Tag Archives: Suicide

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.

Obituary: Roh Moo-hyun (BBC)

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Former South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, who has died after falling into a ravine, was a controversial figure whose administration ended last year dogged by scandal and infighting.

At the time of his death, which police are treating as a possible suicide, 62-year-old Mr Roh was under investigation for receiving millions of dollars in bribes from a businessman while in office.

With his relative youth, lowly beginnings and promises to root out endemic political corruption, he seemed when he took power in 2003 to be the new start the country needed.

But his term in office was a rollercoaster ride. His Uri party was hit by scandal and in-fighting, and there was fierce public opposition to several of his policies.

He was even suspended early in 2004, after parliament voted to impeach him over a breach of election rules, but the Constitutional Court later overturned the move and he was reinstated.

Campaigning lawyer

A human rights lawyer by trade, President Roh first made headlines soon after he entered politics in 1988, when he grilled top officials from the previous administration during a special parliamentary hearing on graft.

He had been one of the leaders of the “June Struggle” in 1987, against the dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan. He served a three-week jail sentence that year for abetting striking workers.

Born to poor peasant parents in the south-eastern region of Kimhae, Mr Roh initially studied law as a means of escaping poverty.

But in 1981 his work brought him in contact with a case of human rights abuse which he says changed his aspirations forever.

Mr Roh was asked to defend one of two dozen students arrested for possessing banned literature, for which they were detained and tortured for almost two months.

“When I saw their horrified eyes and their missing toenails, my comfortable life as a lawyer came to an end,” Mr Roh is quoted as saying.

Following nationwide protests which pushed Mr Chun out of office, Mr Roh entered politics by winning election to the National Assembly as a member of a pro-democracy party led by the activist Kim Young-sam, who later became president.

Mr Roh was helped to leadership by a public disillusioned with scandal and South Korea’s close relationship with the US.

Ironically, it was scandal and political infighting that also blighted Mr Roh’s time in office.

Mass defections

Within a year of taking office, Mr Roh and his supporters formed the Uri Party ( which means Our Party).

But in March 2004, parliament voted to impeach Mr Roh for breaching a minor election law, and he was forced into two months of political limbo.

The impeachment came about because the conservative opposition – which at the time dominated South Korea’s parliament – said the president had contravened the country’s voting rules by openly supporting the Uri party in the run-up to assembly elections.

The move humiliated Mr Roh, worried markets and drove thousands of people onto the streets in protest.

In May the Constitutional Court overturned the verdict, saying Mr Roh had violated the law, but not gravely enough to warrant his removal from office.

The Uri Party made a strong showing in assembly elections that April, and the president emerged in a much stronger position to push his reformist agenda in parliament.

But a series of unpopular decisions, including sending Korean troops to Iraq, a failed attempt to move the capital from Seoul and the continuation of a policy of engagement with North Korea saw Mr Roh’s popularity ratings plummet again.

His government was also accused of incompetency over its handling of the economy and in foreign affairs.

Last month, Mr Roh was questioned over allegations that he had taken millions of dollars in bribes from a wealthy businessman. He later apologised for the scandal.

In a statement posted on his website, he admitted his wife received a substantial sum of money from the businessman, but suggested it was not a bribe but a payment to help her settle a debt.

Mr Roh leaves his wife and childhood sweetheart Kwon Yang-sook, a son and a daughter.

He said he enjoyed mountain climbing and bowling. He spent his two months of impeachment reading and hiking around the hills behind his official residence.

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