Kim Young-sam, Former President of South Korea, Dies at 87
By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Young-sam, the former president of South Korea who replaced the last of the country’s military leaders, purged politicized generals and introduced a landmark reform aimed at transparency in financial transactions, died on Sunday in Seoul. He was 87.

The cause was sepsis and heart failure, said Oh Byung-hee, the chief of Seoul National University Hospital, where Mr. Kim was admitted with a fever on Friday. He had been treated for a series of strokes and pneumonia in recent years.

Mr. Kim, an outspoken critic of military dictators from the 1960s through the 1980s, was president from 1993 to 1998.

He was one of the “three Kims” — the others were former President Kim Dae-jung and former Prime Minister Kim Jong-pil — who played major roles during South Korea’s turbulent transition from dictatorship to democracy.

Mr. Kim was born on Dec. 20, 1927, a son of a rich anchovy fisherman on Geoje Island, off the southeast coast of South Korea, when all of the Korean Peninsula was a Japanese colony.

He was elected to Parliament at 26 and developed a following as an opposition leader famed for his daring criticism of Park Chung-hee, who seized power in a coup in 1961 and tortured and imprisoned dissidents before his assassination in 1979.

Mr. Park had Mr. Kim expelled from Parliament for criticizing his dictatorship during an interview with The New York Times in 1979. Mr. Kim’s colleagues resigned from Parliament in protest, and huge antigovernment demonstrations broke out in Mr. Kim’s political home ground in the southeast. Mr. Park was assassinated by his spy chief later that year.

Mr. Kim’s travails continued when Mr. Park was replaced by Chun Doo-hwan, an army major general who engineered a coup to fill the power vacuum left by his patron’s death. Mr. Kim was barred from politics and put under house arrest. He once staged a 23-day hunger strike.

“Dawn will come even if the rooster is strangled,” he once said, a saying that became a catchphrase for Koreans yearning for democracy.

Mr. Kim had a lifetime rivalry with Kim Dae-jung, a fellow opposition leader from the southwest Jeolla region. They both ran for president in 1987 in South Korea’s first democratic election and split the opposition vote, allowing Mr. Chun’s handpicked successor, Roh Tae-woo, another former general, to win.

In 1990, Mr. Kim merged his party with Mr. Roh’s military-backed governing party in a move widely condemned as a betrayal of pro-democracy forces.

The merger was a political marriage of convenience: Mr. Roh wanted a parliamentary majority, and Mr. Kim, who distrusted Kim Dae-jung as much as he detested the military dictators, believed that he would never win the presidency as long as the other Mr. Kim competed with him for the opposition vote.

Once in the governing party, whose top hierarchy included many former generals, Mr. Kim and his followers, vastly outnumbered by rival factions but all seasoned veterans in party politics, quickly expanded their ranks and dominated the party.

Mr. Kim beat Kim Dae-jung in the 1992 election to become the first civilian leader in South Korea in more than three decades.

Although he won with the support of the military-backed party, Mr. Kim did not forget his roots. He purged a clique of politically ambitious army officers who went by the name Hanahoe, which roughly meant “an association of one-for-all, all-for-one.” The officers were forced to retire.

Mr. Kim’s purge culminated in the arrest and conviction of Mr. Chun and Mr. Roh on mutiny and corruption charges for their roles in the 1979 coup and a bloody crackdown on a pro-democracy uprising the following year, as well as for collecting hundreds of millions of dollars each in bribes from businessmen. (Mr. Kim later pardoned them and released them from prison.)

Mr. Kim also barred South Koreans from owning bank accounts under pseudonyms. That change is considered a critical step in South Korea’s long-running campaign against corruption; bank accounts under borrowed names had been widely used by politicians and businessmen to hide slush funds.

But Mr. Kim’s time in office was also marked by missed opportunities.

In his memoir, Mr. Kim said he persuaded President Bill Clinton to cancel the United States’ plan to bomb North Korea’s nuclear facilities in 1994 for fear of war.

