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The second quarter of 2009 saw North Korea make headlines around the world, as it likes to do. (On their leisurely train journey across Siberia toward Moscow in the summer of 2001, Kim Jong-il told his Russian host, Konstantin Pulikovsky: “'I am the object of criticism around the world. But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track.”) The quarter was neatly, perhaps deliberately, bookended by missile launches. On April 5 after a two month build-up, while the world watched the preparations via spy satellites, the DPRK finally fired its long-awaited Taepodong-2 long-range missile. Ostensibly this was to put a satellite in orbit – although neither the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) nor anyone else has managed to observe any new object soaring across the heavens. Meanwhile, relations between the South and North continued to deteriorate as interaction became more caustic and the stakes higher. By the end of the quarter, the rest of the world watched again as the North launched more missiles. A Fourth of July fusillade Pyongyang marked the Fourth of July – surely no coincidence – with a volley of seven ballistic missiles, having fired four others two days earlier. The first four were small anti-ship weapons. The later seven comprised two mid-range Nodongs, which can hit all of South Korea and much of Japan, and five shorter-range Scuds, whose reach covers most of South Korea. Seoul’s Defense Ministry (MND) said that some flew up to 420 km, and that their accuracy – uncertain in the past – had “greatly improved.” Being ballistic missiles, this Fourth of July salute was illegal under UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1874, passed unanimously on June 12 in response to North Korea’s far graver provocation than any missile: its second nuclear test, carried out on May 25. April’s rocket launch had also prompted UNSC censure, as Pyongyang must have known it would. But at Russian and Chinese prompting, this rap was quite mild: a President’s Statement rather than a full-fledged resolution. Even so, it prompted paroxysms of feigned indignation. The DPRK declared it will “never” return to the nuclear Six-Party Talks, but rather would resume its nuclear activities. For once, Kim Jong-il was as good as his word, as we saw on May 25. The situation on the peninsula has thus entered a new and worrying phase. We may hope that this fresh belligerence somehow reflects the delicate process of choosing a successor to Kim Jong-il, reportedly his little-known third son Kim Jong-un. Once that is in place, the DPRK might return to negotiations in some form. But perhaps it will not, defying expectations and creating fresh challenges for the region. At present we can do little more than wait and see. North Korea-South Korea Relations 87 July 2009 Totting up the slurs At a time when the world grows ever more puzzled and alarmed at Pyongyang’s behavior, inter-Korean relations are something of a sideshow. Predictably, a North Korea angry with pretty much everyone reserved its worst venom for South Korean President Lee Myung-bak. Lee Chan-ho, chief analyst of cross-border ties at the ROK Unification Ministry (MOU), has been keeping score. As of June 22, DPRK media had denigrated President Lee 1,705 times so far this year: on average 9.9 times daily, up from 7.6 last year. Lee added that “some of the epithets … used to refer to President Lee are so blatant that I can’t even quote them here …What’s worse is that North Korea is using indescribably abusive language to slam the prime minister, foreign, defense and unification ministers as well.” Moreover, “the figure would be much higher if we combined the fire-breathing editorials in various North Korean media, including the Rodong Sinmun” (daily paper of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, WPK). There is no excuse for such vicious rudeness, but it reflects real disappointment. As we have argued before, Lee was wrong to repudiate the economic projects agreed by his predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun, at the second inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang in October 2007, two months before Lee’s election. At the very least, if the North was minded to end all cooperation in any case, it would have had much more to unwind and the fault would have been wholly on one side. As it is, Lee’s vapid and passive, but implicitly hostile, stance from the outset toward the North – no more “Sunshine,” but no better idea except an unfeasible linkage to nuclear disarmament and a patronizing ‘Vision 3000’ plan to develop the DPRK – can only have undermined those in Pyongyang who dared to favor North-South dialogue, while strengthening the hardliners now manifestly ascendant there. A spook’s false move If a small trumpet may be blown, here lies