Russia's Hands Tied over N. Korea
Georgy Kunadze
Special to The Daily Yomiuri
Dec. 2, 1999(Georgy Kunadze is chief researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of World Economy and International Relations.)
After succeeding the Soviet Union in December 1991, Russia had to sort out the foreign policy it inherited.
One of the most controversial aspects of the Soviet legacy was the problem of relations with North Korea, the last dinosaur of the Stalinist brand of socialism. North Korea was not popular with the new Russian administration to say the least, if for no other reason than that it had openly welcomed the short-lived coup attempt by communist hard-liners in August 1991.
However, something should have been done about relations between Moscow and Pyongyang, which effectively had remained frozen since Soviet recognition of South Korea, although the Soviet Union and the North were strictly speaking alliance partners.
To adequately assess North Korea, Russia, no longer a communist country, had to rely on common sense. The first thing to do was to acknowledge a total ideological divorce.
The Soviet Union and North Korea were never exactly close in the past, but Russia and North Korea became worlds apart overnight. They no longer had anything in common in their respective systems of government. In the area of foreign policy, the basis for a priori cooperation obviously disappeared, although a certain degree of mutual compatibility of interests could not be entirely excluded and should have been duly explored. For example, Russia believed that any attempt at isolating or strangling North Korea would have endangered peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and was prepared to work with North Korea on this premise.
The biggest problem that Russia faced was the status of the alliance treaty with North Korea, concluded in 1961, which had been automatically extended for a further five years in the summer of 1990 by the Soviet government.
The treaty thus remained effective, as did its security guarantees, which were interpreted by many governments as stipulating Russia's automatic involvement, in support of North Korea, in any armed conflict in which the North became involved. Russia, on the other hand, was of course reluctant to encourage North Korean to take action on its own initiative.
The key to the puzzle was found in the wording of a security clause that in fact limited Russia's commitments, saying that its help should be enlisted only in cases of unprovoked external aggression against North Korea. Needless to say, in the event of a conflict on the peninsula, Russia retained the right to determine independently whether an act of aggression had in fact been committed.
In January 1993, the North Korean government was duly informed of this precise interpretation of the alliance treaty, which has contributed to peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula ever since by providing North Korea with security guarantees while restraining its excessive ambitions.
Aside from that, the Russian government viewed North Korea as a sovereign state fully entitled to be treated as equal to other countries. The Russian government was neither prepared to accord North Korea privileged status nor intent on discriminating against it. However, due to its well-known economic weakness and political idiosyncrasy, North Korea was unable to develop ties with Russia unassisted. The relationship was therefore doomed to stagnation.
Then came the North Korean nuclear crisis, which forced many countries--Russia included--to eye the North with growing concern. In the not-so-distant past, the Soviet Union had assisted the North Korean nuclear program on the basis of an understanding that North Korea in return would add its name to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and put all its nuclear facilities under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Having initially honored this deal, in the spring of 1993, as a result of conflict with the IAEA, North Korea decided to abandon the NPT. It became apparent that North Korea was two to three years away from assembling its first combat-ready nuclear device. The crisis had begun.
Almost immediately, the idea of U.N.-sponsored sanctions against North Korea was aired by the United States and South Korea.
Russia, having frozen its nuclear cooperation with North Korea, saw this idea as counterproductive and ultimately dangerous. Sanctions would have little effect on North Korea, which was long accustomed to living on the brink of starvation and in this sense was almost self-sufficient.
Sanctions might have even have pushed North Korea to accelerate its nuclear preparations, thus prompting the United States to launch a preventive attack on its nuclear facilities. In short, war on the Korean Peninsula would have started just like that.
Russia's view, which was endorsed by China and tacitly welcomed by many other countries, prevailed and in fact proved indispensable in settling the crisis through compromise. However, as a kind of reprisal for opposing the United States and North Korea, Russia was excluded from the final stage of the settlement and later from the famous "four-party talks" proposal jointly put forward by U.S. President Bill Clinton and former South Korean President Kim Young Sam.
The fact that Russia had been denied a place in the Korean settlement triggered an angry reaction on the part of the Russian people. Russian critics claimed that their country had gained nothing by becoming estranged from North Korea, and in particular had failed to obtain adequate compensation from South Korea.
As a result of the outcry, the Russian government had to forgo the procedure of denouncing the alliance treaty with North Korea. According to the Russian Constitution, the right to ratify or nullify any treaty is vested in the State Duma (lower house), which must decide the issue by majority vote. Extending the treaty was inconceivable.
But for a denouncement plea to be rejected by the Duma would have been a total embarrassment, and the Russian government therefore had to settle for a less formal procedure. In the summer of 1995, it forwarded a draft of a new standard treaty to North Korea.
A year later, the Russian government stated for the record that the old treaty had duly expired according to the clearly expressed wishes of both sides. As at the time of writing, the new treaty between Russia and North Korea has already been initialed and is ready to be signed formally.
Russia's relations with North Korea have thus entered a new stage. As usual, the bottom line of the relationship will be determined by Russia's intention to help North Korea survive, to keep it from drifting into a desperate isolation that might prompt the impossible regime to do something stupid and dangerous.
Therefore Russia will strive to engage North Korea in dialogue and to maintain reasonable economic exchange with the country. Well aware of the fact that North Korea is absolutely closed to any attempt to pressure it into reforms, Russia will not back schemes based on this idealistic premise.
Likewise, Russia will not expect North Korea to improve its human rights record, nor try to link such an improvement to any aid or cooperation projects. Human rights are nonexistent in North Korea, and that is the end of it. Occasionally the Russian government, pushed by left-wingers at home and its newly acquired anti-American zeal, may be tempted to develop with North Korea something more substantial than lukewarm exchange.
This temptation may become especially strong if the United States and its allies try to take a "second way," as envisaged by U.S. special envoy
to North Korea William Perry, aimed at containing the North.
Hopefully in this eventuality the Russian government would recognize the illusory nature of this temptation, at about the same time as Perry discovers that there is no such thing as containment as far as policy towards North Korea is concerned.
Quite simply, a piecemeal containment would have no effect whatsoever, while a full-scale containment would lead to war with a country that is somewhat less sensible than, say, Yugoslavia.
However, extreme cases apart, Russia's policy toward North Korea, at least for the time, being will not differ much from the policies pursued by other major countries. It will be marked by habitual frustration both with North Korea's stubbornness and the scarcity of available means to influence it.
Admittedly, few people in Russia will be happy or proud at having to maintain contacts with North Korea. But even fewer will fail to understand that there is no other way to ensure peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.
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