SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Dae-jung, a dissident who survived a death sentence and an assassination attempt by past military dictators before winning the South Korean presidency and receiving a Nobel Peace Prize, died on Tuesday, according to Yonhap news agency. He was 83.
Mr. Kim, once vilified by his rivals as a Communist, flew to Pyongyang in 2000 to meet the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in the first summit between the two Koreas. That meeting led to an unprecedented détente on the divided Korean Peninsula, which remains technically at war because no peace treaty was signed at the end of the Korean War in 1953.
Under his “Sunshine Policy,” the two Koreas breached their border to connect roads and railways. They built a joint industrial park. Two million South Koreans visited a North Korean mountain resort. In a scene televised worldwide, aging Koreans separated by the war a half century ago hugged each other in tears in temporary family reunions.
Mr. Kim, president from 1998 till 2003, was the first opposition leader to take power in South Korea.
Wheelchair-bound and in and out of hospitals for treatment of pneumonia, Mr. Kim spent his last years lamenting his legacy crumbling. Tired of giving billions of dollars of aid and trade to the Communist North but getting little in return, South Koreans in 2007 abandoned Mr. Kim’s Sunshine Policy by electing Lee Myung-bak, a conservative leader who promised a tougher stance on Pyongyang.
Inter-Korean relations chilled to their lowest as North Korea tested a nuclear weapon, first in 2006 and again in May, and as the United States, South Korea and Japan rallied international sanctions. Pyongyang retreated into its xenophobic and belligerent isolation after years of hesitant steps toward openness, though Mr. Kim’s critics have dismissed those earlier gestures as a mere ploy by the North to cheat its Southern neighbors out of more aid.
Mr. Kim epitomized South Koreans’ struggle for democracy and their dream of reconciliation, and eventual reunification, with North Korea. When the Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize in 2000, it was in recognition of his trials and tribulations as a pro-democracy campaigner as well as his vision for overcoming five decades of mistrust and hostilities in the divided peninsula to engineer an inter-Korean summit.
Mr. Kim was born on Dec. 3, 1925 to a farming family at Haeuido, a small island that was part of Cholla Province in the southwest, a region discriminated against under successive presidents who hailed from the rival Kyongsang Province in the southeast.
After attending a vocational high school, Mr. Kim dabbled in running a shipping company and a newspaper. In 1961, on his fifth try, he was elected to the national legislature. A week later, Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee staged a coup, the beginning of his 18-year iron-fisted rule.
A skilled rabble-rouser who spoke for political freedom and for the downtrodden, Mr. Kim quickly emerged as an opposition boss and Mr. Park’s nemesis, especially after he won 45 percent of the vote running against the incumbent dictator in his first presidential race in 1971.
His image as a persecuted dissident expanded abroad in 1973, when agents from KCIA, Mr. Park’s notorious spy agency, kidnapped him from a Tokyo hotel room from which Mr. Kim was leading an exile movement for democracy in South Korea.
He later said his kidnappers had attached a weight to him aboard a boat and were about to throw him into the sea when the U.S. government intervened. Five days later, he was dumped, shaken and bruised, at the gate of his Seoul home and was placed under house arrest.
The harsher Mr. Park’s rule became, the more Mr. Kim’s popularity grew — especially in Cholla, where he swept upward of 95 percent of the votes in elections. It was this regional loyalty that allowed him to make a comeback after each of his three failed attempts for the presidency.
Mr. Kim’s chance appeared to have come when Mr. Park’s disgruntled spy chief assassinated the dictator in 1979. But another general, Chun Doo-hwan, seized power in a coup and arrested Mr. Kim and other leading dissidents. When people in Kwangju, the central city of Cholla, rose up, the junta sent tanks and paratroopers to kill more than 200 protesters and sentenced Mr. Kim to death on sedition charges.
Again the United States intervened. Under a deal with the Reagan administration, Mr. Chun let Mr. Kim board a plane to the United States in 1982. Three years later, he returned home, escorted by American politicians, but was dragged back into house arrest.
Eventually, it was not the powerful friends he made in Washington, and not even the unconditional support he commanded in Cholla, that helped him attain the presidential Blue House in 1998 in his fourth try. It was the Asian financial crisis, which had prompted South Koreans to veto the often corrupt conservative establishment that had ruled South Korea almost uninterruptedly since the Korean War.
Mr. Kim reshaped the economy by clearing up debt-ridden banks and conglomerates. But he spent most of his energy on building reconciliation with North Korea, carrying out his life-long belief that South Korea could prod the North toward openness and reduce the strain of eventual unification by first promoting gradual economic integration with injections of aid and investment.
His best moments came in June 2000, when Kim Jong-il hugged him at the Pyongyang airport and escorted him through the Communist capital, where hundreds of thousands were mobilized in their holiday best waving flowers at the visitor from the South.
Mr. Kim spent his last months in office in a grim mood, however. Kim Jong-il never kept his promise to make a return visit to Seoul. Nor did he give up his nuclear program despite South Korean aid. Two sons were in prison for corruption. A special investigator with a parliamentary mandate found that Mr. Kim’s government had helped funnel $500 million to North Korea in dubious business deals shortly before the 2000 summit, fueling opposition charges that he had “bribed” the Communist leader to win a Nobel.
Often sanctified among his Western supporters as the “Nelson Mandela of Asia,” Mr. Kim had a more checkered reputation among his own people. He was accused of coddling the North Korean regime. Officials from Cholla were over-represented in his administration, leading to charges of reverse discrimination.
출저 : CNN