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SINGAPORE: No one should be surprised at the anti-American sentiment that has galvanized South Korea’s presidential election. It was demonstrated many months ago in front of a worldwide audience.
When South Korea’s Ahn Jung-hwan scored the equalizer in the soccer World Cup against the United States in June he celebrated by racing to the crowd, crouching and swinging his arms like a speed skater. He meant to. He was honouring a compatriot who South Koreans believe was robbed of the 1,500 metre gold in the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. The medal went to a US skater.
Feelings have been running similarly high throughout the entire election campaign, reaching a climax hours before the polls opened, over Seoul’s role in the unfolding drama of relations between the United States and North Korea.
Governing party candidate Roh Moo-Hyun is eager to stay engaged with North Korea. Conservative rival Lee Hoi-chang wants to get tough with a neighbour developing nuclear arms.
Ties between the United States and one of its closest allies in Asia have overshadowed the entire campaign, culminating in the 11th-hour drama late on Wednesday when hints by Roh that Seoul would stand neutral in a US-North Korea war prompted his chief political ally, soccer supremo Chung Mong Joon, to end their partnership.
“It’s a deep-rooted problem and clearly magnified by the pressures of the election,” said Brad Glosserman of the Pacific Forum CSIS, a Honolulu-based think tank.
SOWING CONFUSION: “It’s a political hothouse,” he said. “The growing frustration in South Korea is the product of a number of different things: pride, resentment, confusion, political and economic difficulties and modernisation generally.”
Sowing the most confusion is communist North Korea.
South Koreans have yearned for decades for reunification and the astonishing moment in June 2000 when incumbent President Kim Dae-jung flew to Pyongyang to be greeted on the airport tarmac by his secretive North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong-il, marked a turning point in popular opinion.
Kim Jong-il was no longer a mysterious, isolated dictator with bouffant hair, but a smiling host who could crack jokes and raise a toast with his visitor from the South. The bloody 1950-53 Korean War seemed lost in the mists of the past and US suspicions about the threat from Pyongyang seemed overdone.
“What riles South Koreans is that the Clinton administration’s policy of connecting with North Korea has changed under the Bush administration into one of disconnecting,” wrote John Barry Kotch, visiting professor of politics at Seoul’s Hanyang University, in the International Herald Tribune.
The tide began to turn.
“Anti-American sentiment has been festering for quite some time,” said Glosserman.
But it reached unprecedented levels before the election, bringing tens of thousands into the streets in anger after a US court martial acquitted two U.S. soldiers whose armoured vehicle crushed to death two teenage girls during military exercises in June.—Reuters
