North Korea needs real change, not charades
By Aidan Foster-Carter
Op-ed for the Financial Times
[printed in Asia/US editions, not UK/Europe]
Completed 14 June 2005Edited version published 15 June 05 under the headline
"The sun is setting on North Korea" at (subscription required)
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/2d29fb50-dd3b-11d9-b590-00000e2511c8.htmlFive years ago today, the first ever inter-Korean summit in half a century of partition raised hopes on the peninsula and around the world. South Korea's then president, Kim Dae-jung, won the Nobel peace prize for what was hailed as a major breakthrough.
Alas, all was not as it seemed. The revelation in 2002 that North Korea's leader Kim Jong-il had secretly been paid at least $500m to host this show soured sentiment in Seoul. Some of those involved were jailed, despite protesting that they had acted in the national interest.
Yet the summit was more than a cynical photo-opportunity. It led to unprecedented regular North-South meetings: ministerial, economic, family reunions, and more. Two road and rail corridors breached the long-sealed Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). A million Southern tourists have visited Hyundai's Mt. Kumgang resort. Managers drive daily from Seoul to a rising industrial park at Kaesong near the DMZ, meant to become Korea's Shenzhen. The South now lets its citizens go North freely (while still blocking the North's ludicrous websites).
All this has its price. Kim Jong-il's greed bled Hyundai dry; it is no longer the top chaebol. Seoul of course foots all bills, without demur. Yet an ever-cynical North has twice frozen all official contacts for up to a year, on spurious pretexts. It only relented last month, as it needed fertilizer (200,000 tonnes, pronto) and to mark the fifth anniversary of the summit.
A regime that reduces all politics to theatre, North Korea is big on hollow ceremonies. In 2003 North and South solemnly relinked railways in the DMZ; yet gaps remained on the Northern side, due to Pyongyang's delays. Today, rail tracks do connect Busan to Beijing; yet no one expects trains to run anytime soon. Was this just for show? If not, why wait?
For advocates of Seoul's 'sunshine' policy like unification minister Chung Dong-young - a presidential hopeful, who today leads a 40-strong team plus 300 civilians on his first visit to Pyongyang - these are early steps on a long journey. If the process is slow and one-sided at first, they argue, that is because building trust after half a century of conflict will take time.
But is Kim Jong-il playing the same game? Critics fear that, adept at militant mendicancy, the dear leader is happy to take Seoul's (or anyone's) cash - and use it to shore up his rule. Cash being fungible, Southern dollars may have helped the North develop nuclear weapons.
Not even sunshine's balmiest fan could claim it has made the peninsula or the world safer. While Bush administration blunders precipitated the current second North Korean nuclear crisis, its root cause is Kim Jong-il's inability to conceive security other than as possessing all known nasties: two kinds of nukes, chemical/biological weapons, and more. Under Bill Clinton, some of this was shut down. Thanks to Bush, the whole lot is now out of control.
There are no easy answers, but facts must be faced. Neither Bush nor South Korea's leader Roh Moo-hyun, whose brief summit in Washington last Friday put a veneer of unity on an alliance in deep crisis, is a match for Kim Jong-il. Four years in, a split US government still has no Korea policy. Rude rhetoric undercuts its belated, vague offers to North Korea - and alarms Seoul, where the conservative opposition too favours engagement with Pyongyang. Bush may go down in history as the president who lost South Korea, never mind the North.
Roh is at least consistent, but like Voltaire's Pangloss his blithe optimism fails to convince. Sunshine is now an axiom, yet after five years it requires cool evaluation. It has not opened North Korea: Kaesong and Kumgang are just enclaves. The wider DPRK economy remains in dire straits; three years of quasi-market reforms have left most people poorer but failed to kickstart output. The last three budgets had no numbers at all. Dengism this is not.
South Koreans now know the North better, and fear it less. But there is no reciprocity here. Worse, this toxic sunshine warms the oppressor but not the oppressed. Most North Koreans remain poorer and more brutalized than ever. The World Food Programme (WFP) warns that famine may return; hunger is endemic. Smuggled videos show public executions; the gulag sites are known. Yet Seoul conspires to silence critics of the North's foul abuses, not even pressing (unlike Japan) for its own abductees' return. Sunshine for whom, and what? Videos also show dissenters, at last; who, like defectors, find the South's stance appalling.
It is time to ditch what might be called the feral fallacy. Kim Jong-il is not some orphaned Bambi, to be melted by gifts and smiles. He is a knowing, skilled poker player: tactically brilliant, if less so strategically - does he really think this can all carry on indefinitely?
What is needed, but will not happen, is for all concerned - the other five in the moribund six-party talks - to offer Kim Jong-il the mother of all packages: one last chance to emulate Libya's Colonel Gadaffi and rejoin the global community, suitably rewarded - on strict condition that every last nasty (nukes, CBW, missiles, the lot) be verifiably surrendered.
If he demurs, sanctions must follow - plus encouragement to North Korea's longsuffering people to take matters into their own hands. With three of Kim's sons already fighting to succeed him, long-run internal stability is anyway in doubt. The great powers should agree on contingency plans for any collapse, which will be a perilous moment - but in the long run less dangerous than today's status quo and delusions that gradualism is working.
The writer is honorary senior research fellow in sociology and modern Korea at Leeds University, UK