The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History

by Oberdorfer, Don

  The contrast with the hard-edged Chun could not have been greater. I noticed that in an hour’s conversation, Roh never mentioned Chun except when I brought up his name, although the office contained a framed photograph of the two men in their shirtsleeves, in addition to the obligatory official presidential portrait. When I asked about Chun, Roh said that their friendship and loyalty to each other had “not changed,” though their relationship was somewhat different since the announcement of direct popular balloting. Although it was not generally known at the time, Chun privately agonized about whether he could really trust Roh as his successor, according to Kim Yoon Hwan, who had known both men since high school days and held senior Blue House positions under both of them.

  Roh Tae Woo was born on December 4, 1932, in a farming village near Taegu. His father, who worked in the village office, was killed in an automobile accident when Roh was seven, and he was raised by his mother. After brief military service at the start of the Korean War, Roh joined the Korean Military Academy in its first four-year class, the famous eleventh class, which included Chun and many others who later came to power as political and military leaders.

  Chun and Roh became close friends. Chun, two years older, was almost always in the leadership role, with Roh a supportive follower. Before becoming president, Roh had been the successor to Chun in at least five key military or security posts. When Chun led the December 1979 military coup, Roh played an essential supporting role, bringing troops from his Ninth Infantry Division from the front lines.

  A person who knew both men well since their military academy days described Chun as “a very simple man who sees pictures in black and white” and Roh as “a man of environment and situation.” Another Korean, who had watched both men as political leaders at close range, said that “the secret of Chun’s leadership was his assertiveness,” whereas Roh was “calculating and cautious” as well as surprisingly artistic, interested in music, poetry, and novels.

  My interview with opposition leader Kim Young Sam took place over breakfast at the Japanese restaurant of the modern Lotte Hotel. A man at ease with himself, he quickly discarded his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves as we ate fish, rice, miso soup, and pickles. Kim had met the rival opposition leader, Kim Dae Jung, ten times in the previous six weeks and said he planned to continue meeting at least weekly until they reached a decision about which of them would run for president. “The public expectation is for the nomination of one [opposition] candidate as soon as possible,” he said. In the meetings, “we promised each other we would have a united front to achieve democracy.”

  The personal rivalry between the two Kims went back to 1970, when they had contended for the nomination of the major opposition party to run against President Park. Kim Dae Jung had been the victor in the nominating convention due to deft maneuvering. Although the two Kims and their respective factions sometimes worked together, they were never comfortable with each other.

  Kim Young Sam was born on December 20, 1928, on Koje Island near Pusan, at the southeastern tip of the Korean peninsula. His father, a successful island businessman, sent him to the elite high school in Pusan and to Seoul National University, the nation’s most prestigious university. Kim was elected to the National Assembly on the government ticket at age twenty-five, the youngest national legislator on record. He soon rebelled against the Syngman Rhee government’s dictatorial tactics and was an original member of the opposition Democratic Party, embarking on a lifelong advocacy of democracy.

  In 1960 the Koje Island home of Kim’s parents was invaded by two men demanding money. As Kim’s mother grappled with one of the men, she was fatally wounded by a gunshot to the abdomen. A year later, one of the robbers was caught and confessed to being a North Korean agent seeking money to buy a boat. The family tragedy, which was well known in Korea, colored Kim’s attitude toward the North and shielded him from the red-baiting that was common against opposition politicians. His elite schooling and establishment roots made him unusually acceptable to the middle and upper ranks of Korean society. Of the three leading presidential contenders in 1987, he was the closest to a normal politician.

  As an opposition leader, Kim had long been outspoken and undaunted by oppression. During the Park era, he was jailed for opposing military rule and in 1969 was the victim of an acid attack while opposing Park’s drive to amend the constitution to allow him a third term. A decade later he was expelled from the National Assembly for publicly calling Park a dictator and asking the United States to intervene. After Chun took power, Kim was placed under house arrest for two years for demanding democratic reforms and went on a twenty-three-day hunger strike. In our conversations while he was in opposition, I found Kim Young Sam a steadfast advocate of reform and democracy but vague on other issues.

