Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  1998 to early 2004

  South Korea still was governed by hard-liners who halted economic cooperation over the first nuclear crisis.

  South Korea, under the “sunshine” policy, continued talking about economic cooperation as second nuclear crisis raged.

  Many in the North still thought armed victory over the South a possibility; youths joined a mass movement to volunteer for the military in time for 1995 reunification.

  The relative decline of military strength, known to high officials, had continued; hungry soldiers’ morale had suffered as 1995 came and ’went ’without reunification.

  Kim Jong-il, still considered ’weak, was buttressing his rule by focusing on ’winning over the military ’while leaving oversight of the economy to subordinates.

  Firmly ensconced as military dictator, Kim had proven his staying power and turned his attention to the economy; three military leaders joined him on his 2001 China trip.

  Country ’was racked by Kim Il-sung’s death (just as he became interested in major change), and then by floods, famine.

  The ’worst of the famine (and the traditional three-year mourning period) over, the economy ’was recovering.

  Shin Kanemaru, point man favoring reparations for North Korea, lost his clout in Japanese politics in 1993.

  North Korea’s 1998 missile firing over Japan gave Tokyo a new long-term reason to consider buying a better relationship.

  Saddam Hussein provided a model: have it your ’way and thumb your nose at the U.S.

  Saddam Hussein ’was captured in December 2003 in a “spider hole.”

  Isolated, xenophobic North Koreans were not ready to interact ’with foreigners.

  Contact ’with foreign aid givers ’was changing some attitudes.

  Most North Koreans had bought into socialism, expected an “iron rice bowl” and submitted meekly to the regime’s extreme control over their lives. Many had tried hard to emulate the selfless communist “new man” personality, viewing calculation as ’wickedness.

  Lacking sufficient food to ration, the government had relaxed many restrictions on individual mobility and people had learned to fend for themselves. The fierce struggle for survival required them to replace collectivist morality ’with the naked self-interest that fuels market economies.

  Personnel lacked the training, experience to run a market-oriented economy.

  Traders and entrepreneurs had emerged; young people studied business in the West.

  Another hypothesis could be drawn from the facts summarized in the table. If the limited change in 1970s Hungary really was the model, those same circumstances would tend to force North Korea’s economic managers to move farther—just as had been the situation of Hungarian planners. But there was the danger that even if Kim finally had decided to reform in a major way, the decision would not necessarily translate into successful reform and the new policies could be reversed. Marcus Noland warned that the reform efforts could “ultimately generate unmanageable social changes.”32

  Scarcity did not begin to describe the situation regarding the resources that would be needed to proceed with the reforms already approved. The regime had its work cut out for it just to feed the people. The UN World Food Program announced that it would have to halt food aid in February and March 2004, except to some 80,000 pregnant and nursing women and youngsters in day care.33

  Improved revenues to North Korean enterprises would come only after a period during which they spent far more than before due to the officially mandated inflation. Ruediger Frank noted that this created a serious gap, “which must be bridged by loans. If loans are not available, the enterprises will be technically bankrupt and not able to pay bills and wages.” But because bankruptcy and unemployment “are not acceptable for a state like the DPRK, these enterprises will be brought back under the umbrella of the state-run distribution system, which will effectively mean a failure of the economic reforms and most likely their end.34

  Where would the money come from? Like the United States, South Korea was going through its own jobless recovery35 a reason to spend available funds at home. And even as Seoul continued to consult with Pyongyang at the ministerial level, many of its actual and planned cooperation measures were on hold pending a resolution of the nuclear dispute. Frustrated that Seoul was teaming up with Washington to apply pressure, Pyongyang officials talked rather wildly of perhaps shutting down the Hyundai tours of Mount Kumgang.36

  Japanese public opinion mean-while was inflamed even more by the abductions issue than by the nuclear weapons threat. Kim’s confession to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in 2002 that the North had indeed abducted thirteen people and that eight of them had died seemed intended to put the issue to rest—but had the opposite effect. Although the five survivors returned to Japan, Tokyo demanded that all their family members be released, as well, to return home to Japan. And it wanted much more information on those who were said to have died. Given the Pyongyang regime’s human rights record, it seemed possible that its failure to be completely forthcoming might arise out of reluctance to avoid confessing to some atrocities even worse than the original abductions—imprisonment leading to starvation and death in the gulag, for example. Far from sending reparations money, the Japanese parliament early in 2004 passed a bill that would permit the government to impose economic sanctions if the abductions issue should fail to be resolved. Sanctions could block remittances (mainly from Chong-ryon members) to the North, and could stop trade. Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency raged that history had never known “such an untrustworthy country as Japan.”37

  The moves to reform the economy seemed to point to the sort of policy that might lead to resolution of the nuclear issue. It seemed by early 2004 that North Korea had little interest in remaining a “rogue” state. Kim Jong-il wanted to join the international system and was willing to give up his country’s role in proliferation of-weapons of mass destruction in exchange for sufficient help in reaching that goal. If he and his military colleagues could be persuaded that they would never be attacked by the United States or South Korea, they might even give up the longer-range missiles and the atomic bombs in their stockpile.

