Read The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Online
Authors: Don Oberdorfer,Robert Carlin
Like Park Geun-hye, Kim has inherited a country stronger than it was even twenty years ago, when his father assumed power. Despite years of predictions from outside analysts that pressure for change is growing within North Korean society, and even taking fully into account all of the economic and political problems Pyongyang faces, North Korea continues to demonstrate an ability to survive as a coherent, functioning entity. However lamentable the regime’s policies and treatment of its own people, North Korea is not a “failed state. “The introduction of technology may ultimately play a critical role in undermining the regime’s grip on power. But for now, the North has been able to absorb and adapt to fairly widespread use in the population of computers and cell phones, digital cameras and electronic libraries. The regime is using the image of technological prowess as a way to demonstrate that, despite its obvious challenges, the country is modern, forward looking, and revitalized. It remains to be seen whether the population’s widespread access to the Internet, still severely limited in the North, will turn out to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
After a string of failures going back to 1998, North Korea’s successful launch of a satellite into orbit in December 2012 demonstrated that Pyongyang is technologically able—and has the industrial wherewithal—to achieve some of its most ambitious goals, contrary to what many observers had thought. At the same time, the launch was a source of considerable pride within North Korea and very likely gave a boost to its young leader’s self-confidence.
Yet the missile launch also set in motion a new crisis between Pyongyang and Washington. On January 22, 2013, the UN Security Council passed yet another resolution (2087) condemning the launch. Not long after, on February 12, the North responded with its third nuclear test, the largest and apparently most successful to date in the test program that began in October 2006. The subsequent action-reaction cycle was unusually fraught. It was quite different from what has often—and erroneously—been described by Washington as “the cycle” of North Korean provocation and negotiations. This time, events snowballed into something that appeared more dangerous.
A day after the UN’s public condemnation of the launch, Pyongyang released a Foreign Ministry statement proclaiming, in addition to the obvious point that the North would continue to launch satellites, that the DPRK government had drawn the “final conclusion that the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is impossible unless the denuclearization of the world is realized as it has become clear now that the U.S. policy
hostile to the DPRK remains unchanged.” In other words, the North Korean nuclear issue was no longer to be considered in isolation but rather as part of efforts by the nuclear weapons states to reduce and abolish nuclear weapons worldwide. If there was any doubt as to their meaning, the Foreign Ministry emphasized that the September 19, 2005, six-party joint statement was “defunct” and that talks for the North’s denuclearization were no longer possible.
*
Finally, the statement warned that North Korea would “take steps for physical counteraction to bolster the military capabilities for self defense, including the nuclear deterrence, both qualitatively and quantitatively.” Put plainly, the DPRK planned to produce more and better nuclear weapons.
To underline the point that a new, far-reaching policy was in the works, over the next few weeks Kim Jong Un took part in three unusual, high-profile meetings—a small group session with his security and foreign-policy advisers (January 26), an enlarged meeting of the party’s Central Military Commission (February 3), and a Politburo meeting (February 11) involving the top-ranked members of the Workers Party of Korea. Judging from the brief North Korean media reports that accompanied each, Kim spoke at the meetings about the main components of what, at the end of March, he would announce as a new two-line strategy. On February 12, the day after the Politburo meeting, the North moved ahead on one part of the strategy by conducting its third nuclear test.
Thereafter, almost every day for the next month and a half, Washington and Seoul on one side and Pyongyang on the other took steps or made statements that added to the sense of an open-ended escalation. By the time the storm had passed, the United States had flown strategic bombers over South Korea on at least three separate occasions, the North Koreans had announced that the Armistice Agreement had been nullified, and Kim Jong Un had convened an “urgent operation meeting” to consider new operational status for the KPA Strategic Rocket Force (SRF). To add spice to the drama, North Korean media even noted the time of the meeting—00:30.
**
At the meeting, according to KCNA, Kim “examined and finally ratified the plan of the Strategic Rocket Forces,”
ordering standby status so that in case the United States launched a “huge provocation,” the SRF could “strike any time the U.S. mainland, its military bases in the operational theaters in the Pacific, including Hawaii and Guam, and those in south Korea.”
