4 ANALYSIS & FEATURE
When great leaders are ahead of their time
Punishment is occupational hazard for people with great political vision
By Chris Williams
The sad news of the death of
Kim Dae-jung evokes memories
of other great leaders who spent
time in prison. Punishment is
an occupational hazard for peo-
ple with great political vision.
“Good criminals” pervade the
history of visionary leadership.
The story of Jesus is the most
obvious example. He was devel-
oping the ethics of forgiveness,
justice and peace in a Roman-
Jewish political regime where
power was legitimized by injus-
tice, merciless torture and
killings.
Kim was following this tradi-
tion when he wrote in his prison
letters, “The happiness we de-
rive from becoming Christian
consists of loving, not hating,
our enemies.” He explained that
Jesus “was executed as a politi-
cal prisoner by the Jewish rul-
ing class and the Roman
Empire for standing up for the
rights of the oppressed and the
poor.”
The political and spiritual
leaders who are facing trial in
Iran this week are in the same
situation. They have the vision
to see that things must change,
and have tried to evolve the sys-
tem peacefully. Websites are re-
placing prison letters, and this
week opposition leader Mehdi
Karroubi complained of rape
and other abuses in prisons —
“Some young people were beat-
en to death just for chanting slo-
gans in post-election protests.”
In South Africa, Nelson
Mandela spent 27 years in
prison, 18 years on Robben
Island where he was only per-
mitted two visitors and two let-
ters each year. Yet he immerged
to become one of the most re-
spected statesmen in the world.
Earlier in South Africa,
Gandhi’s string of imprison-
ments started when he in-
fringed British racist — laws. As
an independence activist in
India, he was arrested and tried
for sedition, and sentenced to
six years — imprisonment in
1922. Later he, and the whole
Congress working — from prison. As for Mandela,
Committee, was arrested. He
spent another two years in
prison, and his wife died after
18 months in jail.
The fate of Aung san Suu Kyi
in the Burmese courts this week
follows the same pattern. The
charges are fictitious even un-
der Burmese law. The sentence
is to silence her and send a
warning to others who may
think like her.
Kim Dae-jung was banned
from politics and imprisoned for
five years in 1976 for helping
with an antigovernment mani-
festo. When Park Chung-hee
was assassinated in 1979, Kim
What is behind N.K.’s
conciliatory moves?
Reclusive North Korea con-
firmed yesterday that it would
send a delegation to the South
to mourn former President Kim
Dae-jung, who died earlier this
week, in the latest sign of eas-
ing tensions with the outside
world. North Korean leader
Kim Jong-il has made a num-
ber of conciliatory gestures this
month, marking a change in
tone by his defiant state after it
stoked tensions with a nuclear
test in May, missile launches
and threats to attack the
South.
Following are some questions
and answers about the moves:
Why is North Korea open-
ing up to the South?
The most obvious reason is
money.
Impoverished North Korea’s
economy, already broken by
years of mismanagement and
global sanctions, has taken fur-
ther hits this year from heavy
rains that hurt its crucial farm
sector, a loss of aid from the
South — roughly equal to about
5 percent of its estimated $17
billion a year GDP — caused by
political wrangling and new
U.N. sanctions for the nuclear
test aimed at cutting off its
arms trade that is a key source
of hard currency.
Chris Williams
● Chris Williams is based at the
Center for International
Education and Research,
University of Birmingham,
United Kingdom.
● He can be reached at
chrisunula@yahoo.com
was reinstated. But in 1980,
during the coup by Chun Doo-
hwan, Kim was arrested and
sentenced to execution on
charges of sedition and conspir-
acy. The sentence was commut-
ed to 20 years in prison.
Last year, the British
Library presented an exhibi-
tion of its historical holdings
around the theme of the Nobel
Prize. One of the most moving
exhibits was a small letter
written by Kim to his wife,
letters were limited, and so to
optimize the small amount of
paper he was permitted, his
writing is tiny. But he also used
another device to double the us-
age of the paper. Having filled
both sides in the normal way,
he simply turned the page 90
degrees and continued, writing
across his original words in a
way that was crowded but
could be deciphered.
But we remember brave men
more than brave women. Before
Kim, Yu Gwan-sun had suffered
imprisonment for organizing in-
dependence protests against the
Japanese in 1919. She was giv-
Why does the North need
the money?
North Korea uses foreign cur-
rency to buy items abroad need-
ed for its military and nuclear
programs as well as to purchase
perks for its ruling elite and the
military. Leader Kim, 67, has
moved forward with his succes-
sion plans after he apparently
suffered a stroke a year ago and
needs the backing of powerful
military and communist party
figures to secure a smooth path
to power for his designated heir,
his youngest son, analysts said.
North Korea may also be look-
ing to rebuild its main nuclear
plant that had been disabled
under a six-way nuclear deal.
