By Andrei Lankov
On June 26, 1949, Kim Ku, the 74 year-old politician and famous independence activist was at his home lazily reading a collection of ancient Chinese poetry (like virtually all educated Koreans of his generation, he was fluent in classical Chinese).
All of a sudden, a young military officer appeared in the room and shot Kim four times. Kim was dead, and his assassin, Lt. An Du-hui was apprehended. This was arguably the most notorious political assassination in 20th century Korea.
What made An kill Kim, one of the most influential Korean politicians of the era? An himself did not make a secret of his motive. During his trial he insisted that Kim Ku was acting on behalf of the Soviets, undermining the ROK government, and thus had to be stopped for the sake of the country.
Only a few years earlier, anybody who would describe Kim as ``acting on behalf of the Soviets'' would have appeared insane. Of all the major politicians of post-liberation South Korea, Kim Ku was most staunchly anti-Communist.
He spent decades in China, where he ran an underground network of armed Korean resistance groups. Kim did not make a secret of his sympathy toward Chiang Kai-shek, the then military strongman of China who never felt tired of slaughtering real or alleged leftists.
In China, Kim Ku acted as one of the top leaders of the Korean government-in-exile, the nucleus of a would-be South Korean state, and he came back to Seoul together with other leaders of the nationalist right, including Syngman Rhee.
However, from late 1946 relations between the two major leaders of the Korean right began to deteriorate. Syngman Rhee openly stated that he was willing to create a separate state in the South if the negotiations with North Korean Communists turned out to be unsuccessful.
Kim decisively opposed this plan, arguing that the result would be the division of the country and perhaps a civil war. He demanded negotiations and compromise.
His gloomy predictions were correct, but it seems that Kim Ku did not understand (or at least pretended that he did not understand) that North Korean leaders had very little influence over the decisions on their country's future.
At that stage, the North's policy was largely decided by Moscow, not by Kim Il-sung and his entourage, and Moscow did not want a unified Korea where the right would probably prevail.
Of course, Kim Ku's own ambitions might have played a role, too: A vocal protection of the failing national unity was certain to win support in the Korea of 1947-48.
Kim Ku insisted on negotiations with Kim Il-sung, and in April 1948 he was even invited to Pyongyang. There Kim Ku took part in the joint conference of the political parties of the South and the North, and also had an opportunity for direct conversation with the North Korean dictator.
Recently declassified Soviet documents confirm that Moscow suggested that Pyongyang hold this meeting, obviously as a part of a propaganda smokescreen whose aim was to persuade the Korean and international public opinion that the North was ready to compromise.
After Kim Ku returned to Seoul, relations between him and Syngman Rhee were damaged beyond repair. The war of words intensified: Kim Ku was accused of being too soft on the Communists, and even of being a secret sympathizer of the ``Reds.''
Most Korean nationalists were unhappy about this divide between their two major leaders, and hoped for re-conciliation. As a curious confirmation of these hopes, we should mention the ``Donga Ilbo incident'' of May 1949. On May 21, the Donga Ilbo, one of the nation's major newspapers, reported that Kim Ku and Syngman Rhee met in a park to enjoy a viewing of the spring flowers. The article was even accompanied by a photo showing the two happily looking at the flowers together. However, it was soon discovered that the photo was a fake.
This was the background against which Kim Ku was assassinated. Needless to say, rumors hold that An Du-hui acted on secret orders from President Rhee himself. This indeed might be true, since Rhee was not soft on his rivals.
Still, even if this was the case, the truth will probably never be known for sure: such orders are seldom given in unequivocal form, and never written down.
The posthumous fate of Kim Ku was quite interesting as well, and being a professor I wonder when somebody will choose it as a Ph.D. topic. Kim eventually came to enjoy a great popularity among the Korean left, that is, among people whom he hated for most of his life.
In the left-nationalist historiography he is now presented as a sage who, albeit belatedly, saw the truth and nearly prevented the division of Korea (as if in the late 1940s any Korean politician could exercise influence over the strategies adopted by the Kremlin and the White House).
And what happened to An Du-hui? He got a life sentence but was soon pardoned, fought well during the Korean War and became a reasonably successful businessman. He had to live under an assumed identity, but even this did not save him from some violent attacks and occasional assassination attempts by Kim Ku's admirers.
Finally, in October 1996 An did not survive what would be the final attempt on his life. In a sense, his killer might have been a mirror image of An half a century earlier: a firebrand who took the inflammatory rhetoric a bit too seriously.
Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. He has recently published ``The Dawn of Modern Korea," which is now on sale at Kyobo Book Center and other major bookstores. The book is based on columns published in The Korea Times. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com.