In the first few months of his presidency, he won huge popularity with a series of long overdue but personally risky reforms.These were recited in detail in this month’s New Year address. President Kim purged the military and the bureaucracy of many of the stalwarts of the old regime – more than 3,000 officials were forced out of their jobs, including ministers and members of the President’s own family. He passed a law banning bank accounts under false names, which had for decades underpinned Korea’s culture of corruption. He instituted the first ever local elections (in which his own party performed badly), and limited the powers of the National Security Planning Agency, the successor to the notorious Korean CIA.The boldness of these reforms, and the power of the vested interests that stood in their way, are not to be underestimated, but in 1995 Mr Kim eclipsed himself. Mounting evidence, ferreted out by determined opposition MPs, suggested that his predecessors as president, the former generals Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, had accumulated massive slush funds of bribes during their period in office.Mr Kim initiated an investigation, first into the bribery allegations, and then into the long standing charges that Mr Chun and Mr Roh had personally ordered a massacre of students in the city of Kwangju in 1980. Along with the heads of several of Korea’s biggest companies, implicated in the corruption scandal, they were convicted last year and are serving long jail sentences.If this were the extent of his achievements, he would be approaching the end of his presidency as a hero.
But the reforms and advances of the last four years are offset and, in the minds of many people, neutralised by inconsistency, touchiness and a confusing autocratic arrogance.Even in his pursuit of the two former presidents, it was hard to escape a sense of personal vendetta in which the law became the instrument of a private agenda. The prosecution, theoretically independent, was transparently executing the will of the President; the law on the statute of limitations was amended in mid-investigation to allow the killings in Kwangju to be prosecuted.Even Mr Kim’s bitterest opponents could not bring themselves to complain about this, but other acts of legislative tinkering have provoked more unease. The fuss about the new labour law, which delays the promised legalisation of free trade unions for three years, has overshadowed another more sinister change, granting extended powers to the security agency. For all the constitutional guarantees about the freedom and independence of the press, many of Korea’s media pursue a suspiciously compliant, pro-government line, and reporters complain of contentious stories, especially those about the President himself, being spiked or ignored.The objections against the President crystallised in the recent legislation.
After months of stonewalling by the opposition, who at one point physically blocked the parliamentary speaker in his office, it was finally passed on Boxing Day. Members of Mr Kim’s ruling party were secretly bussed into the National Assembly before dawn. The entire procedure took seven minutes, and no members of the opposition were present.The President appears to have won the latest battle: yesterday, the union leaders announced that the strikes were being wound down. But the political implications of Mr Kim’s victory will last much longer, and the 10th anniversary of Korean democracy will be a moment of rather muted celebration. “We knew Kim Young Sam had a proud record fighting against dictatorship,” says the opposition politician Yang Sung Chul “But we made a mistake.
We thought that because he was a fighter against dictatorship, he would also be a fighter for democracy Unfortunately that is not the case.”. We Used to be able to rely on children to ask those really awkward questions that got to the heart of some adult pretence or hypocrisy in a way that grown ups would never do. But as our culture has relentlessly hacked away at the years of childhood innocence, those sorts of questions are more and more rarely asked. The kids know the answers more or less as soon as they learn to speak. Fortunately, we can occasionally rely on adults who still have the childish gift, and Princess Diana, frequently suspected of being cunning and manipulative, employed the childish virtues of innocence and plain-speaking to powerful effect in Angola last week.
As “expert” ministers muttered anonymously from behind their malt whiskies about a loose cannon, she planted the thought firmly in the minds of millions of people around the world that there may be no justification whatsoever for the manufacture and use of anti-personnel landmines, and that any government that defends their manufacture and use is a disgrace. After all, who is the greater expert on the effects of landmines, the politician imbibing in his club, or the 13-year-old girl who had her leg blown off on the way to the well?Bull shinesWhere children and princesses cannot ask awkward questions, dumb animals sometimes manage it.
