S. Korea: Roh Gets Taste of His Own Medicine

Washington Post ^ | 01/31/04 | Anthony Faiola and Joohee Cho

[TigerLikesRooster]

Roh Gets Taste of His Own Medicine S. Korean Becomes Target of Anti-Graft Drive He Launched

By Anthony Faiola and Joohee Cho Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, January 31, 2004; Page A18

SEOUL -- President Roh Moo Hyun came to power promising to break the silence surrounding the estimated hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal funds funneled into election campaigns by South Korea's powerful family-owned conglomerates. During his 12 months in office, legal scholars say, Roh has granted unprecedented autonomy to prosecutors to launch the broadest corruption probes in national history.

But Roh's efforts have led this new crop of reform-minded prosecutors straight to his own doorstep.

Over the past six months, the prosecutors -- now being hailed by corruption-weary South Koreans as national heroes, complete with their own online fan clubs -- have forced the arrests of 16 politicians, aides and businessmen accused of accepting or handing out illegal cash to fund Roh's successful 2002 presidential bid. They include four of Roh's top presidential aides, his former campaign director and his chauffeur.

[TigerLikesRooster]

Roh, the son-in-law of a dead communist partisan really lives up to my expectation. Presenting himself as a suqeaky clean underdog, working for "little people' turned out to be just corrupt and opportunistic. Shades of Clinton. His supporters have distinct similarity to Boomer hippies. They now want to live through the bankrupt liberal experiment so that they could find out themselves how it is like.

I just hope that the backlash against them is as swift as their rise. One concern, though. There are Korean RINO's in the conservative circle, called 'Oranges'. 'Oranges' used to be a term for rich spoiled kids hanging out in cushy neighorhoods of Seoul. Some of these 'Oranges' legislators are now doing what RINO did in late 60's, watering down conservative ideas and brininging in lefty ideas.

[TigerLikesRooster]

Ping!

[LibertarianInExile]

Dead on. Korea, under dictatorship since the war up right until the 90s, might have seen some technology improvements and modern music, but the revolutions that the 60s brought, with the Great Society and liberal causes screwing everything up never hit there. Heck, a couple of years ago a MAJOR Korean actress was found to have slept with her boyfriend because he put a hidden camera video on the net. She was immediately dropped from the studio roster and blacklisted...simply because they weren't married.

Sounds more like the 40s than the 90s. But not in Korea. The 386ers, like most of Generation X, think that they missed out on the 60s just like everything else they'll be screwed out of by the Greediest Generation, and the 386ers want and now have their chance to fubar things.

On the other hand, it's not like the prosecutors are angels, either. They've been trying to bring down Roh because they're pretty much tools of the GNP, Roh's principle opposition party. The Post is a sucker for a GNP shill here, because even though Roh is probably not with clean hands, he's nowhere near as dirty as the GNP and his former party, the MDP. Roh made that 10% claim because he knows that the GNP IS so bought.

[Mamzelle]

bump

[TigerLikesRooster]

Prosecutors are not really GNP's tools. Prosecutors are the tigers Roh unleashed hoping that it would mainly hurt his oppositions. Prosecutors have showed convoluted reactions since the Roh's inauguration. First they were condemned by Roh as having been collaborating with corrupt power. Roh tried to bring in outside oversight committees stacked with "reform(liberal)"-minded people. Then feeling nothing to lose, prosecutors as institution appear to go a separate path from current "reform"-minded government.
Still there is a problem of priorities. Cases involving governments are not moving along while prosecutors are busy bring in new cases involving oppositions.

One needs to remember that the current people in power did not have the chance to grab some money because they were mostly at the fringe of the power. However, since they got the power, they jumped headlong into money-pit. As for their election campaign, the finance was handled by MDP big shots. These big shots were money-conduit to Roh's campaign. Now Roh bolted out of MDP, creating his own party, while accusing MDP of dirty corrupt deeds which were actually instrumental to finiance his succesful election. Many of Roh's core supporters in his party would not be here today unless they got the illegal campaign money(besides the one on the official record) from now-jailed MDP big shot Kwon noh-gap, one of the closest associate of Kim Dae-jung.

Roh and his ilks are just another bunch of opportunistic populists, who are self-righteous and revisionistic.
They live not in real world but in utopia. Their views did not change since their college days in 80's. Some time in 80's(84?), I have a chance to talk to a grad student at Seoul National University, who was a kind of activist.
He told me that those days his juniors did not think but that they just unconditionally take ideas and and follow them like robots. Those ideas were Juche ideology, Gramsci's, to name a couple. The trouble is that they did not grow out of them. Some did but majority did not. Especially in those elite circles. You had to put up with the crap they spew such as "Juche ideology is the work of genuine creative mind.", which they would say if you go to a bar and loosen up your tongue with several round of drinks.


