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Academics come to aid of
colleague
The
trial of Song Du-yul, a Korean-German sociologist charged with
violating the nation's National Security Law, resumed yesterday with
other academics defending his research and seminars as legitimate
academic work, not the promotion of North Korean ideology.
Mr.
Song, who is on the faculty of the University of Muenster in
Germany, is also charged with being a member of the North Korean
Workers' Party.
In yesterday's session, Park Soon-seong, a North
Korean specialist at Dongguk University, took aim at the
prosecution's attack on Mr. Song's contention that North Korea
should be studied and critiqued based on its socialist values, not
on outside values. Mr. Park noted that similar techniques were
frequently used in anthropology and other related social sciences.
He criticized North Korean studies in the South as being too heavily
tainted by ideology and therefore unable to look at the North's
political system objectively or clearly.
Kwon Man-hak, another
North Korea scholar who works at KyungHee University, has
participated in many of the annual seminars since 1995 on Korean
reunification that prosecutors say were thinly-disguised efforts to
promote North Korean views on unification. Mr. Kwon told the court
that the seminars were not directed by the North. "Mr. Song was only
an interlocutor between the North and South for the seminars," Mr.
Kwon said. "The seminars contributed to the development of
inter-Korean relations. The South Korean government and media even
supported the seminars."
The court said there would be two
additional sessions of the trial before a verdict is
announced.
by Min Seong-jae <iamfine@joongang.co.kr>
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