|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| The Legacy of President Roh |
| Promise and disillusionment: Roh Moo-hyun as a reflection of his times and people |
|
Walter Hendler (cicero)  |
 Email Article
 Print Article
|
|
|
|
Published 2007-12-19 06:42 (KST) |
|
|
|
Roh Moo-hyun's presidency promised to be turbulent from the very beginning. A self-educated lawyer with no political connections, Roh gained notoriety in the 1980s as a defender of political dissidents and a champion of organized labor. In the spring of 2002, as Kim Dae-jung's term in office drew to a close, Roh rose through the ranks of the Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) to become the party's nominee in the December 2002 presidential elections. Roh ran on the promise of continuity of Kim's policies, including the Sunshine Policy of engaging North Korea, and pursuing the economic reforms initiated in the wake of the 1997 financial crisis. As an heir apparent to President Kim, Roh Moo-hyun drew its support from two major electoral blocks: the young urban electorate, disillusioned with the old political elites, and a strong regional base of support in the Jolla provinces, which long felt excluded from national politics by the elite hailing from the rival Gyongsan region. On the final leg of the presidential race, Roh Moo-hyun benefited from a wave of anti-American sentiment, which swept the nation in the wake of the acquittal of two US soldiers implicated in the death of two Korean schoolgirls in a traffic accident.
Roh's Domestic Agenda
 |
TODAY'S TOP STORIES |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
FROM THE SECTION |
|
|
|
|
| To a great extent the Roh Moo-hyun of 2002 personified the dreams and aspirations of a nation that had just shaken off the worst effects of the 1997 financial meltdown and successfully hosted the FIFA World Cup. Koreans, especially young ones, wanted their nation to be seen as modern, prosperous and dynamic. They wanted to transcend the constraints and inhibitions imposed by Korean history and geography -- and do it fast. In his 2002 presidential bid, Roh Moo-hyun skillfully exploited those sentiments. He rallied against "regionalism," which had long been an Achilles' heel of Korean politics. Hailing from the southeastern Gyongsan region, Roh ran and got elected on the ticket of the Millennium Democratic Party based in the southwestern Jolla provinces that had a long history of regional rivalry with his own area. He bet that the younger generations of Koreans weren't interested in perpetuating the feuds of their fathers. To that end, Roh encouraged his young supporters to split from the MDP of his predecessor and mentor Kim Dae-jung and establish a new Uri Party that would truly be national, and be able to overcome the drag of region-based politics, which had bedeviled Korea for decades. The gamble exploded in his face less then a year into his presidency when the embittered remnants of the MDP initiated the process that resulted in Roh's impeachment, and a two-month hiatus in his presidency.
Another top domestic priority in the early days of the Roh presidency was bridging the gap between the haves and the have-nots and mitigating the debilitating effects of elitism, so prevalent in Korean society. To that end, successive prime ministers, appointed by Roh, initiated a series of divisive policies, the most controversial of which were the private education system reform and measures aimed at limiting speculation in the real estate market.
The education reform, bitterly opposed by the conservatives, was designed to strip the nation's top private schools of the autonomy in setting their own admission criteria. The policy was aimed at equalizing the chances of applicants from poor families and provinces of entering the nation's top academic institutions. To the progressive advocates of the policy, the change signified an attempt to create greater fairness and equality in Korean society, dominated by self-perpetuating elites, owing their status in no small measure to their access to, and affiliation with, the nation's top universities. To opponents, the new education policy was a sign of a heavy-handed intrusion by a leftist government in a sphere that had for long been the prerogative of the school administrations and their financial backers.
Similarly, Roh administration policies aimed at limiting real estate speculation in the expensive Gangnam area of south Seoul were condemned by the critics as heavy-handed and anti-market. Roh's other domestic priorities have also produced mixed results. While the plan to move the nation's capital from Seoul to a new, yet-to-be-built, city 100 kilometers to the south was rejected by the Supreme Court, Roh did manage to pass through the National Assembly a law authorizing the creation of an "administrative capital" in the central Chungchong region. He also pushed through a controversial law that purported to rectify historical injustices by authorizing the confiscation of properties of descendants of "Japanese collaborators" during the occupation era.
