New Generation Takes Power in Seoul

During the presidential campaign, Roh Moo Hyun liked to respond to questions about his policies by saying they would be just like those of outgoing South Korean President Kim Dae Jung. With no caveats attached, Roh has wholeheartedly endorsed Kim’s dialogue with North Korea and his handling of the economic crisis that nearly sank the country.

Notwithstanding the ideological affinities between the two, the transition of power today is one of South Korea’s most profound. It also comes as the nation wrestles with a nuclear challenge from the North.

There is a distinct transition of power to the generation that politically came of age after the 1950-53 Korean War, the seminal event shaping modern Korean consciousness. The 77-year-old Kim is of the same generation as his immediate predecessors, Kim Young Sam, Roh Tae Woo and Chun Doo Hwan, all born within a few years of one another and educated during the Japanese occupation before World War II.

Roh Moo Hyun, at 56, is a relative youngster by the geriatric standards of Korean politics. The maverick labor lawyer with a broad, guileless grin seems younger than he is, with his core political support coming from voters in their 20s and 30s.

“This is really a new chapter opening up for us. We are starting from zero and our expectations are unlimited,” said Chung Hoon Tae, 33, who attended Roh’s inauguration with his 6-year-old son. Chung was an active member of an Internet fan club that played a big role in the election.

The inauguration was held on the vast lawn in front of the National Assembly building in Seoul in front of 45,000 invited guests, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. The festive aspects of the ceremony were scaled back out of respect for the more than 133 people killed in last week’s subway fire in Taegu, South Korea’s third-largest city.

In his inaugural speech, Roh promised to continue Kim’s policy of engagement with North Korea, “trying to build on the good results” as well as to “improve on the way the policies are actually implemented.”

Maintaining the mild tone toward Pyongyang that has irked some in the Bush administration, Roh made no reference to North Korea’s test-firing Monday of a short range missile and offered only gentle words of reproach to the regime in general.

“Pyongyang must abandon nuclear development. If it renounces its nuclear development program, the international community will offer many things that it wants. It is up to Pyongyang whether to go ahead and obtain nuclear weapons or to get guarantees of security for its regime and economic support,” Roh said.

Expectations are high for Roh to fulfill not only the promises he made during the campaign but those of Kim Dae Jung, his political mentor, as well. For all his international acclaim and a Nobel Peace Prize, Kim leaves office with a trail of unresolved legal problems and scandals behind him.

Two of his three sons are in legal trouble, one in prison. A scandal is festering over multimillion-dollar secret payments that were funneled to North Korea days before Kim’s landmark summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. The payments raise troubling questions about whether the summit was bought, and could land some of Kim’s aides -- if not Kim himself -- in jail.

“Korean presidents all seem to change for the worse when they take power, and their terms end in disgrace and tragedy,” said Oh Kye Hyun of the Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice, a nonprofit group that advocates political reform. “We were disappointed with Kim Dae Jung, and we hope it will not be the case again with Roh Moo Hyun.”

Although Kim made his name as a pro-democracy crusader, he did not always practice what he preached and was hardly an exemplar when it came to the seamy underside of politics.

“Korean political culture is highly authoritarian, and Kim Dae Jung, although he was a dissident, was part of that,” said Michael Breen, a Korea specialist who is writing a biography of Kim. He says that Kim and his immediate predecessor, Kim Young Sam, another former dissident, “thought that if they could get elected, that was enough and that everything was all right with the system.”

In personal style, Roh couldn’t be more different from Kim. He has a colloquial yet articulate way of speaking that has won him comparisons to Bill Clinton, although Roh describes another former American president, Abraham Lincoln, as his political idol.

“He is humble. He doesn’t have the authoritarian attitude or charisma,” said Moon Jae In, one of Roh’s oldest friends.

At the same time, Roh lacks Kim Dae Jung’s gravitas and stature. When he was elected president in 1997, Kim had already spent four decades in the public eye and was South Korea’s best-known dissident. Roh never held an administrative job more important than minister for maritime affairs and fisheries, as which he served for only eight months. He speaks little English and has rarely traveled outside Korea.

“He comes in with less international experience than probably any president of any major country I can think of,” a senior American diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity told reporters last month. “To a large degree, he’s a blank slate.”

Roh’s relationship with the U.S. is at best ambivalent. Unlike Kim Dae Jung, who spent years in exile in the U.S. and credits American intervention for foiling a 1973 assassination plot by the Korean CIA, Roh has never visited the U.S. In the turbulent 1980s, he served as a lawyer for trade unionists and radical students who were rallying against South Korea’s military dictatorship and against the U.S. presence here.

Although his views have mellowed, he has been openly critical of Bush administration policy toward both Iraq and North Korea. Roh opposes any direct pressure on North Korea to give up its nuclear program.

Roh’s victory in the Dec. 19 election was a blow to those in Washington who had taken it for granted that South Koreans would opt for conservative Lee Hoi Chang, whose uncompromising attitude toward North Korea is more in keeping with President Bush’s view. His designated foreign minister, Yoon Young Kwan, named today, is a professor at Seoul National University who shares Roh’s softer approach.

As president, Roh will inherit not only the North Korean crisis but a troublesome political constellation at home. His Millennium Democratic Party is the minority party in the National Assembly and is expected to have a difficult time pushing through its agenda and appointees. A key first test is to come today when the assembly is to vote on Roh’s appointment of former Seoul Mayor Goh Kun as prime minister.

And with the political wrangling already beginning for assembly elections next year, those who elected Roh on promises of transparency and clean government are watching closely to see whether this newest South Korean president will succumb to politics as usual.

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