  The setting for my meeting with Kim Dae Jung was very different—his house in central Seoul, a walled compound I had visited many times while he was under various forms of house arrest. This time his front parlor was crowded with a claque of supporters, many of them from his home region of southwestern Korea. That area, the current North and South Cholla Provinces, has had a distinctive history, going back at least thirteen hundred years to the time when it was the site of a separate Korean dynasty. Disadvantaged under President Park, who like both Chun and Roh was a native of a rival political center around Taegu, in the mid-1980s Cholla had notably fewer government ministers, generals, and heads of large conglomerates and a lower average income than most other regions. Kim Dae Jung was the hero and standard-bearer of Cholla and other downtrodden people in Korea, but at the same time he was distrusted and even feared by many people from other regions.

  Kim Dae Jung was born on January 6, 1924, on a small island off the southwest Korean coast. Unlike his long-standing rival, however, he was not born to wealth or privilege and was an outsider to the mainstream of Korean elite society. Despite his fame and his important role in so many historic political developments, many leading Koreans had never met him in person.

  After his victory over Kim Young Sam for the opposition-party nomination in the 1971 presidential election, he vaulted to the top rank of political leadership by winning 46 percent of the vote against President Park in an election that was heavily rigged for the incumbent. Park hated and feared Kim Dae Jung and had tried to do away with him permanently. Chun Du Hwan continued the vendetta, if a bit less fiercely than had his predecessor.

  Shortly before I saw him in 1987, Kim had finally been cleared of all outstanding charges and had his full political rights restored. Until then, he told me, there had been only two months since his kidnapping from Japan fourteen years earlier when he had been free of house arrest, prison, exile, or some other serious official restriction. The years in isolation and adversity had deepened his self-knowledge and political awareness. He had worked out his answers to major questions facing the country and could articulate them clearly.

  In the weeks before our meeting, the army chief of staff, General Park Hee Do, had publicly expressed military opposition to Kim Dae Jung’s potential candidacy. There was very serious doubt that military leaders would permit Kim to take office if he should be elected, and many supposed they would kill him. As we sat in the family dining room of his house, eating a Western breakfast of eggs and bacon from atop a red-checkered tablecloth covered by plastic, Kim declared his refusal to give in to such threats. In contrast to 1979–1980, when Chun seized power, he was sure the Korean people would fight this time rather than submit to continued military rule. “Democratization means neutralization of the military,” he said.

  Several weeks after I saw them, the two leading opposition figures pledged publicly that they would not oppose each other, in order not to betray the people’s wishes for political change. Nevertheless, a few days after that, Kim Dae Jung appeared at a huge public rally in his home region of Cholla and began touring the country like a candidate. Later Kim Young Sam did the same, starting with his hometown of Pusan. Each claimed the right to be th
e opposition’s choice on the basis of a long history of standing up for democracy, and each became convinced he would win the election. Heedless of their pledges, both ran for president.

  Roh Tae Woo, meanwhile, enjoyed the advantages of the leader of the incumbent party, including massive funding and extensive coverage in the media, which was heavily, if not totally, controlled by the government. At the same time, he sought to separate himself from Chun in the public mind. Although the US Embassy was under orders to remain strictly neutral, Roh managed to meet President Reagan at the White House in a mid-September trip to Washington to burnish his image as an internationally respected figure. This seemed to many Koreans a virtual US endorsement. Neither of the opposition competitors sought a trip to Washington to test that idea.

  On December 16, election day, Roh won the presidency with 36 percent of the popular vote, as Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung split the opposition majority between them. Manwoo Lee, a Korean American professor who made an intensive study of the election, wrote that “each candidate was like a Chinese warlord occupying his own solid territory” based on his region of origin.

