Kim Dae-jung, 83, Ex-President of S. Korea, Is Dead

SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Dae-jung, a dissident who survived a death sentence and an assassination attempt by military dictators before winning the South Korean presidency and receiving a Nobel Peace Prize, died on Tuesday, according to Yonhap news agency. He was 83.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Pool Photo by Lise Aserud
Mr. Kim accepting the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize. More Photos »
Multimedia
Photographs
Kim Dae-jung, Former South Korean President, Dies
Enlarge This Image
Pool Photo by Yonhap
Kim Dae-jung, left, with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang, North Korea in 2000. More Photos >
Mr. Kim had been under treatment for pneumonia since July 13, and died of “heart failure caused by internal organ dysfunctions," Park Chang-il, president of Severance Hospital, said in a news conference, according to Yonhap.
Mr. Kim is survived by his wife, Lee Hee-ho, and three sons.
As president from 1998 till 2003, he was the first opposition leader to take power in South Korea.
Once vilified by his rivals as a Communist, Mr. Kim flew to Pyongyang in 2000 to meet the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in the first summit between the two Koreas. That meeting led to an unprecedented détente on the divided Korean Peninsula, which remains technically at war because no peace treaty was signed at the end of the Korean War in 1953.
Under Mr. Kim’s “Sunshine Policy,” the two Koreas breached their border to connect roads and railways. They built a joint industrial park. Two million South Koreans visited a North Korean mountain resort. And in a scene televised worldwide, aging Koreans separated by the war a half century ago tearfully hugged each other in temporary family reunions.
“Through his political dedication and persecution, he has come to symbolize South Korea’s democratization,” Kang Won-taek, a political scientist at Soongsil University in Seoul, said Tuesday. “He also broke long-standing taboos in South Korea — he led the liberals to the fore of South Korean politics after decades of conservative rule, and he changed North Korea’s status among South Koreans from an enemy to be vilified to someone that can co-exist with the South and can be engaged.”
But Mr. Kim “never overcame the limits” of an old-style South Korean political boss who had depended on and stoked regionalism and “privately owned political parities,” which he created and demolished for his own political gains, Mr. Kang said.
Wheelchair-bound and in and out of hospitals for treatment of pneumonia, Mr. Kim spent his last years lamenting his crumbling legacy. Tired of giving billions of dollars of aid and trade to the Communist North but getting little in return, South Koreans in 2007 abandoned Mr. Kim’s policies by electing Lee Myung-bak, a conservative leader who promised a tougher stance on Pyongyang.
Inter-Korean relations then chilled as North Korea tested nuclear weapons, first in 2006 and again in May, and as the United States, South Korea and Japan led the call for tighter sanctions on North Korea. Pyongyang retreated into belligerent isolation after years of hesitant steps toward openness, though Mr. Kim’s critics have dismissed those earlier gestures as a mere ploy by the North to wring more aid from the South.
Mr. Kim became a symbol of the South Korean struggle for democracy and the dream of reconciliation, and eventual reunification, with North Korea. When the Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize in 2000, it was in recognition of his struggle as a pro-democracy campaigner as well as his vision in overcoming five decades of mistrust and hostility to engineer the inter-Korean summit.
He was often praised by his Western supporters as the “Nelson Mandela of Asia,” although Mr. Kim had a more checkered reputation among his own people.
Mr. Kim was born on Dec. 3, 1925 to a farming family at Haeuido, a small island that was part of Cholla Province in the southwest, a region scorned by successive presidents who hailed from the rival Kyongsang Province in the southeast.
After attending a vocational high school, Mr. Kim dabbled in running a shipping company and a newspaper. In 1961, on his fifth try, he was elected to the national legislature. A week later, Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee staged a coup, the beginning of his 18-year iron-fisted rule.
A skilled rabble-rouser who spoke for political freedom and for the downtrodden, Mr. Kim quickly emerged as an opposition leader and Mr. Park’s nemesis, especially after he won 45 percent of the vote running against the incumbent dictator in his first presidential try in 1971.
His image as a persecuted dissident expanded abroad in 1973, when agents from KCIA, Mr. Park’s notorious spy agency, kidnapped him from a hotel room in Tokyo, where Mr. Kim was leading an exile movement for democracy in South Korea.