artist was indicted over graffiti directed toward Park Geun-hye that read sayonara, the Japanese word for goodbye.
In 2014, Japanese reporter Tatsuya Kato was charged with defamation for reporting rumors that Park Geun-hye and Choi’s husband, himself a former parliamentary aide for the president, had been engaged in a romantic liaison during the sinking of a ferry that killed hundreds of students. Kato was later acquitted, but last year, a South Korean activist was imprisoned for scattering leaflets that carried the same rumor.
And officials like Park Kwan-cheon, the former police officer, have paid a price for investigating Choi or her family. In 2013, two officials at the culture and sports ministry who pursued accusations that her family interfered in the affairs of an equestrian association — Choi’s daughter is an equestrian — were banished to obscure positions and later resigned.
This summer, Lee Seok-su, a senior government auditor appointed by Park Geun-hye to monitor her relatives and associates, was forced to resign after looking into corruption allegations involving Choi and presidential aides. Several aides sued journalists in 2014 for reporting similar allegations involving them and Choi’s husband.
One of those aides was recently arrested on charges of passing on classified presidential documents to Choi.
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