The Nobel committee honored Kim’s extraordinary lifetime achievements. In a statement, they praised the political leader for enduring “repeated threats on his life and long periods in exile” to democratize South Korea. He was also lauded as a “defender of universal human rights against attempts to limit the relevance of those rights in Asia.” The committee made particular mention of Kim’s latest crusade to forge peace with Stalinist Pyongyang. “His visit to North Korea gave impetus to a process which has reduced tension between the two countries,” the committee concluded. “There may now be hope that the cold war will also come to an end in Korea.”
It very well may, but perhaps not while Kim Dae Jung is in office. At age 76, and with barely two years left as president, he doesn’t have much time to coax the communist North to the bargaining table, or to bridge the ideological chasm that still divides his homeland. True, his dream of a united, free and prosperous nation seems less distant today than ever before. But that doesn’t mean that reunification is close at hand–even when promoted by a leader who has been hailed as Asia’s Nelson Mandela. Bringing the North and South together will be enormously complicated and expensive, and require major concessions from North Korean strongman Kim Jong Il, whose country lacks everything but humility. No matter: according to people who know him, Kim Dae Jung has held the same vision of Korean unification for 30 years. Before his election as president in early 1998, he pledged to enact a “sunshine policy” crafted to thaw relations with Seoul’s Northern enemy. Despite a bloody naval clash last year and a financial crisis that has battered South Korea’s economy, he has persevered. “For the last 50 years DJ has never given in or bent his principles,” says his longtime comrade Kim Ok Doo, a ruling New Millennium Democratic Party lawmaker who served jail time with Kim Dae Jung in the 1980s. “He is a man of faith.”
Last June Kim stepped into the international spotlight–not as a politician, but as a statesman. He traveled to Pyongyang for talks with his Northern rival. His historic summit with Kim Jong Il altered a long legacy of hatred and hostility in Korea. The meeting led to family reunions, agreements on new road and rail ties and the first military-to-military talks since the war. “More has happened between the North and South in the last four months than in the previous 30 years,” says Don Oberdorfer, author of the book “The Two Koreas.” “The process has the potential to reshape the Korean Peninsula and reshape East Asia, and Kim Dae Jung deserves a lot of the credit.”
But even as he accepts the peace prize, President Kim is under fire at home for the ardent peace initiatives that won him the award. Most Southerners are thrilled by the idea of a rapprochement with the North. But the jubilation of last summer’s summit has been replaced with anger and frustration. Critics say that Kim is a little too eager to embrace the North, and has become a hostage to his own policy. He has been quick to dole out money and favors to Pyongyang but gotten nothing substantive in return, such as a troop pullback or direct mail links. In one recent survey, nearly two thirds of the South Korean respondents said that engagement with the North had moved ahead too quickly. “Given our huge economic problems, is this the time to buy Chinese corn and Thai rice for North Korea?” asks Yonsei University political scientist Lee Jung Hoon. “People are raising their eyebrows.”
Kim is used to skepticism. He was a dissident and political activist for decades, and paid the price. He entered the opposition when South Korea’s first president, authoritarian Syngman Rhee, hijacked an election in 1952. Eight years later Kim–“DJ” to his supporters–won a seat in Parliament. But after Gen. Park Chung Hee took power in a coup three days later, Kim found himself in jail. Once freed, he railed against Park’s dictatorship and in 1971 challenged him for the presidency. Park, backed by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, or KCIA, stole the election and then hounded Kim into exile. In 1973, KCIA agents nabbed Kim from a Tokyo hotel and hustled him aboard a fishing boat. En route to Korea, they bound him to a burial board, weighed down his body with cement blocks and prepared to dump him alive into the Sea of Japan. Under U.S. pressure, Park ordered the execution halted. Five days later Kim was delivered to Seoul for house arrest.
Park himself was assassinated by his own KCIA chief in 1979. Kim went free, began to rally his supporters and got into trouble again. He was arrested in 1980 after another general, Chun Doo Hwan, seized power. In Kwangju, DJ’s political stronghold, citizens stormed police stations and seized weapons in a rebellion that lasted several weeks. To assert his authority, Chun deployed the Army and put DJ on trial for treason. In 1980, he was sentenced to death. Chun, eager to seal a visit to Washington, later commuted the sentence to life. DJ spent four years in prison before he was exiled, for the second time, to the United States. He returned to mount a failed presidential campaign in 1987, lost narrowly in the 1992 presidential race but won the Blue House on his fourth attempt in 1998. He was 74.
