Korea's Mid-Crisis Election

...Kim Young Sam lacked sufficient economic sophistication to understand what was going on, and to undertake the necessary reforms...

...The worst-case scenario would be for the North to negotiate American troops out of South Korea, then see the unrest in the South as providing an opportune moment to strike...

...Nor was he helped by the decision of Rhee In Je, the Governor of a province near Seoul, to enter the fray as an independent after failing to receive the NKP's nomination...

...A somewhat shuffling gait and impaired arm are the result of an "accident" during the one and only presidential election held under dictator Park Chung Hee, in 1971...

...There is no point in losing popularity and votes for nothing...

...Kim Dae Jung's position is that the law is not necessary...

...The country that 19th-century missionaries dubbed the "hermit kingdom" has accepted the prospect only as a matter of expediency...

...Kim Young Sam "should be impeached," he told Korean reporters, unless the Blue House issues an "emergency decree" forcing economic reforms...

...At 73, he claims to be in perfect health...

...When I asked Kim Dae Jung what he thought of the IMF talks in progress, he said simply, "We will have to wait and see...

...Donald Kirk is a longtime contributor to The New Leader whose books include Looted: The Philippines after the Bases, to be published next March, and Korean Dynasty: Hyundai and Chung Ju Yung...

...Unemployment, normally below 3 per cent here, could easily jump to 10 per cent or more if the Congress finally passes a labor law permitting companies to lay off workers—something they cannot do at the moment unless they simply go out of business...

...Lee's prospects suddenly improved when he received the support of the former Mayor of Seoul, Cho Soon, who dropped his own bid for the presidency...

...The reality is that the candidates may attack one another for corruption, incompetence, inexperience or, in the case of Kim Dae Jung, old age, but they are reluctant to question what the IMF is doing here...

...Ultimately, he alone among the presidential contenders criticized the $57 billion bailout that was agreed to, but he soon claimed to have been misunderstood...

...The talking could stop, though, if a victorious Kim Dae Jung balks at asking American troops to leave and demands that the North "recognize" the South...

...They hoped the IMF would relent on its view that the Gross National Product should go up by a maximum 2.5 per cent next year, rather than the customary 6 per cent on the strength of exports fueled by ever more loans...

...They owe about $ 120 billion all told to foreign banks, and perhaps $200 million to local lenders...

...In fact, the IMF's presence here altogether is viewed as a humiliating infringement on national sovereignty...

...The crisis has yet another element that the candidates have largely danced around without taking a stand: the "four-party talks" intended to bring together negotiators from the two Koreas, China and the United States—the principal participants in the Korean War...

...Kim Dae Jung, to be sure, has criticized some of the government's utterances vis-à-vis the North...

...Following a long stretch of desultory maneuvering, the North finally agreed to come aboard when Washington said the agenda could even include withdrawal of the 37,000 United States troops stationed in South Korea...

...Subsequently, he spent six years in prison and roughly a dozen more in prison hospitals or under house arrest in his comfortable Seoul residential compound near the Han River...

...Indeed, antipathy toward Cholla is such that voters in other regions have been moving toward Lee Hoi Chang just to deny Kim Dae Jung the top office...

...The several billion dollars South Korea is supposed to contribute to the reactors are a kind of buy-off against the possibility of invasion by the North, desperate over its inability to feed its own people...

...In their campaigns, the candidates did not advance the kind of imaginative ideas that might achieve peace, or the sweeping criticisms that are vital to dealing with the economy...

...Their nationalist sensitivities notwithstanding, they look upon any serious consideration of a reduction in American military force as part of a greater plot to expose the South to invasion by the North...

...So the Korean question—shifting, tumultuous, often dangerous—careens on into a new presidency and a new era of IMF "supervision...

...These are the questions Koreans were asking as they prepared to go to the polls...

...Complicating the situation is the fact that South Korea, in the midst of economic duress, may not have the funds it has promised to give the North to help build two light-water nuclear energy reactors under terms of an agreement hammered out in Geneva in 1994...

...Cutting back on overtime, he believes, should suffice...

...Seoul's negotiators were extremely reluctant to go to the table...

