Democracy Comes Into Flower

With their high-growth economy now in receivership to the International Monetary Fund and long years of readjustment in store, South Koreans gloomily contemplate a long, cold winter. For the ruling groups of the past few decades, even worse news comes in the form of Korea’s best-known dissident, Kim Dae Jung, who is leading the polls in advance of Thursday’s elections.

But that is remarkably good news for Korean democracy, whose successes in recent years have been far more significant than any economic gains (or setbacks). Koreans have taught us not just how to build a modern economy but that democracy comes from the bottom up through the sacrifices of millions of ordinary people.

A few years ago, South Korea’s military dictators and its culture of street protest were well known, the predictable result of an insecure leadership meeting a strong and resilient civil society. Until Kim Young Sam was elected in 1992, every presidency began or ended with coups or massive rebellions, sometimes both. From the overthrow of Syngman Rhee in 1960 to the ousting of Chun Doo Hwan in 1987, colorful and courageous dissidents brought into the public space original configurations of political and social protest, shaking the foundations of Korean politics.

Among the many martyrs to decades of authoritarianism, Kim Dae Jung was the best known. He has suffered as much as any political leader in recent history.

Kim has limped badly ever since a suspicious traffic accident in 1971, when he had the audacity to accumulate 45% of the vote during the last election that Park Chung Hee allowed before making himself president for life. Later, KCIA agents kidnapped him from a Tokyo hotel and probably would have killed him had it not been for U.S. intervention. After his coup, Chun Doo Hwan sought to execute Kim on trumped-up sedition charges, blaming him for the 1980 Kwangju rebellion; Kim was lucky to escape into exile in the U.S.

Five years later I was part of a foreign delegation that accompanied Kim back to Seoul, the hope being that we might protect him from the fate suffered by Benigno Aquino, who was slain the year before on an airport tarmac in Manila. Kim’s homecoming at Kimpo Airport was less dramatic: A bunch of police and intelligence thugs pummeled us while kidnapping Kim and his wife. Kim was under house arrest for the next two years.

Civil society began to stir again at this time, and by June 1987, an aroused citizenry took over the streets of the major cities, with late-coming but substantial middle-class participation, thus forcing Chun from office.

A few months later, the opposition split as both Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung ran for election, enabling the emergence of Chun’s confidant, Roh Tae Woo. This regime then sought to quiet the political arena with a historic compromise, the Democratic Liberal Party, which would encompass Kim Young Sam and his Pusan-based political machine, bringing them under the tent of the Park-Chun-Roh group to form a single-party democracy that would rule for the ages, while continuing to exclude Kim Dae Jung’s southwestern constituency.

All that fell apart, however, after Kim Young Sam became president. He unexpectedly launched an audacious assault on the military dictators and their legacies, a reckoning with history as deep as any in the global transition from authoritarianism of the past decade. Aggressive prosecutors not only cashiered Chun and Roh for taking political kickbacks but indicted them for treason, for their coup after Park’s assassination and the bloody suppression of the Kwangju rebellion.

These dramatic events bathed Seoul’s elites in a highly critical light, as one after another of Korea’s big businessmen, who had inundated Chun and Roh with political funds (more than $1.5 billion) were hauled into court. Kim Young Sam is of course a politician, too, and thus an unexpected vehicle for this reckoning. But he proved himself also to be a democrat, bringing a remarkable, definitive end to the era of authoritarian rule.

Kim Dae Jung, now 73, is running his last campaign. He still is vulnerable to the sharp regional voting pattern of the past two elections; if he can finally transcend his southwestern base (where everyone votes for him by rote), he will win. But the other two candidates are promising as well: Lee Hoi Chang and Rhee In Je are known for their probity and clean backgrounds. Whoever wins will thus be poised to complete the agenda of democratization: restoring regional balance to Korean politics, giving political representation to labor and abolishing the odious National Security Law (used against dissidents).

Then Korea’s political leaders can reflect on how much they owe to the sacrifices of millions of common people, who made an indelible contribution to Korea’s democratization.