The Meaning of Roh Moo-Hyun

Roh Moo-hyun, with his suicide leap, has become South Korea’s most recent and arguably most spectacular post-presidential flameout. For every South Korean President since Chun Doo-hwan (1980-1988) and Roh Tae-woo (1988-1993), the military generals who eased South Korea into its contemporary democratic era, and/or their families and familiars have been subjected to criminal prosecution. In fact, Roh Moo-hyung’s death makes you wonder if all this isn’t part of the local political culture—the South Korean equivalent of the multi-million-dollar Presidential library that ex-Presidents hit on their campaign contributors for and the six-figure fees they charge for giving pep talk to Moonie conventions and other less reputable audiences, doesn’t it? (Japanese Prime Ministers mainly but not exclusively opt for a more modest goal—bequeathing their Diet seats to their offspring.)

Yes, but.

Actually, Chun through Roh 2 are the analog of the one-off warlords who are destined to give way to a more permanent regime in exchange for a moment of historical glory as short-lived difference-makers. They and their successors (up to Roh 2) remind more me of bridesmaids Nobunaga Oda and Hideyoshi Toyotomi, who briefly held sway at the end of the Sengoku Jidai, or War-States Period, only to pave the way to three centuries of uninterrupted rule by the Tokugawa Dynasty. Korean (and, more so, Chinese) history must be replete with such precedents. From this perspective, Roh’s suicide should be seen as the latest manifestation of the search by the Korean body politic for an enduring protocol of succession as a constitutional democracy.

South Korea’s Opposition Lawmakers Takes Sledgehammer to FTA and the Blog Waxes Nostalgic

Perhaps a sledgehammer is taking it a little bit too far, but it is not beyond living memory in Japan as well that lawmakers would routinely resort to brute force when they didn’t have the numbers. And we Japanese might have similarly adopted the post-dictatorship South Korea’s habit of criminally prosecuting the outgoing president and/or his family, friends and/or acquaintances had our prime ministers not always hailed from the same political party.

A democracy needs time to grow into its mores, manners, customs and morals, it seems. In the meantime, though, I cannot help avoid a sense of envy at the youthful recklessness with which the South Koreans pursue politics as a blood sport. But you know what I think of our current political leadership and their understudies.

Incidentally, Martin Fackler of designer vending machines fame is reporting this story out of Tokyo. Didn’t NYT have a Seoul Bureau? I’m going to start saving their articles that I refer to on my posts, just in case the Grey Lady decides to raise revenue by retreating behind a pay-to-play wall. Or heaven forbid, go six feet under, taking all its servers with it.

South Korean Revisionist Textbook

The Daily NK, a very informative website on North Korea, reports on “A Textbook Alternative to the Historical Leftist View”. According to the report, the Textbook Forum of the New Right Party, which published the “Alternative Textbook, South Korean Modern History”, “claims the need for an alternative textbook because current textbooks negatively depict South Korea's 60-year history since liberation from Japanese colonialism. The most significant characteristic of the alternative textbook is that it emphasizes the "legitimacy" of the establishment of the South Korean government in 1948 saying the true meaning of Korea’s Liberation that it bought freedom, human rights, and the market economy, all of which were oppressed under colonial rule.” According to TNK, the alternative textbook offers some corrective on the colonial years as well:

While describing the Japanese colonial government as "a violent and repressive regime which denied the political autonomy of Korea," it held a different perspective from the currently recognized view giving credit to the colonial rulers for initiating industrial development in Korea.”

This evaluation by itself is not particularly remarkable. Even Bruce Cumings, a revisionist from the left in the American sense and notable non-fan of Japan, allows as much. Of course for the Japanese media, the story is mostly about… us, as this Sankei report shows. The hard copy Yomiuri is also carrying a shorter article, with the same focus.

Lee Myung-bak Puts Marker on Kurdistan; Japan Missing?

China is viewed with some alarm and, yes, some envy for its forays into places where angels fear to tread. But it is the South Korean businesses that have the better-established reputation for risk-taking on the cutting edge of emerging and frontier markets. (Also a reputation for being quick to cut their losses, but some of that may be envy.) Their footprints stretch from Central Asia to sub-Sahara Africa, and the Kurdistan Autonomous Region in Iraq is no exception. In fact, Korean businesses have gone in to cut oil deals with the Kurdistan Regional Government even though the national oil bill to determine control over oil fields, contracts and revenue continues to be stalled in the Iraqi Parliament in a tug-of-war between the Kurds and the central government.

On February 14, South Korean efforts were rewarded when Nechervan Idris Barzani, the KRG Prime Minister and nephew of Masoud Barzani, met President-Elect Lee Myung-bak in Seoul, where the two sides celebrated an oil development deal. For later that day, according to the FT, a “consortium led by Korea National Oil Corp. on Thursday signed a memorandum of understanding with the Kurdish Prime Minister allowing the Korean group to develop energy projects in the Kurdish Autonomous Region.” The consortium includes SK Energy, South Korea’s largest oil refinery. According to this report, the Iraqi oil Ministry had earlier this year halted SK Energy’s oil exports “in response to what it [said] were illegal oil exploration deals with the Kurdish regional government.”

So South Korea’s state-owned oil corporation join in cutting a deal with the KRG in defiance of Iraq’s central government, to which South Korea’s President-Elect gives his blessing and is rewarded with a not-quite state visit. It probably helped that South Korea has, as Mr. Barzani duly noted, troops on the ground in KAR, in the Erbil City neighborhood.

Absent from news reports with regard to Mr. Barzani’s visit was any mention of Roh Moo-hyung, who still had ten days left in his tenure as President. But it is even more notable that Mr. Barzani did not bother to stop over in Tokyo. I used to wonder, early on, why Japan was not sending its troops to Kurdistan. After all, the Kurds asked for them, and it would have been safer than Samawa, where the non-combat Self-Defense Forces eventually went. Now, it’s too late, in more ways than one.