Kim Jong Pil to Resume Seoul Quest After 7 ‘Wasted’ Years

Seven years ago, Kim Jong Pil, as president of the ruling party, stood a good chance of being elected president of South Korea. Then, on the night of May 17, 1980, military investigators knocked on his door and led him away.

Two other presidential aspirants were also taken away in the dark, and the election the three of them had agreed to carry out to choose a successor to the assassinated President Park Chung Hee never took place. Gen. Chun Doo Hwan took over the country by force.

Now, after “wasting seven years,” as Kim puts it, the election that should have taken place in 1980 is almost at hand. A firm date has not been fixed but the timetable specifies no later than Dec. 20.

Kim--who masterminded a 1961 coup that put Park in power, who founded the Korean CIA, who formed Park’s Democratic Republican Party and served for four years as his prime minister--has not yet declared formally that he will be a candidate. He has scheduled an Oct. 30 inaugural convention for a new political party that he will head, however, and he does not deny that his nomination will be the main item of business.

3 Recovered From Purge

His candidacy will wipe out the last vestige of Chun’s 1980 attempt to discredit and destroy the political structure built under Park. With Kim poised to run along with the two 1980 opposition leaders, Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam, all three leaders purged by Chun from political life have re-emerged to haunt the military-backed Democratic Justice Party and its nominee, Roh Tae Woo.

In an interview at his home, Kim Jong Pil--or J.P., as his friends and supporters call him--conceded that there is still “suppressed anger in my heart” because of an old charge that he amassed an illicit fortune of $35 million. He said that military investigators concocted the charge in an attempt to justify Chun’s takeover.

When the military interrogated him, he said, he put up no resistance and “whatever I said meant nothing.”

“They had their mission and they did what they wanted,” he said, adding that in response to their questions, he replied, “Think whatever you want to think.”

He said he was detained for more than 40 days and that this was never reported in the censored national press. Only occasionally was he actually questioned, he said. Afterward, he told his interrogators, “Thanks to you, I read the Bible through twice.”

Asked why he made no attempt until recently to answer the charges against him, he said, “Who would have printed what I said?”

Not Seeking Revenge

He indicated that it is not revenge that has drawn him back into politics.

“The time has come for democracy to take root in our country,” he said. “Therefore, a leader imbued with democracy capable of working democratically for the sake of the people should be chosen. I intend to ask the people to choose that kind of leader.”

Analysts give Kim no hope of winning. But they do not rule out, after the election, a potentially significant future for the suave, intelligent leader whom some call the only charismatic conservative politician in South Korea.

His candidacy is expected to draw votes mainly from Roh, perhaps even denying him victory. Kim made it clear that he will at least add a strong voice of criticism against Roh, the only such voice on the conservative side.

Roh’s forces, according to Kim, already have shown that they fear the impact of Kim’s candidacy. Kim told South Korean reporters that he already has been visited by “a high government official” who, he said, “asked me to cooperate.”

“I took that to mean not to run,” Kim said, adding that he rejected the request.

An aide disclosed that the high official was Ahn Moo Hyuk, director of the Agency for National Security Planning, Chun’s new name for the Korean CIA.

The government also has been applying pressure on businessmen to refrain from renting office space to Kim’s new party, Kim said.

“I may have to set up a tent outside my house for the party headquarters,” he joked.

Asked what differences there might have been if he had won in 1980, Kim recalled that he had turned down a chance to be elected under the indirect, rubber-stamp system that Park instituted in 1972 to guarantee himself the presidency for life.

If he had won, Kim said, “we would have progressed in democracy to the point that the voices now crying out for democratization would not be heard.”

Dismisses Roh Pledge

In public speeches, Kim has already lashed out at Chun and his followers, charging that they might resort to “illicit or immoral acts” to rig the election. He also dismissed Roh’s pledge to carry out democratic reforms as “just words.” He said the ruling party is struggling to hold back reform in the face of the clamor for democratization.

“They are paranoid that they will be executed if they lose power,” he said in one recent speech.

He said in the interview that he will “not go around making charges that this or that person committed this or that scandal--although they did it to me.” He said the people “are already aware of the scandals” under Chun.

Kim gave the Chun government credit for a good performance on economic growth and “not that bad a score” on handling American demands that South Korea open its market to foreign goods.

The principal fault with Chun’s ruling group, he said, is that “they ruled by the logic of power,” and he added:

“Their thinking was to keep the present constitution (with its indirect system of electing the president) and choose their own successor and force him on the people. They progressed with that thinking until June 10, when they chose a presidential nominee. . . .”

He said the people showed, with the widespread demonstrations of last spring, that they “would no longer tolerate the logic of power and demanded democracy.”

The about-face announced by Roh on June 29 and approved by Chun two days later, sanctioning democratic reforms and a direct presidential election, was “an expedient,” he said, not a measure born of political conviction.

Kim said that Chun changed his position on constitutional reform four times in the past year and warned that there is no assurance there will not be further changes.

“The people cannot trust such a government,” he said.

He said the country was not ready for democracy in 1961, when he helped put Park in power.

“Democracy can take root and grow only after the people’s livelihood is assured, after the people are educated enough to make judgments on their own, and after stability has been achieved in society,” Kim said.

In the 1960s, he said, the task for poverty-stricken South Korea was nation-building. The 1961 “revolution,” as Kim calls the coup he helped bring off, “was the real beginning of this country’s modern history.”

In the 1970s, he said, the task was industrialization. Completion of both tasks made the 1980s a “natural era for democratic development,” he said.

“That’s why I rejected election under (Park’s) constitution and insisted on running in a direct election by the people,” he said. “But in these seven years, democracy was completely ignored and politics conducted on the logic of power alone. In effect, we reverted to the pattern of the 1970s.”

Kim set himself apart from the two liberal opposition leaders by saying that he was a participant in South Korea’s nation-building while “they were just critics of those in power.”

“They did not participate in economic development,” he said. “They just opposed everything.”

He acknowledged that the Park government, in its concentration on nation-building, unintentionally inflicted suffering on the people. In 1980, he said, “I wanted to pay back the people by creating an environment in which they could live richly and freely in democracy . . . and then step aside.”

Now Kim has lowered his sights.

“In a democracy,” he said, “you need a firmly established opposition party, one that can take power at any time without causing uneasiness among the people.”

“My goal is to create a model opposition party.”

He complained that, until now, political parties have collapsed and emerged one after another as conditions changed.

Political analysts have indicated that Kim believes that Chun’s ruling party will fall apart if it loses the election, leaving him as a rallying point for a conservative opposition. Then his chance would come five years from now.

Kim denied that he has such a strategy in mind. But, reiterating that South Korea must have an opposition party capable of assuming power at any time, he added, “My goal is to create a model opposition party”