SOUTH KOREA was yesterday mourning one of the giants of the country’s path to democracy, when former president Kim Dae-jung, who pioneered his country’s “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with North Korea, died aged 85.
Branded a “dangerous radical” during the years of military rule, Mr Kim was jailed and tortured but later oversaw South Korea’s metamorphosis from one of the poorest countries in the world, run by a succession of autocratic leaders, into one of the globe’s most successful economies.
Mr Kim was a devout Catholic and was famous for his oratorical skills. He limped after an assassination attempt in the 1970s when a truck rammed his car off a road.
He put democracy in South Korea on a firm footing, a legacy that has made the country one of Asia’s democratic models.
His work as a pro-democracy opposition deputy and champion of human rights won him the Nobel Prize in 2000, and he survived several attempts on his life during an astonishing career.
The liberal champion also spent much of his political life trying to forge closer ties with the Stalinist government in North Korea, and he never gave up hope that one day the Korean peninsula would be united. As president from 1998-2003, he was architect of the “Sunshine Policy” of reaching out to wartime rival North Korea as a way to encourage reconciliation.
Mr Kim was taken into hospital suffering from pneumonia, and then subsequently died from heart failure.
In 1997, the then-opposition leader was elected president, after three unsuccessful attempts, marking South Korea’s first peaceful transfer of power since the country was founded in 1948.
In 1973 he was kidnapped from a Tokyo hotel by South Korea’s intelligence services, the National Intelligence Service, with the approval of then leader Park Chung-hee. It later emerged that the plan had been to assassinate him. One of the highlights of his career was an historic flight to Pyongyang in June 2000 to meet North Korea’s reclusive leader, Kim Jong-il.
South Korea’s famously fractious political parties were united in mourning Mr Kim’s passing.
“We lost a great political leader today. His accomplishments and aspirations to achieve democratisation and inter-Korean reconciliation will long be remembered by the people,” current president, the conservative Lee Myung-bak, said.
Mr Kim’s last year was marked by what must have been disappointments, as voters voted in Mr Lee, a former student radical turned conservative, whose election caused increased tensions with North Korea.
However, there were signs yesterday that Mr Kim’s death might prove a catalyst in easing tensions between the two Koreas.
Earlier this week, a senior executive from the Hyundai group visited Pyongyang and secured an easing of cross-border restrictions.
“The south and north have never been free from mutual fear and animosity over the past half-century – not even for a single day. When we co-operate, both Koreas will enjoy peace and economic prosperity,” he once said.
Mr Kim left office in 2003, to be replaced by Roh Moo-hyun, who was to commit suicide after the end of his own five-year term, in May 2009, when he appears to have jumped into a ravine while mountain climbing after having been accused of corruption.