His timing was not grand. South Korea was quickly sucked into the Asian economic crisis. Even as he managed the disaster (by taking an IMF bailout and aggressively restructuring the South Korean economy), his thoughts were on inter-Korean relations. In a 1998 NEWSWEEK interview, he predicted: “I believe I will have a chance to meet Kim Jong Il during my term and we will have very in-depth discussions on matters relating to the North and South. And we will have solutions.” Kim spoke of achieving a “peaceful coexistence” with the North, and declared: “We have no intention of reunifying by absorption.” Last March he went further, offering the North government-to-government assistance to help solve its crippling economic woes. Weeks later, the North’s Kim invited him to Pyongyang for talks.
Their summit was a made-for-television sensation. At the Pyongyang airport, Kim Jong Il, greeted him with a handshake on the tarmac, then joined him for the limo ride into the Northern capital. Over the next three days the two leaders held hours of discussions, shared wine and agreed to “independently resolve the issue of reunification.” “Many South Koreans shed tears of joy at the spectacle of their leadership being feted in Pyongyang,” wrote Peter Hayes, executive director of the Nautilus Institute in Berkeley. “They were also stunned to find that far from being a wild and crazy guy, Kim Jong Il wields power with complete authority and considerable charisma.”
But Kim and his countrymen have since faced emotional issues of reconciliation. In August, as a follow-up to the summit, two hundred families divided by the DMZ were reunited in Pyongyang and Seoul. These reunions unleashed profound grief. Nam Bo Won, a 63-year-old South Korean comedian, journeyed to Pyongyang in August to do a television program on his meeting with his long-lost sister, now 71. The North Korean government approved the program, but nonetheless kept Nam waiting for eight long days, then produced his sister just hours before his scheduled departure. “I was given only half an hour to see my sister,” Nam laments. The meeting was heartbreaking. After a life spent toiling in a state walnut farm, his sister was hunchbacked, nearly toothless and skeletal with malnutrition. She handed her brother a gift valued in North Korea, a bag of rice. He gave her a fur coat, undergarments, socks, chocolate and 40 scarves. “I wish I hadn’t seen her misery,” Nam told NEWSWEEK.
After the brief meetings, the 200 families parted again. With no inter-Korean telephone or postal services, they, and millions of other families like them, still lack the means to keep in touch. Pyongyang says that logistical concerns prevent it from expanding the reunions. The truth, many argue, is that the regime fears giving its people too much exposure to more prosperous Southerners.
One agreement reached at the June summit was that Kim Jong Il would visit South Korea. That trip, tentatively scheduled for early next year, would give him a firsthand glimpse of the South’s economy and political system, essential grounding should he ever get serious about changing policies in the North. Yet DJ’s domestic opponents, including former South Korean President Kim Young Sam, now oppose a Seoul summit. Kim Jong Il “is not a unification partner, but the biggest hurdle to unification,” he said in September, adding that “a dangerous act of fraud is leading South Korea into turmoil.” The former president–who himself was prepared to meet North Korea’s founding leader, Kim Il Sung, before he died suddenly in 1994–says the estimated $500 million Seoul now spends on annual aid to the North goes to the North’s Kim “as if to pay tribute.”
Five hundred million dollars is a tiny sum, but DJ’s opponents are not above exploiting economic frustrations. They’ve accused the government of ignoring a looming economic crisis in the South in his single-minded effort to expand ties with Pyongyang. Seoul’s Kospi stock index is trading near its yearly lows. Meanwhile, Ford’s recent decision to abandon its bid to take over Korea’s No. 2 automaker, Daewoo Motors, has kindled fear of a second IMF crisis. Hyundai, South Korea’s largest chaebol , is in serious financial trouble, warn analysts, yet the company continues to tout losing ventures in North Korea, including a tourism monopoly on Mount Kumgang and a planned industrial park in Kaesung. “The rumblings of an economic downturn could have great repercussions,” says Gordon Flake of the Manfield Center for Pacific Affairs in Washington. “The Sunshine Policy has been a policy of largess for North Korea.”
DJ will surely fight for his peace plan. But he must also start paying closer attention to domestic concerns. He realizes that. As his first official act as a Nobel laureate, he summoned his Health Affairs minister to chat about an ongoing doctor’s strike that has halted service at hundreds of hospitals across South Korea. Just last week President Kim reminded his countrymen that unification could take “20 or 30 years to achieve.” Even if it does, he will get the credit. He’s always been a stubborn optimist.
