Testing Time
When Roh Moo Hyun takes office on Feb. 25, he faces a slew of pressing policy issues and headaches at home and abroad
Kim Is Going Nuclear
What does North Korea's Dear Leader want? And can he be stopped? (Feb. 24, 2002)
How Dangerous is North Korea?
Dictator Kim Jong II is pushing the world toward a showdown over his nuclear-weapons program (Jan. 13, 2002)
The Dying State
TIME looks inside North Korea, the starving nuclear nation (Nov. 4, 2002)
Peace and War — page 3
Roh says he's not about to abandon engagement. If the South hadn't reached out to its neighbors, "North Korea would already have some nuclear weapons," he says. But he is making adjustments. He says he is changing the name of the "Sunshine Policy" to the "Peace and Prosperity Policy," and he promises that future aid payments will be made in the open instead of furtively. To Roh, there is no alternative to such engagement. There are fears in South Korea that a return to cold war-era diplomacy could lead to a sudden destabilization of the impoverished North. At best, that could mean refugees streaming across the Demilitarized Zone by the hundreds of thousands, throwing a wrench into South Korea's steadily advancing economy. At worst, some fear, it could mean the dying regime of a desperate Kim Jong Il lashes out militarily.
Roh's central role in this geopolitical tangle seems almost unimaginable, given his humble and decidedly parochial origins. After all, this is a man who married a childhood friend from his native village of Bonsan. But Roh shouldn't be underestimated because of his small-town background. Even as a young boy he had a formidable willingness to fight treacherous battles. As a seventh-grader, Roh persuaded his entire class to hand in blank sheets of paper in lieu of an assignment to write an essay on all the good that South Korean strongman Syngman Rhee had done for the country. Confronted by a furious teacher, Roh retorted that students shouldn't be forced to support a "corrupted election"—an answer that earned him a suspension from school.
After graduating from high school, Roh drifted between odd jobs, including work making fishing nets, before deciding to give law a try. He studied on his own for four years, spending part of the time in isolation in a mud hut he built on a hill overlooking Bonsan. In 1976, on his third try, he passed the notoriously difficult bar exam, then started a tax law practice. He was soon making real money, but he blew much of it on alcohol and yachting. When his wife would complain, he hit her. "A man needs three to four women. One for home, one for dancing, and one for discussing life and art," he joked in 1983.
In the early 1980s, Roh became increasingly involved in South Korea's pro-democracy movement, and his transformation into a human-rights hero began. The country's then dictator, Chun Doo Hwan, launched a ruthless crackdown on dissent when he seized power in 1980. The next year, another lawyer asked Roh if he would help defend some students who had been arrested without warrants in the southern port city of Pusan for reading banned books. Before the hearing, one of these young defendants showed Roh his toes, which had been bloodied during a police torture session. The sight changed his life, Roh says. He began fighting against the oppressive regime by defending student activists and union leaders. He also learned to treat his wife with greater respect. He recalls, "I realized that I was an oppressor—of my wife."
Roh first came to the country's attention when a newly elected President, Roh Tae Woo, had organized televised hearings into corruption and human-rights abuses by the Chun government. Roh, elected to parliament from Pusan in 1988, grilled the leaders of the former regime as millions of Koreans watched on television, dumbfounded and delighted by his no-holds-barred interrogation. In the 1990s he joined the inner circle of Kim Dae Jung's party, unofficially emerging as the President's successor.
Roh's brand of straight-talking, fearless independence seems to fit the national mood perfectly as South Korea strives to assert itself more confidently on the global stage. But he will inevitably rankle the U.S., which is keen to define a united strategy on North Korea. Under Roh, it seems, South Korea is unlikely to play the part of America's docile junior partner. Back in Bonsan, those who know him best are sure of Roh's ability to steer his country through these perilous waters. One day last year, confides his older brother, rice farmer Gun Pyung, a rare, golden pheasant fluttered into the courtyard of the family farm. It now lives in a pen there, on display for curious visitors from around the country. Gun Pyung is convinced that the pheasant—a symbol of power and wealth in South Korea—is a good omen for the Rohs. The bird's arrival "can't be pure coincidence," he says. "It must have been sent from heaven." It may be just the kind of luck Roh Moo Hyun needs.
—With reporting by Donald Macintyre, Kim Yooseung and Hyebin Park/Seoul
