Category Archives: Christian Oliver

Obituary: Roh Moo-hyun

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By Christian Oliver in Seoul
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/571c01b4-4859-11de-8870-00144feabdc0.html
Published: May 24 2009 17:07 | Last updated: May 24 2009 17:07

Roh Moo-hyun, who committed suicide on Saturday, was devastated by an enquiry into his probity and had written on his blog of his shame at losing his reputation as South Korea’s only clean president. He was 62.

Prosecutors had been investigating payments of nearly $6m from a shoemaking tycoon to members of the family of Mr Roh, a leftist who left office last year. Even though prosecutors had not charged Mr Roh with corruption or tax evasion, by the time he threw himself from a mountainside, he was distraught about the damage to his reputation.

“I have lost the right to say anything about democracy, progress and justice. I fell into an abyss which I cannot escape,” he wrote earlier this month.

Within South Korea, Mr Roh’s supporters are portraying the case as a politically motivated assault by right-wingers. Although the sums involved are large, they are small by the standards of previous Korean presidents and the money is less clearly linked to direct political influence than in earlier scandals.

Mr Roh is popular mainly among Korea’s young people, who are sick of the traditional political caste. After his presidency, his home village became a pilgrimage site for day-trippers.

Of Mr Roh’s four predecessors, two were jailed for graft and the sons of two others were imprisoned on similar counts. Mr Roh was widely viewed as a highly principled man in a corrupt system. Many Koreans are viewing his suicide as an attempt to free his family from a painful investigation. If that was his motive, it worked.

Mr Roh was born to a poor farming family in Gimhae, south-east Korea in 1946. In a country where political success has normally been the preserve of graduates from Seoul’s top three universities, Mr Roh was an unusual autodidact who had spent nine years getting himself through the national bar exam.

He forged his reputation defending unionists and democracy activists during the turbulent democracy struggle of 1980s when the country was riven by bloody protests. In 1987, he spent three weeks in prison for supporting an illegal strike.

He entered parliament a year later and, ironically enough, gained stardom in a parliamentary hearing on the corruption of a former president, Chun Doo-hwan.

He became the protégé of Kim Dae-jung, president from 1998 to 2003, serving as his fisheries’ minister.

Although not expected to win the 2002 presidential election, he rode to victory on a wave of anti-Americanism, partly fired by the death of two Korean schoolgirls killed in an accident with a US military vehicle. He had campaigned on a platform of fighting corruption and reforming the mighty conglomerates that dominate the economy.

On becoming president, Mr Roh became well-known on the international stage for continuing Mr Kim’s “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with North Korea. Most famously he visited Pyongyang for a summit in 2007 and signed a raft of co-operation deals.

Mr Roh’s strategy was marred by the test of a North Korean nuclear weapon in 2006. However his diplomacy appeared to be paying dividends by the end of 2007 when international inspectors agreed North Korea was disabling its atomic facilities.

At heart a proud Korean nationalist, he was criticised for being too curt in some of his dealings with the US and Japan, the old imperial overlord.

On the domestic front, his presidency was marked by feuding, owing to his lack of a deep political support base. He was impeached in 2004 after publicly supporting his own party, contravening the constitutional neutrality of the president. He was reinstated after two months.

His government forged a trade deal with Washington, that has run into trouble under his successor, Lee Myung-bak.

He retired to the village of Bongha to work in an organisation dedicated to traditional farming methods. But the bribery scandal shattered his pursuit of rural tranquillity.

“Because of the state I am in, I cannot do anything. I cannot even write or read a book,” he wrote in his suicide note.

In the note, he also hankered after a return to nature.

“Do not be sad. Are not life and death all part of nature? … Please cremate me and leave a small tombstone near my home. I have thought about this for a long time.”

Additional reporting by Kang Buseong

Thousands in Korea mourn Roh’s death

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By Song Jung-a and Christian Oliver in Seoul
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f848bf9c-485d-11de-8870-00144feabdc0.html
Published: May 24 2009 13:46 | Last updated: May 24 2009 17:15

Tens of thousands of mourners gathered across South Korea to pay their final respects to Roh Moo-hyun, a former president who committed suicide at the weekend as he faced a growing corruption scandal.

Shortly after dawn on Saturday, Mr Roh, 62, went hiking on a mountain behind his home in Bongha, a village in the south-east of the peninsula. Police said he jumped from a cliff-face near the summit and suffered severe head injuries. He left a brief suicide note to his family.

