Uri Party Chairman to Announce His Resignation Today

Uri Party Chairman to Announce His Resignation Today. August. 18, 2004 21:52. by Young-Chan Yoon Min-Hyuk Park yyc11@donga.com mhpark@donga.com.

Ruling Uri Party Chairman Shin Gi-nam will hold a news conference on August 19 to announce his resignation, which will be held at the headquarters of his party.

The Uri Party leader reportedly made up his mind on Wednesday morning when he had a separate meeting with some senior party officials and key members, respectively.

A senior Uri Party official said, “On the phone call with the chairman, he said he would ‘work for the party without any official post’ and officially announce his resignation on August 19.”

On the afternoon of August 18, Chairman Shin visited an office of the Korea Liberation Association in Yeouido, Seoul and apologized to KLA leadership, including Chairman Kim woo-jeon, saying, “The fact that my father served in the Japanese military during Tokyo’s colonial rule of Korea is not honorable. However, it was information about my late father, which was hard to talk about. I want to apologize to everyone on behalf of my father. Please accept my apology.”

Regarding the matter, the KLA chairman replied, “I was disappointed to hear about your father. But it’s your father’s fault, not yours. Please put all of your effort into enhancing our national pride.”

The ruling Uri Party will urgently call a meeting of its standing committee on August 19 to discuss matters on organizing a new leadership that is now vacant and will decide on its leadership problems at its Central Committee meeting scheduled for this Friday.

However, the ruling party is expected to deal with conflicting solutions on the matter: one is to have Central Committee member Lee Bu Young, who is now the second most powerful man in the party, succeed the chairman, and the other is to discuss the way to sustain the interim party leadership until next February by organizing an Emergency Countermeasure Committee.

Meanwhile, the opposition Grand National Party (GNP) plans to hold its taskforce meeting and make new laws concerning problems of the past century that will integrate 15 bills which either have already been presented to the National Assembly or will be brought before it in order to probe unresolved problems of the past century. The range of the probe into unsolved problems of past history will be categorized into three periods: before Japanese colonial rule, the period of Japanese colonial rule, and after independence from the Japanese rule.