The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History

by Oberdorfer, Don

  On the military side, Chernenko was equally forthcoming. Since the early 1970s, Moscow had refused to provide sophisticated warplanes to North Korea despite supplying them to such nations as Egypt, Libya, and Syria, because of a Soviet fear that Kim might use the planes rashly. However, on the basis of the newly improved USSR-DPRK relationship and because the Reagan administration was supplying the South with high-performance F-16s, Chernenko promised to supply North Korea with sixty MiG-25 fighters—probably no match for the F-16s but a quantum jump beyond the DPRK’s previous weapons. The planes began showing up in North Korean skies the following spring. The Kremlin’s military aid package also included SAM-3 surface-to-air missiles and Soviet surface-to-surface SCUD missiles with a fifty-mile range.

  In return, in a remarkable breach of its neutral stance in the Sino-Soviet split, the North permitted Soviet military aircraft to begin regular overflights of its airspace. By the end of 1985, they had flown twenty-one missions over North Korea. Soviet warships also began making port calls in North Korea. Even before this flowering of Moscow-Pyongyang military cooperation, the US Command in South Korea was sufficiently concerned that it notified American forces whenever Soviet satellites were expected overhead, in order to implement “avoidance techniques” to mask American activities from overhead spying.

  Besides obtaining military and economic assistance, another top-priority aim of Kim Il Sung’s 1984 trip was to persuade the Soviet Union to forswear relations or even contacts with the South. Having failed to unify the country through military means in the Korean War, Kim was passionately opposed to the development of “two Koreas,” which implied along-lasting division of the country. He was particularly allergic to any dealings with or recognition of South Korea by the Soviet Union or China—but his own dealings with the South sapped the force of his argument. If he could deal with Seoul, his allies reasoned, why couldn’t they? Moreover, the South’s rapid economic strides and growing international stature made contacts with Seoul increasingly attractive to members of the communist bloc. South Korea fought hard to undertake and improve these relationships, step by step. And in zero-sum fashion, North Korea fought hard against them, each step of the way.

  For a long time, the Soviet Union rejected all relations with South Korea. But in 1973, following the North-South joint statement and President Park’s drive for normal relations with communist countries, the Soviet Union began to permit South Korean citizens to participate in international conferences and sports events in the USSR. Pyongyang immediately protested, but Moscow responded that if it barred South Koreans from legitimate international activities, its own participants could be barred, and “there is even a danger that the Soviet Union would be expelled from important organizations.”

  Around the same time, North Koreans protested sharply after spotting a Soviet correspondent dining in a fashionable Paris café with two South Korean diplomats. The Soviet Foreign Ministry denied any wrongdoing but cabled its overseas posts that “unauthorized, reckless encounters with South Koreans harm our national interests and undermine trust in the integrity of Soviet foreign policy by the DPRK leadership.” On another occasion, eagle-eyed North Korean diplomats detected a few South Korean stamps in an international postal exhibition in Moscow, prompting a high-level complaint and hurried removal of the offensive stamps from the display cases.

  With South Korea’s growing stature and strength in the 1980s, however, a more realistic assessment was beginning to permeate academic and governmental ranks in Moscow. Following Kim Il Sung’s 1984 trip, the Korean-born deputy director of the Institute of Oriental Studies, Georgi Kim, said at a closed meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee that the Soviet Union should stop looking at Seoul through Pyongyang’s biased eyes. He declared, “It is obvious that South Korea is a successful and respected country which is genuinely interested in being our friend. To respond positively to Seoul’s overtures correlates with the U.S.S.R. national interest.” This viewpoint was becoming increasingly influential in Moscow.

