Draft Dodging Again Threatens To Become Primary Election Issue

With the elections only twenty days away, public opinion seems to be growing weary of what threatens to become the focus of the elections, a growing mudslinging highlighting the draft-dodging allegedly done by the ruling party or the opposition parties.
The opposition party, the Grand National Party (GNP) on March 21 raised the spectre of draft-dodging suspicions against the ruling Millenium Democratic Party (MDP). Their allegations are against 17 MDP incumbents, candidates and their sons who have suspiciously been exempted from military service which is mandatory for all healthy men over the age of 20. However, the MDP counters that if requested, they would gladly submit to an investigation. The ruling party also dared the GNP to be investigated as well.
In response to such heated debates between the ruling and opposition parties, many civic groups, legal and academic circles have pointed out that these investigations could break the up-to-now relatively clean election campaigns. However, they basically agreed that draft dodging was a serious enough criminal act that could not be ignored either.
If the investigation to be conducted by the Prosecutor's Office is to go through, there are fears of the serious repercussions afterwards especially regarding the seperation of the judiciary's involvement in election procedures.
Chang Kwang-kun, a spokesman for the GNP, raised suspicions against the ruling MDP saying that two sons of a MDP candidate had been exempted from mandatory military service by suspicious "eye problems" and because they were "overweight". However, the MDP candidate in question refuted the charges saying that his elder son sufferred from serious myopia and the third son weighed well over 115kg(or 253 pounds).
The GNP said that a politically-unaffiliated civic monitoring the elections have submitted documents to prosecutors concercning the draft-dodging allegations with focus on the MDP politician's sons. Among the files are some outlining that two other congressmen allegedly "obtained" exemptions from military service themselves or were assigned to the military reserves(only a six-month or 18-month stint as compared to the regular 28-month period). There are also further fingers in the files pointing to the sons of some seven congressmen.
Kim Ok-doo of the ruling MDP stressed that the investigations should be done without immunity, saying that everything must come to light regardless of position or party allegiance.
Chan Tae-wan who recently entered the ranks of the MDP remarked that the whole draft-dodging issue is a national absurdity and a destructive element. He also asserted that the people involved must be evicted from their present posts as soon as information proves the allegations true.
Park Won-soon, one of the committee chairs of the 'Citizen's Alliance for the 2000 General Elections' said that prosecutors have not heard civic group requests for prosecutors to investigate the draft-dodging issue. The groups doubt if the prosecutor's office had any real intention to embark on the investigation at all with election day so near at hand. He also suggested that if they do actually want to investigate the allegations, the investigation should begin after the elections and not before.
Yoon Jong-hyun, general secratery of 'Lawyers for a Democratic Society', asserted that an investigation with the election so close at hand would likely arouse suspicions that it was done specifically to aid certain candidates chances for success and thus taint the impratiality of the investigations themselves.
One judge at Seoul District Court said that bribes that would try to waylay draft-dodging investigations are not a factor because the statute of limitations lasts ten years. Previously, the statute was only a two-month period. He instead agreed with Yoon's opinion worrying that prosecutors might hurt their reputation for impartiality by starting such investigation now.
Reporters from sixteen different news organizations agreed to a moratorium on reporting on the draft-dodging issue as of March 20 due to the frenzy possible from reporters trying to outdo each other and shift the focus of the elections away from the actual issues at hand. Also, a spokesperson for the prosecutor's office stressed that investigations had nothing to do with the election per se. Their policy to investigate the draft-dodging allegations is purely criminal and not politically provoked.
However, one attorney at Seoul District Court cited a 1997 precedent that saw the Prosecutor Office deciding to delay then-President Kim's pending political fundraising investigations with elections close at hand, invesitgations ceased due to political reasons.

by Lee Yang-Soo