Kim’s Laurels Appear to Be Greener Abroad

One might say he is a prophet scorned in his own land.

From afar, South Korean President Kim Dae Jung looks like one of the most respected leaders in the world. He is credited with reducing tensions on the Korean peninsula to their lowest level in more than 50 years, with expertly defusing an international monetary crisis and with presiding over a country that is richer and freer than at any time in its history.

But at home, the 77-year-old former dissident is increasingly the butt of jokes, an object of ridicule and pity.

His popularity has plunged as prosecutors close in on his three sons, who are allegedly enmeshed in a tangle of corruption scandals. His youngest son was arrested May 18 on charges that he took nearly $2 million in bribes from a lobbyist. Earlier in the month, one of the president’s most trusted fund-raisers was arrested on another corruption charge. Besieged, Kim resigned from the ruling party.

Meanwhile, Kim’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning “sunshine policy” of engagement with North Korea is at best in a period of eclipse.

Political cartoons in South Korean papers depict the president as a sickly old man unable to govern and unable to protect his family. It doesn’t help that he was hospitalized in April for a leg injury.

“At this moment, he cannot govern the country. He has lost all trust and moral legitimacy,” said Hahn Sung Deuk, a Korea University political scientist who is a specialist on the Korean presidency.

Part of Kim’s problem is that he’s a lame-duck president, in his last year in office and barred by South Korea’s Constitution from seeking another five-year term. In other countries, Kim might be looking forward to a comfortable retirement--a chance to rest on his laurels, as it were--but the last year of a South Korean president’s term is usually the most turbulent.

“Korean presidents always seem to end up as pariahs. In their last year in office, their power wanes and all sorts of things begin to come out,” said Michael Breen, a Korea expert who is writing a biography of Kim. “There is a lot of money in the political business, and basically if they want to go after you, they can always find something. And if they can’t get you, they go after your children.”

It might be no coincidence that almost five years ago, the son of Kim’s predecessor, Kim Young Sam, was arrested on similar corruption charges. And before that, the daughter of previous President Roh Tae Woo was embroiled in a scandal in which it was alleged (but never proved) that she accepted valuable gifts to influence government decisions.

Kim Dae Jung has not been accused of wrongdoing, but the scandals--which are, in the words of a diplomat here, “more complicated than a mosaic in a Byzantine cathedral”--touch on virtually every member of his immediate family.

His oldest son, 54-year-old Kim Hong Il--a member of the National Assembly who, like his father, was imprisoned in the 1980s by South Korea’s military dictatorship--is accused by the political opposition of campaign fund-raising irregularities. The second son, Kim Hong Up, is under investigation for allegedly mishandling funds of the Kim Dae Jung Peace Foundation for the Asia-Pacific Region, a think tank the president set up with the hope it would polish his legacy.

In the Confucian tradition that holds sway here, fathers are held more responsible for their children’s failings than in the West, so this scandal has seriously undermined Kim’s presidency.

Ironically, the son who was arrested, 39-year-old Kim Hong Gul, had been sent to graduate school in the United States when his father became president to keep him out of this kind of trouble.

“His parents advised him not to go into business while his father was president,” said a family associate who asked not to be identified. “They knew that in Korea, the relatives of presidents always get caught in a scandal, and they thought it safest for him to stay in school in the United States.”

In keeping with the plan, Kim Hong Gul received a master’s degree in international relations at USC and then went to work as a researcher at Pomona College. But people began to question how a graduate student could afford a $950,000 house in Rancho Palos Verdes and frequent first-class trips back to South Korea.

The authorities allege that the explanation lies with Choi Kyu Sun, a lobbyist with a knack for getting his picture taken with famous people.

Parlaying connections with the Korean government, Choi tried to interest such notables as global financier George Soros and singer Michael Jackson in various Korea ventures, without success. According to prosecutors, Choi thought that the youngest Kim could help his business, and he gave him stock options and bags stuffed with cash, much of it allegedly from a company seeking a contract for the Korean sports lottery.

“I had great expectations for Kim Dae Jung. He was firm in promising that he would manage his friends and family well, but he has failed to keep that promise,” said Oh Kye Hyun of the Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice, a nonprofit group that advocates political reform.

The family friend agrees, saying, “It looks like this kind of scandal is taking away the will and energy for the peace process. Even though he can finish his term, I doubt he can really accomplish anything in this last year.”

Even before the latest scandal, Kim’s popularity had been skidding from the high it reached around the time of his June 2000 visit to Pyongyang, the North’s capital.

Although the trip earned Kim a reputation as the “Nelson Mandela of Korea,” many South Koreans believed that their country was groveling before North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, who refused to reciprocate with a return visit or even to express gratitude for Seoul’s financial assistance.

Overall, Kim gets better marks for his handling of the economy. When he took office in early 1998, South Korea had just turned to the International Monetary Fund for a multibillion-dollar bailout. The loan was repaid last summer--nearly three years ahead of schedule--winning Kim kudos from the business community, which had been worried about his leftist reputation at the time he took office.

In fact, throughout his presidency, Kim has been more popular from the outside than on the inside. Like those of fellow Nobel laureates who also made the transition from dissident to president, Lech Walesa of Poland and the Czech Republic’s Vaclav Havel, Kim’s image internationally is as an icon of democracy, while his own people see him as an all-too-fallible politician.

“This story of a political prisoner who later wins the Nobel Peace Prize resonates with Americans. It plays better in America than Korea,” said Victor Cha, a Korea expert at Georgetown University. Cha noted that even when Kim won the prize in 2000, many Koreans remained unimpressed.

“This was the most important international accomplishment of any Korean,” Cha said, “and yet there has been tangible ambivalence in Korea about it.”

Despite the political crises of the day, most outsiders believe that history will look kindly on Kim Dae Jung’s legacy. Even the president’s critics acknowledge that the prevalence of financial scandals in nearly every Korean presidency means that there might be something wrong with the system rather than with the people.

Asked to comment on the arrest of Kim’s son, opposition leader Lee Hoi Chang, himself a presidential candidate, declined to criticize the president.

“It is a tragedy of Korean politics that these deplorable happenings repeat themselves.... We must find a solution to establish this country in an upright manner and to give stability to the people,” Lee told a forum of South Korean journalists.

Of South Korea’s eight presidents, two were arrested after their terms in office, one was exiled to Hawaii and another was assassinated. Only Kim’s immediate predecessor left office peacefully, albeit on the heels of his son’s arrest on corruption charges.

“South Koreans are extremely hard on the people they elect as president,” Donald P. Gregg, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, wrote in a column last month for the English-language Korea Times. Kim has “created by his personal diplomacy, the best set of relations Korea has ever enjoyed with Japan, Russia and China. He has directed the economic recovery.... All these achievements have seemingly been forgotten by Koreans.”

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Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.