the strength of Comparative Connections’ careful survey of the minutiae every quarter. Memories are short, in and on Korea as elsewhere. But read back in this journal and recall, barely 18 months ago, the secret visit – revealed a month later – by the South’s then intelligence chief, Kim Man-bok, to Pyongyang on Dec. 18, 2007. On the very eve of the ROK presidential election, Kim – who had earlier played a key role in arranging the October 2007 summit – took it upon himself to go North and reassure his DPRK equivalent, Kim Yang-gon, not to worry if Lee Myung-bak won (his victory was by then a racing certainty, according to all the polls) since he would continue to engage the North. Rarely was worse advice ever given. In a further odd move, Kim admitted leaking the news and transcript of this visit to the Seoul press himself. He resigned on February 11, two weeks before Lee’s inauguration. His motives were probably self-serving, hoping to curry favor with the new administration. Yet his expectation of policy continuity toward North Korea was then widely shared. While critical of “Sunshine” as too one-sided, Lee campaigned as a pragmatic centrist. And as we also chronicled at the time, the North kept its counsel for three months after his election before deciding it had been conned and switching to vitriol mode. All decisions have consequences, as well as causes. Kim Man-bok merely lost his job. His DPRK interlocutor Kim Yang-gon kept his, nominally as a department director in the WPK. He North Korea-South Korea Relations 88 July 2009 remains a regular companion of Kim Jong-il, especially at the theatre; most recently a rendition of the Chinese opera Dream of the Red Chamber by the Pibada opera troupe in the east coast city of Hamhung on June 14. Perhaps as relaxation from menacing the world, the dear leader goes to the opera a lot these days. A week earlier he saw Eugene Onegin, its first mention for many a year – with his also long-unmentioned sister Kim Kyong-hui, wife of his ever more powerful brother-in-law and right-hand man Jang Song-taek. Maybe Kim really is dying; so, externally he is going for broke while at home this is his last chance to get about, see the family, and do what he truly enjoys. But that is beyond the scope of this article. They shoot people, don’t they? Kim Yang-gon is luckier than Choe Sung-chol. As vice chairman of the Asia-Pacific Peace Committee (APPC), Choe was North Korea’s pointman on the South until a year ago. In that role he welcomed and escorted Roh Moo-hyun in the North at the October 2007 summit. After “Sunshine’s” eclipse in both halves of Korea, Choe was rumored in January to be undergoing “revolutionary training” at a chicken farm. But reports in May claimed he had been executed, being blamed for poor judgment after relations deteriorated under Lee Myung-bak. Other versions say he was accused of making the North too dependent economically on the South and nurturing fantasies about South Korea. If true, this highlights both North Korea’s unchanging nastiness and the grim consequences of making the wrong call. Similarly, the current ferment and uncertainty over succession may well be a major cause of the DPRK’s new belligerency. You are less likely to be shot in Pyongyang for taking too hard a line. Standing up for peace is much riskier. So long, Kaesong? With almost all channels of North-South cooperation from the “Sunshine” years now in limbo, if not dead , the main substance of inter-Korean relations in the past quarter concerned the sole project still surviving, albeit ever more shakily. At the Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC) just an hour’s drive north of Seoul, just over 100 Southern SMEs employ some 40,000 Northern workers to make a range of mostly fairly basic household products. The KIC had grown quite fast since it opened in 2004 amid grand talk of its becoming Korea’s Shenzhen. Now, sadly, it looks ever more likely that the KIC will go the way of an earlier venture on the other side of the Peninsula. Hyundai’s Mount Kumgang resort, opened in 1998, brought 1.8 million Southern tourists in the past decade across the once impenetrable Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Yet none have gone since the Korean People’s Army (KPA) fatally shot Park Wang-ja, a 53 year-old Seoul housewife who strayed into a forbidden area in a pre-dawn walk on July 11 last year. The South at once suspended the tours because the North refused to let it send in a team to investigate, and a year later they remain suspended. Hyundai Asan, the operator, insists they will resume, but it is bleeding red ink, and amid the present worsening overall political climate, the prospect of resumption appears remote. Hyundai Asan is also involved, with the ROK parastatal Korea Land, in running the KIC. Since late last year the North has harried South Koreans in the