The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (92 page)

Mindful of previous complaints, the North’s announcement about the planned launch noted that “a safe flight orbit has been chosen so that carrier rocket debris to be generated during the flight would not have any impact on neighboring countries.” In this case, given the flight path from the new launch center, it was Filipinos rather than Japanese who might be concerned.

In a completely unprecedented development—seemingly in line with Kim Jong Un’s new leadership style—a few days before the launch Pyongyang invited the foreign press into the country to visit the new launch facility as well as the launch control center near Pyongyang. The rocket blasted off in the early morning on April 13, but veered off course and exploded about a minute into flight. Several hours later, in another unprecedented move of openness, DPRK television interrupted normal programming to announce the satellite had “failed to enter its preset orbit.”
**

Washington declared the Leap Day deal no longer valid. Administration officials portrayed the deal as a “test” of North Korea, a test that, in their eyes, North Korea had failed. Whether something could have been salvaged from the deal—assuming the political flak in Washington from going back to the table was survivable—is impossible to know. Getting IAEA inspectors to Yongbyon and into the enrichment facility might have yielded valuable insights, but IAEA director general Yukiya Amano was not prepared to take the initiative.

Speculation that the launch failure was a serious embarrassment to Kim Jong Un, possibly undermining his position, proved baseless. Two days before the launch attempt, Kim had assumed the title of “first secretary” of the Workers Party, and his formal grasp of the levers of power was now complete.

THE NEW LOOK

A few days after the launch, Kim gave his maiden address in public, on the centennial of his grandfather’s birth. In tone and substance, it was not the speech of a young ruler shaken by recent failure. Kim laid out (as he had to party cadres a few days earlier) what seemed to be a new approach on several levels. Though paying homage to his father’s rule, he strongly implied that his was the start of a new era, that North Koreans could look to the future with confidence, “without tightening their belts any longer and fully enjoy wealth and prosperity under socialism.” He left the door open to dealing with Seoul, and, by implication, with Washington as well.

For the rest of 2012, Kim Jong Un set about establishing an image for himself vastly different from his father’s. Where Kim Jong Il had seemed aloof, Kim Jong Un was publicly warm. He hugged babies, sat on the floor with new apartment dwellers, and brought his wife along with him into the public eye. He posed patiently as women soldiers, one by one, stood beside him for their pictures to be taken.

The regime encouraged stories in the international media of major economic reform efforts, especially in the agricultural area, but then pulled back. The theme of “belt tightening” became a focus of disagreement, much as Kim Jong Il’s new economic measures in 2002 had been debated in the media. Yet it seems unlikely that such disagreement—then or now—would emerge if change were not in the wind. How much change, how far it might be developed, and how long it could be sustained remained an open question at the end of Kim Jong Un’s first year in power.

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*
Due to torrential rains and flooding in Pyongyang, the summit was rescheduled for October.

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Negative views within the administration about dealing with North Korea made such an idea impossible to consider for very long. Besides, there was an enduring fear of “doing an Albright”—being perceived as somehow endorsing the Kim regime. That fear lasted into the next US administration as well.

*
The theme was strikingly similar to what a North Korean negotiator had said several years before during US-DPRK missile talks in New York. The North had looked around stores in Manhattan, he noted. “We don’t need to sell missiles if we can use our light industry to earn money selling goods to the United States.” Even during the Kumchang-ri negotiations in 1999, the North Koreans had suggested that the empty cavern might be utilized by American companies interested in a place for a light industry factory.

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To avoid a potentially embarrassing situation of orchestra members having to decide whether to stand if Kim Jong Il walked into the hall, the musicians had waited to go onstage until the audience filled the hall and the lights went down.

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After decades in Geneva, Ri Chol returned to Pyongyang in early 2010 to become an important figure among Kim Jong Un’s advisers.

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The Verification Bureau in the State Department, as verification specialists naturally do, devised what would be an ideal program. North Korea, however, tended to see as espionage what the United States considered verification.

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By January 2008, the United States was looking for other countries outside of the six-party talks who might supply the Japanese portion.

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August 14 was either the very day of, or a day or two after, Kim Jong Il’s stroke.

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One of the charges in the 2006 UN Security Council resolution had been that by failing to give such notice, the North had endangered ships and aircraft. That charge, at least, the North Koreans were preemptively swatting away.

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The North sent a similar message to the administration via the New York channel shortly before releasing its formal public statement, though as is often the case, the private message was tougher than the public one.

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How much better was never clear. Seoul would probably have balked at too forward leaning a US policy, and, as previously noted, there was deep skepticism in the White House that engagement with Pyongyang was worth trying.

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They were also moved by Lee’s telling of his impoverished childhood and how his experience, multiplied many times over by the generation growing up after the Korean War, meant that Koreans were truly pro-American in their hearts.

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The Singapore meeting almost never happened. In early September, the North Koreans, without warning to the South, released a large amount of water from one of their dams near the demilitarized zone. Six campers downstream in South Korea were swept away in the ensuing flood. The ROK government quickly sent a message to Pyongyang calling for an explanation. The North, literally within hours (and probably under Kim Jong Il’s direct, urgent orders), replied that it had been forced to release the water because levels behind the dam had risen unexpectedly and that it would give advance notice of future discharges. The reaction by the South Korea public to the episode was ugly enough that a different or laggard response from Pyongyang would probably have made it impossible for the Blue House to proceed with Kim’s August initiative for talks.

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The exception to this iron rule had been the arrival of ROK president Kim Dae Jung in 2002, but that was an extraordinary event, and no one could doubt it.

