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A statue of Syngman Rhee, the first president of the Republic of Korea, will be built on the campus of the American University in Washington D.C. The university said it accepted an offer by Korean residents in the U.S. capital to raise the statue in a ¡°Korea Garden¡± to be built around a graduate school of international studies that will be completed by 2010. The Koreans will pay for the statue. On the spot where the statue is to be built, three cherry trees are growing, which Rhee planted with then American University President Paul Douglas in 1943. A touch-screen display next to the statue will depict Rhee¡¯s life and the establishment of the Republic of Korea.
It¡¯s difficult to find statues of Rhee in Korea. They say there is one on the second floor of the National Assembly and another in the Rhee family¡¯s private residence. But those statues do not befit the president who founded this country. The statue in the National Assembly was put there in 2000 to honor Rhee, who was its first chairman. The statue in the private residence was built using donations from his family and supporters in 1988, while the country was celebrating its 40th anniversary. Both have been placed in locations that ordinary Koreans cannot approach easily, so very few people know they even exist.
Things weren¡¯t always this way. Statues of Rhee once stood on Mt.Namsan overlooking Seoul and in Tapgol Park downtown during his tenure. It¡¯s not normal for statues of a president to be erected during his tenure. Those statues were the creations of his pathetic confidants and sycophants. Because of their odd origins, they were torn down during the April 19 Revolution in 1960, a popular uprising led by labor and student groups which overthrew Rhee¡¯s autocratic government, and were tossed around from one antique dealer to another until they ended up being dumped off in the backyard of a private residence in Seoul. Rhee statues erected at Inha University and Pai Chai University, which have affiliations with the former president, were torn down by student activists.
There are probably few figures who spark such stark divisions among supporters and opponents. The fact that assessments of the president who founded this country are so divided is evidence of the stark contrast in the bright and dark side of Rhee, as well as the rough and difficult path Korea has walked since its founding. But it is now time to take a broad and lenient approach in assessing Rhee the freedom fighter and Rhee the founding president of our country. We must remember what was possible and impossible during the 30 years Rhee spent traveling from one foreign country to another and between 1948 and 1960, when he founded and led the country, under the realistic conditions of those periods and using an objective scale of judgment.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Republic of Korea. The legacy of Rhee is that his mistakes served as lessons in Korea¡¯s movement toward democracy, while his personal accomplishments served as the framework upon which this country could accomplish industrialization and democracy. Upon hearing that a Rhee statue will be erected first in the United States rather than in Korea, we should realize the need to rethink the way we view the president who founded our country.
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