“Honeysuckle” Kim Dae-Jung
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009Kim Dae-jung, former Korea president from 1998 to 2003, passed away Tuesday. He has dedicated his entire life to fighting dictatorial leaders, and recently accused Lee Myungbak’s government of backsliding into the traits of the military dictatorship.
[Mr. Kim speaking during a protest in 1969]
[Mr. Kim in a cell in Chungju Prison, south of Seoul, in 1981]
Below are a few excerpts from the obituary in the news media around the world.
There is a generation of leaders in the world, students of Gandhi, who used non-violent means to change their regions of the world. They are passing before our eyes. One of them was lost yesterday. [Kim Dae Jung: A Hero for Peace]
Although best known in the west for trying to engage communist North Korea with a “Sunshine Policy” of rapprochement, South Koreans will remember Mr Kim as the democracy activist whom the military governments just could not kill in the 1970s and 1980s. [Kim Dae-jung dies at 85]
Former President Kim Dae-jung, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 85, had the nickname “Honeysuckle.” Like the pine and nut pine, the honeysuckle has an iron will and survives the freezing cold of winter. [After Kim, big challenges ahead ]
South Korea lost its most fervent champion of peace and democracy with the death of former President Kim Dae-jung, winner of the Nobel Prize for his efforts to foster reconciliation on the Korean peninsula. [S. Korea loses champion of peace: Kim Dae-jung]
[Mr. Kim embraced Kim Jong-il before his departure from Pyongyang. Under Mr. Kim's "Sunshine Policy," the two Koreas connected roads and railways across their shared border.]
