DJ Was No Peacemaker

Kim Dae Jung may have been brave and statesmanlike as a dissident, but when a politician dies — particularly a liberal one — too many journalists are overcome by the temptation to deify. Let’s not be. DJ’s accomplishments as a dissident, related here vividly by Seth Lipsky, remind us of his courage and vision before he attained power. But what they didn’t do is make him an effective peacemaker or president. But then, when in history has anyone who seemed as desperate for peace as Kim Dae Jung ever achieved it? That’s the lesson I take from DJ’s failure to accomplish the goal that obsessed him.

Had DJ never been inaugurated, there would be no debating his legacy as a liberator. Nothing did so much to undermine that legacy as the manner in which he squandered his moral authority for the sake of atmospheric improvements in relations with North Korea:

[W]hen it came to the question of the fundamental rights of his fellow Koreans north of the border, Kim was unable to present any vision of hope. In fact, throughout his term in office, he assiduously downplayed the widespread human rights abuses in North Korea. Incredibly, Kim told an audience at a leading Washington think tank in March 2001 that the greatest human rights problem in the Korean peninsula was that of the separated families between the two Koreas and that his administration was making progress on that admittedly important issue. But on the far graver issue of the North Korean regime’s systemic and widespread attack on its civilian population — including the operation of vast political prisoner concentration camps where random beating, torture, public execution, hard labor, and starvation are brutal everyday realities — Kim chose to remain silent. [Prof. Sung-Yoon Lee, Foreign Policy]

(Lee’s piece is a must-read if only for his use of language in its last two paragraphs.)

DJ’s canonizers most desperately want to remember him as a man who somehow soothed or pacified tensions with North Korea. Some have been dishonest enough to do this by airbrushing out any mention how DJ’s principal claim to accomplishment in office was bought with an illegal transfer of $500 million in taxpayer funds:

What went unmentioned, however, was that the half a billion dollars in question was roughly equal to North Korea’s export earnings at the time. It was an enormous cash infusion for North Korea, one of the smallest and most isolated economies in the world. Kim’s cash gift to a hereditary totalitarian leadership that identifies as its highest state priorities regime preservation, advancement of its nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction programs, and existential competition against Seoul was an economic bonanza that carried serious strategic and moral implications.

DJ denied the scandal and its greater significance until the very end:

Three days before he was admitted to the hospital in July, the former president told the BBC that his administration had never sent cash to Pyongyang but only 200,000 to 300,000 tons of food and fertilizer aid each year. Kim claimed that the cash transfer of $500 million was a risk undertaken by the South Korean conglomerate Hyundai alone to secure commercial rights in North Korea.

Such claims are inconsistent with the findings of the special prosecution that led to the imprisonment of one of Kim’s key aides and the conviction of several others.

North Korea certainly created a superficial appearance of soothed tensions as long as DJ and Roh kept the money flowing, and if you measure tensions in terms of atmospherics, look no further. But all of that money, and the billions that would follow thereafter — never resulted in one artillery tube being pulled from a bunker facing Seoul, never closed down a concentration camp, never brought home a POW, never reunited a family for more than a few torturous minutes, didn’t stop North Korea from going nuclear, and didn’t stop North Korea from proliferating its missiles and nuclear technology. If Kim Dae Jung really cared about those things, it’s not evident from his words or his policies.

Indeed, what Kim Dae Jung’s policies really did was to keep Kim Jong Il sufficiently well-funded to allow him the option of not reforming, not disarming, and not moderating his brutality, in spite of U.N. sanctions and the best efforts of America. While America subsidized South Korea’s defense from North Korea, South Korea subsidized the North. To this day, that fact causes many Americans (myself included) to question why South Korea needs to be a military welfare state at the expense of U.S. taxpayers, even to question the very nature of what the alliance ought to be. DJ’s fanning and exploitation of hostility toward the nation that saved his life no less than three times only fuels those questions.

If DJ’s legacy was what some would have us believe, North Korea would not still find it so easy to adjust the tension dial after a decade of the policies he favored.