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Roh receives mixed report
card
SEOUL - Ready to enter
his third year in office, President Roh Moo-hyun
still faces a strong, debilitating challenge from
years of economic doldrums and escalating tensions
from North Korea's nuclear weapons ambitions.
Public surveys singled out the sagging
economy as the biggest policy failure under the
Roh administration for the past couple of years,
while giving high marks to decentralization,
social welfare, political reform and departure
from authoritarian rule.
After serving two
years of his single five-year term, Roh's approval
rating hovers around 30% in most recent surveys
due to the sluggish economy and the fresh crisis
over North Korea's declaration on February 10 that
it possesses nuclear weapons; it also announced an
indefinite boycott of further six-party
disarmament talks aimed at ending its nuclear
weapons program. Pyongyang said, however, that it
would be willing to rejoin the talks under certain
unspecified conditions.
In a recent survey
of 1,000 people by the state-run broadcaster KBS,
60.7% of the respondents said Roh did not do well
in the past two years in office, while 37.5%
responded positively.
The overwhelming
majority of the respondents said the Roh
government should do more to create jobs, enhance
job security and increase facility investment for
early economic recovery.
However, Roh has
said he would not employ short-term measures to
move the nation out of the economic doldrums
caused by sluggish consumer spending, burgeoning
non-performing loans, lack of facility investment,
millions of credit delinquents and deepening
economic polarization between the rich and poor
and between big and small businesses.
Roh
and his aides say they would not repeat the
makeshift policies his predecessor, Kim Dae-jung,
adopted as a means of escaping the financial
crisis in late 1997, only to deepen the current
economic woes.
The Kim government
encouraged excessive use of credit cards, adopted
the concept of a flexible labor market to create a
huge number of non-regular workers and pursued
policies that boosted the real estate market and
caused skyrocketing realty prices.
At one
time, Roh said he would stick to proven principles
alone in dealing with the sagging economy,
although the effect of such a policy will only
bear fruit after the end of his term.
Roh's term expires on February 25, 2008,
and he is not permitted to run for reelection
under the constitution.
His critics allege
Roh's pro-labor administration's hostile policy
toward big businesses, such as the investment
ceiling on chaebols, or big conglomerates,
and the voting rights limit for
chaebol-owned financial institutions,
dampened business sentiments and led to the
protracted economic doldrums.
Roh's chief
policymaker, Kim Byong-joon, counters by saying
the difficult economic conditions were triggered
in part by the "false agenda" set by conservative
media and scholars, who attributed the economic
failure to the government's chaebol policy.
Kim, head of the policy planning bureau of
Cheong Wa-dae (office of the president), asserted
the government "will continue its role in
overcoming the polarization of the big
conglomerates, small and medium businesses and
venture firms and help them grow side by side".
The official, however, admitted that the
Roh administration had suffered from economic
difficulties due mainly to "structural and cyclic
factors" over the past two years since Roh took
office.
On the North Korean nuclear issue,
Roh has taken a progressive attitude to coax North
Korea back into the six-party talks on ending its
nuclear weapons programs, although he is not
expected to actively seek an inter-Korean summit
unless substantial progress is made on the North
Korean nuclear issue at the six-party nuclear
talks.
Roh took office in February 2003,
just months after the latest nuclear crisis
erupted in October the previous year when the
United States denounced Pyongyang for having a
secret highly enriched uranium-based nuclear
weapons program, in addition to its existing
plutonium-based weapons program.
Despite
Roh's efforts to persuade the hardline
administration of US President George W Bush to
engage the North, Pyongyang escalated tensions
over its nuclear programs on February 10 with a
declaration that it was a nuclear power and had
manufactured weapons in order to protect itself
from what it called the hostile policy of the US.
Opposition parties described Roh's North
Korea policy as a failure and demanded he put
forth his position on the North's possession of
nuclear weapons.
Roh has yet to express
himself on the North's claim on nuclear weapons,
and just ordered the government to "deal with the
issue carefully".
He stunned the Bush
administration on November 12 last year when he
made a speech in Los Angeles on his way to the
annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)
summit in Santiago, Chile, urging Washington to
abandon its hardline policy on North Korea. He
also expressed understanding of the North's stated
rationale for its development of nuclear weapons
and missiles - to protect itself from outside
threats, namely the US.