  Roh’s victory in a hotly contested direct election gave him the political legitimacy that Chun had lacked. It made it possible for him to permit a greater degree of free speech and free press than his predecessors had and to reduce government control of business. Roh’s victory also permitted him to ease South Korea’s hard anticommunist stance and to bid successfully for amicable ties and eventual diplomatic relations with Eastern European communist countries, the Soviet Union, and China, thereby undercutting North Korea’s alliances and drastically changing the strategic situation in Northeast Asia.

  __________

  * In fact, Chun did come in April 1988, two months after leaving office, and was welcomed as an elder statesman.

  8

  THE GREAT OLYMPIC COMING-OUT PARTY

  FOR MOST OF THE world, the 1988 Olympic games at Seoul were a great sporting festival. Global television brought the opening ceremonies to the eyes of more than a billion people, the largest television audience in history for any event until that time. But for Koreans, the games were much more. As the government and people in the South saw it, the Twenty-fourth Olympiad was their international coming-out party, an opportunity to show the world that South Korea was no longer a poverty-stricken Asian war victim but a strong, modern, increasingly prosperous country with a vibrant society. The South hoped the 1988 Olympics would enhance its economic growth and global stature as the 1964 Tokyo Olympics had famously done for Japan. Moreover, the universality of the games provided a golden opportunity for South Korea to play host to the Soviet Union, China, and the communist-led countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which were North Korea’s allies and which, at the North’s insistence, had shunned the South. For much the same reasons, North Korea loathed and feared the coming of the Seoul Olympics, seeing the Games as an essentially political enterprise that would permit the South to improve its image in the world arena and move toward relations with Pyongyang’s communist allies. North Korea waged a strenuous battle, month by month, to halt or downgrade the Games. But its effort failed. The Olympics marked major strides in South Korea’s drive to win recognition and accommodation from the communist world.

  THE COMING OF THE OLYMPICS

  From the very first, South Korea recognized the political possibilities of hosting the Olympics. President Park Chung Hee, who had approved the plan to bid for the 1988 Games shortly before his death in 1979, specified that one of the major objectives would be “to demonstrate Korea’s economic growth and national power,” and another would be “to create favorable conditions for establishing diplomatic relations with both communist and non-aligned nations.” The potential diplomatic payoff added a unique and powerful incentive to South Korea’s drive.

  After nearly a quarter century on other continents, it was generally accepted that an Asian city would have first claim as host in 1988. For this reason, Seoul’s most important competitor was Japan’s entry, the city of Nagoya. Seoul had several advantages. Japan, a developed country, had already hosted one Olympics. Because of the intense diplomatic rivalry between the two Koreas, South Korea had embassies and consulates in nearly all third-world countries, which made up the bulk of the Olympics participants, while Japan had substantially fewer. Furthermore, many developing countries were sympathetic to one of their own.

  In the end, Seoul simply worked harder. Chung Ju Yung, chairman of the giant Hyundai group, was named chairman of the committee to bring the Olympics to Seoul. As the vote approached, he and other Korean industrialists traveled widely, wining and dining Olympic committee delegates of other countries. South Korean prime minister Lho Shin Yong led an intense lobbying campaign with foreign diplomats in the corridors of the annual UN General Assembly session in New York.

  In September 1981, when the Olympic delegates arrived at Baden Baden, West Germany, for the voting, they found impressive scale models of the Olympic Village that Seoul pledged to construct for the Games. They were also greeted by dazzling smiles from dozens of Korea’s most beautiful young women, including five former Miss Koreas and ten beautiful Korean Air Lines hostesses. According to a member of the victorious Korean delegation, Chung spent several million dollars in obtaining goodwill the same way he won construction contracts for Hyundai in the Middle East, with offers of airplane tickets, women, and money to any wavering delegates. Korea won over Japan by a resounding two-to-one margin.