The theme behind all these is to establish leftist hold on power for good by painting the opposition as sole source of ills and corruptions. The opposition are people from the past, the backward, all collaborators with Japanese while their association with the north or communism are excusable, or malicious fabrication by right-wing reactionaries(a lot of them are neither excusable nor fabrications.)

As in 60's, they are destroying old taboos and creating new taboos.
Old taboos: communist/leftist ideology
New taboos: attack on such leftist ideology, any positive view on traditional morality or religion

[LibertarianInExile]

Well, yeah. I know Koreans who are VERY friendly toward Americans, who wouldn't think of uttering an ill word about Americans, but nonetheless were tossing firebombs and climbing on tanks during college. They think that being radical during college is just something you do...no, I'm not kidding.

But that doesn't mean that the prosecutors aren't GNP-ridden. The whole of the government is. I'm not saying Roh's crowd isn't eager to get their hands in the cookie jar, but they sure haven't had the chance that the GNP and its years of dominance gained. Most of the power points of the ROK's bureaucracies are held by the GNP still, though the GNP has not held the reins of popularly elected government for years.

I don't say for a minute that Roh's squeaky clean. The problem is in the ROK, nobody is. Including the prosecution. And that bodes ill for the South as soon as the U.S. leaves, which will happen when the nuke deal is done, I bet.

[TigerLikesRooster]

There are many different players in the bureaucracy. There were pro-GNP group who was there longest. However, during the Kim Dae-jung days, there were a wholesale effort to plant their people to all levels of bureaucracy. Then there are younger people in the bureaucracy who starts to identify themselves with 386 generation's left-wing agenda. These people are both in GNP camp and MDP camp in all bureaucracies and legislature.

There are 3-way match going on now. It is shaping up to be 1 vs 2 matches, 386 lefties vs GNP+MDP.

Finally, about those people whom you say they used to be anti-American, they did not actually grow up in the real sense. Their views on America and N. Korea or other issues did not change much even though they wrap themselves with American consumer goods, eager to flaunt their English proficiency, anxious to send their kids to expensive prep schools in U.S. The fact that they are into American fads does not translate into abandoning blind hostility to America and equally blind sympathy to N. Korea. I would feel much better if they only used to be anti-American.

[TigerLikesRooster]

In S. Korean political history, prosecutors did not have independence. They always toe the government line. That has been their nature. There could be many GNP sympathizers but they do not have proportionate influence when somebody else are in charge of hiring and firing.

[AmericanInTokyo]

Ive read the poll (yesterday?) that nearly 57% of business leaders say their lot has gotten WORSE since that jerk took office. I hope he is run out of Seoul via Suwon on a rail, tarred and feathered to boot.

[TigerLikesRooster]

Re #9 he is also trying Clinton's trick:
That is, if I am impeached, the ensuing political chaos will make the economy much worse. But economy is already bad. So there is no stock bubble to pop. Roh has a better chance of being ousted than Clinton. I hope they kick those leftie jerks along with them over to DPRK, the worker's paradise.

[AmericanInTokyo]

(Maybe) we should force him and his ilk of traitors, at gunpoint, to walk northward toward "paradise" from Munsan, across the various bird nesting grounds, and straight into the landmine fields of the Korean People's Army set up along the DMZ.

[OahuBreeze]

Re # 10 -- hence, the referendum -- to induce the threat of even further chaos.

Great discussion, thanks.

I guess the recent purge in the Foreign Ministry shows that the Roh administration can shuffle the deck when it wants to.

Ban seems pretty sharp -- I'll give him till spring before Roh fires him.

[TigerLikesRooster]

Re #12

I am hoping that Roh's camp becomes emboldened and cocky. I want them to be overreaching. Then we may not have to work hard to dig their graves. We will see. I sense that their morale is not what it used to be, even though oppositions have their share of politicians in custody.

[LibertarianInExile]

Whatever the MDP did to try to even things out, it's obvious it didn't work. I know from experience that the wealthiest families are still almost universally pro-GNP, and since the most highly qualified people in Korea are generally sons and daughters of the extremely wealthy (since they can afford the best hagwan and private schools and send their kids out of the country), they are likely to remain so.

Korea is much more stratified by Confucianism than any other Asian nation I've been to, and doesn't seem eager to end that division. In fact, I was stunned to find out that a friend of mine there actually broke up with his fiancee of two years because he found out her father was not a private dentist to the rich but worked for factory workers.

