Former South Korean President Roh Tae-woo, who played a pivotal role in the 1979 coup before democratically exercising power from 1988 to 1993, died Tuesday October 26 at the age of 88 , Yonhap agency reported.
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General Roh Tae-woo had succeeded in 1988 his friend the dictator Chun Doo-hwan, whom he had helped to seize power by force nine years earlier but who had been driven out by gigantic pro-democracy demonstrations.
Divisions within the opposition led to Roh's victory in the 1987 election with just 36.6% of the vote.
A decisive role in the fight for democracy
During his tenure, he had overseen the Seoul Olympics in 1988 and forged a rapprochement with China and Russia.
Born in Daegu, in the southeast of the country, in 1932 when Korea was a Japanese colony, Roh Tae-woo had met Chun Doo-hwan at military school during the Korean War.
Roh had played a decisive role in the coup d'état which followed the assassination of military dictator Park Chung-hee in 1979. Then commander of the special forces, he had helped Chun Doo-hwan to seize strategic points in Seoul .
Having become the right-hand man of Chun, Roh then orchestrated, in 1980, the crushing in the blood of the pro-democratic uprising in Gwangju, in the South-West.
The repression had left some 200 dead and missing according to official figures, three times more according to the opposition at the time.
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Roh had never expressed the slightest remorse for his role in this emblematic episode of the struggle for democracy in South Korea. “
Tens of millions of Chinese suffered and shed their blood during the Cultural Revolution. By comparison, the Gwangju incident is nothing,
”he even said in 1995. His successor to the presidency in 1993, former pro-democracy activist Kim Young-sam, had him brought to justice in same time as Chun Doo-hwan.
The two men were convicted of "
treason
" in 1996 after a cathartic trial, in which they appeared hand in hand in their prison uniforms.
Chun had been sentenced to death and Roh to 22.5 years in prison, but both were released the following year following a presidential pardon.
Roh Tae-woo, suffering from prostate cancer, had completely withdrawn from public life more than twenty years ago.