  North Korea was slow to react publicly to these developments. It took more than two months after Seoul was awarded the Games for Rodong Sinmun to acknowledge the South’s victory, and then it zeroed in on the political ramifications: “Recently South Korean military fascists have been mobilizing high-ranking officials and related staff of the puppet government as well as pro-government trumpeters to raise a ridiculous hullabaloo every day about the Olympics, which are said to be going to be held in Seoul in 1988. Now the puppets of South Korea are approaching socialist nations and nonaligned countries in the hope of establishing diplomatic and official relations in order to have their ‘state’ recognized as a legitimate one.”

  As the time for the Games approached, Pyongyang increasingly portrayed the issue to its communist allies in momentous terms. In June 1985, Hwang Jang Yop, then secretary for international affairs of the Workers Party, wrote the East German communist party that the Seoul Games were not merely an athletic issue but “an important political question touching on the basic interests of world revolution, of whether the attraction of socialism or capitalism will be strengthened on the Korean peninsula.” Two years later, the North was still on that wicket. In a May 1987 cable to Berlin, East German ambassador Hans Maretzki reported Pyongyang viewed the issue as “a strategic political fight against the Seoul regime and its imperialistic supporters.” With its stubborn approach, he observed, the North was “once again putting itself in self-imposed isolation.”

  Following a suggestion from Cuba’s Fidel Castro, North Korea proposed that the Seoul Olympics be recast as the “Chosun Games” or the “Pyongyang-Seoul Games,” with North Korea as cohost, sharing equally in the sports events as well as the television revenues. North Korea insisted to its allies that “if the U.S.A. and the South Korean puppets do not accept our justified suggestions, then the socialist countries—as in the case of the [1984] Olympic games in Los Angeles—should collectively carry out a mighty strike and stand up against holding the games in South Korea.”

  Another boycott of the Games by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies, which had boycotted the LA Olympics, was never a serious possibility. Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze made it clear on a visit to Pyongyang in January 1986 that Soviet-bloc athletes were not prepared to sit out another Olympics, no matter what Pyongyang’s problems might be. In a confidential report on his visit, Shevardnadze wrote, “We have the impression that internally [North Koreans] have already come to terms with the unavoidable parti
cipation of the USSR and the other brother countries in the games.” He added that North Korea had asked him emphatically to delay announcing Soviet participation for as long as possible and to support the cohosting proposal. Moscow agreed to keep its planned participation in Seoul a secret and gave lip service to the cohosting idea. Nonetheless, Soviet Olympics officials took an active part in preparations for the Games, attending the convention of national Olympic committees in Seoul in April 1986, although they requested that their presence be given as little publicity as possible.

  Meanwhile, negotiations were under way between the two Koreas, under the auspices of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), on possible North Korean participation. Full cohosting of the Games awarded to Seoul was out of the question, something Pyongyang presumably understood from the start; nevertheless, it went ahead building major facilities and churning out T-shirts, banners, and pins for the Games. According to Park Seh Jik, president of the Seoul Olympics Organizing Committee, he and IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch agreed to try to keep North Korea under control by dragging out the bargaining for as long as possible, even though they saw little hope for final agreement. In the end, they believed, North Korea would never agree to grant full access to tens of thousands of athletes, officials, and accompanying journalists from the West. But while the negotiations continued, it was difficult for North Korea to exert its maximum pressure against the participation of its communist allies in the Games.

  The negotiations came to a head in August 1987, when Pyongyang refused to accept a final IOC compromise proposal. On September 24, South Korea rejected a North Korean proposal for another direct North-South meeting on the issue. With this, in the view of the ROK Olympics chief, “North Korea was completely cornered. . . . Patience, mutual cooperation and careful planning by the IOC and South Korea for three years had finally succeeded in isolating North Korea. By the demonstration that the IOC and South Korea were doing their best to appease North Korea, the USSR and Eastern European countries were granted the option to participate freely in the Seoul Olympics.”