[Editorial] Finally the Truth About 'People's Revolutionary Party'

The National Intelligence Service (NIS) commission given the task of looking into the agency's past has released its findings regarding the "first People's Revolutionary Party affair" of 1964 and the "People's Revolutionary Party Reconstruction Committee and National Democratic Young Student League affair" of 1974. According to the commission, men in power plotted both investigations and in the course of making the pieces fit together, torture and other forms of violence were put to wide use. It had concluded that the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), as the agency was called at the time, exaggerated or fabricated the facts when it called the people involved an "anti-state organization taking orders from North Korea" attempting to "rise against the state and overthrow the system."

In the second round, Do Ye Jong and the seven others who were found guilty of crimes against the state by the Supreme Court were executed the very next day, and that "judicial murder" produced a fatal stain modern Korean history. This confession by the perpetrator about its shameful past is late in coming but is honest. The "reconstruction committee" had already been declared by the presidential commission on suspicious deaths to have been a fabrication by the KCIA, back in 2002. This latest inquiry made progress in revealing that it was Cheong Wa Dae that was ultimately behind the hasty executions, but it was still not exhaustive enough to reveal the whole of what happened.

For more than two years the Supreme Court has postponed making a decision on whether to grant the families of the men who were executed a retrial as requested. Revising the law to ease the conditions that have to be met for a retrial will be necessary, but the court also needs to take a profoundly different approach to the matter, because bears a burden for having aided and abetted the judicial murder. It needs to accept the petition for a retrial and open the way for a complete, judicial "restoration of honor" for the deceased.

Most of the individuals who were part of the National Democratic Young Student League have been officially recognized for their participation in the democracy movement. Those the court found to be part of the People's Revolutionary Party, however, are still officially men who joined an anti-state organization. Five of the men who were not executed have already passed away and the rest do not have much time left. It would be hard to calculate the suffering of their families over the past roughly 30 years for having been seen by others as the families of "reds." The government needs to listen to the commission when it says there needs to be "appropriate and swift action at the state level."

The Hankyoreh, 8 December 2005.

[Translations by Seoul Selection]