KIC by cutting the numbers allowed to North Korea-South Korea Relations 89 July 2009 stay there and arbitrarily closing or restricting cross-border traffic. Now the harassment has moved to a whole new level. Held hostage On March 30, the North arrested a Hyundai engineer at the KIC, only recently named as Yu Song-jin. He is apparently accused of insulting the DPRK system and trying to incite a female Northern worker to defect. (The gender angle has barely been commented on. But since nearly all Southern managers at the KIC are male while almost the whole Northern workforce is female, it would be strange if the old Korean saying nam nam puk yo – Southern man, Northern woman – were not in the air, though romance is strictly off-limits.) The DPRK had no right to arrest Yu. KIC regulations stipulate that any ROK citizen there suspected of wrongdoing must be expelled to the South. Yet over three months later he remains detained, wholly incommunicado. No charges have been brought, yet the North has refused to let anyone see him, to accept letters from his family, or even to discuss the matter. By contrast, the two U.S. female journalists arrested in March and sentenced in June to 12 years hard labor have at least been permitted a few consular visits and telephone calls home. This is outrageous and surely deliberate. Pyongyang must know Seoul cannot accept this, and that Southern SMEs will not stay in the KIC if their people risk arbitrary imprisonment. Besides his being a useful hostage, Yu’s detention thus looks like a ploy to force the KIC’s closure – while placing the onus of responsibility and blame on the South for doing so. Seoul wrong-footed on PSI The North’s other behavior at a series of meetings on the KIC reinforces this interpretation of cynicism. It still has the ability to wrong-foot the South. Thus, when it said in mid-April that it wanted to discuss the KIC’s future, the ROK government rather clumsily postponed announcing a long-expected decision on joining the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), for fear of jeopardizing the new and now rare North-South dialogue. This cut no ice. On April 18, the KPA warned that it would regard South Korea’s full participation in the PSI as a declaration of war. In a more than usually menacing note, the KPA statement added that the South “should never forget that Seoul is just 50 km away from the Military Demarcation Line (MDL).” The eventual first meeting on (and at) the KIC, three days later, was farcical. It lasted just 22 minutes, late in the evening, after procedural disputes had delayed the start for over 12 hours. Clearly playing hardball, the North at first unprecedentedly refused even to reveal the names or rank of its own delegates so the South did not know whom they would be meeting. Arranging a second meeting was complicated inter alia by Yu Song-jin’s detention, with the North refusing to allow this on the agenda. Meanwhile, Pyongyang dropped a bombshell. On May 15 it unilaterally “declare[d] null and void the rules and contracts on land rent, wages and all sorts of taxes” at the KIC. Telling the South to accept the changes “unconditionally,” the North added that “we do not care about them leaving … if they have no will to carry [this] out.” Seoul denounced this blackmail as “simply unacceptable.” Other new restrictions planned for the North Korea-South Korea Relations 90 July 2009 KIC – such as tighter traffic regulations, including a $1,000 fine for illegally blocking streets – can only be called petty harassment. On May 20, a representative of the 106 mostly small Southern firms operating in the zone warned that they face the risk of bankruptcy as their orders plunge while tension rises. Yoo Chang-geun said the companies would lodge a strong protest with both Korean governments. Much good may it do him, with both in their stubbornly short-sighted states of mind. On June 16, a fur and leather apparel maker, Skinnet, became the first ROK firm to quit the zone since it opened in 2004, citing safety and profitability concerns. It is unlikely to be the last. Thirty times more rent, please Not until June 11 did the two Koreas manage to meet again, and the North unveiled its new terms. Brazenly, it demanded a four-fold rise in wages for its 40,000 workers in the KIC to $300 monthly, plus a 30-fold increase in the 50-year land lease fee from $16 million to $500 million. It must know that the South cannot afford – either financially or politically – to accept such exorbitant demands, hence the suspicion has to be that such maximalism is intended to force the KIC’s closure. Yet MOU and others deny this, professing to believe that this is just the North’s usual ultra-tough style and bargaining is still possible. At a subsequent three-hour meeting on June 19, the North unexpectedly offered to lift curbs it has imposed since December on