Dealing With North Korea
Roh Moo-hyun ran for president at the time of a growing nuclear crisis, precipitated by the revelation of a clandestine uranium-enrichment program in North Korea, unfolding against a backdrop of an incredible wave of optimism about the future of inter-Korean relations in the aftermath of the groundbreaking June 2000 visit to Pyongyang by President Kim Dae-jung. Roh Moo-hyun being an ideological heir to President Kim, it was his desire and intention to solidify and expand the Sunshine Policy. However, confronted with the realities of the deteriorating relationship between Washington and Pyongyang and intense pressure by the Bush administration and local conservatives to curtail economic assistance to the North, for the first three years in office the Roh administration had to be content with efforts aimed at preventing the Sunshine Policy from collapsing.
This infelicitous confluence of circumstances bedeviled the Roh administration for most of its tenure in office, essentially reducing its North Korea policy to crisis management. There was a palpable fear in Seoul in the aftermath of the 2003 war in Iraq that the Bush administration was contemplating a regime change along the lines of the Iraqi invasion. Faced with a prospect of a catastrophic second Korean war, the policies of the early Roh administration were aimed primarily at stalling and thwarting the efforts by the hawks in Washington to escalate the pressure on Pyongyang, while at the same time trying to preserve and, whenever possible, advance the inter-Korean security and economic cooperation projects at a pace that would be acceptable to Washington.
The muddling through phase ended emphatically on Oct. 9, 2006, with the report of a nuclear test in North Korea. The news immediately created a sense of crisis in Seoul, which feared that the push by Washington and Tokyo for tougher sanctions on North Korea would result in a military confrontation. The subsequent reversal by Kim Jong-il, who, under heavy Chinese pressure, agreed to sign the Feb. 13, 2007, agreement, brought a sense of relief and an almost gleeful vindication to the Roh administration, which advocated engagement with the North all along. And, even though, the jury on the Feb. 13 agreement is still out, as the prospects of its ultimate implementation are uncertain, as Roh Moo-hyun nears the end of his term in office, the immediate sense of crisis in relations with the North has receded. But the question of long-term viability of the Sunshine Policy, pursued by over the last decade by two successive administrations still looms.
With the prospect of the conservative GNP regaining the presidency, the Roh administration spent its last months in office in frantic efforts to make up for the lost time and institutionalize the inter-Korean cooperation projects, which, it hopes, would make them irreversible. The second inter-Korean Summit, hastily convened in October, and the eight-point declaration it adopted were clearly designed to bind any successive administration to the commitments made in Pyongyang. At the end of the day, however, the ability of any South Korean administration to influence the pace of rapprochement with the North is limited. Ultimately, the choice rests with Kim Jong-il.
Uneasy Ties With the Bush Administration
In the waning days of his 2002 presidential campaign, punctuated by the daily candlelight vigils at the US Embassy, Roh Moo-hyun rhetorically asked, "What's wrong with being anti-American?" To him and his supporters of the so-called 386 generation the answer was simple: absolutely nothing.
Unlike the generation of their fathers, who lived through the Korean War and the privations of the post-war reconstruction, the activists of the 386 generation came of age during the turbulent era of the 1980s, with its rapid economic advancement and often-violent struggle for democracy. Unlike their fathers, who saw the US as their protector and benefactor, the "progressives" of the 80s perceived America as a malevolent, manipulating and hegemonic force, which propped up an oppressive regime and exploited Korea to its own ends.
The timing of the Roh presidency, which coincided with the tenure of George W. Bush and his "with us or against us" doctrine didn't help matters either. For Roh, a former left-leaning activist, maintaining good relations with Bush would be a difficult proposition under the best of circumstances. And the circumstances surrounding the ROK-US alliance have been far from ideal in the last five years. Little wonder, then, that the fundamental differences in governing philosophies, priorities and threat assessment have strained the 50-year-old alliance between South Korea and the United States to the breaking point on more than one occasion on the Roh-Bush watch.
To Roh, and many of his closest advisors, the ROK-US alliance was a necessary, if not welcome, burden, imposed by the circumstances of modern Korean history, a necessary evil to be managed as best they could. He made this much clear in the recent interviews with the KTV news channel and Asahi Shimbun of Japan.
