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increase with the liquidity crisis, entrusted with the task of restructuring the state-party-
business symbiosis they had created since 1961.
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Enjoying powers delegated by Kim
Dae-jung, and filling in the institutional vacuum left by bickering party bosses, the elite
economic ministries found themselves leading structural reform. The power of elite
economic bureaucrats did not suffered a blow with the financial crisis. On the contrary, it
increased. On their part, the progressives saw the state bureaucracy as a partner in
consolidating their newly won power by mobilizing it to restructure the class relations, as
well as to ideologically weaken the conservative political forces. The NGOs joined their
effort, too, agitating to keep the state on the track of structural reform.
The state-NGO nexus became even closer and tighter in the cultural and
ideological realms. Established by Kim Dae-jung, but becoming more progressive under
the presidency of Roh Moo-hyun, the Presidential Truth Commission recognized a former
leftist guerrilla, along with two North Korean spies imprisoned since the Korean War, as
having died under torture in a struggle for democracy in 1974 by refusing ideological
conversion. Their desperate act of resistance, it argued, exposed South Korea’s violation
of its own constitutional provisions on freedom of thought and conscience.
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The
revisionist campaign gained force from Roh Moo-hyun’s allies, protégés, sympathizers,
and labor union followers in control of the two largest TV networks. Then, in July 2003,
the ruling Uri Party joined force with the Democratic Labor Party in endorsing an NGO-
prepared “Truth Law on Collaborators and Traitors during Japanese Colonial Rule by
Force.”
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Through exposing the acts of betrayal, its advocates argued, South Korea will
free itself from not only its shameful past but also its perverse present because with Rhee
Syng Man’s forging of an alliance with former soldiers, bureaucrats and business leaders
of colonial Korea in the war against leftist forces after 1945, many of the collaborators
Convention