SEOUL, South Korea — Moon Jae-in, a human rights lawyer who favors dialogue with North Korea, declared victory in the South Korean presidential election on Tuesday, after his rivals appeared to concede defeat.
His
victory would return the liberals to power after nearly a decade in the
political wilderness and set up a potential rift with the United States
over the North’s nuclear weapons program.
“I
will be a president for all the people,” Mr. Moon said in a nationally
televised speech before a group of cheering supporters gathered in
central Seoul, the capital. He said he would work with political rivals
to create a country where “justice rules and common sense prevails.”
Mr.
Moon was leading in the vote-counting by a comfortable margin around
midnight local time, though official results were not expected until
well into Wednesday.
The vote caps a remarkable national drama in which a corruption scandal, mass protests and impeachment forced a South Korean president from office for the first time in almost 60 years, leaving the conservative establishment in disarray and its former leader in jail.
Continue reading the main story
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Moon, 64, a son of North Korean refugees, faces the challenge of enacting changes to limit the power of big business
and address the abuses uncovered in his predecessor’s downfall, while
balancing relations with the United States and China and following
through on his promise of a new approach to North Korea.
Mr. Moon’s victory would scramble the geopolitics of the standoff over North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.
Even as it is urging the world to step up pressure on Pyongyang, the
Trump administration now faces the prospect of a key ally — one with the
most at stake in any conflict with the North — breaking ranks and
adopting a more conciliatory approach.
Mr.
Moon has argued that Washington’s reliance on sanctions and “maximum
pressure” has been ineffective and that it is time to give engagement
and dialogue with the North another chance, an approach favored by
China. He has also called for a review of the Pentagon’s deployment of an antimissile defense system in South Korea that the Chinese government has denounced.
Mr.
Moon’s position on North Korea is a sharp departure from that of his
two immediate predecessors, conservatives who tended to view anything
less than strict enforcement of sanctions against the North as
ideologically suspect.
While
he condemned “the ruthless dictatorial regime of North Korea” during
his campaign, Mr. Moon also argued that South Korea must “embrace the
North Korean people to achieve peaceful reunification one day.”
“To
do that, we must recognize Kim Jong-un as their ruler and as our
dialogue partner,” he said. “The goal of sanctions must be to bring
North Korea back to the negotiating table.”
David
Straub, a former director of Korean affairs at the State Department and
a senior fellow at the Sejong Institute, a think tank near Seoul,
warned of “serious policy differences between the U.S. and South Korean
presidents” over North Korea and related issues. He added that they
could lead to “significantly increased popular dissatisfaction with the
United States in South Korea.”
China,
on the other hand, is likely to welcome Mr. Moon’s election, which may
make it easier for it to deflect pressure from the United States to get
tough on North Korea and strengthen its argument that Washington must
address the North’s concerns about security.
Some
analysts suggest Mr. Moon’s victory would lower the temperature of the
North Korean standoff, prompting Washington and Pyongyang to pause and
assess the effect of the new government in Seoul on their policies.
Satellite images indicate the North has been getting ready to conduct a sixth nuclear test, and the Trump administration has engaged in a heated campaign of implied threats and military posturing to stop it.
Mr.
Moon’s view of North Korea echoes the approach of the two liberal
presidents who held power from 1998 to 2008 and pursued a so-called
sunshine policy toward the North that included diplomatic talks, family
reunions and joint economic projects, such as the Kaesong industrial park in North Korea, near the demilitarized zone.
But
that era was punctuated by the North’s first nuclear test, conducted in
2006, and much has changed on the Korean Peninsula since.
With
four more tests under its belt, each more powerful than the last, and a
rapidly advancing ballistic missile program, North Korea poses a
greater threat to the South and appears to be closing in on nuclear arms
capable of striking the United States. Mr. Moon also faces a mercurial
adversary in Kim Jong-un, 33, who took power in Pyongyang after the death of his father in late 2011.
Critics
say any attempt by Mr. Moon to revive the sunshine policy — perhaps by
reopening Kaesong, which his disgraced predecessor, Park Geun-hye, shut down last year
— would give North Korea a lifeline it could use to reduce its economic
dependence on China, weakening Beijing’s leverage over it and
strengthening Mr. Kim’s hand.
