The Democratic Party of Korea holds a launch ceremony for its special committee on K-defense industry support on Friday. [Yonhap]
The Democratic Party of Korea holds a launch ceremony for its special committee on K-defense industry support on Friday. [Yonhap]

The Democratic Party of Korea on Saturday accused the People Power Party of enabling the glorification of dictatorship, saying the ruling party had gone beyond lawmaker Lee Jin-suk to allow its own policy chief to co-host a forum whitewashing authoritarian rule.

Democratic Party spokesperson Lee Yong-woo said in a written briefing that PPP policy committee chairwoman Im Yi-ja co-hosted a forum titled "Park Chung-hee the Revolutionary" at the National Assembly on Wednesday. "The event glorified the May 16 coup as a 'successful military revolution' and praised former President Park Chung-hee as 'the greatest contributor to democratization,'" Lee said. "Is the People Power Party a party of historical distortion?"

Lee said the forum also included false claims that only eight people — those executed in the People's Revolutionary Party Reconstruction Committee case — were put to death during Park's rule. "There were other victims, including Kang Eul-seong, who was executed and later acquitted at retrial, yet the forum erased their existence entirely to defend the dictatorship," he said.

Lee added that all eight victims of the People's Revolutionary Party case were also acquitted at retrial. "Invoking what was clearly an act of state violence — lives taken through torture and fabrication — as grounds to defend dictatorship is a shameless distortion of history," he said.

Lee said arguments at the forum justifying the Yushin system ignored judicial rulings on the matter. "The Constitutional Court ruled Emergency Decrees Nos. 1, 2 and 9 unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court recognized the state's liability for damages caused by the issuance, application and enforcement of Emergency Decree No. 9," he said. "Defending the repression of the people as unavoidable is an insult to democracy."

He said crediting Park with advancing democratization on the strength of economic growth was identical to the dictatorship-glorifying content of "Rebak School," and accused the PPP leadership of bringing into the National Assembly the same distorted view of history once fed to children.

"The People Power Party must immediately stop lending the National Assembly as a stage for historical distortion and for glorifying coups and dictatorship," Lee said. "The Democratic Party will firmly resist any attempt to erase the truth of state violence and overturn the history of democracy built by the people."


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