[Editorial] If We Want To Welcome Real “Future Reconciliation and Truth ”

The ruling Uri Party has decided to set up “Committee for Future Reconciliation and Truth” in order to eradicate absurd legacies of the past. This seems to be the Party’s response to President Roh Moo-hyun’s comment at a briefing of Presidential Truth Commission on Suspicious Deaths that “we need a national level project to address past problems.”

The idea was borrowed, they said, from Nelson Mandela, former president of the Republic of South Africa, who launched the “Committee of Truth and Reconciliation” in 1994 with the purpose of investigating cases involved in Apartheid. However, we cannot help casting doubt on whether this method is workable in Korea, which has experienced multi-tiered conflict structures while going through democratization, modernization, and a national division, followed by the Korean War and an antecedent 36-year Japanese colonial rule. How could they manage to rearrange such complicated history comprehensively?

While South Africa was addressing contemporary history for the sake of reconciliation and clemency, President Roh and the Uri Party are seeking the reexamination of “bygone days” and their liquidation.

As for South Africa, as 80 percent of the population, Negro, extended its hands to 20 percent of the population, Caucasian, for reconciliation, an effort to consolidate social unity and heal social disruption was being made. How about our country? Is the ruling party now calling for the liquidation of the past for social consolidation, or for exclusion and partisanship? Unfortunately, few think that they are doing this for social consolidation. Many believe that the ruling party is attempting an arbitrary reexamination into close to 100 years of history, while presumptuously boasting a 20-year democratization record at best.

This method is unlikely to be successful. In particular, increasing suspicion on its intentions, highlighted by stories that “facing a conservative backlash, the party is broaching the subject of the past and seeking a chance for consolidating the nation’s support,” indicates that this will do nothing but bring up unnecessary social controversy. They should keep in mind that if history is misused for certain political purposes like this, it will also be targeted on their offspring’s investigation into their past.