South Koreans were stunned by the sudden death of Mr Roh, famed abroad for his attempts to build a rapprochement with communist North Korea. “This is hard to believe,” said Lee Myung-bak, the president. “It’s very sad and lamentable.”

Mr Roh, who left office in February 2008, had complained he was suffering from intense stress because of a scandal involving alleged corruption during his presidency. Prosecutors summoned him last month for an investigation into allegations that his family received $6m from a businessman while he was in office. His family has also been grilled.

Mr Roh’s supporters claimed the investigation was politically motivated to undermine the opposition and that the prosecutors’ probe into his family drove him to take his own life. The government on Sunday said the case against Mr Roh was closed but analysts speculate his suicide still threatens to catalyse the country’s political tensions.

Thousands of people queued up to burn incense and bow before a make-shift altar erected to Mr Roh in downtown Seoul. As Mr Roh was fond of smoking, many mourners left a cigarette rather than an incense stick. State radio reported 10,000 mourners had visited Bongha by Sunday morning.

“I am lost for words. His death is a great loss for the country,” said Kim Jae-suk, a 52-year-old housewife waiting for her turn in the tearful crowd gathered at the altar.

Mr Roh’s death came as prosecutors were due to decide whether to charge him. Mr Roh admitted his wife had taken money from a businessman to pay family debts. He had issued a public apology, but the scandal dealt a blow to his image as a clean politician in a rotten system.

Mr Roh, a former human rights lawyer, was elected in 2002 on a promise to reform powerful conglomerates, fight corruption, improve relations with Pyongyang and make Seoul more independent from the US, its long-standing military ally.

However, his five-year term proved turbulent, marked by political infighting and scandals. Mr Roh was impeached by lawmakers in early 2004 over a breach of election rules but was two months later reinstated after the Constitutional Court overturned the move.

His death may rekindle tensions between predominantly young liberals and older conservatives in South Korea, where President Lee, a conservative former businessman, came to power last year after a decade of liberal rule.

“A controversy is flaring up over whether the prosecutors were responsible for his death. If the government fails to handle this well, then the probe could be seen as a political revenge against Mr Roh. In that case, it will be a huge political burden for Mr Lee,” said Ham Sung-deuk, a politics professor at Korea University.

Seoul food aims for top table

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By Christian Oliver
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b56f1ae0-417d-11de-bdb7-00144feabdc0.html
Published: May 15 2009 19:28 | Last updated: May 15 2009 19:28

Across the world, every octopus should be quaking in his rock-pool; Korean chefs are going global.

By 2017, we will not just be dialling out for pizza Margherita and chicken korma, we will be hankering after tongue twisters such as samgyeopsal and doenjang-jjigae – sizzling pork-belly and spicy bean-paste stew. Those of a hardier constitution may even have tried dog soup and wriggling tentacles.

As part of an ambitious national branding scheme intended to awaken the world to the joys of an undiscovered hermit kingdom, South Korea’s government says it is planning to make its cuisine one of the world’s top five over the next eight years.

It is a very Korean goal. Koreans love league tables and outstripping performance targets. It is why they do so well. But the desire to produce one of the world’s top five cuisines also illustrates Korea’s peculiar tendency of seeking to quantify the unquantifiable.

The culture ministry does have a more quantifiable target of increasing Korean restaurants worldwide about sevenfold. The fluid strategy involves a sort of Korean Michelin star scheme, Korean cooking classes at Cordon Bleu schools and tweaking recipes to suit international palates.

Even if that works, is Korea then in the world’s top five? Who will measure such a subjective notion? If one starts counting restaurants, should you include the thousands of restaurants that serve dishes from all over the world, including the odd Korean dish?

Then there is the prickly issue of food from a region, not a country. Korea might claim victory over Morocco, Tunisia or Algeria on restaurant count but, in the real food wars, has fermented cabbage really defeated tajine and couscous?

None of this matters. It is an output target and not to be questioned. Much of this Korean love of pecking orders hails back to the educational system. Fear of nepotism means Koreans prefer that exams be reduced to “right” and “wrong” questions, partly explaining why the humanities are so weak. You may flunk exams but at least the mark did not depend on the whim of an arbitrary or corrupt examiner. Ranking people or things has become overly acceptable because it was seen as fair at school.

