Text Fwd: Businessweek: S. Korea Faces Prominent Domestic Skeptics; Government Censoring & Repressing political & media leaders

*J. D. thankfully informed on May 31. 2010

Business Week
South Korea Faces Domestic Skeptics Over Evidence Against North
May 29, 2010,

By Ben Richardson and Saeromi Shin

May 30 (Bloomberg) -- South Korea’s government is trying to stem skepticism about an inquiry that blamed North Korea for the sinking of a warship, according to local media reports.

Prime Minister Chung Un Chan ordered the government to find a way to stop groundless rumors spreading on the Cheonan’s sinking, the JoongAng Daily said yesterday. Prosecutors questioned a former member of the panel that probed the incident over his critical comments, the paper said. The Joint Chiefs of Staff sued a lawmaker for defamation after she said video footage of the ship splitting apart existed, a claim the military denies, Yonhap News reported.

Almost one in four South Koreans say they don’t trust the findings of the multinational panel, according to a poll commissioned by Hankook Ilbo on May 24. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency yesterday accused the South’s “puppet military of trying to cover up the truth about the sinking” by seeking to silence opposition lawmakers with the lawsuit.

The news agency yesterday released six English-language articles asserting that the country is innocent in the March 26 sinking and attacking the evidence presented by the inquiry. The denials come as Wen Jiabao, premier of North Korea’s main ally, China, is in South Korea for a three-way summit that includes Japan.

South Korea and Japan made a joint stand yesterday blaming North Korea, and want China to also take a stance. Wen May 28 said that while China won’t protect anyone found guilty of causing the ship to sink, it is still assessing the evidence.
China is North Korea’s largest trading partner and main political ally, having fought alongside the North and against the U.S. in the 1950-1953 Korean War.
‘Blinded With Ambition’

“The South Korean conservatives are now blinded with the wild ambition to invent a pretext for escalating the confrontation,” the North Korean news service said in one report yesterday. “It has become clearer that a nuclear war is bound to break out,” the report said, “as long as such traitors are allowed to be at large.”

In another, the agency wrote: “The case of the warship sinking is a sheer fabrication made by the South Korean ruling forces, a hideous burlesque orchestrated by them.”

Lee Jung Hee, a lawmaker with an opposition party, the Democratic Labor Party, was sued for defamation by seven people at South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, Yonhap News reported May 25.

Lee said during a speech in parliament that while the Defense Ministry had said there was no feed from a thermal observation device showing the moment the warship’s stern and bow split apart, such a video did exist.

Accident Claims

Prosecutors May 28 questioned Shin Sang-cheol, who runs Seoprise, a Web-based political magazine, over his assertion that the Cheonan sank in an accident and that the evidence linking the North to the torpedo was tampered with, the JoonAng said. Shin served on the panel that probed the sinking.

The magnified photograph of writing on the torpedo showed that the marking was written on top of a rusted surface, the newspaper cited Shin as saying. The Defense Ministry asked the National Assembly to eject Shin from the investigation for “arousing public mistrust,” the report said.

South Korea intends to present its case against the North to the United Nations Security Council. The U.S., Japan, Australia and the U.K. have all accepted the findings of the panel. The commission included experts from Sweden, which has an embassy in Pyongyang and isn’t aligned with South Korea and the U.S.

‘Awkward Position’

North Korea warned the UN to be wary of evidence that it said falsely accuses the country of torpedoing the warship, likening the case to the claims of weapons of mass destruction that the U.S. used to justify its war against Iraq in 2003.

The Security Council risks being “misused” by the U.S., the country’s foreign ministry said last night in a news agency statement. “The U.S. is seriously mistaken if it thinks it can occupy the Korean Peninsula just as it did Iraq with sheer lies,” the statement said.

The U.S. is joining South Korea in blaming North Korea for the sinking to “put China into an awkward position and keep hold on Japan and South Korea as its servants,” KCNA said.

North Korean Major General Pak Rim Su said in Pyongyang yesterday that the international investigation into the sinking was biased because it was supervised by the South Korean military and included the U.S., the Korean Central News Agency said.

Pak said the North does not have the type of submarines that the South said carried out the attack, Agence France-Presse reported, citing North Korea’s Chungang TV. South Korea’s Yonhap News quoted South Korean officials as saying the North has about 10 of the Yeono class submarines, AFP said.

Senior Colonel Ri Son Gwon also derided claims that writing on the torpedo was put there by North Korea, AFP reported.

“When we put serial numbers on weapons, we engrave them with machines,” Ri said, according to AFP.

Twenty-four percent of respondents said they didn’t trust the government’s evidence, with more skepticism among younger and better-educated people, the Hankook Ilbo poll found. Almost 90 percent of people over 60 trusted the findings, while only 70 percent of those in their 40s did.

--Editors: Phil Serafino, Dick Schumacher.
To contact the reporters on this story: Ben Richardson at brichardson8@bloomberg.net; Saeromi Shin in Seoul at sshin15@bloomberg.net