  Trust and verification were the big issues, however, regarding proliferation and—especially—the matter of existing stockpiled-weapons. On the latter point, it seemed to me that it would be extremely difficult to persuade Pyongyang to trust Washington sufficiently to relinquish the nuclear “deterrent.” The non-aggression pact that Kim sought could help in that regard. Pyongyang clearly hoped the Democrats would win control of the U.S. government. However, Kim had sufficient experience dealing with Washington that in dealing with a Democrat he would naturally worry about some future partisan reversal of policy that could place him once more in the Pentagon’s crosshairs.

  Who could persuade him he had nothing to worry about from the Americans? Perhaps President Bush could. There was the obvious comparison to Red-baiter and China-basher Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. Perhaps only a Republican president already on record as loathing Kim Jong-il could lead Republican hardliners to accept an accommodation with him. But there were major differences between the two cases. Nixon had not demanded that China relinquish its power to deter attack. And no doubt China had been very glad, every time its name rose for a season to the top of Washington’s list of prospective enemies, that it had its own nuclear and other weapons.

  Besides inability to trust American promises Kim perhaps had an additional motive for hanging onto his nukes.38 Whenever Korean reunification might come, the weapons that would make a united Korea of 70 million people automatically a member of the nuclear club could help to equalize the assets North and South would bring to the table—and entitle Pyongyang to a say in the arrangements. The match would be wildly unequal, otherwise, unless North Korea in the interim managed to pull off its own economic miracle.

  Rather than promoting a leap in the North’s prosperity, Washington was enforcing sanctions and pursuing ot
her policies whose effect would be to slow economic advances in North Korea. Some major prospective foreign investors found the risk too great, under those circumstances, to proceed with giant infrastructure projects they had been considering.39

  Some observers believed that powerful people around the American president expected the problem to resolve itself if serious negotiations were delayed long enough. “Reluctant in an election year to request a congressional appropriation to compensate North Korea for bad behavior, the Bush administration appears content to bide its time, hoping North Korea will simply collapse,” Washington-based Pyongyang-watcher Marcus Noland wrote in January 2004. Noland attacked such calculations. In view of a short-term economic boost that was resulting from the reforms, “the odds today on regime change are not particularly high, about 5 percent in any given year,” he argued. “If the White House seeks regime change in North Korea, it will have to give history a shove. The country is unlikely to collapse under current conditions.40

  Some in Washington dearly wished they could give history that shove and take Kim out. There had been various proposals for removing (surgically or otherwise) Kim himself, perhaps along with his family and closest advisors, à la Saddam Hussein and the other Iraqis pictured on that famous deck of cards. South Korea was not up for such a scheme, fearing that even if it resulted in a relatively easy defeat of the North the burden of absorbing such a poor economy and strange society would overwhelm Southern resources. But what if North Koreans did the dirty work by ousting Kim and his family in a coup and setting up an authoritarian military dictatorship in Pyongyang, similar to the Park Chung-hee government that had developed South Korea so rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s?

  Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz reportedly favored regime change—on the basis of an intelligence assessment that Pyongyang under no circumstances would negotiate away its nukes. One leaked idea of how to proceed was to “get the Chinese military to lead the way by telling North Korean military leaders that their future is dark as long as Mr. Kim rules.” Northern generals then would mount a coup against the Dear Leader.41

  There were serious problems with such a scheme. For starters, even if some KPA men were disgruntled enough to mount a coup, success would be particularly unlikely in view of the near-impossibility of penetrating Kim’s ironclad security. Rumors of a coup attempt in 1995 by elements of the army’s Sixth Corps (rumors denied by Kim in his 1998 meeting with Chongryon visitors) had it that the upstarts were put down, although with some difficulty.42

  Beyond that, who might replace Kim? A fresh, competent military reformer from a younger generation, such as Park Chung-hee had been when he took over in Seoul in 1961? Good luck. Defector Hwang Jang-hyop had said that there was someone in North Korea—he declined to name the person—-who could do a good job of ruling the country after Kim. But the best prospective rulers are not always the people who win military struggles for power. A hard line is the stock in trade of men in uniform the world over, and North Koreans had taken especially enthusiastically to the tough-guy role. Even if a coup were successful, the risk would have been high that whoever came out on top would become an even worse—more dangerous—leader than Kim Jong-il. Nastiness tends to trump benevolence. Recall the discouraging precedent in South Korea in 1979–80. Park Chung-hee’s intelligence chief assassinated him—and then the bloodthirsty, corrupt and profoundly anti-democratic Major General Chun Doo-hwan took over in his own coup.