"I needed a gesture to show that there was no problem between Seoul and Washington, so I visited the USFK Command … I was not so happy [with the visit]. Was I? Is it a normal state whose president-elect visits the command of foreign troops though South Korea is one of the 13 largest economies in the world … Though it is a sad situation, Korea's commitment to the United States is just a reality Korea should accept. But the bilateral alliance will only be solidified when the US recognizes South Korea as a sovereign state. Otherwise, the alliance could always be troubled by conflicts," Roh said.
Meanwhile, many in the Bush administration perceived Roh Moo-hyun and his foreign policy team as being naive, or worse, North Korea-sympathizers, who don't understand, or refuse to understand, the danger posed by the Kim Jong-il regime. The mutual irritation between the Bush and Roh administrations and the latter's efforts to recalibrate what it saw as a subordinate relationship with the US has been a constant leitmotif of the last five years, poisoning the atmosphere of bilateral relations and complicating efforts to resolve thorny issues, hobbling the alliance.
Here, too, President Roh capitalized on the growing sentiment in Korean society, especially among the youth, seeking to redress what it sees as an unequal partnership with the US. To many Koreans, the situation where their nation is treated merely as a protectorate, forever grateful to its protector, is no longer tenable for the country with the world's 13th largest economy and a growing self-confidence in international affairs. Hence, Roh's foreign policy initiatives from the idea of becoming a "regional balancer" between China and Japan to the plan to reclaim the wartime military command from the US, an issue of enormous emotional as well as operational significance, could be seen as symbolic manifestations of the intent to declare Korea's independence on the world stage.
Naturally, the underlying causes of the strains in ROK-US relations were much deeper and broader than the mutual antipathy between the Roh and Bush administrations; they were rooted in fundamental differences over policies toward North Korea, the perceptions of threat posed by the North Korean nuclear program and the best ways to address that threat.
In Washington, the Bush administration considered the danger posed by North Korean nuclear development to be of paramount importance and saw coordinated international pressure on Pyongyang as the best way to sway Kim Jong-il's calculations away from pursuing the bomb. For Seoul, the nuclear issue wasn't the only one of critical importance. Equally important have been the efforts to preserve and expand inter-Korean cooperation efforts, initiated under Kim Dae-jung's Sunshine Policy. There, the bellicose rhetoric coming from the Bush administration was seen to be as threatening as the North Korean nukes, if not more so. Hence, instead of cooperating with the US policies aimed at pressuring Pyongyang, Seoul did everything in its power to thwart the hard-line policies championed by Washington and Tokyo, fearing they could result in war.
Needless to say, the atmosphere of mutual distrust did little to facilitate the resolution of routine issues and disputes the two governments had to deal with. From the military base relocation and the trade disputes to the reluctant decision to dispatch a contingent of Korean troops to Iraq, in dealing with the US, taking a stand was at least as important for the Roh administration as solving the underlying issue.
Will Roh's Legacy Endure?
President Roh came to office promising internal change, reconciliation with North Korea and respect on the international stage. But while the sincerity of his intentions was never in doubt, Roh Moo-hyun's political skills proved to be no match for the challenges he faced. In the final analysis, the legacies of politicians are determined by the durability of the policies they implemented and by whether the governing philosophy they espoused survived their term in office. But that measure, it's hard to qualify Roh's presidency as a success. He failed to expand his governing coalition and alienated many of his original supporters. Frustrated by the opposition's obstruction of his initiatives, Roh Moo-hyun too often failed to communicate to the public the rationale for his policies, resorting instead to lecturing his opponents. Along the way, he lost credibility and public support, further eroding his ability to govern effectively. The likely result? President Roh's policies, widely perceived to be amateurish and incompetent, have set the progressive cause in the South Korean politics back by many years.
As Roh Moo-hyun nears the end of his term in office, he must be vexed by the realization that the institutional support for the continuation of his policies is very limited and much of his legacy in office is likely to be undone.
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
©2007 OhmyNews
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
How worried are you about the H1N1 influenza virus? |
|
 |
| * Vote to see the result. |
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
RSS
Del.icio.us
Digg 
reddit
Y! MyWeb
Comments Note: Kindly refrain from personal attacks and profanity.
.jpg)
