South Korea's new president, Kim Dae Jung. (File photo/AP)

By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, December 19, 1997; Page A51

SEOUL, Dec. 19 (Friday)—Kim Dae Jung's supporters call him the Nelson Mandela of Korea and, with the 73-year-old dissident's epochal election as South Korea's next president, the analogy seems more apt than ever.

In opposite corners of the world, Mandela and Kim have devoted their lives to fighting injustice. In South Africa, Mandela went to prison for opposing apartheid; in South Korea, Kim's crusade for democracy and human rights caused the dictators he opposed to jail him and repeatedly try to kill him. When Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize, Kim was one of the nominees he beat out.

Now both men have been elected president of a homeland that was once bitterly hostile to them. Both represent the common man: an oppressed black majority in South Africa, the working class in South Korea. And both have cemented their places in history as people who rose from the depths of despair -- Mandela in his prison, Kim from the decks of a ship at sea, where agents of his own government were about to weight him down and toss him overboard.

"His life would make a great movie," said Kim's longtime ally, You Jong Keun, governor of Kim's home region, North Cholla Province. "Because of his persecution, he is almost idolized."

It has been an article of faith in South Korean politics since the 1970s that "Dee Jay," as he is called, could never be elected president, mainly because the solid core of voters who supported him were outnumbered by an equally determined core who despised him.

To his enemies, Kim's moderate approach to North Korea and his close ties with organized labor smacked of Communist sympathy. Those who opposed him say he is an egotist, infected with "presidential disease" -- an obsession to become president that has kept him running for almost 40 years.

Unfortunately for Kim, his archenemies were powerful autocrats who seemed to control everything but thought here as late as the 1980s. When military strongmen such as Park Chung Hee, Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo told the people to hate Kim, the message sunk in. Those men built modern South Korea into an economic juggernaut by controlling the money: Capital was steered to favored industries and industrialists.

This time around, financial reform that limited spending -- and the "media" age, which, for the first time, made television the most important campaign tool -- helped lift the man from the backwater port of Mokpo in Cholla to the presidency.

"It's a huge change for the country," said Lee Ju Heon, 31. He said he voted for Kim because he was "a kind, generous man" who will be far more willing than the ruling establishment to listen to young and old, "the voice of the depressed and the poor, and not just the elite."

In 1971, as a young congressman, Kim shocked the nation and scared Park by almost defeating him in a presidential election. Most impartial observers say Kim likely would have won had the election been fully free and fair.

The race was enough to set Park's security services against Kim. During the campaign, a truck smashed into his car, killing his driver and leaving him with a limp. Kim said that was the government's first attempt to kill him.

In 1973, Kim was kidnapped by South Korean security agents from a Tokyo hotel, spirited out to sea on a ship and prepared for execution by drowning. He was saved by the appearance of a plane that dropped a flare, apparently as a warning. Kim believes it was the CIA sending a blunt signal. That has never been proven, but intense pressure from the U.S. government and people is often credited with keeping Kim alive. Eventually he was taken back to Seoul and dumped on a street near his house.

Kim continued as an outspoken dissident leader, and when the government of Gen. Chun Doo Hwan staged a bloody crackdown on democracy demonstrators in Kwangju in Cholla Province in May 1980, Kim was one of the first arrested.

Last year, Chun was convicted of treason for his role in the Kwangju massacre, in which scores were killed, and now he sits in prison. Roh Tae Woo, Chun's successor, was convicted for his role and imprisoned. Seventeen years after the fact, the South Korean people were finally free to deliver their own verdict -- jailing those who once ran the country and, now, electing the dissident who had been imprisoned.

This morning, in the main square of Kwangju, people tossed flowers and left a banner that read: "We finally made it, a transfer of power. We trust you, President Kim Dae Jung."

In all Kim spent six years in prison, seven more under house arrest, and 26 months in exile in the United States. While in prison, he was allowed to communicate with his family with one heavily censored one-page letter a month. Those letters became the basis for a book, "Prison Writings," a moving work in which Kim, among other things, anguishes because he blames his notoriety for his son's inability to find a job or a wife.

The book also details Kim's strong Roman Catholic faith -- to this day, he peppers conversations with references to the "Heavenly Father." Kim once presented Edwin O. Reischauer, a former U.S. ambassador, a handwritten scroll in Chinese characters that translates, "Serving man is like serving Heaven."

During his U.S. exile, Kim attracted supporters ranging from members of Congress to pop singers. On the eve of his return to South Korea, he was given a sendoff in Madison Square Garden attended by 3,000 people.

A group of U.S. supporters, two members of Congress and 50 journalists traveled with Kim to Seoul, fearing that Chun's agents would kill him upon his arrival. Kim's entourage was met by at least 50 security agents, who roughed up the group and whisked him away.

Kim was banned from political activity until a government announcement in June 1987 that a direct presidential election would be held for the first time since before Park's rule and that the political ban on Kim and other opposition leaders would be lifted. Kim and another key opposition leader, current President Kim Young Sam, offered South Korean voters a taste of democracy. They spoke about human rights in a way that no one had been able to for years.

In the end, however, the opposition candidates split the vote. That allowed Chun's anointed successor, another military general, to win.

After Kim lost again in a splintered vote in 1992, he planned to retire. When he changed his mind, it was age that almost eclipsed him: People said he was too old.

Kim fought off the charge by running a vigorous campaign. In a televised debate, he shrugged off the issue of his hearing aids by quipping that even "young President Clinton" was wearing them.