In this file photo, South Korean President Kim Dae-jung (center), speaks with Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, at a dinner banquet at the presidential office in Seoul in 2001. (Presidential archives at Ministry of the Interior and Safety)
Author Han Kang became the second South Korean to win a Nobel Prize on Thursday, as she was recognized with the laureate honor in literature by the Swedish Academy.
Preceding Han was Kim Dae-jung, the late South Korean president who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 to honor his efforts to revive democracy in South Korea and improve relations with North Korea.
The Nobel Prize committee said the award motivation was “for his work for democracy and human rights in South Korea and in East Asia in general, and for peace and reconciliation with North Korea in particular.”
Kim was widely regarded as one of the most prominent figures fighting for democracy under the authoritarian rule of President Park Chung-hee in the 1960s and 1970s.
After Kim became the country’s 15th president in 1998, he sought ways to lay a foundation for the peaceful reunification of the two Korean states through his trademark “sunshine policy” with the North.
As a result, he eventually held a summit with then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in 2000, offering a chance for many of those who had been separated across the border from family members for over four decades since the 1950-53 Korean War to meet with loved ones.
“It was not only Kim Dae-jung's policy of reconciliation with the neighboring state to the north that the Nobel Committee set store by,” the Nobel Prize committee wrote in Kim’s introduction on its official website.
“It also valued his long and courageous struggle for democracy and human rights in his own country, which had entailed long periods of imprisonment, house arrest, kidnapping and exile.”
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