Roh Moo-hyun

Roh Moo-hyun (in Hangul, 노무현; in Hanja, 盧武鉉; revised Korean romanization, No Muhyeon; McCune-Reischauer, No Muhyǒn; Gimhae, 1 September 1946 - Yangsan, May 23, 2009) was a South Korean politician and lawyer who served as president of South Korea from 2003 to 2008.

Before entering politics, he worked as a lawyer and stood out for his defense of political activists during the mandate of General Chun Doo-hwan in the 1980s. He later became active in the democratic movements of Busan and in 1987 he joined the Party of Kim Young-sam's Democratic Reunification. With the establishment of the Sixth Republic he became linked to center-left formations, first in the Democratic Party and since 1996 in Kim Dae-jung's National Congress of New Policies. During his presidency, he was Minister of Maritime Affairs between 2000 and 2001.

He won the 2002 presidential elections with a program in which he promised political regeneration, combating corruption and decentralizing the administration to correct territorial imbalances. Not having a majority in the National Assembly to approve them, he promoted his own formation to the 2004 legislative elections—Uri Party—and obtained an absolute majority. In 2004 the conservative opposition tried to expel him through an impeachment process for alleged lack of neutrality that left him out of office for two months, until the Constitutional Court ruled in his favor.

During the rest of the legislature, he unsuccessfully proposed moving the country's capital to Sejong, sealed the signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, and continued the policy of rapprochement with North Korea towards national reunification, reaching sign the so-called "Declaration of Peace and Prosperity" in 2007. However, his government was also marked by political instability, the result of successive electoral defeats that weakened his mandate.

A year after finishing the presidential term, he was being investigated on charges of having accepted money from a businessman. According to his version, his wife had requested a large sum from the person involved, but added that it was a loan and not a bribe. He committed suicide on May 23, 2009 by jumping off a cliff near the residence. of the.

Biography

Roh Moo-hyun was born in a village near Gimhae in 1946, being the sixth and last child of a poor family of peasant origins. As a child he frequently missed class because he had to help his parents in the fields. However, he was able to resume his studies thanks to a scholarship and in 1966 he graduated from the Busan College of Commerce. Between 1968 and 1971 he had to complete mandatory military service in the army of the Republic of Korea.

Due to the influence of his older brother, he began to study law on his own to apply for a position in the judiciary, while combining it with other jobs. He passed the mandatory bar exam in 1975. After working for a year as a district judge in Daejeon, in 1978 he was encouraged to set up his own law firm.

Starting in 1981, he would specialize in defending clients prosecuted for political activities, after accepting the case of some students prosecuted for possession of prohibited literature. At that time, South Korea was governed authoritarianly by former general Chun Doo -hwan, who had come to power through a coup d'état, and civil and political rights were very limited. He later joined Busan's democratic movements, and in 1987 he was arrested for investigating police involvement in the death of a worker; Although he was released from prison after three weeks, the judges disqualified him from practicing as a lawyer.

From 1972 until his death he was married to Kwon Yang-sook, with whom he had a son and a daughter. Although he converted to Catholicism in 1986, he was not a practicing Catholic.

Political career

In May 1987, Moo-hyun joined the Democratic Reunification Party (PRD) in which opposition leaders Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung were active, whose objective was constitutional reform towards full democracy. When this objective was achieved, the opposition could not agree on a single candidacy for the 1987 presidential elections and there was a split between both leaders. The lawyer remained loyal to Young-sam and the PRD named him a candidate for the Busan constituency in the 1988 legislative elections. He was well known in South Gyeongsang for his legal career. Moo-hyun won the title of deputy in the National Assembly with more than 50% of the votes.

In 1990, Kim Young-sam announced the merger of the PRD with the ruling Democratic Justice Party to form a conservative coalition, the Liberal Democratic Party. Moo-hyun was part of the most progressive wing of the PRD and considered that allying with President Roh Tae-woo, also linked to the 1979 coup, was a betrayal of democracy. For this reason, he and other deputies launched a new formation, the Democratic Party. Moo-hyun lost his seat in the 1992 legislative elections and three years later failed in his attempt to win the mayorship of Busan.

After a new defeat in the 1996 legislative elections, the Democratic Party accepted the proposal of presidential candidate Kim Dae-jung to join his group, the National Congress of New Policies, which would end up winning the 1997 presidential elections. Inside Of this transversal candidacy, Roh was linked to the left wing.

Roh regained his seat in the National Assembly in the 1998 by-election. During the presidency of Kim Dae-jung, he was appointed Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries from August 2000 to March 2001. He then rose through the ranks of the organizational chart of the Democratic Party, especially after the scandals that affected the president's children, and won by a large majority the primaries to be the Democratic candidate for the 2002 presidential elections.

