Authors: Andrei Lankov
The present author is a historian, and this makes him immune to the ideas of “triumphant justice”—most injustices of history have never been avenged, and many injustices have paid off handsomely, both to perpetuators and their descendants. But even pushing moral issues aside, one has to admit that there are serious problems with the Kim-era ex-elite: those people will retain their old habits, including, in all probability, a remarkable appetite for kickbacks. Their knowledge of modern economics and technology, while superior to that of the “lower orders,” still leaves much to be desired. To further complicate things, a Northern democratic government would be prone to populist decisions, responsive to pressure from below. Ordinary North Koreans are likely to hold particularly naïve views on how their society and economy can and should operate, and some mistakes introduced via popular vote might become ruinous and costly.
Ultimately, both solutions appear to be flawed. Whichever road will be taken out of the current situation, one must expect a great deal of mistakes, demagoguery, mutual accusations, wild populism, and, alas, official corruption. Nonetheless, on balance one should prefer a corrupt and inefficient democracy (run by the local turncoats) over an inefficient and corrupt viceroyalty (run by the carpetbagging outsiders). It is better to give North Koreans an opportunity to sort out their problems themselves—and if they make mistakes, they will suffer consequences and, hopefully, learn something. It is also important that they see less reason to blame outsiders for such mistakes. North Korea is their country—not a country of foreigners (even those foreigners who sincerely wish them best) and not even the country of South Koreans—so they must be empowered as soon as possible.
One of the thorniest issues is the post-unification fate of medium- and high-level bureaucrats as well as the small army of enforcers who once ensured the survival of the Kim family regime. It is quite possible (and indeed highly probable) that many people in both South and North will loudly demand justice be served to the former security police officers, secret informers, and prison guards. The graphic exposure of the horrors of the North Korean prisons and camps will greatly strengthen such
demands. This approach is noble and understandable but, unfortunately, unrealistic.
My acquaintances from the North Korean security police say that such police usually have one informer for every 40 to 50 adults. This claim seems plausible since it comes from a number of people who do not know one another—and do not have a particular reason to lie about the figure. This means that roughly 200,000 to 300,000 North Koreans are now active police informers. There is no doubt that some informers have been dropped from the roster, so the total number of informers and ex-informers might be well over half a million. On top of that, some quarter to half million North Koreans might have been on the payroll of the security police at certain periods of their lives. Unless the entire justice system of post-unification Korea is going to spend years dealing with former informers and political police personnel, no honest and fair investigation of their deeds is possible.
In North Korea, the managerial and professional elite maintain much closer connections with the ruling bureaucracy than was once the case in the Soviet Union or countries of Eastern Europe. The closeness of these connections means that any honest and systematic efforts at “de-Kimification” (analogous to post-1945 German “de-Nazification”) will mean that virtually all North Koreans with managerial and professional skills will have to be removed from the professional scene. It will be great if the efforts aimed at creating an alternative elite (as outlined above) produce a sufficient number of skilled and ethically untainted personnel by the time of unification. However, we should not be that optimistic—even if the second elite emerges soon, it is likely to remain small.
One must be honest: no justice is likely to be possible in dealing with the former agents of the Kim family dictatorship. There are far too many of them, and their crimes, committed over long decades, are now almost impossible to investigate thoroughly. Most of their victims became statistics long ago. Sadly enough, the rejection of the regime’s henchmen and collaborators will also mean the rejection of nearly all people with useful experience and education. Thus, the justice is not merely impossible: it might be very damaging.
There is also another important reason why there should be no rush to punish Kim’s people. One of the major reasons why the Kim family regime has been so stubborn in rejecting reforms is the widespread perception among the Pyongyang elite that regime collapse (a highly probable outcome of such reforms) would lead to the political demise and perhaps even physical slaughter of the current elite. This fear of persecution is not merely the major reason why these people have refused to switch to more rational methods in running their country. It is also the reason why the North Korean elite and its supporters (a significant minority of the total population) are likely to fight in order to protect the system if and when the final crisis comes. A clear and unequivocal promise of general amnesty for all former misdeeds will perhaps help to prevent a full-scale civil war. In order to be taken seriously, such an offer should be made in no uncertain terms, thus making its eventual retraction less likely. And of course, such an offer, once made, should be kept.
This does not necessarily mean that misdeeds of the Kim regime should be neglected and glossed over. A possible—and very partial—solution is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an approach once pioneered by South Africa, where crimes and human rights abuses under apartheid were investigated but no judgments were passed and no punishments administered.
Another possible device is the lustration system, akin to what was used in post-Socialist Eastern Europe. According to this system, the more prominent collaborators of the Communist governments—secret police officers, mid- to high-level party officials, and so on—were deprived of the right to occupy important administrative positions or to serve in the judiciary and law enforcement agencies. The same policy might be acceptable in North Korea as well, but it should not target too many members of the old elite. In a sense, for at least a few decades every educated North Korean could be plausibly described as a regime collaborator, so this definition should be applied only to those who were actively involved with the most repulsive and obvious forms of police terror—like prison camp administrators. We should leave it to the investigative journalists and historians of later generations (and, perhaps, even descendants of some of the culprits) to fully investigate their crimes.
The Kim family should not become an exception. Ideally, it makes sense to let these people (and there are a few dozen of them) leave the country and proceed to comfortable exile somewhere—perhaps in Macao, where they can be controlled and protected by China, which can also deny direct responsibility for sheltering the dictatorship’s first family. Let these people do what they are rumored to be best at: devour impressive quantities of delicacies, while also enthusiastically chasing after women. Perhaps some of them will also write memoirs where they will persuasively explain how they would have brought unbelievable prosperity to their homeland had their plans not been sabotaged by corrupt officials and a “complicated” international environment (this is what the overthrown politicians always do).
