Top Soldier Assailed For After-Golf Acts

It wasn't that he continued his golf game, but the fact that afterward he went home.

That seemed to be the way sentiment was shaping up in government circles Friday, as an investigation was launched into the actions of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Cho Yung-kil, in response to North Korean incursions into Southern waters on June 2.

For going home after the golf game instead of to a briefing room, the chairman is likely to be reprimanded or dismissed from office, sources said. But the sources ruled out the possibility of government sanction against Defense Minister Kim Dong-shin, who was also playing golf that Saturday afternoon, and who also continued his game. That would pose a political embarrassment for President Kim Dae-jung, who has lauded the military's response.

In fact all the top brass － also including Vice Defense Minister Kwon Young-hyo and the chiefs of staffs of the army, navy and air force － were on the links at the time, though not all playing together.

"When they were playing golf in the afternoon, the situation was not very serious," explained a Blue House official. The North Korean freighters were passing through the Cheju Strait, as other countries' ships do under the so-called "right of innocent passage."

"But some officials and experts are criticizing the chairman for having returned to his official residence and commanded the situation from there in the evening when the ships were violating the Northern Limit Line," the official said.

The military command chain places General Cho No. 3, after the president as chief executive and the defense minister.

Senior figures in the ruling Millennium Democratic Party criticized the chairman's action. Representative Yu Sam-nam, a former Navy chief of staff, said that General Cho's failure to report to the military briefing room after the golf game shows "complacency in the way he took grasp of the situation."

The opposition Grand National Party called for General Cho to be sacked.

The Blue House official said that the government had refrained from ruling on the chairman's actions at the time of the incursions, as top military secrets were involved. "We will produce the final analysis and the decision after Defense Minister Kim Dong-shin returns on Sunday," he said.

The Joint Chief of Staff reportedly defended General Cho in a statement to the Blue House. "Had the chairman led things in the briefing room," it said, "that would have put us on a semi-war status." The statement added that the general had been following precedents involving other incursions by North Korean commercial vessels.

Opposition legislators continued to decry what they saw as a tepid response to violations by the North Korean ships. They suggested that Seoul and Pyongyang had secretly agreed to let each other's ships enter territorial waters as a step to further inter-Korean reconciliation.

by Kim Jin-kook