By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 11, 1998; Page A31

SEOUL—Seven months after his inauguration, South Korean President Kim Dae Jung is coming under harsh attacks over his handling of the nation's ailing economy, his moderate approach to North Korea and his government's aggressive criminal investigations of political enemies.

While Kim is in no danger of losing his job, he is the latest Asian leader to suffer painful political consequences from the Asian economic crisis. The crisis already has claimed four Asian leaders, including Kim's predecessor, and political instability is threatening the continent's longest-serving leader, Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad.

As South Korea's economy continues to slide, the honeymoon is clearly over for Kim, 74, a longtime dissident and democracy advocate who was a global sentimental favorite when he finally was elected president on his fourth try last December. Lawmakers from the main opposition party, who began blunt efforts to undermine Kim on the day he was sworn in, have tied the legislature in knots by boycotting parliament and marching in the streets.

The country's economy, already decimated by the economic crisis, continues to decline, although Kim assures his people it is on the verge of a turnaround. Exports have not fueled a recovery as hoped, and the International Monetary Fund said recently that South Korea's economy is expected to shrink 7 percent this year -- considerably more than its earlier forecasts.

Kim's "sunshine policy" of engagement toward North Korea also faces growing skepticism. Kim has remained largely silent in the face of several North Korean provocations, including last month's launch of a missile over Japanese territory. Many moderate voters who were willing to give Kim's progressive policy a chance are now wondering if South Korea is being played for a patsy by hard-liners in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.

Kim got a boost on a state visit to Tokyo last week when Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi and Emperor Akihito offered unprecedented apologies for Japan's occupation of the Korean peninsula earlier this century, and Japan expressed continued support for Kim's initiatives on North Korea.

Still, political solutions to the economic crisis and reasoned debate over North Korea policy seem distant. Kim and his opponents are locked in a nasty feud involving allegations of spies and torture, secret meetings with North Korean agents, plots to incite shootouts along the demilitarized zone and the hiring of gangs of thugs to cause mayhem at political rallies.

While virtually none of the allegations has been proven, the spectacle has tarnished all involved, including President Kim, a perennial nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. The often bizarre political food fight seems pathetic to average South Koreans battered by economic hardship and looking to their leaders for answers.

"The political feud is disgusting, but everyone's too busy living to pay much attention," said Kim Min Jee, 28, an office worker in Seoul. "If my feet are on fire, I'm going to concentrate on putting it out, not on politics."

Park Jai Chang, a professor at Sook Myung Women's University, said "DJ," as the president is known here, has been damaged by the impression that he is obsessed with politics instead of focused on fixing the economy.

"There is a growing feeling that political revenge has become the prime focus of the current government," Park said. "It's a problem not just for DJ, but for all the people of Korea. We are feeling very gloomy nowadays."

Kim and his ruling National Congress for New Politics party say they have not engaged in political revenge and that prosecutions of numerous top opposition officials are simply an effort to purge corruption from government and politics. They say the opposition party is guilty of playing obstructionist politics and bogging down economic reforms.

"This political bickering is very disappointing," said You Jong Keun, a top adviser to Kim. "The president asked for cooperation and some sort of a honeymoon period of one year. He pleaded, several times, but the opposition turned a deaf ear." He said the criminal investigations focus primarily on opposition politicians because they were the ones in power for many years, and thus the ones in position to accept bribes and engage in other corrupt favor-trading.

The opposition Grand National Party, led by Lee Hoi Chang, the man Kim narrowly defeated in December's presidential election, said Kim is using prosecutors and security forces to wage political war against it. Lee said he suspects Kim's cronies hired a gang of tattooed thugs who attacked Grand National legislators at a protest march last weekend -- a charge Kim's people deny.

"President Kim says he is a man of democracy, but I think he is trampling on our democracy," Lee said in an interview.

Kim, who was jailed, exiled and targeted for assassination under previous authoritarian regimes, promised when he took office that he would not use the presidency to seek revenge against those who had wronged him over the years.

But Lee says Kim is doing exactly that. The former head of the Korean security agency is in jail after being convicted of arranging a scheme to paint Kim as a North Korean communist sympathizer during last year's campaign. Many other opposition politicians also have been the subjects of highly public corruption probes, some of them on relatively minor charges dating back five years or more.

Lee said Kim's government has strong-armed many of the 32 opposition politicians who switched to Kim's party this year. Lee said many of them were threatened with criminal investigation unless they changed parties -- and few politicians in South Korea can withstand close scrutiny of their campaign finance practices. Kim's ruling party says the politicians changed party affiliations freely.

"A lot of people are finding Kim Dae Jung's current witch-hunting and his policies difficult to believe," said Lee Jung Hoon, a political science professor at Yonsei University.

Last week, state prosecutors and the Agency for National Security Planning, the domestic security agency, dropped their latest bomb: Lee Hoi Chang is under investigation on suspicion that he tried to arrange to have North Korean soldiers start a shootout with South Korean forces just before last December's election. Prosecutors allege that men working for Lee went to Beijing and met with North Koreans, promising that if North Korean troops initiated violence in the demilitarized zone just before the election, Lee, if elected, would offer generous humanitarian aid to North Korea.

As the prosecutors explain it, the shootout was supposed to scare conservative South Korean voters into voting against Kim, who has had to fight allegations that he is soft on the communist North. No shootout took place, and Kim narrowly defeated Lee.

Lee denied knowledge of any such a plot and called for a full investigation. He also said he believes Kim's government may be behind the "fantasy" allegations and may have tortured informants to make them implicate him and his brother, who is alleged to have paid the plotters.