The
American missile defense system, known as Terminal High Altitude Area
Defense, or Thaad, presents another test for Mr. Moon. It went into operation
last week, and Mr. Moon has complained that its deployment was rushed
to present him with a fait accompli. But if he tries to undo it, he
could strain the alliance with Washington while leaving the impression
of bowing to Chinese pressure.
That
could be politically fatal in South Korea, where the public, across the
political spectrum, is wary of the country looking “obsequious” toward
big powers. Many South Koreans complained that the United States had
foisted Thaad on their nation, but they also fumed about retaliatory economic measures taken by China in response to its deployment.
Acknowledging
the complexity of the challenges he faces, Mr. Moon has been careful to
say that when he promised to review the Thaad deployment, he did not
necessarily mean he would reverse it.
And
while he has said South Korea must “learn to say no” to Washington, he
has emphasized that any diplomatic overture toward North Korea will be
grounded in the South’s alliance with the United States. He has also
often expressed gratitude to the United States for protecting the South
from Communism and supporting its transformation into a prosperous
democracy.
Mr. Moon’s parents fled Communist rule during the Korean War and were among tens of thousands evacuated from the North Korean port of Hungnam
by retreating American Navy vessels in the winter of 1950. They often
told him about the Christmas sweets that American troops handed out to
those packed into the ships during the journey.
Mr.
Moon was born in January 1953, after his parents had resettled in a
refugee camp on an island off the southern coast of South Korea. His
father was a handyman, and his mother peddled eggs, coal briquettes and
black-market American relief goods.
Asked
by the daily Dong-A Ilbo what he would do with a crystal ball, Mr. Moon
said last month that he would show his 90-year-old mother what her
North Korean hometown looked like now and how her relatives there were
faring. “If Korea reunifies, the first thing I would do is to take my
mother’s hand and visit her hometown,” he said. “Perhaps, I could retire
there as a lawyer.”
In
the 1980s, Mr. Moon defended student and labor activists persecuted
under military rule and forged a lifelong friendship with a fellow
lawyer, Roh Moo-hyun. When Mr. Roh was elected president
in 2002, declaring that he would be the first South Korean president
not to “kowtow to the Americans,” Mr. Moon served as his chief of staff.
Many
conservatives’ misgivings about Mr. Moon stem from his association with
Mr. Roh. But some former American officials who dealt with the Roh
government remember Mr. Moon as more practical and flexible than other
officials. In his memoir, Mr. Moon defended Mr. Roh’s decision to sign a
trade agreement with the United States and dispatch troops to Iraq over
the protests of Mr. Roh’s liberal political base.
Mr. Roh completed his five-year term in 2008 and committed suicide the next year as prosecutors investigated corruption allegations against his family.
“It
was the most painful day in my life,” Mr. Moon wrote in his memoir,
describing his friend’s death as “tantamount to a political murder” and
placing the blame for it on a political vendetta by a new conservative
government that wanted to discredit him.
Mr.
Moon entered the 2012 presidential race vowing to finish Mr. Roh’s work
by fighting corruption, the influence of the country’s family-owned
conglomerates, and what he called “politically motivated prosecutors” —
and by seeking peace with North Korea.
But he narrowly lost to Ms. Park,
the daughter of the South Korean military strongman Park Chung-hee, and
spent the next four years as a leader of the opposition.
In
a recent interview, Mr. Moon recalled how he visited Mr. Roh’s
predecessor, Kim Dae-jung, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and architect
of the sunshine policy, shortly before Mr. Kim died in 2009.
Mr.
Kim was so feeble by then that he had to be fed by his wife, and he was
heartbroken. He had devoted much of his career to building trust with
North Korea through humanitarian and economic aid, and the conservatives
in power were dismantling that legacy and embracing sanctions against
the North.
“President
Kim said he could not believe his eyes,” Mr. Moon recalled. “In what I
thought was his dying wish, he asked us to take the government back.”
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment