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Park Geun-ryeong risk

Posted August. 01, 2015 07:21,   

한국어

The Sun, a British tabloid, recently attracted attention by carrying a front-page image from a video apparently showing Queen Elizabeth II as a seven-year-old child giving a Nazi salute. Her sister Princess Margaret is also shown in the photo. While the queen has been living a solemn life, the princess had so many sex scandals that she was compared to Don Juan. One day, the princess made an excuse for her behavior, saying, "It was inevitable: when there are two sisters and one is the Queen, who must be the source of honour and all that is good, while the other must be the focus of the most creative malice, the evil sister."

Park Geun-ryeong, President Park Geun-hye`s younger sister, made headlines by holding an engagement ceremony with Shin Dong-wook, then a college professor who was 14 years younger, in 2007, when her older sister was running for the nomination of her party`s presidential candidate. In 2009, the fiancé faced police investigation for slanderously claiming that Park Geun-hye "robbed" the managerial control over the Yookyoung Foundation. He was imprisoned in 2011 for falsely accusing his brother-in-law of masterminding a murder, before being released in 2013. He and Park Geun-ryeong are still married.

When Park Geun-ryeong publicly refers to President Park, she uses an honorific term, indicating the psychological distance between the two. The president is just two years older than her sister. After then First Lady Yuk Young-soo was assassinated in 1979, however, Park Geun-hye assumed her mother`s First Lady role. After her father, President Park Chung-hee, was also assassinated, she played the role as the head of the family. In order for Park Geun-ryeong to become independent, she had to get out of her older sister`s shadow. It seems that such a tense relationship surfaced in the 1990s in the form of a dispute over the managerial control of the foundation.

The younger Park has stirred up controversies by saying that Japan does not have to pay compensations to Korean wartime sex slaves for the Japanese military and that Seoul`s criticism of Japanese politicians` visits to the Yasukuni Shrine is intervention in Japan`s internal matters. Such remarks indicate her ignorance about the facts that the sex slavery issue was not raised during the negotiations for the normalization of diplomatic ties between the two countries and that the shrine visits became controversial because Class A war criminals are enshrined there. Park Geun-ryeong and her husband seem to have intention to participate in politics, considering their past behaviors. President Park appears to have "Park Geun-ryeong risk" in addition to the risks from her younger brother, Park Ji-man.



pisong@donga.com