The warning of that wildly improbably scenario was followed the next day by something even more extreme: a “special statement” in the name of the “government, political parties, and organizations” of the DPRK, announcing that “from this moment, North-South relations will be put in a state of war and all issues arousing between north and south will be dealt with according to wartime regulations.” Taking the bait (for that is apparently what this statement was), the English-language
Japan Times
on March 31 carried an article headlined “North Korea Tensions Near Boiling Point.”
In fact, rather than increase tensions, Pyongyang pivoted and headed in the opposite direction. At a Korean Workers Party Central Committee plenum on the last day of March, the North began lowering the temperature on both the domestic and the international fronts.
*
The major signal came in Kim Jong Un’s address to the plenum, laying out in detail the new two-line policy he had apparently been contemplating and discussing internally for the previous two months.
**
That policy took the North into new territory on both the economic and the nuclear fronts. Justifying a retreat from the economic theme he had introduced a year earlier (in April 2012) about no longer forcing the people to “tighten their belts,” Kim said that events had demonstrated that an end to economic belt tightening was not possible as long as the North was under external military threat. As a result, improvements in the economy would have to be accompanied by continuing efforts to develop the North’s nuclear weapons program. Kim charged that the United States was creating obstacles to the North’s economic development by “dragging us into an arms race.” His response was that the new strategic line would make it possible to reinforce the country’s defense capabilities “with a small outlay without increasing national defense spending, while directing great efforts to economic construction and improvement of the people’s living standards.”
Further indicating that he did not want to be seen as having given up on new economic policies, Kim underlined the need to improve economic “management,” terminology the North has long employed to avoid having
to use the term
reform
. Looking beyond the current crisis, Kim exhorted officials to “organize tourism areas in various parts of the country, including Wonsan and Mt Chilbo areas [on the country’s east coast], briskly promote tourism, and set up economic development zones in
all
provinces in line with their actual circumstances” (emphasis added).
The sense of renewed focus on the economy was reinforced by a symbolically potent promotion at the March 31 plenum. Pak Pong Ju, who had served as prime minister during the years of Kim Jong Il’s new economic measures a decade earlier before being relieved of his duties and demoted, was named a full Politburo member. The next day, at the annual spring Supreme People’s Assembly meeting, Pak was appointed prime minister, replacing the eighty-three-year-old Choe Yong-rim.
In parallel developments over the next few days, Pyongyang also pressed ahead on the nuclear front. The SPA meeting promulgated a new “Law on Consolidating the Position of Nuclear Weapons State for Self-Defense,” setting forth provisions for the use and safekeeping of nuclear weapons, as well as cooperation in “international efforts for nuclear non-proliferation and safe management of nuclear substance.” The next day, Pyongyang announced that it would “restart and readjust” its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon, specifically naming the “uranium enrichment plant and 5[-megawatt] graphite moderated reactor, which had been mothballed and disabled under an agreement reached at the six-party talks in October, 2007.”
*
On April 12, the Atomic Energy Bureau was upgraded to a full cabinet ministry to develop the country’s “independent nuclear energy industry.” That, presumably, meant increased resources would be devoted to completing the experimental light-water reactor under construction at Yongbyon. (Indeed, commercial satellite photography from the spring showed that construction of the reactor was making progress.) The upgrading of the DPRK’s Atomic Energy Bureau could also indicate that plans for new, larger power reactors would be drawn up.
As the military situation on the Korean peninsula eased, another more familiar confrontation between North and South began in early April. This tension centered on the Kaesong Industrial Zone. From its beginnings in 2003, the KIZ had slowly and somewhat fitfully grown to be home to around 120 small South Korean firms employing more than fifty thousand North Korean workers. For reasons that remain unclear, in the spring of 2013 Pyongyang decided to bring operations at Kaesong to a sudden halt.
