The President of South Korea appoints the Civil Prime Minister of Defense in 64 years – Chicago Tribune
Poor Kim Tong
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – The President of South Korea, Lee Jae Myung, appointed a progressive legislator on Monday with five experienced mandates as Minister of Defense, breaking with the tradition of appointing retired military generals.
The announcement occurred while several eminent defense officials, including former Minister of Defense, Kim Yong Hyun, faced large -scale criminal trials for their roles in the taxation of martial law last year during the mandate of the president of the time, Yoon Suk Yeol, who was accused of rebellion and rejected his post.
Ahn Gyu-Back, legislator of the Lee Democratic Party, sat on the Defense Committee of the National Assembly and chaired a legislative panel which investigated the circumstances surrounding the decree of the Martial law of Yoon.
Yoon’s authoritarian measure involved the deployment of hundreds of troops strongly armed in the National Assembly and the offices of the electoral commission in what prosecutors have described as an illegal attempt to close the legislator and arrest political opponents and electoral leaders.
This caused calls to strengthen civilian army control, and Lee promised during his electoral campaign appointed Minister of Civil Defense.
With a coup in 1961 which led the military dictator Park Chung-Hee to power, all the South Korean defense ministers came from the army, a trend which continued even after the democratization of the country in the late 1980s.
Although HUN is faced with a legislative hearing, the process is probably a formality, because Democrats have a comfortable majority in the National Assembly and legislative consent is not required to read the name. Among the appointment of the cabinet, Lee only needs legislative consent for the Prime Minister, post number two of the government.
“As a Civil Prime Minister of National Defense in 64 years, he will be responsible for directing and supervising the transformation of the army after his mobilization into Martial law,” said Kang Hoon-Sik, head of the Lee cabinet, at a press conference.
Ahn was one of the 11 ministers appointed by Lee on Monday. Cho Hyun’s diplomatic veteran was selected as Minister of Foreign Affairs and the legislator of the five mandates, Chung Dong-Young, returned for another period as Minister of Unification, a position which held 2004 to 2005 as the main representative of Seoul for relations with North Korea.
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This story was translated from English by an AP publisher with the help of a generative artificial intelligence tool.
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