cross-border traffic and on the number of South Koreans permitted to stay at the KIC. It was not clear if this was sincere, and no other progress was made – including (crucially) regarding the still detained Yu Song-jin. A further one-hour meeting on July 2 was again stalemated, and broke up with no date set to meet again. Despite MOU’s optimism, the fear must be that in its present mood the DPRK does not care: either about loss of income in the short term – last year firms in the KIC remitted some $26 million in wages, straight to Pyongyang before an unknown portion of it reaches the actual workers – let alone the long-run win-win vision that the KIC embodied. Hardliners in the KPA are thought to fear the zone’s ideological impact, seeing it as a Trojan horse for capitalism. Why stop them going? Of course, North Korea is primarily to blame for its worsening relations with the South, and indeed, the world. Yet one must question the Lee administration’s response. For example, why ban South Koreans from going North, as the ROK has done in reaction to the DPRK’s nuclear test? (The sole exceptions being travel to the Kaesong and Kumgang zones.) While much about the “Sunshine” policy was arguable, one of its unambiguous gains was to allow a wide range of South Koreans – business, NGOs, professional groups, religious believers, and more – to go North, more or less freely. Although this traffic was one way, it broke the decades-old monopoly of the two governments in controlling unification issues. Even if no counterparts on the Northern side were ever truly nongovernmental, this allowed many valuable relationships to be forged, personally and locally, especially by aid groups, whose motivation is often overtly religious (Christian or Buddhist). It will be tragic both now and for the long term if North Korea-South Korea Relations 91 July 2009 these incipient links are broken, and the Peninsula reverts – as seems to be happening – to old-style confrontation. That was the problem; it is no solution. More immediately, the South’s ban directly hits its own companies who are doing what Lee Myung-bak once professed to believe in: forging pragmatic business ties with the North. There are more of these than one might suppose. Besides the 106 SMEs in Kaesong, no fewer than 611 other ROK firms deal with the DPRK. Most (399) are general trading companies. A further 164 engage in processing-on-commission, the leading edge before the advent of the KIC: sending raw materials and sometimes equipment North, and receiving finished goods in return. There are also 48 investment companies; 120 of these met in Seoul in angry mood on June 15 to demand that the current crisis be resolved. While not all actually need to go North, for those who do Seoul’s ban is a major headache. All goes down Worsening North-South political ties can already be measured by economic numbers. On May 31 Seoul’s MOU reported that in the first four months it spent only 26.91 billion won ($21.48 million), or a mere 1.8 percent of this year’s budget of 1.5 trillion won earmarked for inter-Korean cooperation. Such spending already plunged by two-thirds from 715.73 billion won in 2007, Roh Moo-hyun’s last year in office, to 231.2 billion won in 2008, the start of Lee Myung-bak’s presidency. In theory large funds (800 billion won) are still set aside for rice and fertilizer aid, but no one expects this to be asked for or given in the present situation. The same applies to other notional budgets, e.g., for crossborder rail links. In a later report on June 24, MOU said that total Southern aid (state and private) to the North during Jan.-May was $15.18 million, down 60 percent from $26.33 million last year. While governments can switch aid on or off like a tap, commercial trade is less subject to direct official control and slower to react. Inter-Korean trade, having surged fivefold in less than a decade of “Sunshine” from $329 million in 1999 to $1.7 billion in 2007, inched further upward even in the chill of the Lee Myung-bak era to reach $1.82 billion in 2008. The rise will not continue this year, at the present rate. South Korean customs data show that in the first four months trade fell by a 24.8 percent (year-on-year), from $566.92 million to $426.35 million. May’s figure fell 38 percent from $171.9 million to $106.5 million: the ninth successive month of year-on-year declines. Matters are unlikely to improve in the second half. Roh’s suicide: the North stokes the flames On the political front, in an eventful three days in late May ex-President Roh Moo-hyun’s sad suicide on May 23 was upstaged globally, if not locally, by North Korea’s nuclear test two days later. A corruption probe was drawing ever closer to Roh, whose tragic death – his last political act, and one of his most effective – was much mourned in the South. Yet it also emphasized the deep faultlines there