The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History

by Oberdorfer, Don

  Hwang’s first overt move of opposition, according to sources in Japan, had come in early-February 1996, during an international seminar held in Moscow on “the juche idea.” In this setting, the high priest of juche expressed his determined opposition to war, calling it inhuman and comparing military combatants to animals, and he declared his support for Chinese-style market reforms, which were still anathema in Pyongyang.

  On March 10, Hwang’s world began to change when an article in Rodong Sinmun attacked “careerists and conspirators [who] outwardly pretend to uphold the leader and be faithful to the revolutionary cause while dreaming another dream inwardly and making conspiracies behind the scenes.” It warned that “socialism will go to ruin if there are careerists and conspirators seated in the leadership.” Although the article was one of a continuing series of such warnings and mentioned no names, Hwang was certain it was aimed at him. Surveillance of his activities was increased, and lectures were organized that criticized his views and weakened his authority, again without specific mention of his name. He noticed that government officials began avoiding him, a timeworn signal of trouble ahead. A few days after the Rodong Sinmun article appeared, Hwang’s aide dropped hints to a South Korean contact in Beijing that Hwang might defect because of his opposition to military dominance and the growing possibility of war.

  On July 3, while transiting Beijing on his way home from leading the official DPRK delegation to a congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Hwang met Lee Yon Kil, a sixty-nine-year-old South Korean businessman, born in the North, who had been leading a personal crusade to induce and assist defectors from the communist regime since serving as a commando under US and ROK direction in the Korean War. “War must be prevented at any cost,” Hwang told him, and to do so South Korea should provide food to the people of the North, which is “50 years behind the South.” Hwang emphasized the need for absolute secrecy, telling Lee that a North Korean agent was situated deep in the “power core” of the Seoul regime.

  In the late spring, in an attempt to stabilize his position at home, Hwang had taken the advice of high-ranking party figures to compose a self-criticism, admitting to mistakes. Toward the end of July, however, a speech by Kim Jong Il, published in the Workers Party theoretical journal Kulloja, returned to the attack against “social scientists” who erroneously interpreted juche. Hwang knew then that his self-criticism had been rejected and that his ouster from the seat of power was inevitable. In Beijing in late July, Hwang’s aide spoke explicitly of defection for the first time and reported that Hwang requested cyanide ampules in case suicide was his only option. He also asked for money to approach younger people in Pyongyang who he believed were less sympathetic to the regime.

  Hwang now began to move decisively to the dissident camp. On August 21, he penned a lengthy treatise summing up his view that North Korea had become “neither a nationalist nor socialist state, but a full-fledged dictatorship” that “has nothing in common with the genuine juche idea.” As for Kim Jong Il, Hwang wrote that he

  possesses vigorous energy, as well as unswerving will to protect his own interest. His political and artistic sense is very sharp, and his brain functions fast. Since he has only been worshipped by the people without being controlled by anyone, he has never experienced any hardships. As a result, he got to be impatient and has a violent character. He worshipped Germany’s Hitler. . . . He never consults with anyone else. No one can make a direct telephone call to him, no matter how high his or her position is. He considers the party and military as his own and does not care about the national economy.

  Regarding the possibility of war, Hwang wrote that “the North is developing nuclear, rocket and chemical weapons” and “believes it will win in a war.” Therefore, he wrote, “the South should set up a social atmosphere of respecting the military; beef up military forces in all directions; and make impregnable readiness with proper preparations for war” in order to prevent armed conflict from breaking out. Reversing his previous stand, he wrote that to weaken the North, the South should discourage reforms in the DPRK. He advocated continuation of the economic blockade to isolate the North, with the exception of providing food and medicine for the North Korean people.

  On January 28, Hwang left Pyongyang to deliver the main address at a symposium in Japan sponsored by the Cho Chongryon, the pro-Pyongyang residents’ association. He was closely guarded in visits to Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nagano, during which he extolled juche and paid tribute to Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. He flew to Beijing on February 11 for an overnight stop before his scheduled train trip to Pyongyang the following afternoon. Instead, he left the North Korean Embassy on the morning of February 12, pleading that he needed to go shopping for gifts. A short time later, he took refuge in the South Korean Consulate.

