Senior members of civil society hold a press conference to announce a statement, with the signatures of 100 senior leaders, calling for a parliamentary reinvestigation into the sinking of the Cheonan and an end to the Four Major Rivers Restoration Project at the Korean Press Foundation in Seoul, Aug. 12. (Photo by Lee Jong-keun)

DP says 2 of 3 S.Koreans do not trust Cheonan report

Despite releasing its final report on the sinking of the Cheonan on Monday, the Lee Myung-bak administration has been unable to explain the number of questions that have been raised. Accordingly, there has been a flood of calls from lawmakers and civil society calling for a thorough reinvestigation into the sinking.

Civic groups have issued strong calls for a reinvestigation into the sinking of the Cheonan.

In a press conference in front of the National Assembly, a civic group composed of about 40 groups, including the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) and MINBYUN-Lawyers for a Democratic Society, called on the government to determine what really happened to the Cheonan without a single suspicion through a joint four-nation investigation.

The People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD) said in an editorial today that the government has failed to convincingly respond to the suspicions raised by the South Korean people, lawmakers and domestic and overseas experts through the report released six months after the sinking.

At a general meeting of lawmakers at the National Assembly on Tuesday, Democratic Party (DP) emergency council head Park Jie-won spoke on the issue.

“Since two out of three citizens cannot trust the civilian-military Joint Investigation Group’s (JIG) investigation results, and Sweden and Russia have been raising suspicions, we must immediately reconvene a special committee to investigate the Cheonan,” said Park. “If the Grand National Party does not respond to this issue, the Democratic Party will convene a committee itself and raise the problems with the report.”

Lawmaker Park Joo-sun, a member of the National Assembly’s foreign affairs committee and a candidate in the Democratic Party's upcoming caucus Oct. 3, said during a press conference on Jeju Island on Tuesday.

“The government is consistently secretive, and must report all of its information to the National Assembly, including all investigation material, audit results, reports made to the Americans and the Russian investigation results,” said Park Joo-sun.　

Democratic Party lawmaker Choi Moon-soon, who served on the National Assembly’s special committee investigating the Cheonan sinking, asked 10 questions of the Defense Ministry on Tuesday. He pressed to know why the explosive power of the torpedo was more than 1.44 times that of the results announced in in May interim report; the content of the two reports handed to the UN Security Council by the Defense Ministry; why neutral nation Sweden was dropped from the Multinational Combined Intelligence Task Force, which named the attacker, and replaced with Canada; and why the North Korean submersible that attacked the Cheonan was not specified as a Yono-class, but rather just a midget sub.

Meanwhile, the Defense Ministry released a comic book with the final report, in which it illustrated personal attacks on those raising suspicions about the Cheonan. The Defense Ministry called them obstinate and people just looking for a fight. The 32-page graphic novel explains away the suspicions regarding the Cheonan through a conversation between a magazine journalist who covered the sinking and his fiance.

Explaining why North Korea sank the ship, the book stressed that Pyongyang wanted to cause internal division within South Korea, and claimed that a “certain group” - alluding to PSPD - had brought international disgrace to South Korea by sending a letter to the UN. It reminded one of red baiting linking suspicions raised about the Cheonan with forces being controlled by North Korea. It even includes threatening language towards media raising suspicions, saying that one should not irresponsibly pen articles without sure evidence, and that in a rough world, you could loose everything with one mistake.

Netizens who saw the comic online called it a childish comic like those released by the military dictators of the 1970s and 1980s.

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