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| DATE | 2009-08-22 |
| FROM | From: "Michael L. Richardson"
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Democratic Leaders dieing away
|
OK I will bite Whats the moral?
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Ruben Safir wrote:
> Kim Dae Jung's Lesson
> Engaging dictatorships is risky business.
>
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> By SETH LIPSKY
>
> The life of free Korea's ex-president, Kim Dae Jung, which came to an
> end this week, gives new meaning to the phrase "sunshine soldier." In
> some respects he was like Corazon Aquino of the Philippines, who died
> last month, a hero of the struggle for democracy in Asia. In other
> respects, however, Kim had a story that was more complex and
> dangerous—one that stands as a cautionary tale for Mr. Obama.
>
> I met Kim in 1979, when he was being held under house arrest at Seoul
> and I was the managing editor of the Asian edition of The Wall Street
> Journal. I'd been told that if I went to his neighborhood, Dong-gyo Don,
> in the western section of South Korea's capital, and telephoned him from
> a pay phone, I would receive instructions. They were to walk down a
> nearby alley and, whatever happened, to avoid stopping, or talking, when
> approached by government security agents.
>
> Sure enough, the moment I ducked into the alley I was swarmed by them.
> When I declined to speak and kept walking briskly, they fell away. One
> of Kim's aides waved me on from his gate, which, as soon as I scrambled
> inside, closed behind me with a welcome clink. Then I was ushered into
> the modest bungalow of the man who once marshaled crowds of half a
> million Koreans and nearly toppled the presidency of the country's
> strongman, Park Chung Hee.
>
> Kim had left the country after losing the 1971 election. When President
> Park declared marshal law in 1972, Kim began criticizing him from
> foreign soil, and in 1973, he was kidnapped from a hotel in Tokyo and
> brought back to his country. He was arrested in 1976 after he signed a
> manifesto against the president and drew a sentence of five years. His
> country was then, as now, in one of the most dangerous military
> standoffs on the planet.
>
> In a living room lined with hundreds of books in Korean, Japanese and
> English, along with busts of Lincoln and Kennedy and a painting of Jesus
> Christ, Kim lit a pipe and began to sketch his goal—which was for
> what he called a "democratic reunification" with North Korea. He made
> the point, over and over again, that the democratization of the South
> would have to precede any reunification, and that any reunification
> would have to be done democratically.
>
> Government agents, including some who were once friends and admirers,
> set Kim down as not just naïve but vain. I tended to discount that kind
> of talk, for dissidents or exiles often can seem flaky. But I did find
> it hard to believe that there was much hope for his vision. Any visitor
> to the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea gets a visceral
> feel of how explosive and dangerous is the peninsula, where millions
> died during the 1950-53 war.
>
> Kim didn't deny the extraordinary economic gains that Korea was starting
> to show under Park Chung Hee. He argued that the recent economic growth
> in non-Communist countries in Asia demonstrated "the advantage of the
> Free World compared to the communist countries." He also said it was no
> coincidence that the success was coming in Confucian countries. Yes,
> under Park there had been what Kim called "brilliant" economic growth.
> But he predicted that the more economic growth there was, the more
> social unrest there would be absent a democratic system.
>
> The meeting with Kim was one of the most memorable in a long newspaper
> career, even though, I don't mind saying, I emerged highly doubtful that
> he had a future. I couldn't have been more wrong.
>
> Only months later, Park Chung Hee was having dinner with several of his
> closest cronies when the chief of his intelligence service pulled out a
> pistol and shot him to death, an assassination that rocked the world. A
> new strongman, Chun Doo Hwan, eventually emerged and martial law was
> again declared.
>
> This was followed by riots in the city of Kwangju, an uprising that was
> brutally suppressed with some 200 people, maybe more, were killed. Kim
> himself ended up being prosecuted, if that is the word, for his alleged
> role in the rebellion, even though he was in custody at the time. He was
> sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted and he was later exiled to
> the U.S. He returned to Korea in 1985. Then, in 1988, the year in which
> Korea hosted the Olympics, democratic elections were held—and they
> have been held ever since.
>
> In 1997, Kim Dae Jung became the first opposition leader to be elected
> president, one of the most astounding comebacks in political history,
> entering office as a liberal after decades of conservative rule. He
> stepped into a sharp economic downturn, as well, but he got the chance
> to try the theories that he had expounded to me through the clouds of
> pipe-smoke nearly 20 years before.
>
> Kim's "sunshine policy," as it was called—détente and economic
> engagement with the North—gained him a meeting with the North Korean
> communist dictator, Kim Jong Il. It took place in 2000, and Kim himself
> was promptly awarded the Nobel Prize for peace. A period of détente,
> replete with various economic projects, followed.
>
> Yet eventually scandal erupted, when it turned out that Kim had
> apparently steered hundreds of millions of dollars to the North Korean
> dictator to facilitate the summit. It seems he'd attempted his
> "democratic reunification" with democracy in only one of the two halves
> of Korea. South Koreans grew sick of it, abandoning the policy as a
> failure and bringing in a conservative in 2007.
>
> This is something for Barack Obama, who praised Kim after his passing as
> a "champion of democracy and human rights," to study—not only with
> respect to Pyongyang but also the other regimes with which he seeks
> engagement before they have had their own democratic revolutions.
>
> Mr. Lipsky, a former member of the Journal's editorial board, is
> founding editor of the New York Sun.
>
>
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