South Koreans Mourn a Former President and Rebuke the Current One

[김재균]

May 30, 2009

South Koreans Mourn a Former President and Rebuke the Current One

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — Hundreds of thousands of South Koreans turned out Friday to bid a somber farewell to former President Roh Moo-hyun as anger against the current president, Lee Myung-bak, whom many blame for Mr. Roh’s suicide, continued to grow.

“Goodbye, President!” people shouted as Mr. Roh’s hearse moved slowly along the main boulevard in central Seoul. Many of the mourners wore yellow hats or threw yellow paper airplanes — Mr. Roh’s campaign color was yellow — while others followed the hearse, carrying traditional funeral streamers and chanting his name.

Some also yelled slogans against Mr. Lee, and yellow leaflets carried by many mourners read, “Lee Myung-bak, apologize!”

The crowd in Seoul was the largest since huge antigovernment protests that grew out of Mr. Lee’s decision to lift a ban on American beef hobbled his administration last spring.

Despite South Koreans’ mourning, North Korea test-fired a short-range missile on Friday, at least its sixth this week, said an official at the South Korean Defense Ministry who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the delicacy of the issue. The launching followed days of aggressive moves by the North that began with a nuclear test on Monday that has drawn international condemnation.

Mr. Roh, 62, jumped off a cliff last Saturday as prosecutors were aggressively pursuing allegations of corruption against him and his family. His death set off a weeklong period of grief and mourning unrivaled in recent South Korean history.

Emotions continued to run high on Friday. After Mr. Roh’s remains left the city center for cremation south of Seoul, the police urged people to disperse. “Please go back to your ordinary lives,” they said through megaphones, adding that Mr. Roh had asked in his suicide note that people not blame anyone for his death.

But thousands of people tried to march to Mr. Lee’s office behind a mock hearse. When the police built a barricade, the marchers occupied a boulevard in downtown Seoul, chanting, “Apologize for political murder!” and “Down with Lee Myung-bak!”

Over the past year, Mr. Lee, a conservative, has upended many of the policies of Mr. Roh, a liberal who had focused on developing ties with North Korea and sent it significant amounts of aid. Mr. Lee has taken a much tougher stance toward the North, pushing hard for it to give up its nuclear program. Although anger with Mr. Lee has grown this week over Mr. Roh’s suicide, many South Koreans had also expressed frustration with the North even before its recent nuclear test.

Mr. Roh’s troubles started soon after he left office in February 2008, when prosecutors began to raise allegations against him and his family. He had long insisted that his government was different. In a country where all the recent presidents were touched by scandal, he said, his government was clean.

Those proclamations appeared to add to the deep disappointment expressed by many South Koreans when Mr. Roh admitted that his family had taken money from a businessman during his term of office, although he said he did not know about the payments until after his presidency ended.

But when he killed himself, a kind of national forgiveness took hold, a sentiment that has begun to evolve into outrage against the Lee government. It has been accused of hounding Mr. Roh’s family with what critics call a politically motivated corruption investigation.

The government did not publicly respond to the charge and helped organize a large state funeral for Mr. Roh, awarding him posthumously the highest government medal for his service.

But the criticisms of Mr. Lee’s government continued at the funeral on Friday, at an ancient palace in Seoul as some protesters demanded an apology when the president stepped forward to pay his respects. In her eulogy, Han Myung-sook, who served under Mr. Roh as his prime minister, the first woman in South Korea to hold that post, said, “We are sorry we didn’t protect you.”

The reversal of fortunes for Mr. Roh, in death, echoed his ability during his lifetime to overcome great political odds.

He won his 2002 election with a razor-thin margin. He then became the first South Korean president to be impeached after he was charged with a minor violation of election rules, but he survived and finished his term.

In the corruption case, the quick shift of emotions — from disappointment to forgiveness — appears to be rooted, in part, in the notion that Mr. Roh had been treated unfairly, and for some had even become a political martyr.

Many South Koreans now argue that the $6 million taken by Mr. Roh’s family from a little-known businessman and family friend paled in comparison to the payments made in previous corruption scandals that exposed extensive ties between the country’s leaders and the heads of its powerful conglomerates, or chaebol.

Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, the military strongmen who ruled South Korea from 1979 until 1993, were convicted of illegally seizing power by coup and extorting hundreds of millions of dollars from big businesses. They received long sentences but were pardoned after two years in prison.

Roh Moo-hyun’s two immediate predecessors, Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam, also saw their reputations tainted in their last months in office when their sons were convicted of bribery and widely accused of influence peddling. But prosecutors never summoned the two former presidents.

And although numerous tycoons have been convicted of embezzling or squandering tens of millions of dollars of company money on bribes, few have spent much time in jail.

“My thought when I first heard about the scandal was that the amount involved, $6 million, was small for a presidential scandal in our country and did not come from a chaebol,” said Park Su-na, 30, an office worker in Seoul, referring to the conglomerates. “If President Roh got the money from a chaebol, prosecutors would not have harassed him as much as they did, because they always go soft on the chaebol under the pretext that punishing them too harshly would damage the economy.”

[김재균]

Angry crowds day a politically motivated inquiry hounde a man to death

[김민정]

지금 한국은 노무현대통령 서거에 대해서 애도의 물결이 엄청나네요.. 이명박은 민주주의를 무시한채 독재정치로 인해 국민들이 원성을 쌓고있구요 북한문제로도 어지럽구요...