  The emerging Soviet relationship with South Korea was one of the principal issues on Kim Il Sung’s mind in October 1986, when he flew to Moscow to meet Mikhail Gorbachev, who had taken power the previous year after the death of Chernenko.* Kim also sought to persuade the new Soviet leader to press the United States to remove its nuclear weapons and troops from South Korea, suggesting that the Seoul regime would be in trouble if its US props were removed. Kim told Gorbachev with considerable exaggeration, “There is a big movement in favor of socialism in the South, and work is underway to create a national front. One third of South Korean parliamentarians support the North. Unlike the recent past when Americans were perceived as liberators and supporters, now many, not to mention the students, speak against the American presence.” According to Vadim Medvedev, a senior aide to Gorbachev who participated in the talks, Kim was openly concerned that the interests of North Korea might be ignored in the heightened Soviet-American dialogue, just as he believed was happening in the Sino-American dialogue.

  Several months before Kim Il Sung arrived, the Soviet Politburo had decided to shift to a more conciliatory economic and political posture toward South Korea that, a May 1986 Politburo document acknowledged, “was becoming a factor [in the] global, military-strategic balance.” Trade with South Korean firms through third countries was encouraged and began to increase rapidly. Exchanges were permitted with South Korea in art, sports, and culture. Nevertheless, in his meeting with Kim in the Kremlin, Gorbachev unexpectedly excoriated China for doing business with South Koreans and declared flatly, “The Soviet Union won’t engage with them.” Vadim Tkachenko, the Korea expert on the Central Committee, was thunderstruck by Gorbachev’s declaration, which contradicted the policy decisions that had been recently made with Gorbachev’s participation. When Tkachenko asked higher-ups the next day what policy to follow, he was told to ignore Gorbachev’s surprising declaration and “work as before.”

  When Kim and Gorbachev met, the Soviet leader had been in power nineteen months, but, as Gorbachev told me in a 1994 interview, “We ourselves by that time had not yet moved very far in developing and shaping the new Soviet line” in foreign and domestic affairs. Earlier in the month, Gorbachev had met Reagan in a high-stakes bargaining match over nuclear weapons at the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik and had returned to Moscow without an agreement. The Soviet leader was coming under fire for the first time from conservatives and some of the military for giving away too much to the West; this criticism may have accounted for his surprising declaration of solidarity in the meeting with Kim. In private, “Gorbachev had an ironical attitude to the claims of the Great Leader and considered him as a burden he had from the past,” recalled Anatoly Chernyayev, Gorbachev’s national security assistant. As Gorbachev would write in his memoirs, despite his misgivings about Kim’s unusual ideology and a personality cult unique in the world, “North Korea was seen as a privileged ally, close to us through the socialist family group and the treaties of mutual friendship and protection. For this reason, we fulfilled virtually all of Pyongyang’s wishes for weapons deliveries and economic help.”

  During the talks with Gorbachev, Kim was able to reconfirm the pledges of economic and military aid that had been offered by Chernenko two years earlier. Specifically, he obtained promises of thirty MiG-29 fighters, supersonic warplanes more advanced than those he had received from Chernenko, plus SU-25 fighters, SAM-5 missiles, and an advanced radar system for early warning and control of ground forces. As the pledges became realities, Soviet military aid to North Korea reached its post–Korean War peak levels, even while Gorbachev was reducing tensions on other fronts and dissolving conflicts with the West.

  As a result of Kim Il Sung’s diplomacy and the intensification of the Cold War in the early years of the Reagan presidency, cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang flourished in many fields in the mid-1980s. In 1987, the year following Kim’s meeting with Gorbachev, the Soviet Union sent forty-five delegat
ions to North Korea, while North Korea sent sixty-two delegations to Moscow. Nonetheless, there is considerable evidence that Kim Il Sung did not trust the new Soviet leader, especially as his liberalizing reforms, glasnost and perestroika, began to take hold and his relations with the capitalist world improved. Word was circulating among Pyongyang’s diplomatic elite that Kim considered Gorbachev even more of a revisionist than the dreaded Nikita Khrushchev had been. Pyongyang increasingly feared a turn for the worse in relations with Moscow.

