The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (29 page)

In the national jubilation that followed, Roh was acclaimed a hero by many Koreans, especially as there was widespread speculation that he had taken the bold steps with only grudging assent from Chun. The president said nothing to refute this belief and steadfastly refused to discuss his role in Roh’s decisions. In early 1992, more than four years later, Chun’s former press secretary published detailed notes of presidential conversations from June 1987, indicating that Chun had originated the decision to accept direct elections and arranged for Roh to take the credit in order to enhance his candidacy. Whatever the true origin of Roh’s dramatic reversal, it ended the crisis of June 1987 and put South Korea decisively on the path to political reform.

THE ELECTION OF 1987

The South Korean election of December 1987 was the first popular balloting for president since President Park Chung Hee’s narrow victory in 1971. Roh Tae Woo was praised for his summertime role in agreeing to a direct presidential election, but it was widely assumed that he could not win in December because of his military background. Chun Du Hwan thought otherwise. Even before Roh’s dramatic June 29 declaration, Chun told aides he had no worry that the ruling party would lose a popular vote “because the government has made numerous accomplishments and the economy is doing well.” He also believed that clashes between the two most important opposition figures would sap their strength.

Indeed, a central problem for the opposition was the presence of two powerful leaders, more rivals than colleagues, each with a different geographical and political base. Both Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung were civilian leaders who had long been persecuted. Together they represented a formidable force, but the big question was whether they could work together.

I was in Seoul that August and took the opportunity to meet separately with Roh and the two Kims, all of whom I had known for years.

The meeting with Roh took place amid the trappings of his political power in the spacious corner office he occupied in the National Assembly building as leader of the ruling party. Since our first meeting in 1980, 1 had seen him several times in Washington and Seoul, and it seemed to me this time he was more articulate as well as a bit grayer. Wearing a conservative business suit, he nevertheless hooked his thumbs into his belt as we talked, as if he missed his uniform. When I reminded him of his statement at our first meeting that soldiers should not become involved in politics, he responded that he had not changed his mind. He went on to say, in the whispery voice he used to discuss sensitive topics, “I found myself in this situation. It may be the will of heaven—this is my destiny. That’s my best answer.”

The contrast with the hard-edged Chun could not have been greater. I noticed that in an hour’s conversation, Roh never mentioned Chun except when I brought up his name, although the office contained a framed photograph of the two men in their shirtsleeves, in addition to the obligatory official presidential portrait. When I asked about Chun, Roh said that their friendship and loyalty to each other had “not changed,” though their relationship was somewhat different since the announcement of direct popular balloting. Although it was not generally known at the time, Chun privately agonized about whether he could really trust Roh as his successor, according to Kim Yoon Hwan, who had known both men since high school days and held senior Blue House positions under both of them.

Roh Tae Woo was born on December 4, 1932, in a farming village near Taegu. His father, who worked in the village office, was killed in an automobile accident when Roh was seven, and he was raised by his mother. After brief military service at the start of the Korean War, Roh joined the Korean Military Academy in its first four-year class, the famous eleventh class, which included Chun and many others who later came to power as political and military leaders.

Chun and Roh became close friends. Chun, two years older, was almost always in the leadership role, with Roh a supportive follower. Before becoming president, Roh had been the successor to Chun in at least five key military or security posts. When Chun led the December 1979 military coup, Roh played an essential supporting role, bringing troops from his Ninth Infantry Division from the front lines.

A person who knew both men well since their military academy days described Chun as “a very simple man who sees pictures in black and white” and Roh as “a man of environment and situation.” Another Korean, who had watched both men as political leaders at close range, said that “the secret of Chun’s leadership was his assertiveness,” whereas Roh was “calculating and cautious” as well as surprisingly artistic, interested in music, poetry, and novels.

