hankyoreh

where she boasted of her disaster preparedness. The text reads

Fourteen days after the sinking of the Sewol ferry, President Park Geun-hye has come out with a public apology and a list of actions to take, including creating a new “national safety agency” to coordinate rescue operations in cases of major disaster. But the format and content hardly seem to warrant the name “apology.” As expected, Park opted to apologize indirectly, at a Cabinet meeting, rather than facing the public directly. There has been talk in the Blue House about her considering a formal apology to the public once the recovery is finished, but even that is beyond comprehension. With an unprecedented national tragedy like this, what’s another ten or twenty apologies before the people of South Korea? The President still seems to have no grasp of concepts like “guilt” or “responsibility.”

But it’s when she starts blaming the accident on “mistaken vices from the past” that one is left simply speechless. Even when she said “sorry,” she was not reflecting on her own administration’s blunders, but apologizing for “failing to fix deep-rooted vices from the past.” Never mind taking the blame for anything herself - Park wants to pin responsibility for the sinking on the “past.”

This raises some questions that we’d like to ask President Park. Was it the fault of “deep-rooted vices from the past” that all those precious lives were lost because the early response failed with the vessel right there in sight? Is the past to blame for the way the administration is flailing about at this very moment because of the lack of a control tower? And where’s the connection with past vices when the government pats itself on the back and rates its disaster management system as “outstanding” in its assessment of governance programs? Before talking about past vices, Park really should have taken a long, hard look at the general incompetence and irresponsibility of her administration and apologized for that. Before thundering about “rooting out old evils,” she should have pledged to eradicate the evils lurking in her own Blue House and administration. The reason the President’s apology rings so hollow is because she seems to have so poor a grasp of the situation.

As for setting up a “national safety agency” under the Prime Minister, she’s presenting a prescription before the nature of the disease has even been made clear. When the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened in the US, the country responded by setting up a bipartisan special investigation committee that spent 20 months drafting a comprehensive report covering all the facts of the incident, along with the circumstances, causes, and countermeasures. The measures the US government devised were based on 41 recommendations made by the committee. The South Korean government’s priority right now should be to conduct an extensive and detailed analysis of all the factors behind the sinking - the proximate and ultimate causes - together with problems with the response as it unfolded over time and the reasons for miscommunication between agencies. To skip over this process and expect that creating a whole new office will make the country secure is the very definition of a stopgap solution, an administration that wants to look like it’s doing something.

President Park has talked about “remodeling the country,” but no remodeling is going to happen if these are the methods. The careless grasp of the situation, the stopgaps that fail to take any responsibility - those are the holdovers from the past that need to be rooted out. If this remodeling is going to get off the ground, the first thing that needs to change, and change a lot, is the President’s attitude toward governance. Consider it a kind of “remodeling the President.” It’s a core message that President Park continues to ignore.

“An experienced captain who dares to go into the high waves”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xahk8Bdm6Lk

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