*
May 29–31, 2000; June 15–20, 2001; April 19–21, 2004; June 10–18, 2006; May 3–7, 2010; August 26—30, 2010; and May 20—26, 2011. Top-level Chinese leaders visited North Korea less frequently—Jiang Zemin, September 3—5, 2001; Hu Jintao, October 28—30, 2005, but there is a long list of exchanges just below the top level, especially from 2009 to 2011.

*
“Rason” is the administrative area that was created by combining Rajin city and nearby Sonbong county.

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The warning was the latest in an escalating series from the North since early in the year about the South “firing shells into the territorial waters of the DPRK side.” In parallel, the North also began to conduct its own artillery exercises that came closer and closer to challenging NLL and asserting DPRK claims. Whether these steps were originally designed to lead to an eventual attack is not known.

*
A good question is if Kim Jong Il had lived and the deal had been closed according to schedule in December, would the extra couple of months to get it under way have made a difference when the North announced its plans for the space launch? Or, indeed, would Kim Jong Il have postponed the launch?

**
The admission of failure to the domestic audience was so unusual that it was probably cleared, if not actually instituted, by Kim Jong Un himself.

AFTERWORD

W
HEN
D
ON
O
BERDORFER ENDED
the second edition of this book, in December 2000, there was reason to be optimistic about the future of the Korean peninsula. Then, diplomatic and security trends between the two Koreas and between each of them and the larger powers finally appeared to be moving in a positive direction. That is not the case today. From almost every angle, the past dozen years has been unrelievedly negative. As of this writing, not quite halfway through 2013, the way ahead for Korea appears not simply hazy but also unusually perilous.

Two landmark developments seem to offer an indication of what the future has in store for the two Koreas. On December 12, 2012, after a calculated (and highly successful) effort to make the outside world believe it had postponed a planned rocket launch due to technical difficulties, North Korea put a satellite into orbit from its west coast launch center. A week later, in South Korea, sixty-year-old Park Geun-hye, the daughter of former dictator Park Chung Hee, was elected president of the Republic of Korea. Though unrelated on the surface, each of these events has set in motion a train of policies and actions that are already shaping Korea’s future course.

THE GREAT LEADERSHIP DIVIDE

It was a remarkable sign of the changes in South Korea: in what was once (and to some extent still is) an intensely conservative, male-dominated society, a woman was elected president. And it was an impressive victory. Park Geun-hye won with a majority rather than just a plurality of the vote, the first of Korea’s democratically elected presidents to do so. Having won the election, however, Park’s celebration could be only short-lived. She was propelled into a welter of domestic social, political, and economic problems every bit as serious as those her father confronted more than fifty years before. Yet Park cannot stay in office nearly as long as her father did to deal with the challenges, nor does she have anything like the powers he had.

Park Geun-hye has inherited a South Korea many times more prosperous than it was in 1961, its position vis-à-vis the North is much stronger, and its role as an important international actor (a role that seemed light-years away at the time of Park Chung Hee’s 1961 coup) is firmly established. Yet the foundations of almost everything South
Koreans have believed about themselves for the past several decades look to be in jeopardy. Self-congratulations about the “miracle” of the country’s economic growth and its remarkably peaceful transition a generation ago from dictatorship to democracy have grown stale.

There is a constant urge by politicians and commentators, inside and outside the ROK alike, to compare South Korea with the North, a comparison that for the past thirty years has been less and less revealing of anything other than the fact that the South always comes out ahead. It is hardly news that there is a gap between the two parts of Korea, and everyone (including the leadership in Pyongyang) knows that the gap is growing. Focusing on the gap, however, has become a distraction, a veil covering the reality that all is not well in South Korea. To take only one tragic example, South Korea’s suicide rate is far above that of all other OECD countries. There are many explanations for such a grim statistic, but in a deeper sense, the figure speaks for itself.

Park Geun-hye will hold office until early 2018, her five-year term prescribed under the ROK Constitution. In other words, on taking office she had only sixty months to address urgent and growing problems of enormous long-term consequence, ranging from South Korea’s low birthrate and the rapid decline of the traditional family to a lack of a strong safety net for the aging population and growing disparities in wealth. None of these problems is unique to South Korea, but they have hit the South all at once and picked up speed so quickly that there is hardly any time to deal with them before their impact will be felt with full fury.

As if this basket of problems were not enough, there is the ever-present shadow of the country’s division hanging over the scene. At this juncture, the core question of how to deal with the other half of the Korean nation, the 24 million people north of the demilitarized zone, appears intractable. South Koreans have gone through a succession of phases in thinking about the North—hatred, contempt, pity, frustration, and now a sort of ennui—but it is more clear than ever that nothing they try will work without a sustained national policy combining vision, commitment, persistence, and, of course, money—a lot of it. Whether the South Korean body politic and its leaders can devise and sustain such a course remains to be seen.

In contrast to Park Geun-hye’s relatively small window of opportunity, Kim Jong Un could sit in power for the next three or even four decades. Even if his life span is more like his father’s (sixty-nine years) than his grandfather’s (eighty-two years), he will still be making policy and influencing events in 2050. At this point, of course, it is early in Kim’s rule and not wise to try to predict his career arc from the outside. For now, however, well into his second year as the North’s supreme leader, he appears to be securely in power. So far, he has shown himself capable of the same sort of agility, in political and diplomatic terms, that has marked North Korea’s performance ever since the end of the Korean War. And if he dies at a ripe
old age, as his forebears did, the younger Kim will watch a succession of four, five, maybe six South Korean presidents come and go.