The World Today
March 1999

Sunshine or Sunset?
By: Aidan Foster-Carter

 

Despite the demise of communism elsewhere and its own severe crises, North Korea survives. How to handle the risks it poses, however, is causing discord between Seoul and Washington. South Korea under Kim Dae-jung is trying a radically new ‘sunshine’ policy, encouraging businesses such as Hyundai to prise open their  northern neighbour with joint ventures. But this patient approach clashes with a new tougher US line, which views North Korea as a missile proliferator and probable nuclear recidivist. A carefully constructed 1994 deal to provide new power plants may be at risk, and this year could see a return to the serious tensions which preceded it.

 

North Korea Is the great survivor of our times. In the 1990s this last bastion of Stalinism has weathered three storms, any of which might have sunk it. The first was the abrupt ending in 1991 of the Soviet aid which, despite Pyongyang’s boasts of self-reliance, had sustained it all along. As in equally dependent Cuba, the result was economic disaster: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has shrunk throughout the 1990s and is still falling. In rare official data given to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) last year, Pyongyang claimed that per capita income had halved in three years to just $481 in 1996: one of the lowest figures in the world.

North Korea blames its economic plight on a different disaster: famine, caused by four years of floods, hail or drought. It will not admit its farms were already in crisis from decades of poor policy: under-investment, the over-use of chemicals, and deforestation. Either way, Pyongyang is now the biggest Asian recipient of US food aid, and hosts the UN World Food Programme’s largest operation worldwide. The exact death toll is uncertain, but some agencies believe it totals three million in a population of twenty-four million.

Remarkably this holocaust has not thus far damaged political stability, despite coming hard on the heels of a third huge blow: the death in 1994 of founding leader Kim Il-sung, a man who could have echoed Louis XIV’s famous l’état c’est moi.

After several years delay, Kim’s son and heir, the enigmatic Kim Jong-il, now formally occupies the top posts in both party and state. He rules as Chairman of the National Defence Commission: one of many signs that real power may now lie with the officers of the large and formidable Korean People’s Army.

 

Reckless Rocket

Against all the odds, then, North Korea survives and remains a worry, in ways both old and new. In 1999 the two Koreas are still technically at war. Four-party talks with the US and China to discuss a formal peace treaty to replace the 1953 Armistice reconvened in Geneva in January, but have made scant progress.

Meanwhile, the nuclear fears which brought the peninsula close to war in 1994 were revived last August by claims of suspicious digging: spy satellites spotted a big hole near the supposedly mothballed Yongbyon site. Soon after, on August 31, Pyongyang fired a rocket over Japan. Said to be a satellite launch, it showed an alarming grasp of multi-stage missile technology.

Add various incursions against South Korea a spy submarine (the second in three years) in June, a speedboat sunk in December plus the constant fiery threats from the media in the north, and it is little surprise that deterrence remains top priority in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo.

To this longstanding threat is now added a newer, perhaps likelier, worry: that North Korea may collapse under the weight of its problems. In the abstract, this might seem a blessed relief. Concretely, however, the risks it poses — vast refugee flows, civil disorder, even warlordism — have led to an ironic shift of outlook in recent years.

Observing the huge costs of German reunification, most South Koreans would rather have a functioning North Korean government preferably a nicer one — than none. This has been reinforced by the south’s own plunge into economic crisis since late 1997, which has left neither public nor private finances in any condition to take on the extra burden of rescuing and rebuilding the north.

The result has been a degree of convergence by all North Korea’s neighbours, towards the view hitherto associated chiefly with China: that the best policy is to prop up the Pyongyang regime, while trying to persuade it to embrace reform. Beijing has strong reasons for this stance, fearing two scenarios: mass refugee incursions, and a Seoul-led unification which could bring US troops to its very borders in Manchuria.

 

Propping up Pyongyang

For obvious reasons, propping up Pyongyang is a more contentious and less palatable prospect for its traditional enemies — the US, South Korea, and Japan — than for China. Yet all three had in recent years moved in this direction. Russia, to its chagrin, now has little clout on the peninsula.

The Clinton administration, its hand forced by former President Jimmy Carter’s meeting with Kim Il-sung just before the latter’s death, made a U-turn from confrontation to engagement. The imaginative diplomacy of the Geneva Agreed Framework of October 1994 created a consortium, the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), to provide new light water reactors for North Korea and to supply fuel oil while they are built.

KEDO ushered in unprecedented practical cooperation between North Korea and both the US and South Korea. The new reactors will be furnished by Seoul, over a hundred of whose engineers now work in the north preparing the site. Some goals remain unfulfilled for Washington, such as easing economic sanctions and exchanging liaison offices, but there has been successful cooperation in the recovery of the remains of those missing in action in the Korean War. The US has also become a major food donor, most recently late last year with 300,000 tonnes of surplus wheat.

These new contacts made some in Seoul uneasy: not least the then president, Kim Young-sam (1993–98), whose own nordpolitik — like most of his policies — had no discernible overall strategy, but oscillated unpredictably between hard and soft lines. Over the past year, however, a new leader, the veteran democrat Kim Dae-jung, has brought a fresh approach. South Korea’s sunshine policy combines military vigilance with active encouragement of inter-Korean contacts by businesses and civilians. A precedent here is how China and Taiwan do business despite political acrimony.

 

Sunshine and Cattle

Sunshine’s main harbinger so far is the Hyundai group and its northern-born founder, the redoubtable Chung Ju-yung. Three times last year Chung crossed the normally impermeable demilitarised zone at Panmunjom, bearing gifts: 1,001 cattle and a fleet of cars. He made the trip again in February, vowing to go on doing so until Korea is reunified.

