For decades, South Korean leaders such as ousted former President Park Geun-hye and those in their orbits have endured criminal inquiries, embarrassing scandals, even prison time.
For decades, South Korean leaders such as ousted former President Park Geun-hye and those in their orbits have endured criminal inquiries, embarrassing scandals, even prison time.
It’s almost a rite of passage in this relatively young democracy.
Since the mid-1990s, two former leaders received lengthy prison sentences. Another committed suicide by jumping into a ravine after questioning by prosecutors. Still others have left under clouds of suspicion about corruption among relatives or friends.
Few have escaped untarnished by scandal — both a testament to the country’s struggles with corruption and also perhaps to its burgeoning commitment to the rule of law.
Now Park also faces the prospect of jail time after prosecutors on Monday sought her arrest on as part of a sprawling corruption investigation that forced the scandal-marred politician from office earlier this month. She remains free and had no comment about the decision.
Prosecutors have asked a court for permission to detain the former president — whose father ruled South Korea as a military strongman as the country emerged as an economic force in the 1960s and 1970s — pending an indictment related to 13 allegations. They include bribery, abuse of power, coercion and disclosures of confidential information.
The allegations against Park are long-simmering and have upended the nation’s political order, prompting historic street protests for months.
The prosecution’s effort sparked a variety of reactions among South Koreans on Monday inside and outside the country’s institutions of power.
For some, like Younkyoo Kim, a professor at Hanyang University in Seoul, a nagging question lingers: “Why do Korean presidents keep on making these kinds of mistakes?”
Theories abound.
Some say the presidency itself, crafted in the late 1980s to be democratic but maintain a strong leader during a continuing warlike posture with North Korea, requires constitutional reform. Proposed changes are stalled in the National Assembly.
Others point to decades of collusion — both real and perceived — between the country’s powerful family-controlled conglomerates, known as chaebol , and political leaders, including the president. Despite years of progress in reforming their influence, solutions remain elusive amid concern about maintaining South Korea’s export-driven economy, among Asia’s largest.
Park was the nation’s first female president and the first democratically elected leader to be removed by impeachment. However her saga ends, Park’s name will be added to a list of troubled South Korean presidencies.
The nation emerged from the Korean War under Syngman Rhee, a strongman who fled the country in 1960 amid a popular uprising. He died in Hawaii in 1965. The following two decades were largely led by Park’s father, Park Chung-hee, who ruled as a strongman until his assassination by the nation’s spy chief in 1979.
The country began allowing direct election of presidents in the late 1980s, when mass protests threatened to cast a shadow over the Summer Olympics in Seoul.
Two other former leaders, Chun Doo-hwan and his successor, Roh Tae-woo, were charged in the mid-1990s — after they left office — with improperly collecting tens of millions of dollars from businesses during their tenures.
