Sooin Moon
These days, Koreans are more prone to make protests to make a difference, positive or not, and are quite skeptical of government actions. I was working for the auxiliary police for 19 months from 2016, February, so I can say I have first-hand experience with many protests. Today. I’d like to talk about why protests have changed over the years.
The biggest reason is the former president, Park Gunhae, who was impeached and sent to jail for manipulation of the government. These accused manipulations were so stunning and lengthy, I will explain in a chronological order to fully explain how it akk happened.
I will begin with the major manipulation, the Mir foundation. This foundation was known to be founded with the purpose of supporting Korean culture. However, the press quickly found out that the foundation’s fund was being funded by the huge corporations in Korea, like Samsung, SK, LG and more from Korean economy union because of the government forced them to. One employee of one of these corporations said that he was only ordered to go to the Gangnam’s Palace hotel with papers to send money as a support fund, without any kind of explanation about what it was for and how the corporation will benefit from it. The ordered employee said that this was a very rare case that you skip all the negotiations and to just send money, which only happens during the emergency periods.
50 billion won was gathered within 2 months, with no questions asked. The thing was, a similar thing was also found in another organization, the K sport, with almost identical structure and methods of gathering money. Skeptical of what was happening, a Korean paper started to delve into deeper parts, finding out that the owner of the K sport was Choi-sunsil’s favorite massage center’s owner. Choi will be discussed later, as she plays an important role in the impeachment. For now, she can be explained as a sort of a mastermind behind a lot of steps the president took during her time in office. Anyways, these accusations ignited a huge barrel of questions aimed at the president’s qualification, along with a disclosure made by one of the managers in the Mir foundation, proving that the all funds came from the president and Choi.
So, people began to ask, who is this Choi lady? The answer was not so simple. The more people dug in, the more came out. So, on the very same year, newspapers started to make news on her. Starting with one of the most shocking disclosure, that she read and edited presidential speeches. However, she was a nobody with no specific or professional knowledge; she was just a very good friend of the president. Then, the prosecutors started to work on the case, trying to figure out what happened with the funding of Mir, and K sport. After a while, on October 24th, there was a report from the Korean press JTBC, that they had acquired a tablet PC from the Choi’s office, giving sound evidence on how she was able to access on all the important presidential speeches and edited them, with zero ability to do so in reality. This created a huge uproar from the people. Basically, a lady just edited and accessed the president’s speeches and documents, ever since the Park was a candidate, just because she was a friend of the president.
This was very hasty and a huge mistake, because the president said she only received advice from Choi, and she stopped working with her after the election. However, JTBC disclosed another set of files, including images that were not uploaded on Choi’s facebook page, to prove the credibility, that she had a data like Dresden speech and reports on government council conference. The data was so important because in included situations and cases on how the government would do in the future with the North Korean government and the economy, which all totally revoked and proved that the president only lied to escape the impending accusations.
The prosecutor named this as “Choi sunsil gate” and begun to investigate, which will be talked about later.
Well, for the spoilers, both the president Park and Choi insisted that they were never a part of the funding and didn’t intend to use them for their private cause either, of which however were found out as a lie, and they all went to jail for that.
myHUBS 
Leave a comment