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김대중 전 대통령 타계와 관련 국내 언론이 그의 공(功)만을 부각시키고 있는 반면 18일 LA타임즈는 그의 과(過)도 함께 지적함으로 눈길을 끌었다.
LA타임즈의 바바라 데믹(Barbara Demick)은 ‘전(前) 한국 대통령 김대중 타계' (Former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung dies)라는 제목의 기사에서 "김대중은 그의 말년에 정치적 스캔들 속에 있어야 했다"며 "그의 막내 아들은 로비스트로부터 뇌물을 받은 혐의로 체포됐었다. 김정일과의 회담 직전 북한에 그의 측근을 시켜 500만 달러를 제공한 것이 폭로됨으로써 노벨평화상을 돈으로 샀다고 여겨지게 됐다"고 했다.
바바라 데믹은 "2005년에는 당시 수사관들이 민주주의와 인권의 대명사로 알려진 김대중이 그의 재임중 불법도청을 허용했다는 것을 밝혀냈다"며 김대중의 이중적 태도를 지적하기도 했다.
그는 이어 "김대중은 북한에 비판을 너무 느슨하게 한 나머지 북한인권문제에 눈을 감고, 오히려 북한에 인도적 물자와 현물을 지원했다는 비판을 받았다"며 "퇴임 후 그는 정상회담에 지불한 돈에 대해 뉘우침이 없었다. 그는 2004년 파이낸셜 타임즈에서 "부자 형이 가난한 동생을 찾아갈 때, 부자 형이 빈 손으로 갈 수는 없지 않느냐"고 말했다고 했다.
그는 "결과적으로 김정일과 거래해서 받은 노벨평화상은 그 빛을 잃었다"며 "김대중은 자신의 정치 초기 한국의 현대 민주화를 위한 공로로 더 나은 평가를 받게 될 것"이라고 평했다.
[다음은 기자 全文]
The longtime dissident, who survived three assassination attempts and spent years in prison, was 85. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for engaging North Korea.
By Barbara Demick
August 18, 2009
Kim Dae-jung, a former dissident who survived three assassination attempts, one death sentence and six years in prison to become South Korea's president and its first Nobel laureate, died today in Seoul after a long bout of pneumonia.
He was 85.
South Korea's president from 1998 to 2003, Kim is best known for the moment on June 13, 2000, when he stepped onto the tarmac at Pyongyang's airport with arms outstretched to embrace North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.
That landmark meeting, which was supposed to end 50 years of enmity between the Koreas, won Kim the Nobel Peace Prize. But Kim lived just long enough to see his "sunshine policy" unraveling as a result of North Korea's continued nuclear ambitions and the installation last year of a conservative president in South Korea.
The meeting in Pyongyang was only one of many dramatic moments in a most eventful life.
There was the time in 1973 that Kim found himself on a boat -- blindfolded and manacled, his limbs encased in concrete -- about to be tossed overboard by assassins presumably working for South Korea's military dictatorship. And then there was his return from exile in the United States in 1985, when he arrived at Seoul's airport flanked by U.S. congressmen, only to be immediately seized and placed under house arrest.
After four decades as the country's most famous dissident, Kim (often known by his nickname D.J. to distinguish him from other Kims in public life) became its president in 1998. By daring to meet with Kim Jong Il, he established what many think is an irreversible course of rapprochement between the estranged Koreas. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for his "sunshine policy" of engaging North Korea and his lifelong struggle for democratization.
But his final years were spent in frustration. He was disappointed by Kim Jong Il's failure to reciprocate for the Pyongyang summit with a visit to Seoul, as well as by the George W. Bush administration's skeptical attitude toward his efforts.
Just five months after winning the Nobel Prize, Kim was humiliated during a White House visit when newly inaugurated President Bush was publicly dismissive of the idea that one could negotiate with the North Koreans.
"Although I understand fully why the North Korean leadership is not very likable, it is in the interests of global peace to pursue the policy of dialogue," Kim later recalled, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, telling Bush.
Kim also had to spend his later years fending off a series of political scandals. His youngest son was arrested on charges of taking bribes from a lobbyist. The revelation that Kim's aides had secretly ordered the transfer of $500 million to North Korea shortly before the meeting with Kim Jong Il led to charges that he had bought the summit and hence the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 2005, investigators made the ironic discovery that this icon of democracy and human rights had allowed illegal wiretapping during his presidency at a pace unmatched even by South Korea's former military dictators.
Like former dissidents who became president -- Lech Walesa of Poland or Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic -- Kim's image abroad was always better than at home. He was often likened to a prophet scorned in his own land.
"The Koreans forgot that he was a champion of democracy and saw him just as another political boss. He was always more highly rated overseas than domestically," said Michael Breen, a Seoul-based biographer of Kim Jong Il who has been researching a biography of Kim Dae-jung as well.
In his later years, with his hair dyed the artificial dark black of many aging Asian politicians and his skin powdered white, Kim appeared as a distant and forbidding figure. He gave only occasional interviews, pleading for continued dialogue with North Korea.
Kim was succeeded as South Korea's president by Roh Moo-hyun, a similarly left-leaning politician who tried to continue the rapprochement with Pyongyang. But 2007 elections brought conservatives back in power.
A much-heralded resort run by South Korea's Hyundai Asan group near North Korea's Mt. Kumgang closed last year, and many businesses pulled out of an industrial park in Kaesong, north of the DMZ. North Korea's two nuclear tests, one in 2006 and a more recent one in May, have been viewed by many in South Korea as proof that Kim's policies of conciliation were a failure.