My interview with opposition leader Kim Young Sam took place over breakfast at the Japanese restaurant of the modern Lotte Hotel. A man at ease with himself, he quickly discarded his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves as we ate fish, rice, miso soup, and pickles. Kim had met the rival opposition leader, Kim Dae Jung, ten times in the previous six weeks and said he planned to continue meeting at least weekly until they reached a decision about which of them would run for president. “The public expectation is for the nomination of one [opposition] candidate as soon as possible,” he said. In the meetings, “we promised each other we would have a united front to achieve democracy.”

The personal rivalry between the two Kims went back to 1970, when they had contended for the nomination of the major opposition party to run against President Park. Kim Dae Jung had been the victor in the nominating convention due to deft maneuvering. Although the two Kims and their respective factions sometimes worked together, they were never comfortable with each other.

Kim Young Sam was born on December 20, 1928, on Koje Island near Pusan, at the southeastern tip of the Korean peninsula. His father, a successful island businessman, sent him to the elite high school in Pusan and to Seoul National University, the nation’s most prestigious university. Kim was elected to the National Assembly on the government ticket at age twenty-five, the youngest national legislator on record. He soon rebelled against the Syngman Rhee government’s dictatorial tactics and was
an original member of the opposition Democratic Party, embarking on a lifelong advocacy of democracy.

In 1960 the Koje Island home of Kim’s parents was invaded by two men demanding money. As Kim’s mother grappled with one of the men, she was fatally wounded by a gunshot to the abdomen. A year later, one of the robbers was caught and confessed to being a North Korean agent seeking money to buy a boat. The family tragedy, which was well known in Korea, colored Kim’s attitude toward the North and shielded him from the red-baiting that was common against opposition politicians. His elite schooling and establishment roots made him unusually acceptable to the middle and upper ranks of Korean society. Of the three leading presidential contenders in 1987, he was the closest to a normal politician.

As an opposition leader, Kim had long been outspoken and undaunted by oppression. During the Park era, he was jailed for opposing military rule and in 1969 was the victim of an acid attack while opposing Park’s drive to amend the constitution to allow him a third term. A decade later he was expelled from the National Assembly for publicly calling Park a dictator and asking the United States to intervene. After Chun took power, Kim was placed under house arrest for two years for demanding democratic reforms and went on a twenty-three-day hunger strike. In our conversations while he was in opposition, I found Kim Young Sam a steadfast advocate of reform and democracy but vague on other issues.

The setting for my meeting with Kim Dae Jung was very different—his house in central Seoul, a walled compound I had visited many times while he was under various forms of house arrest. This time his front parlor was crowded with a claque of supporters, many of them from his home region of southwestern Korea. That area, the current North and South Cholla Provinces, has had a distinctive history, going back at least thirteen hundred years to the time when it was the site of a separate Korean dynasty. Disadvantaged under President Park, who like both Chun and Roh was a native of a rival political center around Taegu, in the mid-1980s Cholla had notably fewer government ministers, generals, and heads of large conglomerates and a lower average income than most other regions. Kim Dae Jung was the hero and standard-bearer of Cholla and other downtrodden people in Korea, but at the same time he was distrusted and even feared by many people from other regions.

Kim Dae Jung was born on January 6, 1924, on a small island off the southwest Korean coast. Unlike his long-standing rival, however, he was not born to wealth or privilege and was an outsider to the mainstream of Korean elite society. Despite his fame and his important role in so many historic political developments, many leading Koreans had never met him in person.

After his victory over Kim Young Sam for the opposition-party nomination in the 1971 presidential election, he vaulted to the top rank of
political leadership by winning 46 percent of the vote against President Park in an election that was heavily rigged for the incumbent. Park hated and feared Kim Dae Jung and had tried to do away with him permanently. Chun Du Hwan continued the vendetta, if a bit less fiercely than had his predecessor.