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  * Due to the “spy plane” charges and the failure to locate the airplane’s black box, or inflight data recorder, the circumstances of the tragedy would be controversial for nearly a decade. It was only in January 1993, a year after the Soviet Union had collapsed, that the long-hidden black box and recordings of air-defense conversations were unveiled by the Russian government that had succeeded to power in the Kremlin. These records conclusively established that the airliner had strayed 360 miles off its scheduled course due to a series of innocent navigational errors and that a trigger-happy Soviet air-defense commander had ordered the plane shot down by air-to-air missiles on the mistaken assumption it was on an espionage mission. The tapes also disclosed that the KAL cockpit crew members were unaware that they had strayed off course, oblivious to the danger they were in, and never knew what hit them when they and their passengers tumbled uncontrollably for twelve minutes to a watery grave.

  * By the early 1990s, the two had resumed contacts and trade but did not establish formal diplomatic relations again until April 2007.

  * The USS Pueblo, an electronic surveillance ship on a mission off the east coast of North Korea, was seized by the North Korean navy on January 23, 1968. The North claimed the ship was in its waters; the United States said the vessel was in international waters. The crew was held until December 1968, when the United States offered an apology that was immediately rescinded once the men were safe in American hands. The Pueblo was docked for many years in the east coast port of Wonsan. It was moved in 1999 to the Taedong River in Pyongyang, where it was turned into a museum. The ship is slated to be moved again to become part of the exhibit of the newly built Fatherland Liberation War Museum in 2013.

  * In explaining Kim’s decision to make an imperial-style rail trip across the Soviet Union in 1984, North Koreans had told Soviet officials that Kim’s doctors recommended that he not fly, due to back trouble. In 1986 they said the doctors no longer objected to his flying.

  7

  THE BATTLE FOR DEMOCRACY IN SEOUL

  FOR NEARLY ALL ITS existence since the liberation from Japan and the division of the country in 1945, South Korea had been dominated by strong rulers exercising virtually unchecked powers. As in the Kim regime in the North, this was in part a legacy of the leadership style of the Japanese colonial rulers, validated and justified by the national security requirements of the life-or-death struggle on the divided peninsula. During General Park Chung Hee’s lengthy reign and the successor rule of General Chun Doo Hwan, the South experienced dramatic economic gains, but its political arrangements seemed frozen in time. This discrepancy gave rise to growing public discontent, expressed passionately by potent antigovernment political and social forces that even the strongest rulers had never been able to stifle. As the end of Chun’s regime approached, the sense of imminent danger from North Korea diminished and South Koreans demanded an end to military rule enforced by the heavy-handed activities of secret police agencies.

  “The June Resistance,” as the political crisis of mid-1987 is sometimes known, was the turning point for South Korea in its shift from authoritarianism toward democratic practice, from strong-arm politics to civil society and the rule of law. Although many trials and controversies still lay ahead, by the end of 1987 South Korea had taken a new road from which there was no turning back. At a crucial moment, the United States played an important supporting role.

  CHUN’S SUCCESSION STRUGGLE

  The opportunity for peaceful transition emerged in the first instance from Chun’s pledge, soon after taking office, to serve only a single presidential term. Chun made his pledge, according to a close associate, because he drew a profound lesson from watching the regime of his mentor, President Park, decline, decay, and collapse in a hail of gunfire when its leader stayed on too long. In June 1980, while dominating the political scene as the top-ranking general before assuming the presidency, Chun told Richard Walker, a conservative professor with extensive Asian experience who would shortly be US ambassador to Korea, “If I were to become president, I would like the history books to say that I was the first one in Korea to turn over power in a legitimate and constitutional manner.”