The North announced that as of April 3, it would no longer allow passage of personnel or material from the South through the DMZ into Kaesong. In short order, the North withdrew its workers, essentially shutting the zone down. With no supplies or personnel replacements for managers and technicians arriving from the ROK, South Korean operators reluctantly closed up shop and went home. The last seven South Korean staff left on the evening of May 3, after two armored vehicles arrived from the South with final payment (reportedly more than $13 million) for taxes, some of the back salaries of North Korean workers, and other expenses. How closing down the KIZ squared with Kim Jong Un’s plenum speech—which urged North Korean provincial authorities to set up “economic development zones,” presumably with the participation of foreign investors—is hard to fathom.
The first months of 2013 witnessed public expressions by both Beijing and Pyongyang of anger and frustration with the other. A debate in China over what to do about its troublesome ally has gone on for years. Similarly, North Korean distrust of the Chinese is long-standing and, in Pyongyang’s view, completely justified. Rifts in relations between the two have occurred frequently.
Westerners often talk about the Chinese–North Korean “lips and teeth” relationship, but neither Pyongyang nor Beijing has thought of their ties in those close terms for at least thirty years. The private characterizations are less polite and more graphic. A ranking North Korean diplomat complained in the late 1990s that the Chinese treat the North like “dirt between their toes.”
Kim Jong Il’s shift to a much closer and more active economic and political relationship with China from 2009 until his death was driven by necessity, not by any love on his part for the North’s overbearing neighbor. After Kim’s death, relations drifted back to something more familiar—coldhearted smiles in public and expressions of thinly disguised contempt behind the scenes.
Many Western observers believe that since the North’s most recent missile and nuclear tests, Chinese–North Korean relations have truly entered a new phase and that Beijing’s overall approach to the Korean issue is undergoing a fundamental shift. But history suggests that we are equally likely to be watching the development of another period of frosty ties between Beijing and Pyongyang, of uncertain depth and duration but with the likelihood of reconciliation (of sorts) sooner or later. Either scenario will create new dangers and opportunities not just for North Korea but also for the South. With the continued growth of Chinese power and
influence, the dynamics on the peninsula are changing in ways that no one can yet predict.
By May 2013, the situation on the Korean peninsula had calmed, for the moment. But history suggests that until and unless new, predictable patterns emerge, the two Koreas may find themselves living closer to the brink of conflict than ever before, with the surrounding big powers pulled into frequent storms.
The storm of early 2013, and the unusually long sense of crisis it produced, was fed almost daily over two months by a sharp escalation of North Korean rhetoric, breathless Western media reporting, and apprehension in Washington over the leadership situation in Pyongyang, especially how to judge Kim Jong Un’s reactions and decision-making style. Curiously, throughout this period, the public mood in the South was remarkably calm. The situation clearly would not have benefited if South Koreans had started panic-buying instant noodles, as happened in the crisis of June 1994. Nevertheless, the calm this time around may be masking a deeper problem: South Koreans have lived with the northern threat for so long and are so tired of worrying about it (or have convinced themselves it is all a bluff) that the ROK government faces an ever more difficult task convincing its people that they cannot simply shrug off the longer-term issue of how to deal with North Korea.
The complex story of the Korean peninsula in the first dozen or so years of the twenty-first century is one of considerable, even momentous, changes. But none of these changes has altered the basic fact that nearly seventy years after division, there remain two Koreas. Perhaps nothing so clearly illustrates the problem as the sheer persistence of the formal structures left over from the Korean War. The summer of 2013 witnessed the sixtieth anniversary of the July 27, 1953, Korean Armistice Agreement. The anniversary was to celebrate not an armistice document long ago replaced, but one that, at least nominally, has remained in force for six decades. That longevity is testament not to the agreement’s vitality or utility—it has enjoyed neither trait for decades—but rather to the stasis, almost paralysis, that has become tacitly accepted as the norm by all the players on and around the peninsula. Sadly, nowhere are there any signs of movement toward ensuring that this state of affairs does not last as a festering national wound far into the twenty-first century. Should two hostile regimes continue to exist on the peninsula, it will be a tragedy not only for the Korean nation but for all of Northeast Asia, warping policies and hobbling developments for decades to come.