SEOUL - Just what goes on behind the high
walls that surround the tightly guarded fortress
homes and manicured lawns and gardens of Korea's
latter-day nobility, the chieftains of the
chaebol that dominate the economy, has
always been a mystery.
Details of their
love lives - which children were carried by their
wives and which by assorted mistresses - as well
as the flow of funds among their family members,
from private coffers to those of
trusted consultants to
government contacts - are hinted at but rarely
exposed in the South Korean media.
Only
when prosecutors zero in on one of the
high-and-mighty for profligate fraud, in the form
of bribes and share manipulation, do cases hit the
headlines. Then, after the miscreants are tried
and let off, usually with suspended sentences and
fines, the public awaits the next revelation.
The latest allegations of chaebol
abuse of power, while part of the same pattern,
are a little different. The star attraction this
time is the chairman of the Hanwha Group, Korea's
10th-largest chaebol, a sprawling empire of
more than 50 companies, including subsidiaries,
covering a wide spectrum, typical of the
multi-tentacled chaebol, from chemicals to
construction to finance.
Kim Seung-youn,
55, is accused not of bribery but of ordering his
goons to kidnap and beat up half a dozen members
of the staff of one of those ripoff karaoke bars
favored by members of the chaebol class.
Kim is even said to have had a hand in the
beating, all in retribution for one member of the
staff's roughing up his 22-year-old son, Kim
Dong-won, in a brawl that left the son with a cut
needing 11 stitches.
It's widely assumed
that the chaebol chieftains, in the style
of hereditary lords, second- or third-generation
heirs to the chaebol founders, are capable
of violent retribution against those who cross
them, whether company lieutenants or union
activists or disobedient members of their own
families.
Ordinarily, a barroom battle
would have escaped notice except that, in this
case, one of the victims wrote about it on a
weblog, and the media, led by Hankyoreh Sinmun, a
left-of-center advocate of the policies of the
government of President Roh Muu-hyun, picked up
the scent.
True, the trail by then was
nearly two months old - the fracas occurred in
early March - but the blitz of publicity has
frustrated any attempt at quietly resolving such
an annoyance in the time-honored manner.
Ordinarily, chaebol royalty would
think nothing of offering a little shut-up money -
a pittance for a chaebol princeling but
sometimes quite enough to make all that pain and
suffering quite worthwhile to the recovering
victim.
The intrusion of the Internet has
exposed what chaebol royalty view as
"private matters". Bubbling over into daily
headlines, the story reveals some of the
ambivalence and hypocrisy of modern Korean
business and society.
The elder Kim, after
all, is the son of the late Kim Jong-hee, who made
his mark selling the dynamite used by construction
companies - and went on to manufacture tear gas,
laced with an eye-watering pepper compound, used
to suppress violent anti-government
demonstrations. Not for nothing did he earn the
nickname "Dynamite Kim" before his death 26 years
ago.
Kim Seung-youn definitely appeared
more sophisticated - and worldly - than his
father. He loved to court American conservatives,
setting up something called the "Korea-US Exchange
Council" with links to the heart of the right-wing
Washington establishment. From his soaring glassy
headquarters in central Seoul, he sponsored
seminars and speeches at the next-door Radisson
Seoul Plaza, a Hanwha holding, drawing such
influential figures as Edward Feulner, president
of the Heritage Foundation, and retired American
generals dedicated to preserving the Korean-US
alliance.
So taken was Kim by his
high-level American friends that he was delighted
to send son Dong-won to Yale, still ranked as one
of the two or three best US universities despite
the embarrassment of having to count George W Bush
among its graduates. Straddling cultures and
countries, little Kim was spending his penultimate
year at Seoul National University when rudely set
on, he told Daddy, at the bar.
While
courting American conservatives, the elder Kim has
always shown an interest in the manly art of
self-defense. According to his official bio, he
has headed the Korean and Asian amateur boxing
organizations and served on the Korean Olympic
Committee when Korean boxing was at its roughest.
He was, it seems, vice president of the Korean
Olympic Committee during the 1988 Seoul Olympics
when referees declared the future great American
boxer Roy Jones the loser in a match in which
Jones clearly outclassed his Korean opponent.
Korean chaebol chieftains at the
time were also at their roughest. Hyundai Group
founder Chung Ju-yung, at the peak of his powers
in the 1970s and 1980s, before an ill-advised,
ill-fated campaign for president in 1992, was
known to slap and punch subordinates at staff
meetings.
With the full backing of
president Park Chung-hee, assassinated by his
intelligence chief during labor disturbances in
1979, and that of Park's successor, General Chun
Doo-hwan, whose legacy remains his brutal
suppression of the Kwangju revolt in 1980, Chung
was merciless toward union activists.
In
May 1988, in one well-documented episode, an
organizer in the Hyundai headquarters in Seoul was
kidnapped outside a bar in Seoul's fashionable
Kangnam district by six men who drove him several
hundred kilometers before letting him go. Nor was
he the first union organizer to have been
kidnapped. Others, he told this correspondent, had
simply "disappeared".
Several months
later, in January 1989, men with baseball bats and
iron pipes poured into a dormitory housing workers
who had lost their jobs at Hyundai factories in
Ulsan, pulled them outside and beat them. At the
same time, goons armed with bats and pipes beat up
workers at a weekend training session seen as an
anti-Hyundai rally.
Those, however, were
the bad old days. The leftist Confederation of
Korean Trade Unions, an illegal organization at
the time, is now well established. Workers at
major South Korean companies strike periodically
but earn more than do their counterparts in most
other countries - and also considerably more than
less well-protected workers in small and medium
enterprises in South Korea.
Beneath
appearances, though, violence, like corruption,
remains a method to enforce the dominance of the
chaebol system that has emerged over the
past half-century and more since the Korean War.
Kim Seung-youn, as leader of South Korea's
10th-largest chaebol, with a fortune
estimated by Forbes at US$800 million, is no
stranger to the uses of force. Even as
investigators searched his estate for clues of the
latest incident, the Korean Broadcasting System
(KBS) reported that he had flailed away at a
worker in a bar two years ago with a broken
bottle, inflicting severe enough wounds to keep
the man in a hospital for the next two months. The
victim reportedly was reluctant to talk for fear
of of his life.
Similarly, the victims of
the latest episode also may be reluctant to reveal
all they know about their ordeal, and the police,
until the story surfaced on the Internet, were
suspiciously slow to act - so slow that
closed-circuit video footage that might have shown
what happened no longer exists.
Who indeed
wants to risk the wrath of another attack - one
for which there are no witnesses, no angry words,
possibly no prolonged torture, just a
"disappearance"?
This case, however, may
not fade so easily. Roh has promised a full
investigation and prosecutors want an arrest
warrant. Nobody forgets that Roh, as a young labor
lawyer, began his political career defending the
workers who were the victims of attacks by
chaebol goons.
Journalist
Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and
the confrontation of forces in Northeast Asia -
for more than 30 years. (Copyright 2007
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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