[Column] Is deception in the national interest?

Park Sun-bin, Industry Team Chief

The 2002 World Cup. It was an exciting summer. But at the same time, there was a huge increase in Chinese garlic imports, and when prices evaporated, farmers asked the government to invoke urgent import restrictions, or safeguards. The Korea Trade Commission announced it would study the damage. But immediately there arose a problem. An addendum document to the Sino-Korean garlic agreement of July 2000 happened to have a clause that said safeguards could only be enacted for two-and-a-half years after the agreement. The clause had been a virtual state secret up to that point.

Farmers were upset when they found out about the secret clause. They were angrier at the fact that the clause had been hidden away than at the wording itself. Even within the government, the agriculture ministry announced it had never agreed to any such clause, and the Blue House said the "president was never informed of the existence of that kind of clause." The blame game began, and eventually the foreign ministry had to make a little confession.

"At the time the two countries were negotiating about garlic, Korea’s biggest concern was that China would take retaliatory measures on Korean mobile phones and Polyethylene products, and so the addendum documents did not end up being adequately disclosed," it said.

The public had been told the negotiations were about garlic, but in fact it had been a trade between the threat of Chinese trade retaliations and the fate of 500,000 South Korean garlic farms. Three high-ranking foreign ministry officials ended up stepping down after public outcry over the closed-door negotiations.

A similar situation is unfolding five years hence. It started with articles on the free trade negotiations with the U.S. published in The Hankyoreh and Pressian newspapers on January 18 and 19. As mentioned in the articles, the sources of the information were two "eyes-only" secret documents submitted to a special National Assembly committee before being collected again by the executive branch right ahead of the start of the sixth round of FTA negotiations.

Certain corners of the government were furious. A committee under the president that exists to aid him in the trade negotiation process angrily declared that the people who leaked the documents and the media that reported them should be held responsible for aiding the interests of the U.S. in the ongoing negotiations. The conservative media, too, invoked the "national interest" and went on a witch hunt for those involved in the leak. They showed no interest in what the initial reports actually said.

Let’s consider a few issues here. The first is whether the documents should be secret or not. What it revealed for the first time is that Korea would (1) use trade remedies as leverage to achieve some give and take on automobiles and pharmaceuticals, (2) accept "new financial services" that exist in the U.S. but not in Korea, (3) Korea would positively consider ways to allow the processing and handling of Korean financial data in the U.S. and third countries. The key here was the strategy of using trade remedies as leverage. The documents reveal that Korea had already lost its chances on its key demands in that area, because in unofficial but high level talks, the U.S. had already said it could not accept them because it would involve new legislation. Still, the strategy is supposed to be to pressure the U.S. on demands that would lack effectiveness if not legislated, and this is the strategy that is supposed to be used in sensitive areas like automobiles and pharmaceuticals.

This strategy, however, is an already outdated one, used at the fifth round of negotiations held in December of last year. What was different was that the negotiation team’s intentions became official in these documents.

The documents also mention a strategy of making better use of unofficial high-level negotiations. It says both sides are in agreement about that kind of approach for the negotiations. In other words, the U.S. already knows all about it. This is what made us reporters at The Hankyoreh remember the nightmare of the garlic agreement with China. The problem then was that journalists had failed to adequately keep watch on the process of closed-room negotiations and discuss the advantages and disadvantages with the people. It would seem fit to quote our in-house guidelines for news coverage of issues relating to the national interest:

"We do not give up reporting on the truth and on the facts because of the national interest, unless there is present, urgent, and clear reason."

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