Will the move have any im-
pact on stalled nuclear
talks?
The North’s recent moves
likely indicate Pyongyang may
be finished with its recent round
of provocations and signal it is
ready to try diplomacy. This will
likely ease concerns among in-
vestors who were worried about
troubles spinning out of control,
which could lead to heavy dam-
age to the globally vital
economies of North Asia.
Analysts do not expect any
breakthrough in the talks
en a seven year prison sentence,
aged 16. From inside Seodae-
mun prison she continued her
protests, but was beaten and
seemingly died from torture.
When the history of North
Korea is written, who will be
recognized as the “good crimi-
nals” who stood up to the
regime? Little known women
such as Cho Sung-hye, who was
returned to North Korea
against her wishes by China,
may be an example.
It is not just political leaders
who have been imprisoned and
punished for being ahead with
their ideas. Galileo’s support for
the view that the Earth was not
the center of the universe led to
problems with the Roman
Inquisition. In 1632 he was im-
prisoned for heresy, forced to say
he was wrong, and he then
spent the rest of his life under
house arrest.
Even the German composer J.
S. Bach suffered a similar fate.
His employer, the Duke of
Wiemer, would not let the bril-
liant composer leave his service
to visit England. Bach com-
plained strongly about the in-
among the two Koreas, China,
Japan, Russia and the United
States, especially after Pyong-
yang said it saw that process as
dead and signaled it wants to
talk directly with Washington.
Will Kim be seen as buck-
ling?
Quite the contrary. The visit
of Bill Clinton this month to se-
cure the freedom of the two
American journalists held in the
North was portrayed by the
North’s media as proof that the
country’s recent nuclear test
and missile launches were a
stunning victory for Kim and
that resulted in the former U.S.
president coming to Pyongyang
to pay tribute and negotiate.
By sending a delegation to the
funeral of Kim Dae-jung, whose
“Sunshine Policy” of engage-
ment with Pyongyang started a
steady stream of aid to the im-
poverished state, the North’s
leaders can show their anger at
current President Lee Myung-
bak who has effectively ended
the policy by linking handouts
to the North’s disarmament.
On Sunday, Kim Jong-il met
the chairwoman of the powerful
Hyundai Group, a major in-
vestor in the North for about a
decade, where they agreed to re-
sume stalled business ties. The
justice, and the Duke put him in
prison where he wrote the
“Little organ book.”
Following Galileo’s tradition
of scientific dissent, in the 1950s
Andrei Sakharov had worked to
stop nuclear proliferation. Like
Kim, in 1975 Sakharov was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1980 he was arrested for
protesting against the Soviet
Invasion of Afghanistan, and
was punished by being sent into
exile in Gorky.
The factor that creates “good
prisoners” is a fear of the power
of ideas. But the lesson from his-
tory is that you may be able to
imprison a person, but you can-
not imprison an idea.
The former Secretary-
General of the World Trade
Organization, Mike Moore,
wrote in his autobiography, “It
is wrong to be right too soon?”
He became the focus of civil so-
ciety challenges to unfair prac-
tices at the WTO, most notably
at the “Battle of Seattle” in
1999. But he was not responsi-
ble for initiating these polices.
And, because journalists often
copy stories from one another
Kim Ki-nam (left), secretary of the central committee of the ruling
Workers’ Party of North Korea, and Kim Yang-gon, department di-
rector of the central committee of the party. They will head the
North Korean delegation to mourn former President Kim Dae-
jung.
meeting will be trumpeted as a
tribute showing one of South
Korea’s leading conglomerates
has great respect for Kim, which
can serve as a jab at President
Lee.
How much could North
Korea earn?
By allowing tourism to re-
sume at the Mount Geumgang
resort, located in North Korea
and run by a Hyundai affiliate,
Pyongyang can receive tens of
millions of dollars by the end of
the year.
The North was also seeking to
increase wages and rents paid
at a joint factory park in the
instead of doing proper re-
search, the world did not know
his heart was with the demon-
strators.
I only learned later from an
interview with Moore that he
had been a social worker and
ardent trade’s unionist. Before
his time at the WTO, in a book
called “A brief history of the
future,” he had written,
“Citizens will not, and should
not, accept any form of inter-
national regulation or institu-
tion over which they have lit-
tle control.”
He argued that NGOs “should
be welcomed by professional
policy makers as part of democ-
ratization. They represent tens
of thousands of invisible net-
works circling and tying the
globe together. That’s good. It’s
not a danger. It’s the privatiza-
tion of influence from the pow-
erful to the many. God bless the
internet. Governments can no
longer control ideas or people.”