At a rare meeting with Kim Jong-il, the dear leader gave his blessing to an ambitious range of joint ventures, including an industrial estate planning to produce annual exports worth $4 billion — five times North Korea’s present total. In November Hyundai inaugurated the first south-to-north tourism, with regular boat trips to the famously scenic Mt Kumgang region.

Hyundai’s cows and ships are just the tip of the iceberg. Tourists aside, more South Koreans went north in 1998 than in all past years put together. They included journalists, aid workers, sports delegations, musicians and professors, as well as businessmen. This is as radically new as were the first visits from Taiwan to China in the late I 980s. It opens a new chapter in inter-Korean relations: not least on the business front, where north and south could do much for each other.

Such contact and cooperation also offers the best long-run hope of reducing political and military tensions. This is why Kim Dae-jung stays coolly patient despite northern provocations like spy submarines and speedboats, whereas Kim Young-sam went ballistic after an earlier such incident in 1996. That patience pays off was proved on 3 February, when Pyongyang offered wide-ranging political talks albeit on condition that Seoul end military exercises, and ties generally, with the US. South Korea promptly accepted talks, while of course declining the preconditions. Such fencing is usually a preliminary to progress, and the two sides will find a way to meet over the coming months.

Yet sunshine may not have time to work its warmth, as storm clouds gather. Pyongyang’s provocations are too much for some. Last August’s rocket stung Japan, with whom ties had been improving, into a fit of firmness rarely seen there on any issue. Diplomatic contacts and charter flights — the latter important for trade were suspended, and for a time Japan threatened to pull out of KEDO it is due to provide a billion dollars towards the reactors. Recent reports that North Korea may be planning another “satellite” launch are not reassuring.

 

Washington Hawks

Seoul’s sunshine may also be eclipsed by Washington. The big hole issue now dominates US concern, for reasons related as much to in-fighting at home as any clear and present new danger from North Korea. There are two fissures.

With the Monica Lewinsky affair in full cry, Republicans in Congress — where Korea is rarely a major concern — gleefully added being soft on Kim Jong-il to the Clinton charge-sheet. Specifically, they withheld the small appropriations to fund fuel oil for KEDO, relenting eventually on two conditions. North Korea must be certified innocent both of nuclear recidivism and — a separate issue — missile proliferation; and a senior figure should be appointed to review overall policy towards Pyongyang. William Perry, the former defence secretary, took on this task in November and is due to report this month.

But it is not just Congress that has put advocates of engaging North Korea on the defensive. The whole big hole issue began as a press leak, seen by some in the State Department as a deliberate strike by elements in the intelligence community pushing for a harder-line. This charge has been put by Ken Quinones, ₁ a now retired North Korea desk officer at State who has made no fewer than thirteen visits to Pyongyang since 1993. Satellite data per se is mute, or moot: it is the spin put on it that is crucial. The big hole is not proven as any immediate threat, and no reason to scrap a policy — still less the entire Agreed Framework, as some are now advocating — which has worked well.

Alas, such a refusal to panic, though very much in line with Seoul’s stance, is now a minority view in Washington. The Clinton administration’s North Korea policy is in disarray, with embarrassing U-turns late last year over just how urgent a threat the big hole poses.

Predictably too, the harder US line — coupled with unhelpful leaks of contingency plans to occupy North Korea if it ever invades the south — has driven Pyongyang to respond with lurid threats of its own to blow up the US. Unfortunate too is the new gap between Washington and Seoul. Kim Dae-jung’s sensible suggestion that the big hole be dealt with as part of a wider package deal has fallen on deaf ears.

 

Keep the Temperature Down

It is not as if the critics have any better idea what to do. Particularly disquieting is a tendency to ignore the views of others: Japan, China, even South Korea. Thus Arnold Kanter, Under-Secretary of State under President Bush during 1991–93, chides all three for being more skeptical than we about the North Korean threat, concluding that “the US must be determined, if necessary, to carry out a unilateral (sic) strategy aimed at coercing North Korea”. A recent essay by a senior Republican Congressional advisor on East Asia, Peter Brookes, fails even to mention other countries: as if the US should seek a showdown with Pyongyang, one on one.

There are three common sense points. First, if North Korea’s immediate neighbours do not feel under immediate threat, it ill behoves those safely on the far side of the Pacific to raise the temperature on the peninsula. Secondly, for the US to override its own Korean ally in this matter is neither a polite nor a politic way to treat one of Asia’s most pro-American leaders. Third, heightened tension over Korea can only deter the foreign investment which Seoul needs to rescue its economy — which in turn is vital both for its own security, and for shouldering the eventual burden of the north.

One might equally query the wisdom of abandoning an admittedly unique, but arguably successful, policy of cautious engagement with an avowed rogue state, to go down a road which has uncomfortable shades of Iraq.

The Iraqi link has been there all along: the pre-Agreed Framework push for sanctions being largely driven by hawks, smarting under Saddam Hussein’s deception and determined to make an example of the next nuclear miscreant who came along. The current disarray over Western policy after the latest strikes on Baghdad, which even Kuwait opposed, should give pause for thought.

Finally, it is beyond argument that the three scenarios for change in North Korea — war, collapse, and evolution — stand in a very clear order of desirability. A second Korean war, even if brief, would be a human and an economic catastrophe — even if nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, were not deployed. And a northern collapse would be much more costly and risky than a soft landing.

Hence the responsible strategy, taking the longer and wider view, must be to keep trying at all costs for a soft landing; and conversely, to avoid painting Pyongyang further into its corner. Kim Dae-jung sees this, and so until recently did the Clinton administration. One can but hope that the latter will come to its senses, see off its critics, and stick with jaw-jaw.

 

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Endnotes

Note 1: His article and the debate it inspired are on the Nautilus Institute’s web site at <http://www.nautilus.org/napsnet/fora>  Back.