  The fears and wishes of his family also had a major impact on Chun. In 1981 Lee Soon Ja (Mrs. Chun) told me that when her husband was inaugurated on September 1, 1980, their children asked that he finish his presidency properly and hand over the office to his successor. On Chun’s first day in office, in a small meeting with her husband and his top aides, the first lady repeated this advice, according to a participant. She added that George Washington was eternally revered in the United States because he refused to be installed permanently in office but insisted on leaving the presidency. “Please help my husband act like that,” she implored the officials present. Two days later, while presenting letters of appointment to the members of his initial cabinet, Chun publicly declared, “More than anything else, I am fully determined to establish a tradition of peaceful transfer of power.” Subsequently, he announced at a press conference that he would serve a single term—which was set by his new constitution at seven years—and then return to private life.

  Chun’s declarations were greeted with great skepticism. Having seized power through military means and cemented his power in the Kwangju bloodbath—and having subsequently been elected president by a rubber-stamp college of electors—in the eyes of his people Chun lacked legitimacy. It seemed unlikely that this stern, aloof, highly unpopular general would be the person to inaugurate a democratic tradition. Chun, however, took his one-term pledge seriously. He made plans to center his postpresidential life in a one-story marble office building constructed for this purpose in a parklike setting, replete with fruit trees, behind high steel gates, south of Seoul. “Chun’s fortress,” as it was dubbed by Seoulites, was the headquarters of the Ilhae Foundation, a think tank named for Chun’s honorific pseudonym and financed with $90 million in forced contributions from South Korea’s big businessmen. Showing a keen interest in his life after stepping down from power, Chun quizzed FBI director William Webster, on a visit to Seoul, about the US system for protecting former presidents.

  President Reagan and other senior American officials repeatedly and publicly praised Chun’s “farsighted” commitment to turn over power through constitutional processes, statements intended to lay down markers so that the pledge could not be ignored. “Chun Doo Hwan had made a commitment, and we wanted him to realize that the United States expected him to keep it,” according to Secretary of State Shultz, who suspected that Chun would abandon the commitment if he could devise a way to do so. Yet Chun insisted he was sincere, volunteering to Reagan in a meeting at the Blue House in November 1983 that because of the precedents of Presidents Rhee and Park, who unilaterally extended their terms of office and were finally ousted by force, “the people believe that a change of presidents is possible only through violence. This is a very dangerous way of thinking. . . . My term is scheduled to end in 1988, and it will.”

  Nevertheless, Chun found it more difficult than he expected to keep his promise. “In a country like ours, it requires a lot more courage to give up power than to grab it,” he confided at a dinner for Blue House reporters. He was well aware of the immense personal risks of dismounting from the tiger he had been riding since December 1979, including political and legal retribution from those who had suffered under his rule.

  An important factor in the Korean political transition was the worldwide trend in th
e mid-1980s toward democratization of authoritarian, military-backed regimes. The most dramatic case in Asia was the Philippines. Ferdinand Marcos’s 1972 power grab, in which Washington had acquiesced, had encouraged Park Chung Hee to impose his yushin system in Korea months later. But in 1986, Washington approved the “people power” revolution that ousted Marcos, and it prodded the falling dictator to leave for exile in Hawaii aboard a US Air Force plane. These spectacular events emboldened the Korean opposition and focused an international spotlight on South Korea as the next potential flash point.

  The opposition was also emboldened by the approach of the 1988 Summer Olympics to be held in Seoul, an event that promised to enhance the country’s international prestige and was thus of towering importance to all Koreans. The president of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, had made it known that the Games might be moved elsewhere in case of massive disorders in Seoul. This added substantially to the government’s reluctance to use lethal force to put down protest demonstrations.

  By the start of 1986, Korean public life was focused on post-Chun political arrangements. In April the president returned from a European trip convinced that moving to a parliamentary system would best suit South Korea; many suspected it might also permit him to retain power as prime minister or power broker after his presidency ended. The opposition, seeing such a change as a threat, demanded a return to the earlier practice of direct election of the president rather than through the easily controlled college of electors, established in President Park’s martial-law “reforms.” With the press still muzzled and the National Assembly a toothless body, the political contest moved to the streets, with the opposition seeking to demonstrate insurmountable national support.