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The Democratic Labor Party in an extraordinary national convention voted down a proposal to expel senior party members who were involved in an espionage scandal in 2005. The proposal targeted Choi Ki-young, former vice secretary general of the party, and Lee Jung-hoon, a former member of the party Central Committee who are serving prison terms after they were convicted of reporting on the South Korean political scene for Pyongyang in the so-called Ilsimhoe case.
The party also deleted most clauses in a reform proposal that aimed to distance the party from North Korea, which had been pushed by party chairwoman Sim Sang-jeong and an emergency committee from the minority People¡¯s Democracy faction. With the failure of the reform proposal, observers expect Shim and the PD faction to defect. Shim has already said she will resign the party headship if the party reform proposal was killed and is to announce her decision about her political future at a press conference on Monday. A split of the DLP seems inevitable.
The majority National Liberation faction flatly rejected the PD faction¡¯s demand that the party distance itself from North Korea and ditch pro-North Korean policies. NL faction members held pickets at the convention urging instead more pro-North Korean policies. The emergency committee accused the Choi and Lee of hurting the party¡¯s independence and autonomy. But the NL group deleted a clause to expel the two in a revision and passed the new version. It also deleted a sentence in the party reform proposal that bans any outside forces including the North from hurting the party¡¯s independence and autonomy.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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