Korean officials now maintain the illusion that league tables can nail subjective issues. Their graphs can reflect their own opinions about certain themes, rather than objective data collection. The culture of statistics is pervasive and the otherwise truculent domestic press whimpers before them. An international survey ranking Korea only 50th in mothers’ welfare received wide but bizarrely uncritical coverage.

Korea’s culture ministry concedes there is no real ranking system for foods but wants random people surveyed in 2017 to say Korean food is in their top five. As with many things presented as statistics in Korea, it is ultimately a question of raw emotion.

Gulag horrors and showstoppers

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By Christian Oliver
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7b613b4c-2ae6-11de-8415-00144feabdc0.html
Published: April 17 2009 03:00 | Last updated: April 17 2009 03:00

On entering North Korea’s brutal gulags, inmates have to sign a declaration that they will never tell anyone what goes on there.

Jung Sung-san is one of the few men ever to get the chance to break that vow of silence and broadcast the hidden horrors of the reclusive communist dictatorship. He has chosen to do so through the surprising medium of stage musicals, delivering his message through toe-tapping tunes and exuberant dancing troupes.

Jung escaped to Seoul in 1994 and his first musical, Yoduk Story , opened in 2006. The power ballads were interspersed with unnervingly graphic depictions of rape, floggings and shootings inside an infamous penal camp. The lead characters all came to a sticky end.

“I wanted to shock South Koreans by letting them know that this is the truth,” he says at the rehearsals for this year’s extravaganza, Great Show , as the glamorous cast bursts into another feisty song-and-dance routine in front of the mirrors of the rehearsal room.

Great Show makes for jollier family viewing during an economic downturn that has pole-axed South Korea. Jung has branched out into romance and comedy to give a more human picture of ordinary North Koreans, who are often casually dismissed as brainwashed automata.

“South Koreans are totally indifferent towards North Korea and I want to change this sentiment,” says Jung. He craves a reunification of the peninsula but feels he might get more sympathy for his work abroad than in Seoul; he is in exploratory talks about taking the show to London.

This year’s musical tells the tale of a young man on national service arrested for watching a contraband video of a South Korean pop singer, with whom he falls in love. He avoids the death penalty by accepting a mission to abduct her for the delectation of Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s leader.

The plot is not as crazy as it sounds. Kim, a film buff and former official propagandist, did indeed kidnap one of South Korea’s top directors and his wife, a film star, in 1978. Jung says the plot was more directly inspired by a story he had heard of party officials who were jailed for getting hold of a South Korean pornographic movie. The South Korean videos and DVDs that are smuggled over the Chinese border into the North have had a profound effect on the country’s political mindset, forcing the North Korean government to redraft its catalogue of propaganda about its rich democratic neighbour. Pyongyang can no longer tell its people that the South is as poor as the North – it must now resort to accusing it of being a morally bankrupt Babylon.

Great Show ‘s plot also overlaps with Jung’s own story, as he was arrested for listening to a South Korean shortwave broadcast – officially, North Koreans can only buy radios set to the one approved state frequency. For more than two months, he was in a penal camp dubbed “Station of the Wolves” because all that could be heard was the howling of inmates. He escaped across the Chinese border after a van carrying him to another camp crashed on a road made slippery by heavy rains. “There were two men who were killed helping me escape,” he says, “and I am dedicating this show to them.”

On arriving in Seoul, he went back to furthering his knowledge of cinema, which he had studied in Pyongyang. There he had been trained in the Soviet tradition, making a graduation film on coal miners trapped in a collapsed shaft who keep their spirits up by singing patriotic songs in honour of the country’s leaders.

Although North Korean black-market favourites now include Desperate Housewives and Mr Bean , Jung had seen no films from outside the socialist sphere before fleeing except for a few of Sean Connery’s outings as James Bond.

“Arriving in Seoul was a huge culture shock. It was like the difference between heaven and earth. Instead of just revolutionary songs, I could listen to pop, jazz and dance,” Jung says. However, his big problem was – and still is – money. Directing musicals initially appealed because they cost only a tenth of the price of a film to produce. Even so, the money needed was enormous for a refugee. When raising finance for Yoduk Story , he used one of his kidneys as collateral on a loan.

The musical was first performed during the presidency of Roh Moo-hyun, who was trying to pursue a “sunshine policy” of rapprochement with the North. This conciliatory stance from the government made it very difficult to find backers for a musical that was so critical of the North’s human rights record.

