Roh Moo-hyun's ultimate victory

By Kyung Moon Hwang

Fifteen years ago this week, in mid-December of 2002, I came to Seoul for an academic conference and witnessed a remarkable event, the election of Roh Moo-hyun as president of South Korea.

Roh’s victory was extraordinary for many reasons, including a sudden turn of events the day before the election that further reduced his chances. His presidency likewise became historically significant in ways that were difficult to detect at the time.

Moreover, Roh’s shocking suicide in 2009, a year after he left office amid an investigation of him for alleged corruption, appeared as a tragic end to not only his life but his causes. But while it’s still a bit early for grand historical judgments, the past decade of developments suggests that Roh has actually won.

This assessment comes not just from the fact that his protege and chief of staff, Moon Jae-in, was elected president this year while championing Roh’s agenda and approach, but that the enveloping mood and direction of the country have come to reflect Roh’s aspirations. These include a fierce defense of democratic values, resistance to economic and political structures of privilege, and the insistence on facing Korea’s painful history squarely and honestly.

Roh stuck to these goals as president despite countless problems caused by a wide range of factors, including his own arrogance and aloofness. He faced a constant barrage of attacks from the political opposition, from the conservative press, and even from his own ideological allies.

He was even impeached for abuse of power, when he refused to apologize for publicly proclaiming, just before the National Assembly election of 2004, his support for the new liberal party that he helped to found, an utterance that appeared to violate the Election Law.

But the impeachment was clearly a political move by the then-majority opposition party, and even though Roh’s popular support had been declining, the citizenry immediately recognized this as a ploy and expressed themselves in defiance.

The results of the ensuing National Assembly election actually stripped the conservatives of their majority, and soon thereafter the Constitutional Court invalidated the impeachment and returned Roh to his duties.

The impeachment, however, reflected not just the ingrained opposition forces but a general lack of personal appeal that eventually doomed Roh’s signature projects, including the establishment of an administrative capital in order to relieve hyper-centralization in Seoul.

This idea aroused fierce opposition from various entrenched social sectors and thus did not come to fruition, at least under Roh’s tenure. But eventually the establishment of a separate administrative capital did become a reality, and this was but one example of how, over the longer term, Roh’s apparent failures actually turned out to be successes.

We can also point to the abolition of the age-old “household-head” registration system that had long discriminated against women in family law, and to Roh’s support for and expansion of government-sponsored investigations into Korea’s troubled history in order to promote the spirit of truth and reconciliation.

Both of these steps had an immediate, major effect, and the fruitful consequences will likely extend far into the future. Another big achievement, the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, also remains in place and will probably stay despite the current U.S. administration’s attacks on it.

Just as consequential over the long term were those Roh initiatives that did not get implemented or passed, but which either established the basis for later efforts or continue to inspire thinking about fundamental reform: movements to either weaken or abolish the National Security Law, to depoliticize the National Intelligence Service, and to restructure fundamentally the educational and college entrance systems.

All of these steps attempted to promote a more equitable, fair, and democratic society, both economically and politically, by removing the layers of deep-rooted ills accumulated over the past.

The mass, peaceful, candlelight demonstrations beginning last year to remove Park Geun-hye from office rode this spirit of protecting democratic gains, a spirit that has come to be associated with Roh’s legacy quite deliberately and explicitly.

Back in 2009, such a scenario would have seemed improbable, given the terrible circumstances of Roh’s suicide amid the pressures of the corruption investigation into him and his family.

It turned out that the traditional national security agencies under the next president, Lee Myung-bak, played a role in intensifying this scandal, but it was also clear that Roh, too, had fallen to the temptations of the customary misbehavior of Korean leaders.

The corrupting power of power was most visible when contrasting Roh’s death with his life before his presidency, a biography that is now a recurring object of popular interest. Born and raised in such dire economic circumstances that he could barely feed himself, much less find the means to attend university, he had taught himself enough to pass the national bar exam, a stunning accomplishment.

Thereafter, in the midst of the military dictatorship of the 1980s, he used his experiences of poverty and social injustice to devote himself to democratization and greater equality as a human rights lawyer, then a legislator.

Even his campaign for the presidency in 2002, which depended on countless small donations from his growing legions of supporters, signaled this resolve to further cultivate a democratic, more equitable society and political culture. Just as his election victory back then defied the odds, his ultimate victory, while perhaps improbable due to many difficult challenges, seems promising.

Kyung Moon Hwang (khwang3@gmail.com) is a professor at the Department of History, University of Southern California. He is the author of “A History of Korea ― An Episodic Narrative” (second edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).