During his presidency from 1993-1998, he had his two predecessors indicted on mutiny and treason charges stemming from a coup. He later pardoned the two convicted military strongmen, Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo.
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“If Secretary General Ban and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un meet that will be a meaningful meeting in itself” he said. Kim said he feared such a strike would provoke a full-scale war.
Former US President Jimmy Carter arranged a meeting between Kim Young Sam and then-North Korean leader Kim Il Sung when he flew to Pyongyang to defuse the crisis that year.
The North, slapped with U.N. and US sanctions for its nuclear weapons and rocket programmes, often threatens to destroy the South, and its major ally, the United States, in a sea of flames.
Pyongyang’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Korean Peninsula, which handles North-South ties, on Thursday proposed the talks. If Ban’s does plan a return to politics in South Korea, demonstrating a rapport with North Korea’s leadership may prove valuable.
Relations between North and South Korea have been both tense and hard since the 2010 sinking of a South Korean warship, an incident South Korea reportedly blamed on the North. Pyongyang reportedly denied any role in the incident. It was an unprecedented apology from the North – though it said the sub drifted into southern waters while on a routine training exercise.
Kim was credited with disbanding a key military faction and bringing transparency to the South’s financial system.
Kim saw the country’s economy take a nose-dive in the final months of his presidency, weighed down by massive foreign debt and culminating in the biggest bailout of the Asian financial crisis by the global Monetary Fund. During the Korean War, he anchored a defense ministry’s propaganda radio program, Yonhap reported.
Kim was elected to the South Korean National Assembly in 1954, quickly aligned with the opposition party that had been working to rewrite the country’s constitution.
During that chaotic period, Maj.
A leading figure in the pro-democracy movement, Kim was twice placed under house arrest for a total of two years in the early 1980s.
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He ruled for five years.
