Will the real Im Jong-seok please speak up?

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, AS IF TO ANSWER THE QUESTION I RAISED in the final paragraph of yesterday’s post, reports on the background of South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s Chief of Staff, Im Jong-seok, or rather, some of it. It’s an unsatisfying report by first-rate reporters that reads as if it has been edited too heavily by lawyers. Its most glaring omissions are the word “Chondaehyop,” what it did, or when Im led it. Specifically, it fails to answer the questions that I’ve been waiting for any reporter to answer: was Im still in charge of Chondaehyop when it tried to firebomb the U.S. Embassy or the Consular Annex? Did Im have a role in planning those attacks, or other violent attacks Chondaehyop carried out against U.S. facilities around that time?

The report confirms that starting in 2005, “North Korea granted Mr. Im power of attorney to act as its agent in the South, collecting royalties on North Korean literary and artistic works used by South Korean publishers and film producers,” but does not tell us when that arrangement ended, or whether it ended at all. Starting in 2006, the U.N. imposed sanctions on North Korea that obligated those transferring funds to the North to “ensure” that those funds weren’t used for prohibited purposes, including its nuclear weapons program (paragraph 8(d)). The WSJ report does nothing to elucidate whether Im violated those sanctions, was still in violation of them last year, or continues to violate them today. Indeed, if Im is funneling those royalties to Pyongyang in dollars, he may well be violating U.S. law, too, as they’re likely paid to the Propaganda and Agitation Department, an entity that is designated by the Treasury Department.

Most telling of all is that Im still refuses to discuss any of this or explain what his views are, whether the questioner is a reporter or a member of South Korea’s National Assembly.

Instead, the WSJ interviews character witnesses who vouch for his recent moderation, without explaining which views have moderated or how. One of these witnesses is a fellow ex-activist and a member of Im’s party, and another is a centrist politician who says that Im “has never been a North Korean sympathizer,” which is patently untrue. There’s no question that he was–the question is whether he still is. That centrist politician, Ha Tae-kyung, was recently fined $4300 in a libel suit for calling Moon Jae-in’s lawyer’s guild “jongbuk,” meaning North Korean sympathizers (which many of them almost certainly are, in addition to being quislings, unethical lawyers, and shitty human beings who’ve made a cynical punchline of the words “human rights” by using the legal system to bully North Korean refugees and breach their legal rights to confidentiality). It occurs to me that if you’re going to ask a public figure if the President’s Chief of Staff is jongbuk, this isn’t the guy who will feel free to say what he really thinks.

This, by the way, is the newspaper that usually does the best foreign reporting from Korea–the only one that’s still worth the subscription price.

Then again, if I were a center-right Korean politician–don’t forget that Ha Tae-kyung spent time in prison during his own jongbuk period years ago–I might have answered the same way. I don’t take issue with pinning the jongbuk label on someone when it fits, and as a blogger, I don’t have a political reason not to when I think it does. I could also excuse Ha for thinking that too often, the Korean right acts as if the jongbuk label is the only argument it needs, rather than having to offer an appealing agenda for uniting all Koreans within a more just, equal, and free society. Koreans deserve a better choice than (on one hand) six days a week of soulless toil for the economic oligarchy of the chaebol and a seventh trying to stay awake in church, or (on the other) a stultifying, humiliating, and ultimately impoverishing capitulation to totalitarianism. Ha would still have been better off with a polite “no comment,” and I have never been more curious about all that we still don’t know, and should want to know, about Im Jong-seok.