ABSTRACT
The issue of past affairs was raised in South Korea when President Kim Dae-jung’s administration was launched in 1998. In 2003, President Roh Moo-hyun’s administration recognized the past settlement issue as an important gateway to social reformation, set it as one important task, and promoted it as such. Thus, it became a frontline of conflict where the extreme conservatives confronted the reformists, and the conservatives confronted the progressives. Settling past history has not gone smoothly in South Korea, because the people who committed human rights abuses decades ago, as well as those connected to them through political and familial relationships, remain in power.