between left and right. Opinion polls found that most South Koreans believe the corruption investigation against Roh was politically motivated. The North must have planned its nuclear test far in advance, but its timing two days after Roh’s death riled many in the South, as if Kim Jong-il was determined to upstage him to the last. The North Korea-South Korea Relations 92 July 2009 Dear Leader swiftly expressed condolences, but Pyongyang did not leave it at that. On June 5, Rodong Sinmun declared that: “The South Korean public unanimously contends that the unexpected and tragic death of the former ‘president’ is murder by Lee Myung-bak’s political retaliation.” (Note those weasel quote marks around ‘president’; North Korea still does not accept South Korea’s legitimacy.) Four days later the North’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea (CPRK) issued what KCNA called “a detailed report on the truth about the death of Roh Moo-hyun.” CPRK called this “a politically motivated, premeditated and deliberate terror and murder orchestrated by the United States and the pro-American conservative forces of south Korea” – and much more in a similar vein. Yet to say that “the Lee Myung-bak group … had gone mad with the operation to ‘kill Roh Moo-hyun’” is absurd as well as offensive. In fact Roh’s death has harmed Lee politically, not helped him, putting the government on the defensive, and giving progressives and conservatives in South Korea yet one more issue to fight about. Cyberwar? The quarter ended – or strictly, the new quarter – began with what may be a taste of things to come. Fears of cyberterrorism had been mounting, and on April 30 South Korea and the U.S. signed an accord on jointly combating this. On May 5, intelligence sources in Seoul claimed that the KPA has created a 100-strong cyberwarfare unit – later described as Research Center No. 110, under the KPA General staff – tasked to disrupt ROK and U.S. military networks. DPRK hackers reportedly break into U.S. military websites more often than anyone else. In June, ROK defense officials said they were detecting 95,000 attempted cyber attacks a day on average, 11 percent of which tried to obtain military information. Similar claims have been made before, but in early July South Koreans sat up and took note. On July 8, the Communications Commission (KCC) reported that major ROK websites had been inundated by heavy traffic generated by malicious software, starting the night before. As the attacks continued, some 33 sites in total were affected. They included the Blue House, Defense Ministry, and National Assembly; Kookmin, Shinhan and Korea Exchange banks; top Internet portals Daum and Naver; and a leading online shopping mall, Auction. The Seoul press swiftly pointed the finger at North Korea. The National Intelligence Service (NIS) echoed this, blaming the North or (ominously) “its southern supporters.” Others were less sure. It emerged that major U.S. government sites were also attacked, starting during the Fourth of July holiday. On July 10, the NIS said the cyber attacks on the ROK came from 86 internet protocol addresses in 16 countries, including the U.S., Japan, China, and South Korea – but not North Korea. Blocking five specific sites in the U.S., ROK, Germany, Austria, and Georgia slowed down the attacks. As many as 200,000 computers may have been involved, most hacked into and hijacked into a “botnet” to flood the targets with fake queries. North Korea was not mentioned, but the NIS reserved its suspicions – though chided by the liberal opposition Democratic Party (DP) for not publishing its evidence. The fact that many of the computers used were in South Korea could merely reflect the fact that few countries possess such a concentration of high speed computing power. In a further twist on July 10, the malicious North Korea-South Korea Relations 93 July 2009 codes that had broken into thousands of South Korean personal computers (PCs) started wiping their hard drives. KCC reported 350 PCs affected, but warned the number could rise sharply as up to 50,000 have been infected. Whoever did it, this attack has jolted the ROK to move faster in setting up a cyber defense system at public institutions by the end of the year. The MND will bring forward plans to create an agency to protect military information from cyber attacks. The new Information Security Command will be launched next Jan. 1, two years earlier than planned, and become fully operational in July 2010. Was it the North? Before this episode, the CPRK poured scorn on any such suggestions. KCNA’s typically robust headline read: “S. Korean Puppets’ Move to Participate in U.S.-led Cyber Storm Exercises Blasted.” Decrying claims that the KPA has a cyberwarfare unit as “misinformation,” the article did assert “the DPRK is fully ready for any form of high-tech war.” Better believe it.