By Park Yoon-bae
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Kim served as the country's top environment policymaker between July 2017 and November 2018. Now she is suspected of forcing CEOs and other ranking officials of organizations affiliated with the Ministry of Environment to resign only because they were appointed by the previous government.
It is no secret that Kim applied undue pressure on those officials to tender their resignation en masse. She collaborated with Blue House officials in charge of personnel affairs, apparently helping President Moon Jae-in to "parachute" his confidants into organizations under the wing of her ministry.
This act of parachuting has long been a norm, at least since the military dictatorship started following the May 16, 1961, coup lead by Park Chung-hee. The general-turned-president excessively relied on cronyism to solidify his grip on power and perpetuate his autocratic rule.
Eighteen years of his tyranny ended in 1979 when he was assassinated by his spy chief, Kim Jae-gyu. Yet the military rule never stopped because a new generation of army generals led by Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo seized power. It was not until longtime opposition leader Kim Young-sam became president in 1993 that civilian rule was restored.
Nevertheless, the legacy of the military dictatorship has been too deeply-entrenched to root out bad practices such as cronyism and nepotism. Kim and other popularly-elected presidents continued to install their henchmen as executives and auditors in almost all government agencies, state enterprises and public entities just as their predecessors with military backgrounds did.
Despite taking pride in achieving both rapid economic development and democratization in a short period of time, the country has yet to get rid of the parachuting practice.
Whenever a new president takes office, the government never fails to name political bigwigs' close aides to top positions at state-run businesses and public institutions. That is why this unfair and irrational pattern shows no sign of abating whoever the president is ― liberal or conservative.
The problem aggravated under former conservative Presidents Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, a daughter of the late strongman Park Chung-hee. The parachuting episode reached a climax in a massive power abuse and corruption scandal surrounding the junior Park and her confidant Choi Soon-sil.
Park's former chief of staff, Kim Ki-choon, and then Culture Minister Cho Yoon-sun were indicted for forcing high-level ministry officials to resign because they were not loyal to the president. They were also accused of drawing up a "blacklist" of up to 10,000 artists, entertainers and other cultural figures critical of the Park government.
Now the question is whether the Moon Jae-in administration has succeeded in eliminating such corrupt practices. Given the former environment minister's case, the government appears to have repeated the same mistakes of the previous administrations.
Worse, the presidential office is even trying to exert influence over the judiciary in a bid to justify Kim's ill-conceived scheme to kick out those appointed by the ousted President Park.
On Tuesday, a judge turned down the prosecution's request for an arrest warrant for former Minister Kim, raising the "double standard" issue. He gave an impression that the court was defending the Blue House's interference in the replacement of executives at the ministry-affiliated organizations.
His logic is that the Moon administration's parachuting is a legitimate practice, while that of the Park Geun-hye government is not. He also implied it might be hard to hold Kim and presidential officials culpable.
One cannot but think that the judge was currying favor with the presidential office just as former Chief Justice Yang Sung-tae and some senior judges allegedly abused judicial authority to suck up to political power.
The judge's action undoubtedly has dealt a setback to the prosecution's efforts to fight the parachuting. It has also undermined the credibility of President Moon's commitment to eradicate "accumulated evils" of the previous administrations.
Koreans often say, "If I have an affair with somebody, it is a romance. But if others do so, it is an infidelity." This saying could be regrettably applied to the Moon administration.
The President and his aides should no longer apply a double standard. The more they are bent on legitimizing parachuting, the more they look like hypocrites. And this could lead to the betrayal of not only Moon's promise to build a fair and just society, but also the people's aspiration for democracy.
The author (byb@koreatimes.co.kr) is the chief editorial writer of The Korea Times.
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