South Korea's Roh puts behind the first difficult year

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

For many South Koreans, especially aides and supporters of President Roh Moo-hyun, Wednesday came as a great joy and relief -- but also a surprise -- as their leader marked his first year in office.

Roh, formerly a fiery human rights lawyer and jailed dissident, became South Korea's ninth President on Feb. 25, 2003, upon a campaign pledging a crusade against corruption, keeping peace on the Korean Peninsula, reviving Asia's fourth largest economy and achieving a more balanced relationship with Washington.

During his first year in office, Roh -- an outsider and odd- man-out in South Korean politics -- has neither curbed corruption nor revived the economy, while his close aides came under public scrutiny over alleged corruption.

Roh's former secretary Choi Do-sul reportedly received US$1 million from a political slash fund reportedly set up by South Korea's conglomerate, or chaebol, the SK Group. But he denied the accusations and luckily, he was not only the person under the spotlight. Thanks to the corrupt political system, both the ruling and opposition parties -- the Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) and Grand National Party (GNP), respectively -- had allegedly received funds from businesses in excess of legal limits for the Dec. 19, 2002 elections.

GNP head Choe Byung-ryol offered to resign and thus take responsibility for the chaebol donations. On his part, Roh offered to seek a new mandate through a referendum in December, which did not materialize.

The economy, instead of heading toward recovery, slipped into recession. As a result, the growth rate recorded less than 3 percent in 2003 instead of the targeted 5 percent.

Since his assuming the country's top post in February 2003, Roh has often seemed indecisive in the face of events, be they political defections, oft-violent street protests or North Korea's posturing on the nuclear arms issue.

The self-educated and computer savvy president was forced to resign from the ruling MDP in October 2003 after a mass defection of 38 loyalist members in the National Assembly to form an independent group.

In the South Korean National Assembly, the opposition GNP is the biggest faction with 149 seats, while the MDP now has a mere 63 seats.

Roh, who won the presidency with a thin margin of votes from the minority MDP, has been thwarted on several crucial issues. Some say this mess is due to his inexperience in politics and administration and because his close aides, who are in their 30s or 40s, are also rookies with little sense of realpolitik. The reality, however, is that he faced a hostile parliament, a critical, vocal media and radical student and trade unions.

Though Roh concentrated mostly on the North Korean nuclear issue in his first six months as president, the mercurial communist North remains a hard nut to crack. This prompted many South Koreans to feel the president had neglected the domestic agenda and economy, and thus sent his approval ratings plummeting to 25.6 percent from a 80 percent after he took office.

Yet, thanks to his survival skills and changing policies, he was able to clear each and every hurdle, slowly but surely.

Since day one, or even before then, the 57-year-old Roh defeated U.S. favorite Lee Hoi-chang with a promise to stop the U.S. and North Korea from heating up to war over the nuclear issue and to introduce economic reforms.

In his inaugural speech, Roh tried to woo Washington and foreign investors by calling South Korea-U.S. relations a "cherished alliance" and visited the U.S. base in Seoul. He also addressed the American Chamber of Commerce and the conservative Heritage Foundation.

"He (Roh) told them (the Americans) he is not a socialist and he is not anti-American, he has just got a new vision for an old alliance," Kim Sung-hun of the Institute of Foreign Affairs told AFP in Seoul.

He met with U.S. President George W. Bush two times -- in Washington in May 2003 and in Bangkok during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in October -- to discuss the nuclear issue and the Iraq war.

The president was able to convince both the right and the left in the National Assembly on the need to send 3,000 troops to Iraq, which made South Korea the third largest contributor to the war-ravaged country after the U.S. and Britain.

Under his participatory government, Roh revamped the rigid administrative system and vowed to remain a coordinator of state affairs rather than a wielder of absolute power. In order to smooth the country's foreign policy toward the U.S., he appointed last month Ban Ki-moon, a 60-year-old career diplomat, as the new foreign minister in place of Yoon Young-kwan, a university professor with no government experience.

Ban is scheduled to visit Jakarta in June this year.

As far as Indonesia is concerned, the world's largest Muslim- majority nation and South Korea have enjoyed cordial relations since 1973.

Under the leadership of Roh, South Korea, the fifth largest trading partner and third largest foreign investor in Indonesia, has consistently tried to boost bilateral economic ties. This was further strengthened by President Megawati Soekarnoputri's visit to South Korea last year and President Roh's attendance at the ASEAN+3 summit on Bali, also last year.

After surviving several crises over the past year, President Roh must proceed with the experience gained and try to garner support, probably through his reformist faction, in the April parliamentary election. This is the only way he can complete his remaining tenure and turn the South Korea into a mighty regional power.