PERSPECTIVE ON SOUTH KOREA : Will Kim Restore the Public Trust? : If he is a true reformer, the president will put a special prosecutor on the cases of his indicted predecessors.

The story of three of South Korea’s presidents--the criminality and venality of the last two and the presidential politics of the current one--has been overwhelming the South Korean media the past three months, engulfing an entire nation in a frenzy of public indignation, political disarray and rising cynicism.

In a jolting succession of the unthinkable, current President Kim Young Sam had two former presidents, Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, and heads of several big businesses indicted and special legislation passed for the investigation of the 1980 coup. He has been stunning the nation with one shocker after another, yet has also been maintaining imperial aloofness and secrecy, refusing to face the nation in a single news conference in three months.

The unfolding scandal uncovers not only the sordid depth of two corrupt presidencies but also a culture of raw power and naked greed. It exposes a politics that shamelessly reduces everything to the private, routinely manipulating public office for personal, partisan or corporate gain, with nothing but utter contempt for the res publica. The power of the state, its public offices, its legal and financial resources, all are there to be sold for money, even to be seized by force for personal ambition, and in any case to be exploited for private desires. The exploding scandal has put on trial not only Chun and Roh, their sycophantic political, business and media elites, but also the nation as a whole.

It has put President Kim on trial as well. His prosecution of the two dictators could have received unreserved national applause, for it would amount to settling accounts with the two former military regimes and setting history straight. But it has not. The mounting suspicion is that he is exploiting the current affair, engaging in the ancient politics of pure desperation and intimidation of enemies.

Kim had long opposed action against Chun and Roh, with whom he joined forces in 1990 and whose help was essential for his election in ’92. However, after his party’s devastating defeat last June in provincial races and the reemergence of Kim Dae Jung as head of the largest opposition party last September, and with the increasingly certain prospect of another disaster in this April’s general election for the National Assembly, suddenly last October, he reversed himself.

In his New Year address to the nation, Kim admitted receiving political money but left all the details about how much, from whom and for what in masterful ambiguity. One rumor is that he received more than $300 million from Roh’s slush fund for his 1992 campaign, and that he would negotiate a deal on prison terms with Chun and Roh in return for their continuing silence on the matter.

Given that he has been a chief beneficiary of Roh’s slush fund, the long history of flagrantly partisan manipulation of the prosecutor general’s office and the revolutionary national significance of exposing the last two presidencies, the only honorable thing for Kim to do would have been to appoint an independent, nationally respected special prosecutor. He has refused. An impartial investigation would require judicial, not political, decisions. It has been President Kim’s own political decisions that have determined whether to prosecute, when and how fast to prosecute and whom to implicate. He has moved the investigation so fast that Roh’s trial has already begun and Chun’s will begin in early February, just two months before the general election.

Most disturbing is the persistent rumor that while keeping himself immune from investigation, Kim is using the current probe to collect damaging information on the flow of political funds from Chun, Roh and the businesses to his political rivals in order to discredit the opposition on the eve of the election. Rather than a “clean break with the past,” this will be not only traditional dirty politics but also politics at its most cynical.

President Kim is perhaps the only politician with the guts to have two former presidents indicted. Will he also have the decency to honor the national cause and not privatize the public power of his office as they did? Will he redeem himself as the true reformer he has been claiming to be? A nation is watching. What began as the tragedy of two presidents finally brought to justice may end as a sideshow of three presidents.