A final triumph against all odds

THE MOST striking image in Seoul yesterday came at the beginning of the inauguration, when Kim Dae Jung, the new president, was greeting guests. There were former Japanese prime ministers, an ex-president of the Philippines, a retired German chancellor, the financier George Soros, and Michael Jackson. And there, framed by the huge screen above the stage, were two other heads, one bald and bespectacled, the other long and lugubrious.

They belonged to the former presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, among the most famous and most loathed in South Korea. The last time they were seen together like this was in court where, hands tied, they were sentenced to prison for murder and treason. Now they were chatting amiably with the new president, a man whose death they once plotted.

South Korean politics has always been subject to brutal about-turns. Presidents can be turned into convicts and then turned back into respected public figures. Yesterday the world witnessed another of these swings, when Mr Kim, a former dissident and political prisoner, became president. After almost 40 years in opposition, he comes to power at his country's most difficult period since the 1950-53 Korean War. But he is already showing he has the quality that so many South Korean politicians lack, whether they are military dictators or democrats, which is the ability to compromise and forgive.

The progress of DJ, as he is known, follows that of the South Korean democracy movement as a whole, a bumpy, fractious, but finally triumphant rise to power. He grew up in Cholla, the poor south-western province, and was elected to the National Assembly in 1961.

A Catholic with, in the words of one writer, "a martyr's fatalistic certainty that what he is doing is right", Mr Kim spent six years in prison and 10 years in exile under the military dictators who ruled until 1987. In 1973 he was kidnapped by the South Korean version of the CIA, which planned to drown him. In 1980 he was condemned death after a show trial. Both times, only US intervention saved him.

Before his victory in December he had lost three presidential elections, usually owing to vote-rigging by the government but once because of divisions within the democracy movement.

His most bitter fall-out was with his former friend, the outgoing president, Kim Young Sam, who became almost as implacable a foe as his other persecutors. But in the two month since his election, he has shown a knack for reconciliation. As president-in-waiting he has brokered an agreement on lay-offs between unions and employers, as well as approving the release from jail of the two men who nearly brought his career to an end once and for all.