“Looking back,” Mr. Kim said in an interview in 2009, “I think the North Koreans think they can say whatever they want because no matter what they do, the Americans will never attack them.”

The 1994 nuclear crisis was defused when former President Jimmy Carter met with the North Korean leader at the time, Kim Il-sung, in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, and brokered what would have been the first summit meeting between the leaders of the two Koreas. But Kim Il-sung died of heart failure in July 1994, two weeks before the meeting was to take place.

”Fate played a trick on me,” Mr. Kim said. “If I had met Kim Il-sung, I would have changed the nation’s history.”

It fell to his rival and successor, Kim Dae-jung, to hold the first summit meeting with the leader of the north. In 2000, Kim Dae-jung flew to Pyongyang and met with Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung’s son and successor. That year, Kim Dae-jung was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

By the time Kim Young-sam ended his five-year term in early 1998, he was a disgraced lame duck.

In 1997, South Korea swallowed the humiliation of a $58 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund during the Asian financial crisis. Mr. Kim was criticized for failing to prevent the crisis by overhauling the country’s powerful family-run conglomerates.

Mr. Kim’s reputation was further tarnished with the arrest of a son on corruption charges. His governing party was so unpopular that South Koreans were ready to hand over power to the opposition for the first time, as they did with the election of Kim Dae-jung in late 1997.

Survivors include his wife, two sons and three daughters.

南韓前總統金泳三逝世 享壽87歲

南韓前總統金泳三廿二日凌晨於首爾大學醫院逝世，享壽87歲。他長期從事民主運動，就任總統後起訴前獨裁者並杜絕軍人干政，還實施金融透明化改革。但任內遭逢亞洲金融危機，南韓破產被迫向國際貨幣基金借貸，讓他飽受批評。

金泳三近年來多次因中風、心絞痛及肺炎住院，本月19日發高燒再次入院，22日零時22分因敗血症與急性心臟衰竭不治。

金泳三1927年出生於朝鮮半島東南端巨濟島的富有漁家，畢業於首爾大學哲學系。1954年首度當選國會議員，年僅25歲，此後又當選8屆。但他反對總統李承晚想當終身總統而加入在野黨，1979年因批評朴正熙總統被逐出國會。朴正熙遇刺身亡後，陸軍少將全斗煥發動政變奪權，金泳三被禁止參政，三度遭軟禁還曾絕食23天抗議政治迫害。

1987年南韓舉行首次總統普選，金泳三和政敵金大中瓜分了在野陣營選票，讓全斗煥推舉的盧泰愚漁翁得利當選總統。金泳三擔心此事重演，1990年大膽決定和盧泰愚的政黨合作，雖然為他招來背叛民主運動的罵名，但他成功將盧泰愚勢力收為己用，1992年擊敗金大中，成為南韓首位文人總統。

金泳三從1993主政至1998年，任內以叛國、貪汙等罪名起訴全斗煥盧泰愚兩個前總統，從此杜絕南韓軍人干政。他還積極反貪肅貪，禁止軍方秘密組織，公開高官財產，以及落實金融實名制。

然而一九九七年亞洲爆發金融危機，韓元劇貶，南韓政府破產，被迫向國際貨幣基金（IFM）借貸580億美元，金泳三因此飽受批評。

金泳三任內曾有機會和時任北韓領導人金日成會晤。1994年，美國柯林頓政府考慮轟炸北韓核武設施所在地寧邊，金泳三擔心爆發戰爭，極力反對。金泳三告訴柯林頓，美國空襲「將馬上促使北韓對南韓主要城市開火」。美國前總統卡特及時前往平壤會晤金日成，金日成同意凍結核武方案，美國動武危機方告解除。

危機期間，卡特還安排兩金高峰會，但因金日成1994年7月心臟病猝死，這場韓戰以後南北韓領導人首度會晤未能成真。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/world/asia/kim-young-sam-former-president-of-south-korea-dies-at-87.html

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytimes.com/asia-pacific/20151123/c23kimyoungsam/zh-hant/

2015-11-23．聯合報．A13．國際．編譯彭淮棟