SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Both women lost their fathers to gunshots.
Both also overcame that tragedy and rose to political prominence in countries
where men dominate decision-making, buoyed in part by the legacies of their
fathers.
Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition
leader whose 2010 release from house arrest signaled the beginning of Burma’s
transition from decades of military rule, met Tuesday in Seoul with Park
Geun-hye, who takes office next month as South Korea’s first female president.
Details were not immediately available.
The meeting between two of the
most prominent women in Asia spotlights a tragic coincidence in their family
history: Suu Kyi’s father, Gen. Aung San, was killed by assassins in 1947 while
Park’s, President Park Chung-hee, was assassinated by his intelligence chief in
1979.
Both women have benefited from
their late fathers’ reputations. Even as she has blazed her own political
trail, the 67-year-old Suu Kyi represents to many of the voters who sent her to
parliament last year a link with her father, a legendary independence hero.
Park, who is 60, enjoys strong support among older South Koreans with memories
of the rapid economic growth during her father’s rule.
Suu Kyi’s trajectory, however,
has been one of a dissident, while Park has built a political career as a
ruling party lawmaker owing much to her father, a dictator who took power in a
1961 coup and ruled South Korea with an iron fist until he was killed 18 years
later.
“Park carries family baggage that
sets her away from the image of the pro-democracy movement, while Suu Kyi
stands on the other side as an icon of democracy,” said Lee Shin-hwa, a
professor of political studies at Korea University in Seoul.
Democracy has firmly taken root
in South Korea since the death of Park’s father and a peaceful transfer of
power more than a decade later. Burma, with a reformist government in place but
the military still in the background, is nurturing a fragile democracy.
The meeting between Suu Kyi and
Park will be the latest in a series of high-profile exchanges between their
countries, including reciprocal visits last year by South Korean President Lee
Myung-bak and Burma’s President Thein Sein, both heading delegations keen on
bolstering economic cooperation. Thein Sein also promised Lee in May that his
country would no longer purchase arms from North Korea, a foreign policy shift
welcomed by Seoul.
Lee’s visit was the first by a
South Korean leader since 1983, when North Korean agents bombed a delegation
visiting Burma, killing 17 South Koreans and four others but missing
then-President Chun Doo-hwan.
During her five-day trip, Suu Kyi
is scheduled to attend the opening of the Special Olympics, a biennial global
event that South Korea is hosting in the alpine town of Pyeongchang for the
first time, organizers of her trip say. The 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate
will then receive a human rights award in the city of Gwangju, where a 1980
uprising was crushed with deadly force by the then-military government.
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