Even confiscation of the Kim family assets, now rumored to be hidden in Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Macao, might not be such a good idea. The couple of billion they have managed to steal will make little difference in the mammoth task of post-Kim reconstruction and might be a price worth paying for a relatively bloodless transition. And of course we should not forget that if you live a billionaire’s lifestyle, it is much more difficult to present oneself as a martyr and victim of unjust persecution.
The proposals discussed above are going to be seen as controversial and, if implemented, are bound to be described by many a future historian as “ethically dubious compromises” or even as “backroom deals between the North and South Korean elites” and thus “anti-democratic” and even “immoral.” As a historian myself, I do not mind letting future historians feel self-righteous. But in real life, the policy decisions tend to be choices between bad and worse. In this case, the alternative seems far worse: North Korean secret police machine-gunning civilians in the belief that by doing so they are saving their families; risky and even suicidal brinkmanship by generals who see themselves as cornered; an alienated, bitter, but large and influential underclass of former regime collaborators who will be united with common Northerners in their disgust at South Korean carpetbaggers. And, after all, one should also keep in mind that the choice of the alternative route will not make future historians happy: decisive and thorough (and seriously counterproductive) cleansing of former regime collaborators will be branded as a “witch hunt” in their writings.
We have seen that neither diplomatic concessions nor military and economic pressure are likely to influence the North Korean regime. One has to wait until history takes its course while speeding up developments through persistent and patient policies. The wait might be long. It is not impossible that Kim Jong Un’s succession may trigger a chain of events that will bring the regime down in the next few years. But it is at least equally possible that the Kim family regime will survive this and other challenges and will remain essentially unchanged until, say, 2020 or even 2030.
We therefore face a persistent problem whose solution will take a long time—probably, decades. But what should be done in the meantime? Due to the democratic nature of the United States, South Korea, and most of the governments involved in the region, we can be certain that at regular intervals a new group of decision makers will pop up just to repeat the same mistakes their predecessors once made. The pendulum is likely to keep moving between overly optimistic hopes for engagement and overly bullish hopes for pressure—as has been the case for the last 20-odd years. But even if cold-minded realists and pragmatists prevail somehow, they still have to do something about North Korea as it exists now. They need to reduce the security risks created by its nuclear program, its brinkmanship, and its risky, if cynically rational, international behavior.
The North Korean issue cannot be simply dealt with using one set of long-term policies, outlined above. It also requires a set of shorter-term policies aimed at preventing (or mitigating) excessive provocative behavior, reducing proliferation threats, and diminishing the sufferings of ordinary North Koreans. However, one should never forget that these short-term policies are essentially palliative, akin to a painkiller that masks the symptoms and makes life bearable until the illness itself can be treated—but does not solve the problem itself.
The first of such shorter-term policies might be a de facto acceptance of the North Korean nuclear program. Admittedly, this is exactly what North Korean strategists want. They don’t talk about freezing their program for
monetary rewards anymore, but they have indicated a number of times that they might be ready to stop further development of their nuclear capabilities if the rewards are sufficiently high.
The “complete, verifiable, and irreversible” denuclearization is doomed to remain unattainable as long as the Kim family regime is in control. Due to the manifold reasons outlined above, North Korea will keep at least a part of its modest nuclear arsenal. The North Korean leaders might compromise on certain things (if they are paid handsomely enough), but this is the nonnegotiable bottom line—and after the second nuclear test the Washington mainstream came to understand it.
Nevertheless, the North Koreans have expressed their interest in the solution recently proposed by Siegfried Hecker, the former head of the US Department of Energy laboratories in Los Alamos, known as the “three no’s”: “No more nukes, No better nukes, No proliferation.” This means that North Korea is expected to halt its nuclear research and production, while keeping the existent nukes—in exchange for some concessions and compensations from the outside world (which, for all practical reasons, means the United States).
This proposal might be acceptable for Pyongyang—if the fee is good, that is. After all, North Korea does not need its old rusty reactors any more. Yongbyon, the North Korean nuclear research center, cannot possibly outproduce Los Alamos in the United States or Arzamas-16 in Russia, and it does not make much political sense to increase the North Korean nuclear arsenal further. The Yongbyon laboratories have already produced enough plutonium for a few nuclear devices, and this is more than sufficient for the dual political purposes of deterrence and blackmail. If North Koreans use these facilities to increase their nuclear armory from the five to ten devices they are suspected of possessing now to, say, 50 or even 100 devices, their ability to deter and/or blackmail will not increase five- or tenfold. As a matter of fact, it will not increase much at all. Consequently, these research and production facilities have outlived their usefulness and thus can be dismantled.
Perhaps the North Koreans will agree to accept measures that will make proliferation less likely, thus addressing another major US concern. It is
open to question which types of measures will be acceptable, but perhaps surprise inspections of ships and airport facilities will be allowed (once again, North Korea’s diplomats will require a high price for such a major concession, which in effect infringes their sovereignty).
Even a partial surrender of existent nukes might be negotiable. Perhaps North Korea can be bribed into giving up part of its plutonium and/or a few nuclear devices. However, this denuclearization is not going to be either “complete” or “verifiable.” Actually, it has to be very partial. North Korea’s leaders will need to at least maintain a high level of ambiguity about their nuclear capabilities or, ideally, receive an explicit or implicit admission that they will be allowed to keep a stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium and/or enriched uranium as well as a couple of nuclear devices. The stockpile and nuclear devices will be safely hidden somewhere in its underground facilities, to serve as a deterrent and also a potential tool for diplomatic blackmail.