Shortly before I saw him in 1987, Kim had finally been cleared of all outstanding charges and had his full political rights restored. Until then, he told me, there had been only two months since his kidnapping from Japan fourteen years earlier when he had been free of house arrest, prison, exile, or some other serious official restriction. The years in isolation and adversity had deepened his self-knowledge and political awareness. He had worked out his answers to major questions facing the country and could articulate them clearly.

In the weeks before our meeting, the army chief of staff, General Park Hee Do, had publicly expressed military opposition to Kim Dae Jung’s potential candidacy. There was very serious doubt that military leaders would permit Kim to take office if he should be elected, and many supposed they would kill him. As we sat in the family dining room of his house, eating a Western breakfast of eggs and bacon from atop a red-checkered tablecloth covered by plastic, Kim declared his refusal to give in to such threats. In contrast to 1979–1980, when Chun seized power, he was sure the Korean people would fight this time rather than submit to continued military rule. “Democratization means neutralization of the military,” he said.

Several weeks after I saw them, the two leading opposition figures pledged publicly that they would not oppose each other, in order not to betray the people’s wishes for political change. Nevertheless, a few days after that, Kim Dae Jung appeared at a huge public rally in his home region of Cholla and began touring the country like a candidate. Later Kim Young Sam did the same, starting with his hometown of Pusan. Each claimed the right to be the opposition’s choice on the basis of a long history of standing up for democracy, and each became convinced he would win the election. Heedless of their pledges, both ran for president.

Roh Tae Woo, meanwhile, enjoyed the advantages of the leader of the incumbent party, including massive funding and extensive coverage in the media, which was heavily, if not totally, controlled by the government. At the same time, he sought to separate himself from Chun in the public mind. Although the US Embassy was under orders to remain strictly neutral, Roh managed to meet President Reagan at the White House in a mid-September trip to Washington to burnish his image as an internationally respected figure. This seemed to many Koreans a virtual US endorsement. Neither of the opposition competitors sought a trip to Washington to test that idea.

On December 16, election day, Roh won the presidency with 36 percent of the popular vote, as Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung split the opposition majority between them. Manwoo Lee, a Korean American professor who made an intensive study of the election, wrote that “each candidate was like a Chinese warlord occupying his own solid territory” based on his region of origin.

Roh’s victory in a hotly contested direct election gave him the political legitimacy that Chun had lacked. It made it possible for him to permit a greater degree of free speech and free press than his predecessors had and to reduce government control of business. Roh’s victory also permitted him to ease South Korea’s hard anticommunist stance and to bid successfully for amicable ties and eventual diplomatic relations with Eastern European communist countries, the Soviet Union, and China, thereby undercutting North Korea’s alliances and drastically changing the strategic situation in Northeast Asia.

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*
In fact, Chun did come in April 1988, two months after leaving office, and was welcomed as an elder statesman.

8

THE GREAT OLYMPIC COMING-OUT PARTY

F
OR MOST OF THE
world, the 1988 Olympic games at Seoul were a great sporting festival. Global television brought the opening ceremonies to the eyes of more than a billion people, the largest television audience in history for any event until that time. But for Koreans, the games were much more. As the government and people in the South saw it, the Twenty-fourth Olympiad was their international coming-out party, an opportunity to show the world that South Korea was no longer a poverty-stricken Asian war victim but a strong, modern, increasingly prosperous country with a vibrant society. The South hoped the 1988 Olympics would enhance its economic growth and global stature as the 1964 Tokyo Olympics had famously done for Japan. Moreover, the universality of the games provided a golden opportunity for South Korea to play host to the Soviet Union, China, and the communist-led countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which were North Korea’s allies and which, at the North’s insistence, had shunned the South. For much the same reasons, North Korea loathed and feared the coming of the Seoul Olympics, seeing the Games as an essentially political enterprise that would permit the South to improve its image in the world arena and move toward relations with Pyongyang’s communist allies. North Korea waged a strenuous battle, month by month, to halt or downgrade the Games. But its effort failed. The Olympics marked major strides in South Korea’s drive to win recognition and accommodation from the communist world.