Page 3 of
5 PART 10: The changing South Korean
position By Henry C K Liu
swept the nationwide local-level
elections. During Park's tenure her party's
approval ratings topped 50%, despite backlash from
the unpopular impeachment call.
Park
resigned her party post last June 16 in
preparation for a presidential bid for the
upcoming election slated for December. Former
foreign ministers Gong Ro-myung and Hong
Soon-young, former deputy commander of the
Korea-US Combined Forces Command Kim Jae-chang,
and former ambassador to Russia Lee
Jae-choon formed a group to
advise Park to focus South Korean policy on North
Korea on reciprocity rather than indulgence while
restoring close relations with Washington and
Tokyo.
On December 1, Park criticized Roh
for opposing the creation of a new bipartisan
political party, saying it was up to the people to
decide. In her 2007 New Year message, Park
attacked Roh's liberal domestic policies and vowed
to end the so-called "Korean disease", a reference
to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher's
attack on the "British disease" of frequent labor
strikes in the 1980s.
During a recent news
conference in Qingdao, China, Park proposed
linking Korea, China and Japan by means of a
train-ferry system, using ships equipped with
rails on deck to accommodate train cars, which she
said would enable Korea to take part in
development projects deeper in China and tap
energy resources in Central Asia. She said such a
regional project would be possible only with
political cooperation among North and South Korea,
China and Japan.
On November 2, Park said
that regardless of personal political
consequences, she would work to resolve the North
Korea nuclear issue, hinting at a second visit to
the North. Her first visit to Pyongyang was in
2002, when she met with North Korean leader Kim
Jong-il. She said then that although her mother
was assassinated by a North Korean agent, she
decided to meet Kim to help bring peace on the
Korean Peninsula. It was a symbolic posture of a
new South Korean relationship with the North that
blood is thicker than ideology.
From the
beginning, Park's political path was paved by
personal tragedy that gave her an aura of serene
dignity. She lost her mother, then South Korea's
first lady, to a North Korean assassin in 1974.
Five years later, her father, Park Chung-hee, the
nation's longtime military ruler, was gunned down
by his intelligence chief.
But as her
political star begins to rise in South Korea, now
an unruly democracy, Park, 55, has transformed
herself from an object of national sympathy into a
statesperson of great expectation. She took
control of the GNP, consolidating the nation's
largest conservative opposition force, which had
lost public support through corruption scandals
and an unpopular attempt to impeach Roh.
As an early contender for December's
presidential race that could make her South
Korea's first female leader, Park traveled to
Washington in mid-March 2005 on her first official
visit to the United States as head of the GNP, the
opposition to the liberal Roh administration that
rubs the US the wrong way. In three days of
meetings with Bush, administration officials and
congressional leaders, she called for
strengthening US-South Korea ties, which have been
weakened in recent years as political differences
over North Korea divided Bush and Roh.
Bush had sought to isolate North Korea as
an evil state, while Roh chose engagement and
reconciliation with a fraternal regime. South
Korea under Roh would not reverse its policy of
active economic engagement with the North Korea
despite its declaration that it had nuclear
weapons. In response, Park's GNP called for a
parliamentary inquiry into Roh's North Korea
policy. Yet the difference between Park and Roh is
one of tactics rather than strategy.
In an
interview designed to solicit US support before
her departure for Washington in March 2005, Park
said South Korea needed to do more to force the
North back to international talks aimed at
dismantling its nuclear-weapons program. South
Korea and China have advocated a softer line with
North Korea, while the United States and Japan
have pushed for a tougher stance.
Yet even
with US support, Park's hurdles toward the
presidency lie in South Korea itself, where her
father's legacy is being debated. Park Chung-hee,
who came to power in a 1961 coup, is revered by
conservatives as the one who set South Korea on
the path to prosperity with an industrial policy,
but he is despised by liberals as a repressive
violator of human rights. His efforts toward
unification with the North, vetoed by the US,
which cost him his life, were generally admired by
South Koreans.
Members of the governing
Uri Party, including several of Roh's top aides
who were arrested during Park Chung-hee's era,
have moved to create a truth commission that is
compiling a list of South Koreans who collaborated
with the pre-World War II Japanese government
during its long occupation of the Korean
Peninsula. GNP officials view the commission as an
attempt to sully the image of Park Chung-hee, who
served as a soldier in the Japanese army during
the occupation. A public disgrace of the elder
Park could kill the political ambitions of his
powerful daughter. Ironically, the investigation
led to the embarrassing revelation of the sordid
past of the late father of Uri Party chairman Shin
Ginam.
Park Geun-hye's political foes are
also moving to list those who illegally benefited
under her late father's dictatorial reign. She has
conceded that "Korean history needs to be
re-examined", acknowledging past anti-human-rights
excesses. But she insists such a review should be
conducted by politically neutral parties and
viewed in the context of the Cold War. In
addition, she said, there should be an
investigation of people who "committed pro-North
acts under the guise of the pro-democracy
movement" during her late father's rule.
Park may have difficulty connecting with
younger South Koreans who, having no direct
experience with the Korean War era, tend to be
more anti-US and often view her late father and
her party as relics of the repressive past
encouraged by US authorities. In defense, Park
said: "The past is the past. I'm looking toward
the future." As in many other parts of the world,
pro-US positions are becoming domestic political
liabilities in South Korea.
Neither the
ruling Uri Party nor the opposition GNP support US
policy on North Korea, with the difference that
the Uri Party is more antagonistic toward the US.
Just as it took a life-long anti-communist,
Richard Nixon, to open the US to communist China,
a political leader of Park Geun-hye's conservative
credentials may be needed to break the artificial
but deeply embedded separation
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
