OSLO, Norway (CNN) -- For more than a quarter century, Kim Dae-jung has
been South Korea's most renowned champion of democracy, human
rights and reconciliation with its outcast sibling, North Korea.
As it happens, his commitment to those ideals has coincided with a
noticeable change in global liberal values, and with a shift
toward them by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. That is the
Oslo-based philanthropic organization that annually bestows the
world's most prestigious award for the promotion of international
harmony, the Nobel Peace Prize.
On Sunday, Kim Dae-jung -- now President Kim Dae-jung -- is being
honored by the committee as this year's recipient of the prize,
elevating him to the ranks of one of the world's most exclusive
fraternities: Nobel Prize laureates.
But for Kim the road to Oslo City Hall, where the Nobel diploma
and medallion are bestowed, is littered with the pain of decades
of struggle. As his country's leading dissident, he paid for his
commitment to democratization and human rights with years of
imprisonment, torture, death threats and public vilification at
the hands of successive military regimes.
That commitment went public in 1954, when Kim at the age of 29
began publicly criticizing the autocratic style of South Korea's
first president, Syngman Rhee, jumping into the political arena
with a run for the country's new parliament.
"I have come to the conclusion," he told supporters in his adopted
hometown of Mok-po, "that the real well-being of the people cannot
be realized unless a genuine democratic political system is firmly
established by ending the dictatorship which ignores the will of
the people and downgrades the National Assembly."
That was a daring and foolhardy thing for a young Korean to do in
those days. But it was only Kim's opening shot in what was to
become a 40-year crusade to democratize South Korea, even as
military coups, political assassinations and mass arrests swirled
around him.
Solidifying his resolve
In 1962, a year after the country's first coup, Kim was jailed and
charged with plotting to overthrow the regime of Gen. Park Chung
Hee. The time Kim spent behind bars solidified his support for
human rights, and especially the humane treatment of political
prisoners.
His continued political challenges to Park and his successor, Gen.
Chun Hoo-hwan, brought Kim years in prison and house arrest,
attempts against his life, exile and death sentences. But it
failed to silence him. He became, instead, more openly critical of
the military regimes, especially of their Draconian security laws
that were used to rationalize the arrest and imprisonment of
hundreds of dissidents as threats to South Korea's defense against
North Korea.
He called repeatedly for freedom of press and assembly, for
release of all political prisoners, and for the repeal of the
national security laws that prohibited any contact with North
Koreans or comments that could be construed as sympathetic to the
Stalinist regime in the North.
Kim devoted more of his time in prison to studying the pacifist
teachings of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. He also
spent many hours reading the reconciliatory writings of Abraham
Lincoln as they pertained to the American Civil War, which struck
the young Kim as highly instructive in thinking about the hostile
relationship between North Korea and South Korea.
Kim began in the mid-1970s to advocate a peaceful reunification of
North Korea and South Korea, culminating in a united, free and
democratic Korean Peninsula sometime in the future. To that end,
he labored for months behind bars developing a formula to achieve
that reunification on the basis of three main principles: peaceful
coexistence, peaceful exchange and peaceful reunification.
It was a Korean version of the "Ostpolitik" (eastern policy) that
eventually helped bring down the Berlin Wall and the reunification
of East Germany and West Germany. But all it brought Kim was new
abuse by South Korea's military and politically conservative
leaders, who denounced him as a pawn of Pyongyang, and his ideas
as naive if not outright subversive.
Yet the tide of history was on Kim Dae-jung's side. As the Cold
War was ending in the late 1980s, President Roh Tae-woo, the
hand-picked successor of Chun Doo-hwan, began moving South Korea's
government decisively toward democratization, freeing hundreds of
political prisoners and incorporating many of Kim's ideas in his
own new "Nordpolitik" (north policy) for dealing with Pyongyang.
Reaching out to old adversaries
But to Kim himself fell the task of taking the most dramatic steps
toward fulfilling his long-held dreams for Korea. Finally elected
president of South Korea in 1997, on his fourth try, Kim set out
to put the crowning achievements on his own legacy. He immediately
pardoned two of his predecessors -- Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo
-- who had conspired to imprison and condemn him to death and were
serving long sentences for corruption and treason, and he invited
them to his inauguration.
He also freed nearly all of the country's political prisoners and
set in motion a major thaw in relations between Seoul and
Pyongyang, culminating in the historic North Korean-South Korean
Summit last June -- an unprecedented achievement that brought Kim
accolades from around world and won him the label, "visionary."
Kim Dae-jung still has his detractors. There are those among the
stalwart generation that fought the Korean War who will never
trust anything that Pyongyang promises, and thus still believe
that Kim is a pawn of the North. At the same time, some of his old
allies in the struggle for justice, human rights and democracy in
South Korea complain that as president, Kim hasn't moved fast
enough to dismantle the old security laws. They also charge that
he has been co-opted by the United States, the International
Monetary Fund and other global institutions.
But in announcing its decision to award him the Peace Prize, the
Norwegian Nobel Committee called Kim "his country's leading
spokesman for democracy."
"With great moral strength," the Nobel committee added, "Kim
Dae-jung has stood out in East Asia as a leading defender of
universal human rights against attempts to limit the relevance of
those rights in Asia." And it cited his attempts to "overcome more
than 50 years of war and hostility between North and South Korea."
Joe Manguno was Seoul Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal
from 1986-1991. He has known Kim Dae-jung and covered his career
for 15 years. Manguno now works for CNN International television.
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