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Of the seven South Korean officials flanking President Roh Moo-hyun in his meetings with U.S. President George W. Bush in Washington D.C. on Thursday, it was his adviser for security strategy Park Sun-won who caught the most media attention. Park is an alumnus of the anti-American movement that seized the United States Information Service (USIS) building in Seoul in May 1985 and was arrested for allegedly masterminding it. Seventy-three students from Seoul National University and four other colleges occupied USIS and demanded a formal apology from the U.S. over the suppression of the 1980 Gwangju Democratic Uprising.
Park himself took no part in storming the building, but as leader of the Yonsei University chapter of Sammint'u -- or the Struggle Committee for Liberation of the Masses, Attainment of Democracy, and Unification of the Nation -- he was suspected of a leading role behind the scenes. His younger days were spent as an anti-American activist, but now Park is part of the South Korean delegation to summits with the U.S. president.
After serving time, Park studied at the University of Warwick in Britain and earned a doctorate in politics for a thesis titled ¡°Dynamics of Intra-Triangular Alliance Security System in Northeast Asia: Political Interventions of the United States and Japan towards South Korea in Regime Transition, 1979-1980.¡± He worked as research fellow at the Institute for Korean Unification Studies, Yonsei University, and joined the National Security Council (NSC) under the current administration, where he was deeply involved in establishing strategies for six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear program under the leadership of then deputy head Lee Jong-seok.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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