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SOUTH KOREA | MARCH 2, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 8 |
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Kim was returned bruised and exhausted to his Seoul home, where he was confined for much of the next nine years--when not in jail or exile. President Park was assassinated in late 1979. As General Chun Doo Hwan moved to consolidate his control over the country, anti-government protests spread through the city of Kwangju in the south, the heart of Kim's support. He was jailed again, and Chun ordered troops into the city, where by some estimates they killed at least 200 people. In June, Chun gave Kim an ultimatum: cooperate with us or face death. Kim refused. In September, after a trial that lasted a mere six minutes, he was sentenced to death for treason. Once again, the U.S. came to the rescue. Ronald Reagan had just won the presidency, and members of his transition team joined with officials from the outgoing Jimmy Carter Administration in putting pressure on Chun to spare Kim. His sentence was commuted to life in prison and, two days before Christmas 1982, he was put on a plane for the U.S. As difficult as it was, life in exile transformed Kim from a provincial dissident to a worldly political leader. During his years in jail, Kim had become an avid botanist and reader--devouring the works of Mencius and Plato, Bertrand Russell and Abraham Lincoln--and taught himself English. (Kim still carries a pocket dictionary, say aides, and constantly looks up new words.) As a visiting fellow at Harvard University, he attracted a coterie of influential friends: the late scholar and ambassador Edwin Reischauer, Senator Edward Kennedy, Congressman Stephen Solarz, Philippine dissident Benigno Aquino. But the pull of his homeland remained strong. In 1983, fellow dissident Kim Young Sam staged a month-long hunger strike to protest Chun's heavy-handed rule. Then Aquino was murdered stepping off a plane in Manila. (Kim still has Aquino's manual typewriter, a gift from the Filipino just before his ill-fated departure.) Although U.S. officials accompanied Kim on his own return to Seoul in 1985, Korean security officers brutally dragged him out of Kimpo airport--and back to house arrest. Nonetheless, Kim resumed his quest for the presidency. When Chun stepped down in 1987, Kim contested and lost what analysts widely agree was a rigged presidential election. Five years later, after his old colleague Kim Young Sam broke with him to join President Roh Tae Woo's ruling Democratic Liberal Party, Kim lost again--and vowed finally to quit politics. As he confided to his wife: "Maybe my role was meant to end here." Yet by 1994, Kim was back. North Korea was threatening nuclear war--a crisis he helped defuse by suggesting that former President Carter travel to Pyongyang for a talk with the North's "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung. At home in Seoul, the opposition had fallen into disarray, and President Kim Young Sam's bumbling had begun to lead South Korea downhill, damaging relations with the U.S. and pitching the country into a frantic bid to expand its economic reach beyond its means. Kim Young Sam's last year was blighted by allegations of mismanagement and the conviction of his son Kim Hyun Chul for bribery. Today "Y.S.," as the outgoing President is known to distinguish him from the incoming "D.J.," is so unpopular that bypassers tell of a sign hung in his old Seoul neighborhood: "Don't come home." Says Kim Yoon Hwan, majority leader of the opposition Grand National Party: "It is fair to say that Kim Young Sam's reform completely failed."
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