  Hwang’s defection posed a difficult issue for the Chinese government, which sought to maintain good relations with both Pyongyang and Seoul, until North Korea dropped its initial claim that Hwang had been kidnapped and announced that “a coward may leave” if he really wanted to defect. Still, in order to ease the embarrassment to Pyongyang, China did not permit Hwang to leave the ROK consulate in Beijing for five weeks and then only for a third country, rather than directly to South Korea. Under an arrangement worked out with Seoul, the Philippines provided a temporary refuge for Hwang before he was permitted to travel to Seoul on April 20. As he and Kim Duk Hong stepped out of a chartered Air Philippines jet at a military airport, the two defectors raised their arms in the air three times and shouted Mansei!—a Korean expression of triumph and good wishes. The South Korean public, watching raptly on live television, suspended its mixed feelings about Hwang, at least for the moment, and warmly welcomed his arrival.

  THE TWO KOREAS IN TIME OF TROUBLE

  By 1998, a half century after the creation of separate states following the division of the peninsula, the two Koreas were radically different, but both were facing serious difficulties.

  South Korea, although far more advanced economically and politically and awash with riches when compared to the North, was beset by problems that would grow dramatically at the end of 1997. In November the financial and economic crisis that had begun in Southeast Asia spread without warning to Korea. By December 31, South Korea’s currency, the won, had lost 40 percent of its value against the US dollar as investors fled the country, and the value of securities on the Seoul stock market had dropped by 42 percent. To avoid defaulting on the international debts of its banks and businesses, the country that in 1996 had joined the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), known as the club of the world’s richest nations, was forced to go hat in hand to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for $57 billion in loans—the largest international bailout on record, up to that point—in return for acceptance of stringent economic requirements. Bankruptcies and unemployment soared, with massive social and political consequences.

  Amid this turmoil, Kim Dae Jung, the longtime opposition leader, was elected president in the December 18 national election. “We’re just entering a dark IMF tunnel,” he told the public in a televised “town hall” meeting. “The real ordeal will begin from now on.” As the Republic of Korea celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its founding on August 15, 1998, its economy was still struggling to find the path to recovery. The economy bounced back dramatically in 1999, but began to slip again in the second half of 2000, as it became clear that underlying problems in the banking and corporate structure were more serious and more damaging than had been anticipated.

  Kim Dae Jung’s policies toward the North were very different from those of his predecessor and rival, Kim Young Sam. From his first years in national politics in the early 1970s, Kim Dae Jung had outspokenly advocated a policy of easing North-South tension and engaging the North. For many years, he was accused of procommunism by military-dominated governments, but he persisted in his views. Now as president, he set out three principles in his inaugural address: “First, we will never tolerate armed p
rovocation of any kind. Second, we do not have any intention to undermine or absorb North Korea. Third, we will actively push reconciliation and cooperation between the South and North beginning with those areas which can be most easily agreed upon.” His administration established a program of engaging the North through positive gestures and lowered barriers to trade and other official and unofficial interactions. Early in his administration, Kim’s program, which became known as his “Sunshine Policy,” was sorely tested by the absence of progress in official relations with the DPRK and by public dismay over another failed North Korean submarine incursion and the discovery of the body of a North Korean commando off the South Korean coast three weeks later. Nevertheless, Kim persevered in his engagement policies.

  When I first saw Kim as president in March 1998, a month after his inauguration, he told me, “We’re now waiting for the North Korean attitude. I think there is discussion among the North Korean leadership about how to change their policy toward South Korea.” The following month, at Pyongyang’s initiative, official bilateral talks were held in Beijing, but they broke up without results because the South insisted on reciprocity, in the form of guarantees of reunions of divided families, in return for two hundred thousand tons of fertilizer it was willing to provide. The North, however, insisted on obtaining the aid without conditions.

