Day 6: A Nobel winner and a squatter’s camp
By Randall Smith | November 10, 2007 | Korea
Thursday
When I was a young reporter in the mid 1970s, there was one day when I spent the morning interviewing a family who had lost everything in a house fire. In the afternoon, I spent four hours talking to Jimmy Carter about why he was running for president.
I often reflect on that day as one of the reasons that I am in journalism: The range of people that you are able to touch is simply amazing.
That’s what happened to me today. I spent the afternoon with Nobel peace prize winner and former Korean president Kim Dae Jung. And in the evening, I ate dinner with a family who was about to become homeless because of a cruel battle to turn a squatter’s camp into a multimillion-dollar condominium project.
There is a feeling of hope when you are in the presence of Kim. Perhaps it’s his bravery and perseverance in the face of adversity: surviving multiple assassination attempts, a death sentence by his own government, and brutal treatment as a prisoner during the Korean War.
That may explain why he kept coming back from political defeats to run again and again, and eventually win the presidency. And, maybe, that’s why he continues to believe that reunification is possible with North Korea almost eight years after he held the talks that seemed to make it inevitable and won him the peace prize.
In the waning years of the Clinton administration, Kim met with the North Korean leader for 10 hours in what was hailed as the best chance for unification between the two Koreas. But then Clinton left office, and Kim began debate-filled years with President Bush who pronounced North Korea as one of the “axis of evil.”
The North Koreans responded to this lack of diplomacy, he believes, by building a nuclear weapon.
And so we are here, in late 2007, with six-nation talks and North Korea willing to shut down its nuclear reactor and the hope that President Bush, who has done what many believe is a diplomatic reverse, will sign a peace agreement before he leaves office.
Kim remains upbeat, sitting in his obscure presidential library in his 80s and answering questions. He has been out of office for almost four years, but he believes that his Sunshine Policy will eventually bear fruit. First will come an official end to the Korean War. Then will come an open market economy that will transform the North. And, eventually, a replenished and revived population will demand democracy.
It’s a simple plan, and Kim sees it happening in Vietnam and China today. He encourages us to remain optimistic.
From Kim’s library, I took the underground to a squatter’s village to have dinner with a group of activists who are fighting to keep their homes on a hilltop that overlooks a beautiful part of Seoul. We shared a meal in their office, a hobbled together structure in the middle of a major construction project.
There was no meat, because they could not afford it.
Their story is essentially this: Families purchased homes here for roughly $50,000 in the early 1990s, thinking that they had deeds to the property. Instead, they found out in 2003 that they did not really own their homes and that a major developer was planning to tear them down and build expensive condominiums in their place.
They have been fighting ever since, hoping for a just moving stipend from both the government and the developer. But it is not going easily. I spoke to one woman who says she was put in the hospital for a week after goons tried to forcibly remove her from her house.
Developers are offering her $40,000 to move, she says, but that’s hardly anything in a time where it would take over $1 million to replace her home.
After dinner, we toured her house. It was simple but comfortable. Built on the side of a mountain, the home is on several levels and the rooms are small. But it is more than enough for her and her two grown daughters, she says.
Before leaving, we gave gifts to the family that more than compensated them for the meal and their time. Walking back to our subway station, a colleague remarked at how much at peace that he felt this family was, and how he envied that feeling.
“I struggle hard to make a living every day,” he said. “I wish that I had what they had…that peace and determination.”
We rode the Metro back to our hotel, and it was well past midnight when we arrived.
Your donation helps continue the IRP's work to inform the public about international issues.
Make A Gift