By Michael Breen
Millions of Koreans and their foreign friends say a final thank you and farewell to Kim Dae-jung on Sunday. After a funeral ceremony at the National Assembly and burial in the National Cemetery in Seoul, the country will then have to become accustomed to politics without him.
So broad was his impact that people will draw on very different memories and meaning throughout the somber afternoon, which caps an official six-day mourning period.
For some, Kim was the architect of reconciliation with North Korea. Indeed, a delegation representing the communist leader Kim Jong-il is expected from Pyongyang to attend. If they indeed arrive, it will be a fitting tribute, the first such participation by northern representatives of its kind in the South.
In modern South Korea, it may seem as easy to favor the liberal engagement with the communist North that Kim Dae-jung sought as to disagree with it and prefer the talk-to-the-hand approach of the present government, or indeed the containment approach of old. But before democracy, when DJ proposed talking with Pyongyang, such debate was not permitted. North Korea policy was the preserve of the intelligence agency, and even liberal democrats like Kim with other ideas would be branded communists and subject to arrest and torture.
For others, Kim Dae-jung was the president who turned the nation around after the hammering of the Asian financing crisis, who improved women's rights, who turned Korea into a wired nation, who moved democracy along.
For those with longer memories, he was the dissident made famous, it could be said, by the dictators he steadfastly opposed. It is hard to recapture the prevailing mood of pre-democracy Korea, when those with power considered it natural to bring the club down on their noisy opponents. In fact, when the rabble became too loud, cracking down seemed a necessary good to preserve national security.
The majority agreed, although you won't find anyone to admit it because we're all democrats now.
Between then and now there was once a layer of fear. Permitting freedom, it can be said, involves the removal of fear because the reasons for restricting it are usually good ones, even if they are wrapped up in personal power interests. Many felt, for example, that allowing too much freedom in South Korea would create openings for North Korea to drill into. Others seriously doubted the wisdom of leaving governance in the hands of civilian politicians, and with good reason.
Kim Dae-jung and his faction took on that fear and, along with others such as Kim Young-sam, spoke out for the kind of democracy that Korea's allies enjoyed. Such talk threatened the status quo. Because of it, he was vilified, suffered one, possibly two, assassination attempts, was jailed, sentenced to death, exiled, and placed under house arrest. For seven years through the 1980s, newspapers were forbidden from running his photograph, his (and that of the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung).
For the people of his home Jeolla provinces, he was their David sent out to do battle with the Goliath of incumbent power whose networks locked them out of power. His hobbling frame and austere face bore their suffering and the forceful cadence of his oratory articulated their aspirations.
There was plenty to criticize about Kim Dae-jung. He didn't have many non-Jeolla supporters. He did little to end the futile regionalism that infected politics. He should have supported Kim Young-sam's candidacy for president in 1987, instead of running and splitting the opposition vote. His engagement policy with North Korea was a disappointment. He illegally paid for the 2000 summit with Kim Jong-il for which he won that year's Nobel Peace Prize. In contrast to his successor, Roh Moo-hyun, he did nothing as president to reduce the powers of the presidency. As a lawmaker in the 1960s, he got in the way of government ministries and hindered progress. In the later years of his term, you could hardly find anyone with a good word to say.
But none of the above overrides his main contribution to the democratization of Korea and to kick-starting reconciliation with the North. From the overall perspective of his life, the criticism evaporates and the disappointments and contradictions, the policy failures and omissions, fall into the obligatory everyone-is-flawed paragraph of the obituary.
Now, just as he acknowledged the contribution of the dictator Park Chung-hee to Korean development, so his opponents acknowledge his.
R.I.P., DJ.
Michael Breen is chairman of Insight Communications Consultants and exclusive partner of FD International. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.