Confucianist corruption in South Korea
By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - If power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, then South
Koreans may be thankful that the five men they've elected to successive
five-year terms as president under the 1987 democratic constitution have never
had absolute power. They have, however, all had power, and it has allegedly
corrupted every one of them.
Tales of presidential corruption, or corruption committed by president's wives
or older brothers or sons or daughters or in-laws, are so commonplace here that
it's possible to shrug off the headlines before turning to the sports pages.
Like rhetoric from North Korea, corruption stories provide fodder for the media
but
are hardly perceived as being important for the average Korean.
Thus on a slow news day, when bluster has lost its luster and boom has turned
to gloom, newspapers will serve up the latest twist in the investigation of the
family of Roh Moo-hyun, the left-leaning liberal who had a "Mr Clean"
reputation as president from 2003 to 2008.
Now prosecutors are saying Roh's family members "may have taken more money than
initially suspected", Yonhap, the South Korean news agency, has quoted the
businessman at the center of the scandal as saying. Park Yeong-cha is a shoe
manufacturer who allegedly passed a bribe through Roh's wife, Kwon Yang-sook,
as a time-honored entree for influence in high places.
The figure everyone talks about has been US$6 million, but now prosecutors are
claiming more money found its way into the hands of Roh's son and daughter.
Roh's brother, meanwhile, has already been indicted for allegedly taking bribes
to win an appointment for one of shoemaker Park's friends as chief tax
official.
Roh himself, emerging from retirement in his hometown not far from the
southeastern port of Pusan, has gone through public contrition, but essentially
passed the buck, or the blame, to his wife, saying he knew nothing about the
whole thing until after stepping down more than a year ago.
"I have lost the right to talk about democracy, progress and justice," he said
on April 24. The words were carefully crafted to show enough humility to get
him off the hook, at least for now. But aggressive prosecutors may not want to
be merciful.
The day before, it was reported that prosecutors were going after a close
friend of the incumbent President Lee Myung-bak, and again Park Yeong-cha
figures in the investigation.
It is alleged that Park asked a friend of President Lee to frustrate an
investigation into tax problems. Prosecutors have been raiding the homes of
those suspected to have profited immensely from rigging the prices of shares in
one of Park's companies, and the man who ran the National Tax Service when it
was audited late last year has run off to the United States, from where
prosecutors are talking about extraditing him.
It's can be expected that allegations of influence-peddling and worse involving
President Lee and his government will only increase during his presidency and
beyond. In the years before he was elected he had to fend off charges in a
real-estate scandal, and his detractors tried with notable lack of success to
embroil him in a scandal surrounding an Internet company just before the 2007
presidential election.
Voters clearly preferred Lee's image when he was mayor of Seoul, as a pragmatic
former business leader with a reputation for getting the job done. In any case,
the numbers that now come up - a few million here, a few hundred thousand a few
thousand there - get lost in the parade of daily headlines. They tend to race
by in a chaotic blur that leaves the reader first confused, then disgusted and
finally pretty well convinced that the whole of society is mired in corruption.
Which some say indeed may be the case, judging from an indignant rant on the
Internet site OhMyNews by Lee Byong-chul, senior fellow at the Institute for
Peace and Cooperation, which calls itself a "non-partisan policy advisory
body".
Focusing on the problems of Roh Moo-hyun, the analyst saw his failings as
emblematic "of the corrupt South Korean politics as a whole" and blamed a
"political culture" that was "still as chaotic as often perceived". He said
"government officials, the national assemblymen and the businessmen are all
broken", with not even the judiciary exempt. "A high court judge's reckless
involvement into a trial seriously damaged the uprightness of the legal
system," added Lee Byong-chul.
That was a reference to the case of a Supreme Court justice who urged a lower
court to speed up the trials of those accused of fomenting months of
demonstrations last summer against the import of US beef. The justice, who
foolishly put his requests in an e-mail to lower-court judges, has so far got
off with a "stern" warning from the chief justice, which is considerably less
than the disciplinary action that many had demanded.
Even if Roh is arrested, Lee confidently predicted "South Korean politics will
not change a great deal". That's a prediction that few if anyone would deny,
given the history of latter-day corruption - and its antecedents in a dynasty
system in which the king reigned supreme, unfettered by prosecutors and
activists.
Just by way of comparison, the allegations, suspicions and insinuations
surrounding Roh Moo-hyun and Lee Myung-bak are really small change compared
with the hundreds of millions that former president Chun Doo-hwan purloined
after seizing power in December 1979, six weeks after the assassination of Park
Chung-hee.
Chun's successor, Korea Military Academy classmate Roh Tae-woo, who had to
agree to the democratic constitution amid the protests of June 1987, did him
one better, making off according to one estimate with about $4 billion.
Those two went on trial during the presidency of Kim Young-sam, elected in
December 1992 as the first civilian to win an open presidential election, but
the real reason for the outrage against them was their role in suppressing the
Kwangju revolt of May 1980, in which about 200 mostly young people were killed.
The corruption charges, on which they were also convicted, stirred far less
outrage than the decision of Chun, a former general, to ask Roh Tae-woo to lead
the troops in taking back the city, the center of the often restive Cholla
region in the southwest.
Corruption-free government was supposed to ensue after the trial, and Kim
Young-sam made a show of implicating hundreds, possibly thousands, in
government and the armed forces in payoffs and tradeoffs. What then was
everyone to make of the bribes that Kim Young-sam's son, Kim Hyun-chul, was
convicted of having accepted from the Hanbo group, a chaebol or
conglomerate, whose troubles signaled the start of the 1997 economic crisis
here?
And what of allegations that Kim himself accepted bribes from top executives of
the Kia group or that businessmen had to extend huge sums merely for the honor
of dining with the president at his Blue House, much less gaining favors.
Those who thought the country had turned the corner with the election of
long-time dissident Kim Dae-jung in December 1997, at the height of Korea's
economic crisis, were sadly disillusioned.
Even as Kim was basking in the glory of the first inter-Korean summit in June
2000, in which he flew to Pyongyang to meet North Korea's Kim Jong-il, rumors
spread that he had had to pay an enormous bribe to get the Dear Leader to
extend the invitation. An investigation revealed that $450 million had gone
into North Korean coffers with another $50 million promised in unspecified
goods. By the time Kim Dae-juing stepped down in 2003, all three of his sons
had been found guilty of accepting payoffs of one sort or another, and two of
them had been jailed before being freed on suspended sentences.
But what is it, Koreans often ask themselves, about their society that makes
corruption at the highest levels so appealing when so often people wind up in
jail? "It has to do with the culture," said Kim Sung-hak, a Hanyang University
scholar, wrestling with a response. "Corruption is condoned at the highest
level. Korean culture is a social relationship, not a written contract."
Scholar Kim goes back to several thousand years of dynastic rule tempered by
Confucianism.
"Confucianism was the governing social philosophy," said Kim. "Family and
regional ties are very important. Here the personal guarantee carries more
weight than an employee contract. Employees are not supposed to betray the
president of the company."
Or the president of the country, the ultimate father figure, to whom the
"envelope", whether passed through a relative or friend or aide, should assure
a full return on the investment - until or unless jealous foes get suspicious
and manage to publicize and destroy the plot in their own drive for power.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of
forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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