The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History

by Oberdorfer, Don

  * The exception to this iron rule had been the arrival of ROK president Kim Dae Jung in 2002, but that was an extraordinary event, and no one could doubt it.

  * May 29–31, 2000; June 15–20, 2001; April 19–21, 2004; June 10–18, 2006; May 3–7, 2010; August 26—30, 2010; and May 20—26, 2011. Top-level Chinese leaders visited North Korea less frequently—Jiang Zemin, September 3—5, 2001; Hu Jintao, October 28—30, 2005, but there is a long list of exchanges just below the top level, especially from 2009 to 2011.

  * “Rason” is the administrative area that was created by combining Rajin city and nearby Sonbong county.

  * The warning was the latest in an escalating series from the North since early in the year about the South “firing shells into the territorial waters of the DPRK side.” In parallel, the North also began to conduct its own artillery exercises that came closer and closer to challenging NLL and asserting DPRK claims. Whether these steps were originally designed to lead to an eventual attack is not known.

  * A good question is if Kim Jong Il had lived and the deal had been closed according to schedule in December, would the extra couple of months to get it under way have made a difference when the North announced its plans for the space launch? Or, indeed, would Kim Jong Il have postponed the launch?

  ** The admission of failure to the domestic audience was so unusual that it was probably cleared, if not actually instituted, by Kim Jong Un himself.

  AFTERWORD

  WHEN DON OBERDORFER ENDED the second edition of this book, in December 2000, there was reason to be optimistic about the future of the Korean peninsula. Then, diplomatic and security trends between the two Koreas and between each of them and the larger powers finally appeared to be moving in a positive direction. That is not the case today. From almost every angle, the past dozen years has been unrelievedly negative. As of this writing, not quite halfway through 2013, the way ahead for Korea appears not simply hazy but also unusually perilous.

  Two landmark developments seem to offer an indication of what the future has in store for the two Koreas. On December 12, 2012, after a calculated (and highly successful) effort to make the outside world believe it had postponed a planned rocket launch due to technical difficulties, North Korea put a satellite into orbit from its west coast launch center. A week later, in South Korea, sixty-year-old Park Geun-hye, the daughter of former dictator Park Chung Hee, was elected president of the Republic of Korea. Though unrelated on the surface, each of these events has set in motion a train of policies and actions that are already shaping Korea’s future course.

  THE GREAT LEADERSHIP DIVIDE

  It was a remarkable sign of the changes in South Korea: in what was once (and to some extent still is) an intensely conservative, male-dominated society, a woman was elected president. And it was an impressive victory. Park Geun-hye won with a majority rather than just a plurality of the vote, the first of Korea’s democratically elected presidents to do so. Having won the election, however, Park’s celebration could be only short-lived. She was propelled into a welter of domestic social, political, and economic problems every bit as serious as those her father confronted more than fifty years before. Yet Park cannot stay in office nearly as long as her father did to deal with the challenges, nor does she have anything like the powers he had.

  Park Geun-hye has inherited a South Korea many times more prosperous than it was in 1961, its position vis-à-vis the North is much stronger, and its role as an important international actor (a role that seemed light-years away at the time of Park Chung Hee’s 1961 coup) is firmly established. Yet the foundations of almost everything South Koreans have believed about themselves for the past several decades look to be in jeopardy. Self-congratulations about the “miracle” of the country’s economic growth and its remarkably peaceful transition a generation ago from dictatorship to democracy have grown stale.

  There is a constant urge by politicians and commentators, inside and outside the ROK alike, to compare South Korea with the North, a comparison that for the past thirty years has been less and less revealing of anything other than the fact that the South always comes out ahead. It is hardly news that there is a gap between the two parts of Korea, and everyone (including the leadership in Pyongyang) knows that the gap is growing. Focusing on the gap, however, has become a distraction, a veil covering the reality that all is not well in South Korea. To take only one tragic example, South Korea’s suicide rate is far above that of all other OECD countries. There are many explanations for such a grim statistic, but in a deeper sense, the figure speaks for itself.

  Park Geun-hye will hold office until early 2018, her five-year term prescribed under the ROK Constitution. In other words, on taking office she had only sixty months to address urgent and growing problems of enormous long-term consequence, ranging from South Korea’s low birthrate and the rapid decline of the traditional family to a lack of a strong safety net for the aging population and growing disparities in wealth. None of these problems is unique to South Korea, but they have hit the South all at once and picked up speed so quickly that there is hardly any time to deal with them before their impact will be felt with full fury.

  As if this basket of problems were not enough, there is the ever-present shadow of the country’s division hanging over the scene. At this juncture, the core question of how to deal with the other half of the Korean nation, the 24 million people north of the demilitarized zone, appears intractable. South Koreans have gone through a succession of phases in thinking about the North—hatred, contempt, pity, frustration, and now a sort of ennui—but it is more clear than ever that nothing they try will work without a sustained national policy combining vision, commitment, persistence, and, of course, money—a lot of it. Whether the South Korean body politic and its leaders can devise and sustain such a course remains to be seen.

  In contrast to Park Geun-hye’s relatively small window of opportunity, Kim Jong Un could sit in power for the next three or even four decades. Even if his life span is more like his father’s (sixty-nine years) than his grandfather’s (eighty-two years), he will still be making policy and influencing events in 2050. At this point, of course, it is early in Kim’s rule and not wise to try to predict his career arc from the outside. For now, however, well into his second year as the North’s supreme leader, he appears to be securely in power. So far, he has shown himself capable of the same sort of agility, in political and diplomatic terms, that has marked North Korea’s performance ever since the end of the Korean War. And if he dies at a ripe old age, as his forebears did, the younger Kim will watch a succession of four, five, maybe six South Korean presidents come and go.

  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.

  NEW HEIGHTS

  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, contr
ary 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 o
f 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 CHINESE SHADOW

  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.”