By Oh Young-jin
Assistant Managing Editor
More than 5 million people have paid their last respects to the late former President Roh Moo-hyun at altars set up across the nation. Roh's funeral procession drew tens of thousands of people last Friday, turning the boulevard in downtown Seoul into a sea of humanity.
Even after his Friday memorial service, mourners are still visiting his hometown of Bongha.
Not all of the 5 million-plus mourners are the late President's supporters or the incumbent administration's detractors, but the huge turnout represents an outpouring of emotion at the national level, which is bottled up due to other competing issues but may erupt and consume the nation at the slightest of provocations.
This pent-up emotion is both an opportunity and potential crisis for President Lee Myung-bak.
Lee can turn it into an enormous amount of energy to get the country on a faster track to growth and prosperity, or leave it as a time bomb with a lit fuse that will hobble the rest of his presidency.
In order to make an opportunity out of the whole affair, it is important for Lee to take a step back and check his first 15 months in office before listing what more he can do for the remainder of his term.
Let's go first to the latest. In handling allegations of corruption involving Roh, Lee lacked subtlety. The President may argue that no one is above the law and that he didn't have anything to do with prosecutors' investigations. But he is empowered to appoint the top prosecutor as well as justice minister who the top prosecutor is obligated to report to, so it is hard to deny his authority to intervene. I am not saying he should have exempted Roh from due legal process.
Prosecutors competed with mass media to leak one unsubstantiated tip after another. Roh's pride as well as that of his family was devastated. When he jumped to his death, he apparently felt as if he were treated like a common thief.
Roh had led the nation as head of state for five years, making him more part of the national institution than an ordinary citizen. Lee didn't step in, lending credibility to claims that Roh's death was the result of his political grudge-settling endeavor.
Roh's death comes into the context of Lee's governing style.
It may be natural that a new President wants a fresh start, especially when his political ideology is different from his predecessor, but denying all that was achieved during the previous administrations may prove to be detrimental to the national interest, not to mention a backlash from the opposite camp.
Former President Kim Dae-jung, who contributed greatly to Korea's democratization, declared the nation's democracy under Lee's rule as half dead. His lament is not just because of Lee's policy that runs counter to DJ's Nobel Peace prize-winning ``Sunshine Policy'' of engaging North Korea. Now, the two Koreas stand eyeball to eyeball, with Pyongyang having conducted its second nuclear test. The North is planning to test-fire an intercontinental ballistic missile. All told, the situation is so precarious that some predict the possibility of conflict on the Korean Peninsula. Amidst it all, the Lee administration doesn't have any leverage or points of contact with the North. It is the Kim Young-sam government all over again. YS lost his chance to directly talk to Pyongyang after denying it as a negotiating partner and he was sidelined from the subsequent Pyongyang-Washington talks over the first North Korean nuclear crisis in the 1990s. Seoul, however, ended up picking up a multibillion-dollar tab for light-water reactors that the United States promised in return for the North's decision to halt nuclear development.
DJ is also seeing the reincarnation of the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s in President Lee. The obvious difference is that Lee was popularly elected, while those dictators were power robbers. Lee was a businessman who cut his entrepreneurial teeth in that so-called age of development-oriented dictatorship, so his ``bulldozer'' management style is a relic from that period. His business-first policy is laudable in some ways but it often comes at the expense of the underprivileged, leaving room for friction between haves and have-nots.
If these arguments are not convincing enough, his control over the governing Grand National Party (GNP) can be an extra piece of evidence recalling the relationship between the late dictator Park Chung-hee and the then-ruling Democratic Republican Party, or between Army general-turned-President Chun Doo-hwan and his Democratic Justice Party. On top of that, Lee has his elder brother, the GNP lawmaker Lee Sang-deuk, suspected of pulling the strings behind the scenes. Sometimes, rumors are truer than truth. Rep. Lee's case may be one example.
What remedial steps should Lee take?
It needs a holistic approach of reaching out to the other side ― those who are not his supporters. Of course, this political maneuver may be risky, because it runs the risk of alienating his supporters without gaining the trust of his traditional detractors.
It is important for the President to remind himself that he is no longer a candidate for his party and supporters, but the leader who represents the whole country including his critics. This representative authority is the basis for his mandate to rule the nation. Then, he should take the risk, act on this mandate and serve as catalyst to unify the nation. The choice is his. But the burden of a wrong choice or inaction will be the nation's to bear.