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Roh Moo-hyun, President of South Korea.
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Furor over the incident called ’political’
The South Korean presidential office said Sunday that the government intends to avoid a large response to last week’s test firing of missiles by North Korea. "The president wants to respond slowly and without raising his voice," it said in a prepared statement titled "Let Us Get Beyond the Ghosts of Past ‘Security Dictatorships.’ " "The president has a responsibility to make the people feel secure," the statement read. "His first interest is the safety of the people, and next comes preventing people from feeling uneasy. [Concern for] public opinion comes after that." "Security Dictatorship" refers to past military dictatorships in South Korea, which sought to justify their tight grip on South Korean society through playing up the threat of North Korea.The statement continued, "South Korea had an era of ’security dictatorship,’ but now something the opposite is happening. Members of the opposition are making the crisis out to be something bigger than it is, and accusing the government of not making a huge fuss. Most of these people are those who benefited from the dictatorships. The world has changed but their thinking is the same," said the presidential office statement. "Was North Korea’s firing of missiles a crisis for South Korea’s security? If someone wants to turn this into an emergency situation for political reasons, it will merely amount to a political incident, and it cannot be made into an emergency situation as far as security is concerned," the statement continued. "It would not be good to have heightened tensions on the peninsula or to try and make inter-Korean relations turn bad, and it will not help resolve the nuclear or missile issues. There is nothing to be politicized here and nothing that should be used as justification for increasing military spending," the statement read.
