What the presidential guts must not miss

Kim Seung-hyun
The author is the national news director at the JoongAng Ilbo.

Trainee doctors, who make up 40 percent of all doctors at major hospitals in Korea, have disappeared from the scene. They have walked out en masse in protest of President Yoon Suk Yeol’s push to add 2,000 to the medical school enrollment quota next year. The government warns that the young doctors are in danger of violating the Medicine Act by defying its order to return to work. It says their jobs and licenses could be saved if they return on time, but adds that they nevertheless will pay the price for abandoning patients. President Yoon defined their massive resignations as “a collective action taking people’s lives and health hostage.”

What started out as a difference over the increase in medical school enrollment boiled down to an existential question for the nation. “Guarding the lives and safety of the people is the reason why a nation exists — and it is the fundamental constitutional role of the government,” Yoon stressed. The public has so far cheered the government for trying to uphold its constitutional duty of tending to the crumbling primary and rural medical infrastructure due to shortages of doctors.

The campaign to increase the number of future doctors is being pushed in idiosyncratic Yoon Suk Yeol style — commanded in plain and simple language, with solemn cause and a good-and-evil dichotomy. The leadership feature can also be found in his younger protégé, Han Dong-hoon, interim leader of the governing People Power Party (PPP), who shares the same credentials, having graduated from Seoul National University Law School and served the Central Investigation Department of the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office. Upon resigning as Yoon’s first justice minister to take up the new role as head of the party on Dec. 26, Han said he was convinced that a country progresses and public livelihood betters when exquisite and sure-footed leadership meets public understanding and support.

That is a common winning strategy for Yoon and Han. As senior prosecutors, they have commanded high-profile investigations in an exquisite and confident manner. They defined the gravity and causes of their investigations in unequivocal language. They claimed “executive power abuse” while investigating former president Park Geun-hye and “judiciary power abuse” when going after the Supreme Court’s chief justice.

Then there was an international case involving Lone Star Funds in 2006 based on suspicions of big-money lobbying and embezzlement to sell a Korean commercial bank cheaply to a foreign hedge fund.

The investigating team that included the Yoon-Han duo summed the case as a “dine-and-dash” by a predatory fund. The public was enraged to see one of their major banks wasted in a fire sale to a foreign investor that turned out to be a speculative force who sold it for a much higher price. Their energetic justice and unwavering drive against corrupt forces always drew public cheers. But their cases did not all end well. When cheers and applause are loud, so is the backlash.

Lone Star bought Korea Exchange Bank for 1.3 trillion won ($975 million) in 2003 and sold it to Hana Financial Group for 3.9 trillion won. The fund faced a rigorous investigation from prosecutors and fines from authorities over the span of 10 years. Financial officials, battered for betraying their country by authorizing the sale, were able to clear their names through non-guilty verdicts.

Lone Star, in 2012, took the affair to the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), filing for $4.68 billion in damages from the Korean government by arguing it had failed to get a fair price due to unjust interference from the Korean government. Ending the decade-old case, the ICSID ordered Seoul to pay Lone Star $216.5 million plus interest, about 4.6 percent of its damage claim, in 2022.

The dispute remains unsettled after the government filed a complaint against the international tribunal’s ruling. Han, the justice minister when the ruling was announced, vowed to “fight till the end” over the issue past governments had battled over a decade “so as not to waste any valuable tax money.”

I bring up the Lone Star case amid the crisis of trainee doctors because it is hard to determine the right choice here and now. Putting its foot down for the interest of the nation and people may be the right choice for the government. But we cannot help but ask whether public interest has truly been factored in.

“The government threw a large piece of stone into a gentle lake. You can imagine how big the rock had been, given the repercussions of mass resignations,” Ryu-Ok Hada, a 26-year-old trainee doctor who formerly represented the interns of the Catholic Medical Center, told the JoongAng Ilbo. “Rats kill themselves if they are pushed to the corner.” She added that her cohort is “anomic suicidal,” a state coined by Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) where there is a breakdown of social norms and values, leading to a sense of purposelessness and a lack of direction in individual’s lives. Young doctors are losing a sense of purpose after seeing their hard work going down the drain and being shamed as criminals, according to Ryu-Ok.

Being forcible is subjective, but agility can be objective. To become both, the government must persuade young doctors who are convinced that a quota increase alone cannot stop the collapse in the medical system. The final goal for the government’s strong and sure-footed crusade must be “national progress and better livelihoods,” not victory over the defiant.