In principle, Roh started in the polls behind the opposition candidate, the conservative Lee Hoi-chang. To come back, he promised to continue Dae-jung's most popular measures, such as reducing the power of business conglomerates (chaebol) and the "Sunshine policy" with North Korea, and added proposals for center-left such as improving social security, combating corruption and initiating administrative decentralization to correct regional economic imbalances. His speech was also full of constant references to his humble origins and a new generation of young politicians. Thanks to that electoral campaign, He surpassed the predictions and was declared the winner with more than 12 million votes (48.9%).

Presidency of South Korea

Shortly after taking office on February 25, 2003, Roh assured that his would be "the government of participation" and promised numerous reforms aimed at the political regeneration of the country. Internally, the most ambitious were administrative decentralization - with which they wanted to reduce the economic differences between provinces - and a reform of all high positions to combat corruption. However, the Democratic Party (PD) did not have a majority. in the National Assembly and had difficulties in moving them forward. His negotiating position was weakened by the rejection of both the majority Grand National Party (GPN) and a good part of the members of his own party, to whom he gave a certain autonomy.

Other points included in his government program were to guarantee peaceful coexistence with North Korea, change the system of electing deputies in parliament, guarantee the free market, base the economic model on technological research, develop social security, guarantee gender equality, and promote collective bargaining in the workplace.

To reorganize his forces, in October 2003 he promoted the creation of a new center-left party, the Uri Party, favorable to reforms. He was joined by 42 deputies (out of 103) from the PD and 5 from the GPN.

Impeachment process (2004)

With legislative elections scheduled for April 2004, Roh Moo-hyun gave his support to the Uri Party in public statements and even in sessions of the National Assembly, in the face of unanimous criticism from the opposition. According to the South Korean constitution, The figure of the president could not speak out in favor of any party. When Roh refused to apologize, the GPN and the PD presented an impeachment process on March 12 for an alleged violation of the electoral law. The result was 193 votes in favor and 2 against. The 47 members of the Uri Party boycotted the motion, considering it a "covert coup d'état" and there were numerous altercations both inside and outside parliament, where Roh's followers were concentrated.

Roh was removed from the presidency while the Constitutional Court debated his dismissal. Prime Minister Goh Kun took over as acting president for two months.

The movement to remove Roh occurred a month before the elections, so a large part of South Korean society was very critical of the process. Thanks to an electoral campaign that positioned Roh as an anti-corruption figure, the Uri Party obtained an absolute majority (152 deputies) in the legislative elections on April 9. The Constitutional Court rejected the impeachment process on May 14 and Roh regained his status as president of the country.

Course of the presidency

Despite having a majority in the Assembly, the Roh government had problems carrying out its administrative reform. To decentralize power from Seoul, the government proposed moving the capital to Sejong, a new city 120 kilometers away. According to the government's plans, the population of Sejong would be 500,000 in 2030, enough to rebalance forces. The opposition - led by the mayor of Seoul and head of the GPN, Lee Myung-bak - considered that this measure was not a priority, filed an appeal and the Constitutional Court ruled against the transfer. As a solution, the president did not change the national capital but established Sejong as the "administrative capital" with the transfer of nine ministries and four agencies by 2015. The most important ones - Presidency, Foreign Affairs and Defense - would remain in Seoul. The complex was inaugurated in 2012.

With regard to the economy, the reform of large conglomerates (chaebol) initiated by Kim Dae-jung was maintained, measures were taken to defend the free market, and the railway network was established high-speed (Korea Train Express). Although exports had increased and the gross domestic product continued to grow by more than 4%, Roh had more problems dealing with the real estate bubble, the increase in youth unemployment and the protests over the liberalization of agricultural markets, such as that of imports of rice. On June 30, 2007, the South Korean government signed the Free Trade Agreement between South Korea and the United States.

The situation of the Roh government was further complicated by the resignation of the Finance Minister due to a corruption scandal, while criticism from the opposition and the media of his economic and foreign relations management increased. The Uri Party lost the absolute majority in the 2005 by-elections and suffered a heavy defeat in the 2006 local elections, winning only one of the 16 provinces (North Jeolla). After this setback, Roh proposed a grand coalition with the Grand National Party to guarantee the stability of the executive, rejected by both the GPN and the more progressive sector of the Uri Party. In his last year in office, 23 deputies left Uri to create a new group, later integrated into the Democratic Party.

With the center-left completely divided, the winner in the 2007 presidential election was the conservative Lee Myung-bak.

Relations with North Korea

Roh Moo-hyun launched the so-called "Peace and Prosperity policy", a continuation of Kim Dae-jung's "Sunshine policy" that sought peace with North Korea through a detente in relations.. To this end, he launched a multilateral diplomatic table in Beijing, in which representatives from the two Koreas, the United States, Russia, China and Japan would participate. Even so, North Korea was still considered by the United States as part of the "axis of Evil", and the misgivings between the two made any negotiation difficult. On their first visit to the White House, the US and South Korea agreed that they would not tolerate nuclear weapons in the north.

