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| A portrait of former President Kim Young-sam is surrounded by hundreds of white chrysanthemums at his memorial altar in Seoul National University Hospital, Sunday. Kim died of a blood infection and heart failure earlier in the day. / Yonhap |
By Kang Seung-woo
Kim Young-sam, the former president who helped end military rule and accepted an IMF bailout program in 1997, died early Sunday. He was 87.
Kim, who led the country from 1993 to 1998, was hospitalized Thursday due to a high fever and breathing problems before he passed away at 12:22 a.m., according to Seoul National University Hospital.
"Kim is believed to have died from acute stress derived from septicemia in addition to a worsened heart condition," Oh Byung-hee, chief of the hospital, said in a press briefing.
Ahead of the hospitalization, Kim had been admitted and discharged from the hospital several times in recent years after he suffered a stroke, angina and pneumonia due to his advanced age.
"The late Kim Young-sam dedicated his whole life to democratize and develop our country as the 14th president," Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn said.
The government will commemorate him with a state funeral. The ceremony will take place at the National Assembly Thursday after a five-day period of mourning, Hwang said. Kim will be buried at the National Cemetery in Seoul.
Kim, a native of Geoje, South Gyeongsang Province, was a nine-term lawmaker who opposed military dictators from the 1960s through the 1980s. He was twice placed under house arrest in the early 1980s.
In 1979, he was expelled from the Assembly for his activities against then authoritarian leader Park Chung-hee. Kim laid the groundwork for a peaceful power transfer in a country that had been marked by military coups.
In his first bid for the presidency in 1987, when the nation held the first free, direct presidential election, both Kim and his life-long rival Kim Dae-jung ran for office. Due to a split vote, he finished second to former President Roh Tae-woo, another army general.
Then he merged his party with Roh's governing party in 1990 and beat Kim Dae-jung in the 1992 presidential election to become the nation's first civilian head of state in decades.
Upon taking office, Kim, an outspoken opponent of the nation's military dictators, put his two predecessors — generals-turned-President Chun Doo-hwan and Roh — behind bars on charges of mutiny and treason stemming from the 1979 coup that led Chun to seize power. However, Kim pardoned the two convicted military strongmen at the end of his term.
One of his key achievements was the introduction of the real name financial transaction system in 1993, a landmark financial reform requiring citizens to use their real names in all financial transactions. The rule which also banned the use of false names in transactions of real estate helped reduce corruption.
Also, he was credited with disbanding a key military group that had produced many politicized generals in past military dictatorships in an effort to prevent another military coup.
The former President sought to reform the government and targeted political corruption, as well.
Kim's presidency was marked by the two major events — the 1994 North Korean nuclear crisis and the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) bailout package for Korea in 1997.
During the nuclear crisis from North Korea at that time, the U.S. government planned a strike against the North's nuclear facilities in Yongbyon, but Kim persuaded then-U.S. President Bill Clinton to cancel it for fear of a possible war on the Korean Peninsula after the North's counterstrikes against major South Korean cities, according to Kim's memoir.
In addition, he was supposed to hold a meeting with North Korean founder Kim Il-sung on July 25, 1994, brokered by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. But what might have been the first inter-Korean summit was canceled after the North Korean leader died two weeks before the event.
Nearing the end of his term of office in late 1997, Kim came under fire for mismanaging the economy during the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis that toppled some of the nation's debt-laden conglomerates, and his administration had to accept a $58 billion IMF-led bailout program that many Koreans still regard as a national humiliation.
Kim is survived by his wife, two sons and three daughters.
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