A year after writing this,
Moore was vilified at the Seattle
protests. Visionary leaders can
be in as much danger from those
they support, as from those they
Yonhap News
North Korean border city of
Gaeseong, run by the same
Hyundai affiliate, which could
again earn its leaders tens of
millions of dollars by year’s end.
There has been no indication a
deal was reached to increase
payments when Kim met
Hyundai Chairwoman Hyun
Jeong-eun.
By improving ties with South
Korea, the North may be hoping
for a resumption of food and fer-
tilizer aid. The South used to
send about 400,000 to 500,000
tons of rice and about 300,000
tons of fertilizer to the North
each year but that has been
halted since Lee took office in
February 2008. (Reuters)
FRIDAY AUGUST 21, 2009
challenge, especially if journal-
ists don’t do their homework
properly.
Last week another visionary
Korean was in London. The
composer Unsuk Chin had her
Cello Concerto premiered at the
prestigious Royal Albert Hall
Prom concerts. I was there with
a friend, Korean scholar Yun-joo
Lee. Chin’s music is not easy to
appreciate. It is technically bril-
liant, and likely to appeal more
to a music professor than to gen-
eral concert goers, but she was
warmly welcomed by an enthu-
siastic audience.
We started to discuss the oth-
er aspects. Chin was born in
1961, when Korea was a poor
country. It is remarkable that
she studied music, or even had
a piano, at that time. She went
to study in Germany, where she
is now based, which was a
brave move for any Korean, es-
pecially a girl. Her Cello
Concerto is the first piece of
Korean music to be played at
the Prom concerts, and even in
Britain women composers are
still not common.
In 60 years, Korea has moved
U.S. gambles on diplomatic
gains in N.K., Myanmar
WASHINGTON (AFP) — The
White House is willing to gam-
ble that high-profile missions by
former president Bill Clinton to
North Korea and Senator Jim
Webb to Myanmar this month
will boost efforts to engage
hardline foes, experts say.
But despite some early signs
of progress, critics say that en-
gagement can carry heavy risks
to U.S. policy and image abroad,
and that the potential for dam-
age to U.S. diplomatic efforts
outweighs the possible rewards.
President Barack Obama has
advocated talks with U.S. foes,
including with long-time adver-
saries Syria and Iran, and views
them as a way to coax
Pyongyang to renounce its nu-
clear ambitions and to urge the
military rulers in Myanmar to
release political prisoners.
Washington has also said it
was open to dialogue with
Tehran amid rising tensions
over its nuclear aims, and has
sent a series of military and
diplomatic missions to
Damascus in recent months to
resuscitate Middle East peace
prospects.
The administration described
as “private” visits Clinton’s dash
to North Korea where he se-
cured a pardon for two U.S.
journalists and Webb’s trip to
Myanmar where he brokered
the release of an American man
jailed after swimming to democ-
racy icon Aung San Suu Kyi’s
house.
from being one of the poorest to
one of the wealthiest countries
in the world, and from having
its women abused as “comfort
women,” to producing the first
woman independence activist,
to having a work by a woman
composer premiered at a Prom
Concert.
In her research explaining
how leadership has contributed
to such rapid positive change in
Korea, Yun-joo Lee uses the
term “cultural shift.” Korean
leaders like Kim were able to
“shift” Korean people from a cul-
ture of oppression and tired
Confucian traditions, towards a
community that is set to launch
a space rocket with technology
that is world-leading.
Chin’s music and Kim’s death
symbolize the importance of
“cultural shifts.” If she wants to
visit England from Germany,
however brilliant her music,
Chin is unlikely to end up in
prison like Bach. And whatever
the horrors he suffered from fel-
low Koreans, Kim did not, like
Yu and many other visionary
leaders, die in a prison cell.
That’s cultural progress.
But analyst John Ciorciari,
assistant professor at the
University of Michigan’s Ford
School of Public Policy, believes
the missions were “absolutely a
strategy” by the Obama admin-
istration.
“Engagement is worth doing
and worth trying but it is im-
portant for us to do it on our
terms and not to allow the rogue
regimes to dictate the terms for
our engagement,” he said.
“The question is, ‘Can we con-
tinue this form of engagement
in a way that puts us in the dri-
ver’s seat?’”
Critics say that dealing with
rogue regimes may only encour-
age the capture of more U.S. cit-
izens.
The military rulers in
Myanmar “have gotten this
burst of publicity and legitimacy
for freeing this American,” said
former U.N. ambassador John
Bolton, even though “their be-
havior is fundamentally illegiti-
mate.”
And in North Korea, Kim
Jong-il “is now put on an equiv-
alent level with a former presi-
dent of the United States,”
Bolton told AFP.
“The fact that the two exam-
ples take place so close together
in time just underlines the risk
that others will use Americans
to extract ransom.”
Meanwhile, the benefits for
the Obama administration and
its allies have been more sub-
tle.