In February 2005, the North Korean government of Kim Jong-il confirmed that it was developing a nuclear weapons program and announced its departure from the diplomatic table. To prevent the negotiations from failing, Roh remained firm in his proposals for dialogue and asked Chinese President Hu Jintao to intercede with the North Koreans. In September of the same year, a joint statement was released by which North Korea agreed to dismantle its nuclear program, in accordance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, if the South supplied it with energy and the United States guaranteed a non-aggression pact. However, that agreement did not last long. Roh also disagreed with his American counterpart, George W. Bush, on the method of action in case diplomatic channels failed: while the US and Japan wanted to use force, South Korea was opposed for security reasons.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs during that period was Ban Ki-moon, who as of 2007 would become the Secretary General of the United Nations.

Roh changed his strategy on October 9, 2006, after North Korea carried out an underground nuclear test. The South Korean president broke off any dialogue, openly criticized North Korean leader Kim Jong-il as a threat to the Korean Peninsula, and allied with the United States to push for sanctions in the Security Council without resorting to force. From that moment on, the North Koreans once again appealed for a diplomatic solution. In 2007, North Korea again announced the closure of the nuclear program in exchange for humanitarian aid and the lifting of sanctions from Japan and the United States.

On October 2, 2007, Roh Moo-hyun and his wife crossed the Panmunjom border on foot and traveled to Pyongyang to attend a two-day summit with Kim Jong-il. A joint statement emerged from that meeting —Declaration of Peace and Prosperity—in which both governments committed to negotiating definitive peace, reducing military tension, and reaching agreements of all kinds with national reunification as the final objective.

Recent years

After leaving the presidency of South Korea, Roh and his family settled in a chalet in Bongha (South Gyeongsang), a town of 120 inhabitants that is very close to his birthplace.

In the last years of his life, Roh was involved in two corruption scandals that directly affected his family. On April 9, 2009, former presidential secretary Chung Sang-moon was arrested for accepting an alleged bribe of $6 million from businessman Park Yeon-cha, president of the Taekwang textile company. The operation had occurred in 2007., when he was still president, and the Prosecutor's Office suspected that Roh was directly responsible. Through his website, the politician apologized and admitted that his wife Kwon Yang-sook had accepted a million dollars for their son's expenses in United States, while the remaining 5 million were allegedly for investments by his niece's husband. According to his version, Kwon had requested the money through the presidential secretary, but he added that they were all loans and not bribes. In this way he also denied the accusations of an alleged influence peddling network under his command.

The same day that the judges called him to testify, Roh published a message addressed to his followers: «I have lost my moral cause with the facts that I have admitted so far. I only have to follow the legal procedure [...] I am no longer qualified to speak about democracy and justice. You should leave me.” During the trial he denied all the accusations.

On the other hand, the former president's older brother, Roh Gun-pyeong, had been sentenced to four years in prison for a separate corruption case, for accepting a bribe from the Daewoo E&C company. The fact The fact that both events were known at the same time attracted enormous expectation among society. In addition, President Lee Myung-bak and his party, the conservative Grand National Party, held Roh accountable for his management.

Suicide

Roh Moo-hyun committed suicide on May 23, 2009, at the age of 62. According to the official investigation, the former president had left his house at 5:45 to go hiking. An hour later, after confusing his bodyguard, he decided to jump off a 45-meter cliff. His body was found at 7:20 and rushed to Yangsan Hospital, where he died from serious injuries.

According to the police, Roh left a suicide note written for his family, in which he acknowledged not being able to withstand the social, political and media pressure in the face of open investigations.

The news caused a huge commotion in South Korea. President Lee Myung-bak lamented his death as "an incredible, regrettable and deeply sad event" and collaborated with those close to him to organize a state funeral for him. On the other hand, former president Kim Dae-jung, despite his serious condition health, declared that he had lost "a colleague with whom I have shared ten years of democratic governments." However, the most striking reaction was that of the president of North Korea, Kim Jong-il, who for the first time showed his sorrow over the death of a southern leader: "after hearing the news of the death of former President Roh Moo-hyun, I express my deep condolences to his widow and grieving family."

The state funeral, held on May 29 in Seoul, was attended by hundreds of thousands of people to pay their respects, most of them followers of the former president. As Roh had requested in his suicide note, the body was cremated in Gimhae and his remains rest in Bongha. Although Roh was no longer investigated after his death, the judicial case remained open for the rest of his family.

Months after the suicide, a memoir was published with texts written during and after his presidency.