  An important element in Kim Dae Jung’s policy was the separation of politics from economics, which in practice meant permitting ROK businessmen to pursue deals with the North, even though there was little or no progress on intergovernmental relations. This proved to be a key in preparing the way to broader contacts.

  North Korea, meanwhile, continued to suffer devastating problems. As a result of failed policies, its economy continued to shrink in 1997 for the eighth consecutive year since the collapse of its alliance with the Soviet Union. An International Monetary Fund mission that visited Pyongyang in September 1997 issued a confidential report, on the basis of data largely provided by DPRK officials, that the economy had suffered “a severe contraction,” with total national output in 1996 only half of what it had been five years earlier. Industrial output had fallen by two-thirds, according to the report, and food production by 40 percent. Estimates of starvation varied widely, but US Census Bureau estimates suggested that about 1 million North Koreans may have died as result of famine between 1994 and 1998. This “arduous march,” as it came to be called in the North, had long-term consequences for economic and social developments in the country and, most of all, the regime’s grip on the people.

  Kim Jong Il, after the completion of a three-year mourning period for his father, was elected general secretary of the Workers Party in October 1997, placing him officially at the top of the political hierarchy he had headed since his father’s death. All signs, however, suggested that unlike his father, he was relying less on the party for control and governance than on the military from his posts as supreme military commander and chairman of the National Defense Commission.

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  TURN TOWARD ENGAGEMENT

  FOR MOST OF THE half century since the creation of its regime, North Korea’s role on the world scene was that of menace to the peace. Its attack across the thirty-eighth parallel that started the Korean War, its massive and forward-deployed postwar military force, its practice of terrorism, and its bristling vocabulary of threats made it a pariah state to be dealt with disapprovingly and as little as possible by most of the nations of the world. Beginning with the death of Kim Il Sung and the evidence of its poverty and deprivation in the middle 1990s, North Korea was seen less as a threat and more as an economic basket case and the object of humanitarian assistance. As Kim Jong Il gathered confidence and came into his own, especially after his June 2000 summit meeting with Kim Dae Jung, North Korea and its leader began to be accepted for the first time in terms befitting a normal state. What had been shrouded in mystery began to be explored; what had been cause for either anxiety or pity began to be engaged diplomatically and examined at high levels by many of the world’s democratic governments.

  North Korea’s shift from self-reliance to engagement began amid very mixed portents. The launching of a long-range DPRK rocket late in 1998 accentuated fears in Japan and redoubled concern in the United States, while charges of nuclear duplicity in clandestine underground activity further marred the atmosphere. At the same time, below the level of most outside awareness, domestic developments in Pyongyang began to set the stage for dramatically different policies that would alter the central relationships on the Korean peninsula.

  INTO THE HEAVENS, UNDER THE EARTH

  At seven minutes after noon on August 31, 1998, North Korea sent a three-stage rocket roaring into the heavens from a launching site on the shores of the Sea of Japan, which both North and South Koreans patriotically call “the East Sea.” The first stage fell away from the rocket ninety-five seconds later and landed in the sea 156 miles away, short of Japan. The second stage flew over the northern tip of the main Japanese island of Honshu and landed in the Pacific, 1,022 miles from the launch site. The third stage, a solid-fueled rocket that North Korea had not previously demonstrated or been known to possess, sought to place a small satellite in a global orbit broadcasting the revolutionary hymns “Song of General Kim Il Sung” and “Song of General Kim Jong Il.” So far as US monitors could determine, the effort to launch a satellite failed. But the range of the rocket, especially its third stage, was a most unpleasant discovery for those concerned about North Korea’s potential for launching ballistic missiles with highly lethal and destructive warheads.

