GNP Lawmaker: Roh may have tried to force N. Korean bomber to retract her accusation of Kim Jong Il

I figured we’d find out a lot of disturbing things about Roh Moo Hyun’s strange affinity for the North Korean regime after he left office. This alleged effort to hijack history suggests that that affinity exceeded his affinity for the lives of South Korean airline passengers:

The ruling Grand National Party will hold a National Assembly hearing about allegations by the surviving bomber of Korean Air flight 858 that the previous government bullied her into backing a conspiracy theory surrounding the 1987 bombing. Kim Hyun-hee, the former North Korean agent now living in the South, has claimed that the National Intelligence Service under the Roh Moo-hyun government leaned on her to appear on a TV program that would examine whether the incident was a setup by South Korean intelligence.

GNP lawmaker Gu Sang-chan, a member of the Foreign Affairs, Trade and Unification Committee, on Sunday said, “If anybody attempted to force Kim to give false testimony on the bombing of the KAL flight, we must find out truth about who did it and why. The hearing is to be in April. [Chosun Ilbo]

I’ll venture that we’d have learned a lot more about Roh in the government files his administration should have left behind. Unfortunately, most of the Roh Administration’s electronic data files disappeared shortly before the transition, and there were rumors of files being shredded. Imagine that.

This story doesn’t implicate those Roh-appointed “Truth and Reconciliation Committees,” but it’s a fine illustration of the motives that cause me to distrust them. To begin with, the name itself is a lie: they aren’t really about truth or reconciliation, but in erasing inconvenient facts and nursing old grudges. This, combined with years of the same kind of thing from right-wing Korean regimes, leaves Korean history altered beyond recognition. Of course, all of this argument about the past has the useful effect (for some) of distracting Koreans from the dire realities of today.