Pushing Korea to democracy
SEOUL— Kim Young-sam, the former president of South Korea, replaced the last of the country’s military leaders, purged politicized generals and introduced a landmark reform aimed at transparency in financial transactions.
He died this week in Seoul. He was 87. The cause was reported as sepsis and heart failure.
Kim, an outspoken critic of military dictators from the 1960s through the 1980s, was president from 1993 to 1998.
He was one of the “three Kims” — the others were former president Kim Daejung and former prime minister Kim Jong-pil — who played major roles during South Korea’s turbulent transition from dictatorship to democracy.
Kim was elected to parliament at 26 and developed a following as an opposition leader famed for his daring criticism of Park Chung-hee, who seized power in a coup in 1961 and tortured and imprisoned dissidents before his assassination in 1979.
Kim’s travails continued when Park was replaced by Chun Doo-hwan, an army major general who engineered a coup to fill the power vacuum left by his patron’s death. Kim was barred from politics and put under house arrest. He once staged a 23-day hunger strike.
“Dawn will come even if the rooster is strangled,” he once said, a saying that became a catchphrase for Koreans yearning for democracy.
Kim beat Kim Dae-jung in the1992 election to become the first civilian leader in South Korea in more than three decades.
Although he won with the support of the military-backed party, Kim did not forget his roots. He purged a clique of politically ambitious army officers.
Kim also barred South Koreans from owning bank accounts under pseudonyms. That change is considered a critical step in South Korea’s long-running campaign against corruption; bank accounts under borrowed names had been widely used by politicians and businessmen to hide slush funds.
But Kim’s time in office was also marked by missed opportunities.
In his memoir, Kim said he persuaded then-president Bill Clinton to cancel the United States’s plan to bomb North Korea’s nuclear facilities in 1994 for fear of war.