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5 PART 10: The changing South Korean
position By Henry C K Liu
(To see the previous installments in
this series, please use the links at the bottom of
this article.)
South Korean politics
has been evolving along two parallel paths since
the Cold War was declared ended by US president
George H W Bush and Soviet president Mikhail
Gorbachev at the Malta summit of December 1989 and
formally ended in 1991 with the dissolution of the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. One path
moves toward increasing resistance to US
domination to the point
of
rising anti-US sentiments. Another path moves
toward closerties with neighboring China, a
country of shared cultural affinity, and with the
largest population in the world, as it adopts a
rapid economic development policy of "peaceful
rise".
Both paths lead to moderation of
Cold War ideological hostility in South Korea
toward its estranged Northern fraternal state
across the 38th Parallel.
While superpower
detente between the US and the USSR unraveled with
the June 1972 Watergate scandal that eventually
brought down US president Richard Nixon in August
1974, was left in deep freeze by the anti-Soviet
bias of Zbigniew Brzezinksi, president Jimmy
Carter's national security adviser, and was
finally pronounced dead with the election of
Ronald Reagan in 1980, "nordpolitik" became South
Korean policy. It was named in 1983 after West
Germany's Ostpolitik by then South Korean
foreign minister Lee Bum-suk but was not formally
announced until the 1988 Summer Olympic Games in
Seoul.
Nordpolitik was a policy of
reaching out to the People's Republic of China and
the USSR, Cold War allies of North Korea, with the
hope that normal relations with these two
neighboring major powers would provide new
economic opportunities for South Korea,
particularly in China, and would also moderate
North Korean belligerence. Nordpolitik later
became the signature foreign policy of South Korea
under Roh Tae-woo, the country's first
democratically elected president, albeit in a
highly orchestrated electoral process, whose term
ran from 1988 to 1993. After the Cold War,
nordpolitik became the Sunshine Policy articulated
in 1998 by president Kim Dae-jung, who received
the Nobel Peace Prize for it.
A new kind
of leader emerged in South Korea out of the new
domestic politics in the new millennium. Roh
Moo-hyun, a liberal democrat, was elected
president on December 19, 2002. Born on August 6,
1946, in Gimhae, Gyeongsang-namdo province, of
poor farming parents who struggled hard to give
their children the benefit of at least some basic
education, Roh attended Busan Vocational High
School on a scholarship. After graduation, he
worked with a fishing-net company for a subsistent
wage. Aiming to be a lawyer but unable to afford
college, he studied law after work at home and,
after what Roh calls the 10 hardest years of his
life, the self-taught lawyer passed the bar on his
fourth try in 1975.
"Every time I look
back on my life, I am suddenly engulfed in a
certain feeling. It is a kind of shame," Roh wrote
in his autobiography, Common Sense or Hope.
"It is exceptional, in a society which puts so
much stress on one's educational background, that
a man with only a vocational high-school diploma
was elected president."
Roh defended one
of several student members of a book club named
Burim that studied leftist theories who were
detained and tortured for almost two months by the
government in what came to be known in Korean
history as the Burim Incident. The experience
affected Roh fundamentally, launching him on the
career path of a dedicated human-rights lawyer,
defending other student protesters and striking
workers. An activist in the pro-democracy
movement, he joined the Democratic Citizens
Council in 1985. By 1987, he became director of
the Busan office of the Citizens' Movement for a
Democratic Constitution.
During 1987, Roh
participated in the June Struggle demonstrations
for direct presidential elections. By September,
Roh was arrested during a protest at Daewoo
Shipbuilding and spent three weeks in prison for
aiding and abetting striking workers, resulting in
a suspension of his license to practice law.
Roh then turned to politics, using his
high-profile record in the pro-democracy front to
win election to the National Assembly in 1988. He
held the seat for only one term, losing it after
quitting his party in protest of a political
merger he opposed. His early efforts in politics
were less than successful. From 1988 to 2000, Roh
won only two out of six elections. In 1992, Roh
ran again for a National Assembly seat as a member
of a new party, representing his home base of
Busan, and lost. In 1995, he ran for mayor of
Busan and lost. In 1998, Roh tried once more for
the National Assembly, this time from Seoul, and
won a two-year term. In 2000, Roh returned to
Busan to run for the National Assembly and lost
once again. Despite another election
disappointment in 2000, a grassroots groundswell
of support kept Roh from quitting his failing
political career in despair. Two and a half years
later, on December 19, 2002, amid a changing
political climate, Roh won the presidency on the
Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) ticket by a
clear majority.
Roh, the most progressive
president to date of South Korea's political
leaders, emphasized his independence from US
influence by boasting during his election campaign
that he had "never set foot on American soil",
adding defiantly: "What's wrong with
anti-Americanism?" He hinted that should relations
with the United States turn confrontational, South
Korea might side with China. Reflective of the new
politics, a campaign focused on ending labor
conflicts, bridging regional rivalries and working
with North Korea gave Roh Muh-hyun the presidency
of a changing Republic of Korea in January 2003.
As a dark-horse candidate, Roh campaigned
on a willingness to negotiate with the North even
after Pyongyang announced in October 2002 that it
was actively pursuing a nuclear-weapons program.
His victory showed that most South Koreans did not
regard the North's nuclear-weapon program as a
threat to the South but as deterrence against US
attack on the North. Despite decades of
ideological estrangement, South Koreans do not
want to see a US nuclear attack on their Northern
brothers and sisters. Such an attack would also
have unspeakably adverse effects on the South, as
well as a severe anti-US backlash. The historical
precedent of the United States dropping two atomic
bombs on Japan shows that another US nuclear
attack in another Asian adversary is not
unthinkable, unless North Korea develops an
effective nuclear deterrence.
Many South
Koreans feel privately that a unified Korea with
nuclear weapons would not be a bad thing, but few
will publicly say so. Still, Roh has explained
that to avoid confrontation with
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