"Finally, about those people whom you say they used to be anti-American, they did not actually grow up in the real sense. Their views on America and N. Korea or other issues did not change much even though they wrap themselves with American consumer goods, eager to flaunt their English proficiency, anxious to send their kids to expensive prep schools in U.S. The fact that they are into American fads does not translate into abandoning blind hostility to America and equally blind sympathy to N. Korea. I would feel much better if they only used to be anti-American."

Well, I don't disagree that they didn't grow up but I feel that's true about Koreans in general. From what I have seen of Koreans they are unexpectedly childish in ways that would be simply unacceptable in the U.S., and this is considered normal. For example, I can't imagine a man proposing, getting rejected, then crying for three hours until she said yes, but I know it has happened here more than once, and seemed normal to Korean people who heard about it at the same time I did. I have seen Korean people push and shove and then seconds later look furious about similar treatment from others. And it wasn't to my eyes Confucian, class or age issues that caused the problem.

And I know that your assessment of many of them 'not growing up' and reflexively being anti-American and pro-NK is a fair one. However, the obvious moves on the part of the US immediately following WWII to back the Rhee government and successive strongman governments post-war, all of which were supported by a strong percentage of former collaborators, played right into NK hands. I don't think that their reflexive anti-Americanism is necessarily misplaced given the historical context. I think we are lucky that other Asian states don't have a similar attitude. Our back-the-anti-communist-at-all-costs policy played a large part in this backlash, and we should anticipate that the nationalism the strongmen engendered combined with this backlash, will make the ROK for all practical purposes a battleground for the hearts and minds of the people.

We may have kept them free from Communists but not from anti-Communists, and it's difficult for people to appreciate the difference sometimes. And the 386ers are winning in the polls right now, because most people are happier the way things are now, regardless of what the MDP and GNP want to say about the good old days under Park and Chun. It's hard to say that the 386ers are wrong when they're not, and hard to deny that the Uri Party is the party of change--when they are. The GNP-slanted papers might hate Roh, but that doesn't change the fact that the GNP has run the National Assembly and had a chance to reform all sorts of things, and yet they are simply standing in the way of reform instead of providing more opportunity to their people via free trade or open labor markets.

We don't really have an argument that the Uri Party will probably take the ROK far left compared to today. But I think Roh is at least open to reform. What the GNP is open to, besides a military buildup and getting their hands in the till, I don't know. And the MDP is all about cashing in down south instead of in Seoul--that's what the party stands for, to most Koreans. If I was a Korean voter, I can't say that I'd choose the GNP or MDP over the Uri party right now. I'd probably not vote.

[LibertarianInExile]

Really!? The polls in the papers in Korea are so fair...

[/sarcasm]

I have yet to read a pro-Uri poll in the papers in Seoul or Pusan. It's like looking for a paper that will endorse a conservative in the U.S. I'm NOT a Uri-lover, but there is no remotely unbiased paper in Korea. From what I can see, they are all MDP/GNP slanted. They HATE Roh.

[OahuBreeze]

Oh, come on! You know those mine fields aren't really there. If you just have the moral courage to believe they're not there, there's no way you can get hurt. Right?

[LibertarianInExile]

C'mon, the referendum was meant to shut the GNP down, not 'induce chaos,' and it did. The GNP bit, and bit hard, thinking the chaos would be in their favor, and then did a poll, realized they'd lose, and backed off. They weren't anti-referendum until they discovered they'd lose, typical pols.

And it's not like a referendum on Roh would have been a bad thing. People voting on retaining their President? Sheesh, that would have been GREAT! I wish we had one of those in the U.S. on every elected official!

I think Roh has become nothing but stronger since, because it made the GNP look scared. In fact, I am very disappointed to see it when people consider the GNP 'conservative.' They are the Tammany Hall party, the slimiest of the three, backing the monster corporations and dictators that ran Korea for years while sucking its people dry. No matter what you think of the MDP or Uri party, the GNP is dirty dirty dirty.

[LibertarianInExile]

A "Sunshine Policy' on minefields. I like it. :)

[AmericanInTokyo]

Imagine there's no landmines. It isn't hard to do....

[AmericanInTokyo]

Interesting coin toss.

Domestic economic reform and transparency, combined with the Korean People's Army marching south upon all of it following their massive artillery barrage.

Or, Kim Jong-il slowly losing his grip on power, and an increased ROK military buildup against his regime, accompanied with unparalleled greasy, under-the-table Teapot Dome deals and handcuffed guys going into Public Prosecutors offices' with cotton gauze masks on their faces. Take your pick.