The confederation regime will help to mitigate the problems of the North Korean middle class and professionals—essentially, by shielding them from competition for the most difficult initial years. During the confederation regime period, special efforts could be made to reeducate those people, preparing them for a new environment, helping them to master modern techniques and skills. Most of the North Korean doctors, teachers, and engineers will be unable to adjust, unfortunately, but at least the 10- or 15-year leniency period will give a chance to the lucky and determined, while also providing others with time to find alternative ways to make a living. During this leniency period they should be allowed to practice their professions, even though some minimal retraining might be strongly encouraged or even made mandatory.
The military of the two Koreas should be integrated, with large (perhaps, disproportionately large) quotas reserved for former North Korean servicemen in the united army. If former military officers are given commissions in the post-unification forces, their remarkable skills and their sincere nationalist zeal will find a useful and safe outlet.
The confederation also should execute some policies ensuring that North Koreans will not remain the source of “cheap labor,” to be used (and abused) by the rich South. Encouragement of trade unions might be one such activity.
Naturally, the rich South will have to provide North Korea with large and consistent aid. Fixed transfers plus direct investment (the more the better) and fixed-purpose aid grants will be necessary. However, it probably will make sense not to repeat the German mistake of merging currencies overnight—for a while at least, keeping two separate currency systems seems to be a better option.
It will make sense to give North Koreans a fixed admission quota in the most prestigious universities in Seoul. In South Korea the top positions in management, politics, and culture are nearly monopolized by the graduates of the top four to five schools, which are all located in Seoul. This situation might be regrettable, but it is not going to change anytime soon. Since North Korean students normally cannot be pushed through an extremely demanding system of pre-exam cramming, they are not going to be competitive in the entrance exams. The only way to get them into places like Seoul National University and Yonsei University is some kind of affirmative action system. Such an affirmative action system is going to be unpopular with South Korean parents who are very sensitive to any hint at region- or class-based preferences in admission policy. But, such sacrifices are necessary preconditions for reforging a unified Korean society.
Politics in the post-unification confederation will be tricky and highly contentious. Currently it seems that there are two possible solutions.
First, it is possible that for the entire length of the transitional period, or at least a few initial years, North Korea would be run by some outside government. Such a government might be appointed by Seoul, but some kind of UN-mandated international administration might also emerge from a future crisis. Unfortunately, such an administration is likely to be full of greedy and ignorant carpetbaggers who take every opportunity to enrich themselves before running away. Alternatively, some of the bureaucrats in a “Viceroyalty of North Korea” will be younger, idealistic officials from the South, who might be personally clean and devoted, but also remarkably naïve.
Alternatively, immediately after the crisis, a democracy might be introduced into the North. This seems to be an attractive option, but assuming that the alternative elite is either absent or very weak, such a democracy will most likely be dominated by minor officials of the Kim family era—or at least their children and close relatives. These natural-born opportunists may instantly change their colors and claim themselves to have been lifelong closet democrats (like their peers in Eastern Europe and the USSR once did).
Their children will fare even better—as a matter of fact, the second generation of the elite is bound to succeed even in the (unlikely and undesirable) case of their parents being ousted from the positions of power. One can easily imagine the choice that will be made by recruiters of a major international (or, for that matter, South Korean) corporation when, in the post-Kim North Korea, they deal with two candidates—a charming girl with a degree from the best Pyongyang college, passable English, and great social skills, and a young girl of the same age from the countryside with no working knowledge of the English language, a very basic picture of the outside world, and little understanding of how the modern economy works.
The choice seems obvious, but one should remember that the former in our thought experiment is almost certain to be the daughter of a party cadre (perhaps an efficient interrogator from the political police or a senior guard in a prison camp). This is principally because usually only well-connected people—in the case of North Korea, people who get their hands dirty (most of the time at least)—can give their children the opportunity to acquire the aforementioned education. Even her great looks might hint that she had the rare privilege of being exempt from annual labor mobilizations (such stints of hard work in the open air are really bad for the skin, and physically age participants). Meanwhile, nearly all the children and grandchildren of the people who once were unlucky to fall victim to Kim Il Sung’s wrath and spend their youth in camps or in exile in the countryside will look like the second girl in the above example—being exiled to the countryside, she would have not the slightest chance to acquire the education and skills that could make her successful in the post-Kim world.
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.
SOMETHING ABOUT PAINKILLERS …
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 prob
lem 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).
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