Kim Dae Jung Again Heads Largest Opposition Party

Veteran opposition leader Kim Dae Jung was elected head of South Korea’s largest opposition party Saturday and he pledged to help keep President Roh Tae Woo’s power in check.

Delegates at the national convention of the Party for Peace and Democracy unanimously chose Kim as its president, the post he relinquished two months ago under pressure from party moderates seeking a merger with other opposition groups.

Kim’s party helped engineer an upset in National Assembly elections April 26, winning the largest bloc of opposition seats and ending the ruling party’s control of the legislature for the first time in the country’s history.

Roh’s Democratic Justice Party won 125 seats, 25 short of a majority in the 299-seat Assembly. Kim Dae Jung’s party won 71 seats, against 59 for the Reunification Democratic Party of his longtime rival Kim Young Sam and 35 for the conservative splinter group New Democratic Republican Party. Independents won nine seats.

“Our party will seek to have close ties with the (Reunification Democratic Party and New Democratic Republican Party) . . . to launch a joint struggle against any abuse of official power,” an ebullient Kim Dae Jung told more than 1,000 supporters gathered at a convention site in Seoul.

Roh, meanwhile, made two key Cabinet changes.

Lee Chun Gu, 54, former secretary general of the Democratic Justice Party and a close associate of Roh, took the post of home minister, a presidential spokesman said. The new home minister, who will have charge of the nation’s police, is a retired brigadier general who had been a member of the National Assembly.

Former Justice Minister Bae Myung In, 56, will take over as the head of the Agency for National Security Planning, formerly the Korean CIA.

The new appointments came five days after Roh reshuffled the ruling party to cope more effectively with the opposition-controlled Assembly.