...Five years later, with Roh barred by the new Constitution from succeeding himself, Kim Young Sam conveniently embracedRoh's party and again defeated Kim Dae Jung as well as billionaire Hyundai founder Chung Ju Young...

...He therefore started out with one third of the votes needed to capture the presidency virtually guaranteed...

...In addition, Lee professed to reject the backing of economically plagued Kim Young Sam, and the President made a show of quitting the NKP— for good measure renamed the Grand National Party...

...The specter of a "second Korean war" seems increasingly remote after more than 44 years of false alarms, "incidents," random killings along the demilitarized zone, spy scares, and the like...

...Blaming Kim Young Sam for not having moved fast and hard enough to block all that easy credit is less risky than deprecating the IMF...

...Historically poorer than the rest of the country, Cholla nonetheless receives fewer government subsidies than other areas and is a frequent target of social prejudice...

...At this stage only one thing is clear: Korea at present faces a prolonged crisis that will not get better before it has gotten worse—and the next President manages to come up with solutions that completely evaded his predecessor...

...This time around Kim Dae Jung, initially seen as having a definite edge, shortly found himself in a tight three-man contest...

...These issues touch deep sensitivities...

...Nevertheless, the next President will have to decide how to come to terms with the North while dealing with economic problems in the South...

...Rhee threatened to pull enough votes away from Lee to fulfill Kim Dae Jung's ambition...

...Significantly, while Chun and Roh were given stiff prison terms (Chun got life, but will probably be released long before his demise) and assorted other ex-generals and bureaucrats went to jail, all the indicted chaebol leaders were let off with suspended sentences...

...But Lee is no politician and lacks a mass following...

...Nor is any other candidate about to dispute it...

...Those words sound cordial, but they do not advance the South's position much from where it has been for years...

...Kim has always won 95 per cent of the votes cast in Cholla...

...Their making the Korean miracle happen was so awe-inspiring that they were forgiven their sins...

...Actually, the motivation for the seeming game of musical chairs was the regionalism that has traditionally divided South Korea—even as it has faced North Korea across the demilitarized zone established under the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953...

...The result has been that the chaebols have borrowed madly on the assumption that they could sell enough of their products, both overseas and domestically, to pay back their loans...

...The difference is that the North under General Secretary Kim Jong II, the son and heir to Kim II Sung, may be more willing to negotiate with Kim Dae Jung than it was with Kim Young Sam...

...Thus on December 10, at a two-day session in Geneva, the two sides met to discuss peace for the first time and decided to put off a second round until March...

...The labor unions—notably the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, which represents about 600,000 workers in heavy industries even though it is still not officially sanctioned by the government—promises strikes and demonstrations if members lose their jobs...

...One might expect the candidates, in the midst of a tight campaign, to raise the subject of the peace talks...

...The real test of the next President will be the extent to which he accepts and can implement the IMF bailout agreement...

...The chaebol chieftains were as guilty as anyone...

...They countered with a proposal to have the Congress pass a banking reform law that would make it possible to absorb the losers through mergers or acquisitions...

...Moreover, his own presidency was severely compromised when one of his sons was jailed for accepting payoffs during the 1992 campaign...

...Kim, who struck a responsive chord in the electorate, was mowed down by a motor vehicle on the campaign trail...

...Ever since the era of Park Chung Hee, who seized power in 1961 and was gunned down by his intelligence chief 18 years later, the government has fostered the growth of chaebols, the gigantic family-owned conglomerates that wage a kind of Koreaagainst-the-world export race...

...The threat of losing markets has compelled Korea to recognize the need to accommodate the rest of the world...

...The sense of an American "sellout" or "betrayal" is never far beneath the surface...

...With the vote split between two legendary opposition figures, Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung, the first one was easily won by Roh Tae Woo, a general and Korea Military Academy classmate of the departing Chun Doo Hwan...

...A SEESAW CONTEST Korea's Mid-Crisis Election By Donald Kirk As I write, embattled South Korea is coming to the climax of its most divisive presidential campaign since mass demonstrations ushered in an era of constitutional quasidemocracy 10 years ago...