In his dealings
with the US on other national security issues, Roh
also earned high marks as he sought a more
independent approach in the dispatch of 3,600
South Korean troops to Iraq as part of the US-led
coalition in the war-torn Middle Eastern nation,
and also urged the pullout of one third of 37,000
US troops and related personnel from the Korean
Peninsula in the coming years.
After an
intensive one-year negotiation for the US troop
withdrawal, Washington pledged to invest over
US$10 billion in a weapons system for the US
troops in South Korea to compensate for the US
troop removal.
Roh also successfully
negotiated with the US to reduce the number and
nature of the South Korean troops in Iraq to 3,600
noncombat troops, well down from the US request
for 5,000 combat troops, meeting halfway between
the US request and domestic public opinion against
the troop dispatch to the Iraq war, which many
said lacked justification.
The South
Korean troops in Iraq, the third-largest among
coalition partners only after the United States
and Britain, serves as a major pillar of the
Seoul-Washington alliance, according to Seoul and
Washington officials.
Roh has tried to
stay away from domestic political issues in order
to depart from the authoritarian rule of his
predecessors, leaving the prime minister and the
ruling Uri Party leadership to handle most daily
state affairs and domestic politics.
Professor Tom Plate of the University of
California in Los Angeles said, "The record of the
first two years of President Roh Moo-hyun's
five-year term has been, to be honest, mixed."
Plate said, "There are many pros and some
cons, but Roh seems earmarked for a special place
in history because of his effort to depart from
the imperial presidency."
Professor Yang
Seung-ham of Yonsei University echoed Plate's
theme, saying Roh's two years in office should be
seen as a "half-success".
"The Roh
administration achieved reform to a substantial
degree, but it was a total failure in terms of
national integration," Yang told a seminar. "Roh
has a serious problem in dividing the people as
our troops and enemies."
Deepening
national division, along with economic malaise,
were among the biggest failures of Roh's first two
years in office, according to a recent survey of
121 lawmakers of the major opposition Grand
National Party (GNP), a highly conservative and
traditional grouping.
"The Roh
administration's first two years turned out to be
a total failure, as most of the GNP lawmakers
picked economic failure, instable national
security and national division as the most
outstanding policy failures," a GNP spokesman
claimed.
The opposition lawmakers,
however, gave him high marks for sending troops to
Iraq and making efforts to depart from the
authoritarian rule of previous presidents.
The national division comes mostly from
Roh's pursuit of ideology rather than pragmatism,
critics said. They note that he has been overly
ambitious after success in the April general
elections and victory in the presidential
impeachment battle last year in pushing ahead with
the capital relocation and abolition of the
anti-communist law, which are opposed by more than
60% of the population, according to public
surveys.
Lim Chae-jung, chairman of the
ruling Uri Party, admitted the ruling camp and
government failed to seek national consensus in
pursuit of the capital relocation project, which
was ruled unconstitutional by the Constitutional
Court last October.
Roh also failed to
properly address deepening regionalism, Kim
Byong-joon, Roh's chief policymaker, admitted.
"Regional rivalry not only triggers social
conflict, but is also a stumbling block to the
revision of the government and social systems," he
said. "We will continue to make efforts to ease
regional rivalry."
However, he was
somewhat more upbeat on the ruling Uri Party
having won more votes in the southeastern
Gyeongsang provinces in last year's general
elections, the home turf of the conservative
opposition GNP. The Uri Party also swept the votes
in the southwestern Jeolla provinces.
On
the GNP's criticism that the Roh government is a
"NATO" (No Action Talk Only) regime with more than
100 "road maps", Lim said, "We've spent the past
two years to produce detailed road maps and you
will from now on witness the real ability of the
Roh administration."
Lim also put forth
such achievements of the Roh administration as
decentralization, an anti-corruption drive and
departure from authoritarianism that was confirmed
in a recent survey conducted by the Citizens
Coalition for Better Government.
The
survey of 308 professors, businessmen, politicians
and artists, however, marked the overall
performance of the Roh government as poor, with a
grade of 2.54 on a 5-point scale.
Kim
Byong-joon was not pleased with the ratings,
insisting the Roh government focused on laying the
infrastructure for reform of the statistics,
communications systems and other national
administration systems "that people cannot see
easily".
"People will feel the effects of
what we've done after the lapse of enough time,"
he said.
(Asia Pulse/Yonhap) |
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