Hahm Sung-deuk, a presidential scholar at Korea University in Seoul, predicts that South Koreans will come to appreciate Kim more, especially when his presidency is stacked up next to the disappointing terms of his successors.
"His legacy will grow with time. Even if he made some mistakes, people appreciate his contributions to democracy and his handling of the economy," Hahm said today.
Kim was born on tiny Haui island off the southwestern coast of South Korea, in Cholla province, renowned for the anti-authoritarian streak of its people. He has said that his date of birth was Jan. 6, 1924, although various later dates are often cited in official records -- discrepancies that his opponents used against him later to claim he was dishonest. (The most likely explanation for the confusion over his birth date was that his family was trying to keep him out of the draft during the 1910-1945 occupation period.)
Another slur leveled against him was that he was the child of a concubine because his mother was not legally married to his father, who had a first wife.
Nonetheless, such arrangements were common at the time and Kim's parents lived as man and wife, raising three sons. He was the oldest.
In a memoir written while incarcerated, "Prison Writings," Kim said his family was distinguished in their farming and fishing village by owning a phonograph. As a child, he loved music and animals, protesting vehemently when neighbors slaughtered a dog to eat. (He wrote in the memoirs, however, that he did taste the meat afterward.)
When he was 7 or 8, Kim was sent to study the Chinese classics with a village scholar. His academic abilities proved phenomenal, and the family moved to the mainland port city of Mokpo so that he could further his education. He became involved in anti-Japanese activities, at one point joining an underground group of young communists who read banned Marxist texts.
Despite scoring top grades through high school, Kim's father did not permit him to attend university, insisting that the family needed him to get a job. Nevertheless, he remained an avid reader and intellectual; his memoirs are rich with references to philosophers from Plato to Friedrich Nietzsche.
His first job was working with a shipping company in Mokpo. In 1947, he bought a ship and started his own company. In that same year, according to Breen, he was arrested by a local detective who claimed he was a communist. He was held briefly -- a colleague took the detective out drinking and he was released -- but there would soon be many longer stays under lock and key. In 1950, when North Korean troops came swarming across the border, Kim was picked up and held by the invading forces for several months before United Nations forces pushed them back.
After the Korean War, Kim had another setback. His first wife, whom he had married soon after high school, died suddenly, leaving him to care for their two young boys. He converted to Catholicism, remaining devout through the end of his days. (He later married Lee Hi ho, a Christian activist, and had another son.) He caught the attention of John Chang Myon, a prominent Catholic politician, and began showing an interest in politics.
The emphasis in those lean postwar years was in rebuilding the tattered nation out of the ruins of war, but Kim didn't believe other values should be subsumed by the quest for economic growth.
"A national economy lacking a democratic foundation is a castle built on sand," Kim would say later during the lecture he delivered upon winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
He won his first election in 1961 as a national assemblyman for the Mokdo district, but before he arrived to take his seat in the National Assembly in Seoul, a general, Park Chung Hee, staged a military coup and closed the parliament.
A decade later, Park held a presidential election and opposition party leaders decided it was time to bring in younger candidates. Kim Dae-jung stunned the power establishment by nearly beating Park.
That brought Kim unwelcome attention. The same year his car was pushed off the road by a truck in what he believed was an assassination attempt. He was left with a limp that gave him a peculiar Charlie Chaplin-like waddle. He left the country the following year.
In 1973, he was kidnapped from a Tokyo hotel room, drugged with ether and dragged onto the boat where he was to be thrown overboard.
"I knew that death was only moments away," Kim later wrote. "I heard them discussing how to keep my body from floating to the surface if the sharks didn't get me first."
While the boat was sailing through the waters, a plane appeared and began circling overhead flashing a red light. Kim was taken back to South Korea. He said later he believed that the CIA had intervened to save his life, but his miraculous rescue has never been fully explained.
But life was hardly peaceful afterward. Over the next 14 years, Kim was either in prison, under house arrest or in exile. He was given the death sentence in 1980 on trumped-up charges of sedition. He fled to the United States for two years, teaching at Georgetown University. It was not until 1987 that he was free to establish a pro-democracy political party.
In 1993, after losing his third race for the presidency -- previous tries were in 1971 and 1987 -- Kim announced he was retiring from politics. He went to Europe to study Germany reunification, and said he would dedicate the rest of his life to Korean reunification.
It wasn't long before he was back, this time more determined than ever to win. He cut a deal with the former head of the KCIA, the spy agency that had tried to kill him at least once, in order to give more conservative ballast to his ticket. Kim Jong Pil became his first prime minister.
As president, Kim put reconciliation at the top of his agenda, not just between the North and South, but within South Korea. At his inauguration, among the most notable guests were former strongmen Chung Doo-Hwan and Roh Tae-Woo, who had ordered Kim tried and sentenced death on the sedition charges.
Kim took office on the heels of an economic debacle in which South Korea, by then the 11th largest economy in the world, had been forced to take a $58-billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund. The loan was repaid in 2001 -- nearly three years ahead of schedule -- and Kim won high markets from the very business executives who had grumbled that he was a leftist who knew nothing about the economy.
Kim came under criticism for being too lax with North Korea, turning a blind eye to human rights violations and propping up the regime of Kim Jong Il with humanitarian aid and cash gifts. Once out of office, Kim was bluntly unrepentant about charges that he had paid for the summit.
"When a rich brother goes to visit a poorer brother, the rich brother should not go empty-handed," he told the Financial Times in 2004.
But in light of subsequent events, the Nobel Peace Prize that Kim won for his dealings with North Korea has lost much of its luster. As a result, he is likely to be better appreciated for the contributions of his earlier years toward the democratization of modern South Korea.
barbara.demick@latimes.com
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
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