...Besides, it is true that during first two or three years as President he focused mainly on pursuing his predecessors, Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, whose regimes were marked by rampant corruption...

...There is no doubt they each took hundreds of millions—if not billions—of dollars in bribes and donations from chaebol leaders and others seeking their aid to secure loans and contracts...

...The outcome of the elections in 1987 and 1992 was never really in doubt...

...Shifting alliances then had something of a seesaw effect...

...He has said he would be glad to negotiate with North Korea on equal terms, respecting its right to exist as a separate country as long as it recognized South Korea's sovereignty...

...The mixture of a sagging stock market, a nosediving currency and mass dismissals could produce an explosion that makes the annual ritual of student protests Koreans are accustomed to seem like a decorous tea party...

...Would Kim Dae Jung, the champion of the underdog, be ready to call out the police and the troops and order the volleys of tear gas required to quell the demonstrations...

...The Koreans further objected to the IMF's insistence on permitting foreign interests to buy their banks and securities firms, and on generally opening up their financial market...

...But the remaining two thirds has been difficult to rally...

...But the Korean Peninsula is not necessarily a "powder keg" waiting to explode...

...The outsiders'sermon of "liberalization" runs directly against their brand of conservative nationalism...

...In the cold days of January and February, however, there may not be much choice...

...Whoever wins the December 18 election (and you may already know that when you read this), the race itself bears close dissection: It has been run against a backdrop of all the economic, political, social, and strategic conflicts the victor will confront when he takes office next February—but none of the candidates would tackle head-on...

...He argues that the chaebols are not in such perilous shape as to have to fire anyone...

...Next, Kim Dae Jung picked up the support of political veteran Kim Jon Pil, a Prime Minister under Park and at one time director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency—the octopuslike organization that had once caught Kim Dae Jung in its grasp...

...even so, he embarrassed Park by taking 45 per cent of the vote...

...They typically have debt/equity ratios of four to one, and often much higher...

...Kim Dae Jung represents the Cholla region in the southwest...

...They did not even want to accept the IMF demand that they raise interest rates to between 18 and 20 per cent in an effort to cut down borrowing to turn out products for export...

...President Kim Young Sam picked as his successor former Prime Minister and Supreme Court Justice Lee Hoi Chang...

...Would Lee Hoi Chang, with no real governing experience, have any idea how to respond—other than to relinquish authority to the generals...

...One of the remarkable aspects of the election rhetoric was that none of the candidates criticized the government's handling of the negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for S55 billion to $60 billion in loans to enable Korean companies to pay off their short-term debts...

...Koreans have never wanted to "open up," to have foreigners owning their institutions...

...Korean negotiators initially balked at shutting down the dozen merchant banks and several commercial ones most deeply in debt...

...The toughest issue is likely to be the mass dismissals that will almost definitely become necessary as the big companies lose contracts and cut back on production...

...None of the candidates gave them definitive answers...

...A couple of hours later, after touring Seoul's famed Namdaemun marketplace around the city's South Gate, he took aim at the President...

...That's an easy line to adopt in a presidential campaign...

...All this might have made it appear to foreign observers that the election was merely an exercise in reshuffling names, with one member of the elite supplanting another...

...Why not let it go to 3 or 4 per cent, they asked, before compromising on a figure of 3 per cent...

...Korea needs the money...

...Consequently Lee, despite his being scarred at the outset of the campaign when it was revealed that his two sons had avoided military service by saying they were "underweight," could gain occupancy of South Korea's Blue House in a come-from-behind photo finish...

...South Koreans, after all, view them with the deepest suspicion...

...Yet as far as could be learned from the candidates' statements, or lack of them, the talks are a nonissue...

...The jockeying for position has of course been played out amid another drama that has stolen the headlines of late: Korea's economic crisis...

...Such compassion may have been a mistake...

...What contributed to the early impression that Kim Dae Jung would get the brass ring on his fourth try was the split among the powers that be, particularly the ruling New Korea Party (NKP...

...To Koreans, the organization represents quintessential economic imperialism—a group of economists sent out from Washington to tell them how to run their country...

...The economic turmoil is paramount but complex...