Benigno and Kim
Christopher Hitchens
On 10 March 1983, there was rather an affecting meeting at the Faculty Club of Harvard University. Present were Be- nigno Aquino, the leader of the democratic opposition in the Philippines, and Kim Dae Jung, who held the same honour in the case of South Korea. Both men had been exiled from their own countries, and both were beginning to realise that exile was Making them stale. Both had tried to change American policy towards their re- spective dictatorships, and both had found- ered on the reefs of realpolitik. Both were liberals who saw themselves as the centrist alternative to a radical anti-American in- surgency.
In Our Man in Havana, Captain Segura informs Wormald that there are some People (Wormald included) who belong to the 'non-torturable' class. Neither Aquino nor Kim can have had many illusions about the regimes which they were confronting, but both of them believed in a certain limited autonomy; a margin within which Political dissent could be useful and hon- ourable. Aquino told Kim over lunch that exile led to impotence and that he, for one, was going home. The subsequent scene at Manila airport is one that nobody is likely to have forgotten. All efforts to deflect the blame for that vile murder from the person of Ferdinand Marcos have been vain. Not only does the evidence of his own judiciary noplicate him directly, but so do his efforts at a cover-up. In cases like these one should bear in mind, as Eric Ambler has it in The Mask of Dimitrios, that what matters is not who pulled the trigger but Who paid for the bullet.
A few days ago, I went to visit Kim Dae Jung in the small office he maintains in Pringfield, Virginia. As we were talking, he handed me a press release bearing that day's date. It announced that 'on or about 31 January', Kim would fly home to Seoul and challenge General Chun Doo Hwan to restore democracy. He would not be more exact about the date and he would not, he added with a slight smile, be flying Korean airlines. KAL has in the past been an accomplice of the regime, on one famous occasion registering drugged and kidnap- ped dissidents as 'baggage' on their way home to imprisonment and torture. Kim may be in the `non-torturable' class, but if so it is one of the few exemptions that he has been granted. His political career has been punctuated by almost every varie- ty of state terror. Having been official government spokesman for the short-lived democratic system which replaced the dic- tator Syngman Rhee, he was elected to the South Korean National Assembly three
times between 1963 and 1971. In 1971 he was chosen as the presidential candidate of the New Democratic Party, to run against the incumbent Park Chung Hee. (That was the last year that a South Korean presiden- tial election had more than one candidate. Park changed the constitutional provision that denied him a third term, and ruled as a full-fledged despot until murdered by his own security chief in 1979.) The 1971 election was marked by the most promiscuous ballot-rigging and in- timidation, but even the government's own tally showed that Kim Dae Jung had taken 46 per cent of the vote. This was a humiliation for Park, who did not wait long to try and expunge it. Kim's car was run off the road by a Korean CIA truck, killing three people and leaving Kim with injuries to his hip which trouble him to this day. Then, in 1973, he was abducted by the KCIA during a visit to Japan and told that he was to be executed. An aeroplane buzzed the kidnappers' ship, which seems to have discouraged them from dropping Kim overboard. He believes that the plane was American, and that it saved his life. To this day, he remains strongly convinced that the United States is a basically free and democratically model society, which in South Korea is betraying its own values rather than defending them.
Having returned home, or been returned there, Kim was clapped in jail. He shuttled between prison and house arrest for the remainder of the decade, until the brief `Korean spring' that followed Park's assas- sination. Kim was released from prison, and spoke to rapturous crowds all over the country. There were several months in which it seemed that a genuine election might still be held. But General Chun Doo Hwan, the head of military intelligence, vetoed the idea. Brushing aside a feeble protest from Jimmy Carter, he installed martial law and sent his troops to crush an unarmed rebellion in the city of Kwangju. Estimates of the death toll go as high as 2,000. Kim Dae Jung was seized and brought before a military court, which sentenced him to death for treason — a charge described by the US State Depart- ment as 'far-fetched'. After energetic rep- resentations from both the outgoing Carter and the incoming Reagan, Kim's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, then to 20 years, and finally (in 1982) to exile. Kim came to America and took up a post as a Fellow at Harvard.
In conversation, he reveals himself as a Christian Democrat. He is a Catholic, as are about one in five South Koreans. He is in favour of free enterprise. He saw enough of the North Koreans during the war to be a convinced anti-communist. He seems baffled by the refusal of the United States government to distance itself from the discredited and odious government of General Chun. It is not as if the Americans have no power to influence the situation. As a result of the United Nations mandate, the real commander of the South Korean armed forces is an American general. In 1960, for example, it was General Magrud- er. When asked by the despotic Syngman Rhee to shoot demonstrating students, he urged his soldiers to remain neutral. But in 1980, his successor, General Whitcomb, gave permission for elite border units to take part in the brutal coup that installed General Chun. In Kim's opinion, this and other mistakes will one day lead to an eruption of anti-Americanism.
All this, of course, is just like seeing an old movie for the umpteenth time. A hateful regime establishes a cosy rela- tionship with Washington. Arms sales go briskly. Senators are 'influenced'. Media junkets are arranged with lavish hands. The embassy has a Christmas gift list a mile or two long. American companies get cheap labour and generous tax holidays. Professors and pundits intone about the `strategic importance' of the country, and about the moral necessity to be seen to stand by old friends. The Communists are ever-vigilant for an opening (this is no exaggeration in the Korean case, with Kim Il Sung's demented court only a few miles away). But then the roof begins, as if in slow motion, to fall in. Crowds fill the streets. The American bases are of no use against internal, civilian dissent. Past the eleventh hour, the discredited regime offers 'concessions'. New York media moguls hunt frantically through their Rolodexes for the name of that exile opposition leader who once appeared on a chat show. But it's too late. A demonstra- tion of American will has been found necessary, and the United States goes down with the ship. The debate begins
about 'who lost China? Or Vietnam, or Iran, or Nicaragua, or the Philippines?' Usually, those who warned of the impend- ing events are held to be blameworthy.
Kim hopes to spare his country from this cycle. But the Chun junta doesn't seem interested. It has announced that, if he returns, he will have to serve out the remainder of his 20-year sentence. The State Department has said, ludicrously in view of the entrenched American pre- sence, that all this is South Korea's 'inter- nal affair'. Others, less insouciant, are planning to go on Kim's plane and see fair play. One person who has volunteered already is the recently widowed Mrs Cora- zon Aquino.
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