Roh associates dispute claims he gave up the NLL

Posted on : 2012-10-11 15:46 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
Current and former government officials say there are no records of Roh yielding to Kim Jong-il

By Park Byong-su and Kim Won-chul, staff reporters

Untimely new revelations of alleged secret dialogues between Kim Jong-il and the late President Roh Moo-hyun have suddenly emerged before the presidential election. On the issue of New Frontier Party lawmaker Jeong Mun-heon’s contention that in the North-South summit held in October, 2007, then-president Roh Moo-Hyun said that he would not insist on the Northern Limit Line (NLL), his party has stepped up the offensive with calls for a full-scale investigation of the issue. Opposition party leaders, for their part, said that the claim is “groundless and a political offensive focused on affecting the presidential election.”

The Northern Limit Line is the maritime boundary between North and South Korea. It acts as the de fact maritime border though it has never been recognized by North Korea.

New Frontier Party Floor Leader Lee Hahn-koo met with press on Oct. 10 and said, “The release of records of conversations between Kim Jong-il and Roh Moo-hyun during parliamentary inspections of the Foreign Affairs, Unification and Trade Committee is a huge incident and has thrown the nation into disorder”.

Lee added that he would soon move to initiate a parliamentary review of the incident along with an internal party fact-finding committee, and seek to convene the National Assembly’s Intelligence Committee. Going on to label the affair, “North Korea-gate,” he called for investigations into whether there were unofficial recordings of the conversations, whether President Roh really made a verbal promise not to enforce the Northern Limit Line with North Korea, North Korea’s stance on nuclear weapons, the removal of US troops, and large-scale support programs for North Korea at the time. Lee’s comments seem to be an outline for a major security-related blitz on the issue.

Earlier, while speaking at a Ministry of Unification parliamentary review, Rep. Jeong Mun-heon had said that he had seen classified records from Oct. 2007 discussions between President Roh and Kim Jong-il, in which the former president confided in Kim that the “NLL issue was a major headache for him because the US had arbitrarily drawn the line in a land grab.” Rep. Jeong also said, “President Roh made a verbal promise that South Korea would no longer hold fast to the NLL and that the area could be used by fishermen from both sides, and that the issue of the NLL would fade away.”

This offensive by the New Frontier party can be interpreted as a move to make this controversy into a point of political contention and steer the issue in a direction that benefits them in the upcoming election. With Park Geun-hye’s support ratings showing no signs of recovery and the party dealing with internal strife, they seem to hope this issue will be just the turnaround they need to escape their current problems.

Democratic United Party floor leader Park Ji-won said, “There was no one-on-one meeting [between the two leaders] and no such record exists.” Park rejected the calls for a parliamentary review of the matter. In a television appearance the same day, Park said, “First of all, such records do not exist, and (even if they did), their discussion would be illegal and therefore an overall security minus for the public. If by some chance such records do exist, they would be classified as level-one national security documents and their release would therefore be illegal.”

Party officials that accompanied President Roh throughout the 2007 inter-Korea summit, former Minster of Reunification, Lee Jae-jeong, former director of the National Intelligence Service, Kim Man-bok and Baek Jong-cheon, former Blue House secretary for security affairs, held their own press conference to dispute the claims. They said, “There was no private meeting, no secret agreement, and no secret records, either.”

On the alleged secret meeting that Rep. Jeong contends took place on Oct. 3 at 3 o’clock in the Baekhwawon Guest House, the group said, “At that time, the afternoon meeting was in full swing,” adding, “No private meetings were held and only the proposition of a peace zone in the West (Yellow) Sea was discussed in the morning and afternoon meetings, but the NLL was never even brought up.”

Then-Minister of Defense Kim Jang-soo had previously stated, “At the meeting between the defense ministers of both nations one month after the summit, then-head of North Korea’s People’s Armed Forces, Kim Il-cheol did say, ‘even President Roh said that there were problems with the NLL,’ to which this group said, ”If Minister Kim did hear those remarks he would’ve headed to the situation room and asked for orders by saying, ‘North Korea is saying this, is it true? How should I be handling this?’ But we’ve heard from the Blue House that no such thing ever took place.“

 

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