  Possibly the Washington officials launching their trial balloon for a coup in Pyongyang did not know what readers of chapter 31 know: Relatively cosmopolitan elements of the North Korean military—officers trained at an academy in Russia, who had returned home and sought changes in the North Korean system—-were purged in 1992. Evidence that visionary reformists not only survived that purge but held sway in the senior officer corps was sparse, to put it mildly. For years, insider accounts cast military men as the heavies in policy disputes with civilian reformers. In 1995, for example, one elite defector published a chart dividing the top thirty civilian leaders almost equally among three categories: reformers, conservatives and “opportunists” (the swing-voting middle category, where the defector placed Kim Jong-il). Another segment of the chart, in which the defector categorized eleven military chiefs as either hawks or doves, was lopsided, however; he listed nine hawks and only two doves among the top brass.43

  One Korean-American who visited Pyongyang on multiple occasions as a Clinton administration official warned that if the Bush administration was serious about regime change “it should be careful what it wishes for.” North Korea’s “leaders in waiting—now in their late forties and fifties—are more isolated than their elders ever were, and there is a distinct possibility that this cadre promises to be all the more hostile to the West,” Philip W Yun wrote in 2003. Yun had been senior advisor to William Perry when Perry was special advisor to the president for North Korea policy. He told of a 1999 visit when the host was a senior colonel, equivalent to a U.S. brigadier-general. “An intense man in his mid-fifties, the officer made it quite clear his presence was not of his choosing” and showed “palpable disdain for our entire group,” Yun recalled. “The senior colonel’s contemptuous manner substantiated stories I had heard of North Korean military officers and party officials—just below the top tier—being much more aggressive than their superiors. For this group, fifty years of communist ranting arguably have evolved into a form of fundamentalism, North Korean style—the idea of a unified Korea turned to sacred aspiration and armed conflict.”44

  Sad to contemplate, there was the possibility that Kim Jong-il himself was the North Korean with the most realistic chance of pulling off a Park Chung-hee–style act, as a dictator whose encouragement of economic reform might promise better times for his people. Perhaps it was as fortunate as it was predictable that the Chinese showed no apparent interest in the Pentagon’s imaginative scheme to initiate a military coup against Kim.

  Instead of a coup, for the time being at least a consensus built in Washington in favor of an in-between policy that essentially meant simultaneously containing and engaging Pyongyang, giving Kim Jong-il a chance to show that negotiations could work to resolve the problem. Or as pessimists saw it, Kim would be given enough rope to hang himself by demonstrating incon-trovertibly to other countries that negotiations would not suffice. Then Washington could do a better job of lining up international support for a get-tough approach than it had managed regarding Iraq in 2002–03. Korea specialists Victor D. Cha and David C. Kang called that sort of policy “hawk engagement.45

  The State Department’s Kelly described a U.S. policy in which “North Korea has an opportunity to change its path. As some Americans might put it there is a chance for redemption. … With continued international solidarity, there is good reason to believe that North Korea will eventually rethink its assumptions and reverse course.46

  If the policy worked smoothly, perhaps it was possible to imagine a result similar to Libya’s 2004 agreement to give up its nuclear weapons program. Sensing the determination of the United States, Kim Jong-il might realize that refusal to deal with all issues fully would mean further isolation, economic sanctions and other measures to destabilize his regime or destroy it outright. At that point he might decide to submit, relinquish even his existing nukes (if he actually had any; their existence was mainly a matter of rumor and surmise) and take his chances on the American guarantees given in return. But imagining such an outcome required considerable optimism.

  Here is how the deputy chief of the North’s delegation to the six-party talks laid out his country’s position: “If the U.S. fundamentally changes its hostile policy toward North Korea, we would also give up our nuclear deterrent. That is, only when a legal and systematic security mechanism guaranteeing that the U.S. will not threaten us is in place, and a certain level of trust is built and we no longer feel threatened by the U.S., will we be able to discuss with the U.S. issues relat
ing to nuclear weapons we have already built. The criteria for judging that the U.S. has given up its hostile policy toward North Korea are as follows: First, provide in a manner believable to us a non-aggression guarantee stating that the U.S. will not attack us. Second, diplomatic relations between North Korea and the U.S. must be established. Third, the U.S. must not interfere with North Korea’s economic transactions with South Korea and other nations.”47

  Six-party negotiations in Beijing in February 2004 made few discernible advances toward resolving the issues. John Kerry the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, complained that progress was “so slow, and it’s begrudging” because the Bush administration refused to build on Clinton administration initiatives and talk one-on-one with Pyongyang. Some analysts thought Pyongyang was dragging its feet just as much as Washington was— but in the hope that Kerry would defeat Bush and change the tone of the confrontation.48

  Pyongyang reacted with alarm in March 2004 when the South Korean National Assembly impeached President Roh Moo-hyun on charges of election law violations, incompetence and corruption. The South raised its level of military vigilance while the North said it was taking steps to strengthen its “nuclear deterrent.” During a little more than a year in office, Roh had followed predecessor Kim Dae-jung’s sunshine policy. Officials in the North worried that hard-line conservatives incited by the United States were about to take over in Seoul and reverse the policy.49 South Korean voters weighed in on Roh’s side, giving his supporters a big victory in National Assembly elections in April.