Nevertheless, the show had a successful run in South Korea, staging 100 performances in Seoul before going on tour to the US. There the Korean-language musical failed to fill the theatres, in spite of considerable media and political support.

But Jung resented the way Yoduk Story became a political football in Seoul. Members of the conservative Grand National Party, opposed to Roh’s détente with Pyongyang, made sure the media knew they were attending performances of the musical. Jung makes it clear that his shows receive no financial backing from any political group and that he depends exclusively on ticket sales.

In spite of his ordeals in the North, Jung expresses simmering frustration with the South – paradoxically, he fears that the unification he yearns for will destroy a certain innocence in his homeland: “There will be a flow of low-quality, capitalist culture pouring in.”

In one of the scenes in Great Show , the North Korean national serviceman arrives in the heart of Seoul on his kidnapping mission. He is dazed by the racing tides of preoccupied people, clutching their Starbucks coffees, texting and barking into their mobile phones. He cannot get anyone’s attention and loses his temper among the tetchy, hurried pedestrians.

“I really miss North Korea and I want to go back there one day. In South Korea you always have to be street-wise, a fox. You lose your purity – but whenever I meet defectors from the North, they still have that innocence to them.” Additional reporting by Song Jung-a . Performances of ‘Great Show’ continue until May 3 at the Goyang Aramnuri Theatre in Seoul, tel +82 2 1577 7766, www.artgy.or.kr

Korean actress’s suicide letter sparks sex-for-favours anger

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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6851b7d2-1d8c-11de-9eb3-00144feabdc0.html

South Koreans who watched Jang Ja-yeon playing an alluring villain twice a week in the nation’s favourite soap opera assumed the 26-year-old star had it all.

But since she hanged herself from banisters this month, the country has had to look hard at the seedy underbelly of an entertainment industry whose films and soap operas have won legions of fans across Asia.

A week before her suicide, she wrote a seven-page letter chronicling the sexual favours needed to achieve stardom in dramas of the Hallyu, or Korean Wave.

Police have opened an inquiry into 12 people, including producers, agents and studio executives. The fair trade commission is promising a rigorous examination of slave contracts in the entertainment business.

The case has become the focus of a national scandal and women’s groups view it as a broader test of accountability for a country where, they argue, an unchecked cabal of middle-aged men calls the shots, sealing deals in bordellos and hostess bars.

Lee Eun-sang, deputy director of Korea’s sexual violence relief centre, hoped the police inquiry would prove a landmark case in cracking down on abuse.

“The practice of powerful figures using their status for getting sex in return for favours is rampant in Korean society at large,” she said. “Miss Jang’s case can be the starting place for setting up a real institutional framework. In the past, the rumours never got as far as a proper investigation.”

The story Jang tells in her letter and the details the police have released smack of a soap opera. Orphaned since her school days when her parents were killed in a car crash, she says she was at the mercy of studio bosses who pimped her off and used her to serve drinks on a golf trip to Thailand.

In a trial by the public, the men she named have already been identified on websites, sparking an outpouring of vitriol.

But the case is far from clear-cut. Kim Sung-hoon, the artist’s agent, was cast initially as the villain of the piece and efforts are under way to secure his extradition from Japan, but he protests his innocence.

In late February, Jang visited Yoo Jang-ho, her former manager, in whose office she wrote the accusatory letter. Mr Yoo then gave copies of this letter to Jang’s family and leading media. The state-run Korean Broadcasting System, which shows Jang’s soap opera Boys over Flowers , aired extracts from the letter.

Mr Kim told Korean media the letter was an attempt by Mr Yoo, his rival, to bring him down. Although the police first assumed that Jang killed herself because of public humiliation, the star’s family contests that she felt hounded after Mr Yoo leaked the document.

Park Mun-yeong, a former KBS producer, said the suicide was also a tragic side-effect of a lack of genuine competition in Korean media that was stifling the arts.

“The current system of three [non-cable] broadcasters was established when the economy was a 10th of its current size. Therefore, a TV appearance has become synonymous with success and people are eager to perform at all costs,” he wrote in the Joong-Ang daily. “Actors and actresses who do not make frequent appearances are treated as losers. To avoid this, they often have to go too far.”

Korea’s government is trying to pass a media reform bill to increase competition but the measure is being resisted by leftwing politicians and unions.

Additional reporting by Kang Buseong