  The test launch of the rocket, called the Taep’o-dong by Western analysts after the area where a mock-up of the projectile was first spotted, touched off an intense alarm, bordering on panic, in Japan. A man-made projectile from an unfriendly country flying over the Japanese islands was the most tangible physical threat to the country since the end of World War II and a nightmare to many Japanese. The government of Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi sought to contain the furor with uncharacteristically quick responses. A Japanese official had been scheduled to sign an agreement in New York that very day to provide $1 billion toward the light-water reactors promised to North Korea under the 1994 Agreed Framework. After the test, Japan announced it would not sign (though it proceeded with the project under US pressure several weeks later). Japan also announced that it was halting humanitarian food aid to North Korea and suspending its offer to continue talks on establishing diplomatic ties, which would be accompanied by large-scale reparations to Pyongyang. Most significantly, in the long run, the Taep’o-dong test emboldened the previously divided Japanese government to override its traditional pacifism and move into the arena of militarized space, deciding to produce its own satellite reconnaissance system for early warning and to move toward joining the controversial US antiballistic missile project in the Asian region.

  In the United States, the test came exactly two weeks after the New York Times reported a leak of highly classified intelligence that the United States had detected what appeared to be a secret North Korean underground nuclear weapons complex in violation of the 1994 accord. Taken together, the possibility that North Korea was secretly continuing its quest for nuclear bombs, while rapidly improving its potential ability to deliver them via long-range missiles, sounded alarm bells in Congress, greatly enhancing the credibility of skeptics who had never accepted the idea of negotiating with North Korea to buy off its nuclear threat. In addition, the Taep’o-dong test, coming six weeks after a prestigious commission headed by former—and future—Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned of a sooner-than-expected ballistic missile threat to the United States, was a gift to partisans of the controversial national missile defense plan. A Republican member of Congress gleefully told a White House official after the North Korean test, “That did it—we’ve got the NMD.”

  In all likelihood, the timing of the test had nothing to do with these US domestic developments, but was keyed to two significant DPRK
milestones in early September: the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the North Korean state and the formal elevation of Kim Jong Il to the top post in the North Korean government. Pyongyang had last tested a ballistic missile, the two-stage Nodong, in 1993. In October 1996, North Korea was observed to be making physical preparations for a new launch, but halted them after US warnings that such an action would seriously undermine bilateral relations and the Agreed Framework. In August 1998, however, the Agreed Framework seemed at a dead end, and so this time the launch went ahead, despite US warnings.

  It would be difficult to exaggerate the damage to the existing US policy inflicted by the twin blows of August 1998. Members of Congress who had reluctantly gone along with the US commitments under the 1994 Agreed Framework were incensed by the developments and prepared to cut off the funds. “I think we ought to stop talking to [North Koreans], stop appeasing them,” said the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Representative Bob Livingston (R-LA). “I see this as a pretty good excuse just to get out of this [1994 agreement].” A senior Clinton administration official with responsibilities in Asia told me, “The [secret] underground facility pulled the plug on the policy, and the missiles hurt even more.” US policy toward North Korea, he said, “is in deep shit.” Should the United States abandon its commitments under the Agreed Framework, it was clear, North Korea would be free to resume its production of plutonium at Yongbyon, and it was saying it would do so. This activity had brought the two nations to the brink of a military crisis in 1994 and would almost certainly do so again.

  Soon after the story broke regarding the secret underground site, the United States demanded to inspect it, in order to determine whether it was indeed a clandestine nuclear facility. In November a US team led by Ambassador Charles Kartman arrived in Pyongyang for the first negotiations the two sides had ever held in the North Korean capital. After initial confusion about the site in question—North Korea thought the United States was concerned about the site depicted on a map in the New York Times article, which had indicated the wrong location—Pyongyang’s diplomats were remarkably relaxed, expressing willingness to negotiate a site “visit” (they rejected the word inspection) if the Americans would pay for the privilege. Naturally, the initial asking price was ridiculously high, probably as much a result of bureaucratic dynamics in Pyongyang as any expectation that the price would be met. The pace at which the North Korean negotiator moved to his bottom line in the first round of talks suggested to some on the US delegation that he was instructed to reach a deal, though not right away. At that point, the North Koreans knew something the Americans were uncertain about: that the underground cavern in question, at a place called Kumchang-ri, was not a nuclear facility and was unsuitable for such a purpose. They also increasingly understood it was essential for Washington to obtain access, and therefore Pyongyang could explore what might be gained in return for letting the United States take a look.