(15) Roh Moo-hyun: The Unlikely President

By Michael Breen

A few days after his election victory in December 2002, president-elect Roh Moo-hyun stepped onto the stage at a hotel in Seoul and faced an audience of several hundred foreign business people.

“If I can get so many foreigners to come out and see me, I guess I must be an important person now,” he said.

The audience responded with laughter and applause, won over by a joke that burst the bubble of what everyone in Korea was thinking: Who on earth is this man and how come he is suddenly the president?

A few days earlier, as the results came in showing that Roh was the sure winner, TV cameras caught the scene in his party’s headquarters not of jubilation but of the party leaders shaking his hand and looking distinctly uncomfortable. Feeling they had miscalculated when Roh won their party’s American-style primary system, introduced for the first time in Korea, and convinced that Roh would lose, they had withheld funds for his presidential campaign. Now they would have to call him “sir.”

Those party leaders left to form an opposition group and teamed up with the main opposition party to have Roh impeached on a technicality, a move that was shot down by the constitutional court.

During this roller-coaster start of his five-year term as president, Roh gave the impression of a man out of his depth. His lack of experience in leadership led to some misstatements. His preference for Internet media over mainstream press upset the establishment. He announced he would sue the media for libel and hinted that it might all be too much for him.

But he would go on to make a huge contribution to Korean democracy, most notably by the formal separation of the judiciary from the executive branch. This historic initiative prompted the first ever anti-corruption drive conducted independently from the political power holders.

Roh Moo-hyun was the youngest of five children of a peach farmer. The first leader born after the Japanese occupation, Roh grew up in a village called Bongha, near Gimhae. In elementary school, Roh once refused to accept a second place prize in a calligraphy contest because, he believed, the first prize had been bought. It was a telling incident, foreshadowing a theme that characterized Roh’s public life: he acted on principle rather than on political expediency.

He became head boy of his elementary school. In middle school he was once suspended when he tried to lead a boycott against an essay contest commemorating the birthday of then-president Syngman Rhee. Roh paid his way through Busan Commercial High School, working as a night watchman in a fire extinguisher factory. He graduated in 1966. As he could not afford college, Roh took a job at a firm which made fishing nets and briefly on construction sites. During this time, he studied law by himself and, nine years later, passed the highly competitive national bar exam.

In 1981, he had an experience that changed his life. He met some students who had been tortured for possessing banned literature. “I saw their horrified eyes and missing toenails,” he later wrote. “And my comfortable life as a lawyer came to an end.” Roh became a pro-democracy activist and labor mediator. He was briefly jailed in 1987 during a strike at a shipyard.

In 1988, he joined the then-opposition leader, and future president, Kim Young-sam, and won a seat in the National Assembly elections for a district in Busan.

In the following year, during live televised hearings at the Assembly on the 1980 uprising in Gwangju, when martial law troops had killed over 200 protestors, the wider public got their first real view of Roh Moo-hyun. While other assemblymen rambled, postured, lost their tempers, and shook their fists at witnesses, Roh maintained his composure in front of the once-feared generals and put them through well-articulated and pointed interrogation. He became an instant star.

But in 1990, when Kim Young-sam merged his opposition party with the ruling party, Roh left his mentor in disgust and joined opposition rival Kim Dae-jung. Later, during the Kim Dae-jung presidency, Roh served a short term as minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, his only experience of administration before becoming president himself.

Roh married a girl from his village, Kwon Yang-sook, and they had two children. He published three books: Honey, Please Help Me! (1994), Roh Moo-hyun Meets Lincoln (2001), and Thoughts on Leadership (2002). In the first, he admitted that during a period of stress in his life, he had beaten his wife.

In person, Roh had a friendly disposition. He was unpretentious and, unusually for a Korean politician, enjoyed debate and was comfortable being disagreed with. He articulated the logic behind policy more clearly than any of his predecessors.

When he became president, there was international concern about his victory. The fact that he had been variously branded in the international media as a socialist, a radical, and a labor activist, was a factor prompting ratings agencies to consider a downgrade of Korea’s sovereign rating.

But Roh’s activist background against military dictatorship underscored his sense of justice and decency rather than ideology. As indication, during a prolonged outburst of anti-Americanism leading up to the election in 2002, caused by a traffic accident in which a US military vehicle ran over two girls, his conservative opponent, Lee Hoi-chang, signed a petition calling for a revision of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) under which US troops are stationed in Korea. Roh, whose young supporters tend to be more anti-US, declined, saying it was “not appropriate.”

Even as a democracy, Korean leaders exercise a high level of intervention. Business and general society are subject to interference by government ministries and the presidential Blue House in the form of ad hoc guidelines that do not require legal passage through the National Assembly. Roh minimized this style of rule and instead preferred to allow market forces play. This was a radical departure for presidential politics in Korea, but hardly the approach of a political radical.

On the international front, Roh was less impressive. He pandered to popular nationalism with aggressive statements against Japan over that country’s claims to the Dokdo rocks off Ulleung-do. He disagreed with the Americans’ tough approach to North Korea over its nuclear program, and irritated Washington by dragging his feet sending Korean troops to Iraq. Roh held a summit with Kim Jong-il that achieved nothing, an embarrassing annoyance that contributed to the current Lee administration’s lack of interest in dealing with Pyongyang.

Unlike most predecessors who, shamed by corruption scandals involving their families, shrunk into relative obscurity behind secure walls after their terms were over, Roh was popular in retirement. He settled in tiny Bongha, his home village, and became a local tourist attraction. Sometimes, as many as 20,000 people would turn up over a weekend to catch a glimpse of the former president. Roh would often come out, wearing his straw hat, and chat with them.

In late 2008, his brother was arrested in a corruption investigation that over several weeks and months grew closer to Roh. When his former aide Chung Sang-moon, was arrested, Roh wrote on his website, “The accusation should be directed at our household, not Chung. Our household made the request, received money and used it.”

The money in question was an alleged total of 6 million dollars. Roh claimed that he himself had not known of the money transfer before his retirement. By May 2009, prosecutors had called in the former first lady, their son, and Roh himself for questioning. Roh claimed he knew nothing of the money until after his retirement, but he accepted responsibility.

“I have lost my moral cause just with the facts I have so far admitted,” he wrote. “From now on, the name Roh cannot be a symbol of the values you pursue. I'm no longer qualified to speak about democracy and justice.... You should abandon me.”

In the morning of May 23, Roh walked up the 150-foot cliff called Owl’s Rock behind his house. He sent his bodyguard back for cigarettes, pulled his jacket over his head, presumably to prevent a change of mind, and jumped.

A stunned populace poured into the streets to pay their respects at makeshift altars. In Seoul, the blocking of access to “unofficial” funeral altars and cordoning off of downtown areas with bumper-to-bumper police buses was a serious miscalculation, reminiscent of the kind of authoritarian mistrust of the citizenry that Roh had struggled against.

The investigation was dropped and Roh’s memory was recalled with sober affection. Photographs and replays reminded Koreans of his principled fury against dictatorship, his empathy for its victims, his commitment to fair process, his honesty and self-effacing humor.

Michael Breen is an author, former foreign correspondent and the chairman of Insight Communications, a public relations consulting company. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.