A History of Korea (89 page)

North Korea’s reliance on a command economy based on the juche philosophy increasingly led to an insular economic development strategy. Priority was assigned to establishing a self-sufficient industrial base, with consumer goods produced primarily to satisfy domestic demand (few products were exported) and private consumption held to very low levels. This approach sharply contrasted with South Korea’s outward-oriented strategy which began in the mid-1960s. As a result, the North Korean economy became increasingly isolated from that of the rest of the world, and its industrial development and structure could not compete in international marketplaces. Because of its self-imposed isolation, the North Korean economy experienced chronic inefficiency, poorquality goods, limited product diversity, and underutilization of manufacturing plants. A catastrophe loomed on the horizon.

As in South Korea, foreign aid was crucially important to North Korea’s postwar reconstruction. North Korea accepted the equivalent of an estimated $4.75 billion in aid between 1946 and 1984, with almost 46 percent of this coming from the Soviet Union, about 18 percent from China, and the rest from East European communist countries. Some two-thirds of the aid were loans and the rest outright grants. Understandably grants dominated in the years immediately after the Korean War, but subsequently loans became the major form of aid. In 1954
the aid North Korea received comprised one-third of its national revenues. By 1960, however, foreign assistance had dropped to less than 3 percent of its total revenues. Thereafter North Korea had to work out its salvation alone.

Although it actively sought foreign aid for national reconstruction, North Korea efficiently used foreign assistance as a means of promoting its ultimate economic autonomy. Kim Il-sung aggressively sought reconstruction aid from the entire socialist community. As early as September 1953 he led a delegation to the Soviet Union, followed by a similar trip to China in November of that year. Other North Korean delegations visited the Eastern European states in 1953, including Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. In 1953 the communist states responded by adopting a policy that rendered substantial assistance to North Korea. The Soviet Union offered 1 billion rubles in assistance in September, and China vowed to provide 8 trillion yuan over a ten-year period. In the same month Hungary agreed to give North Korea grants in aid for reconstruction. The next month, Romania signed an agreement providing $7.2 million in aid. East Germany also concluded an assistance treaty, and in November Bulgaria and Poland signed similar agreements. Poland promised delivery of mining equipment and assistance in railway reconstruction. Czechoslovakia, the most industrialized nation of the East European communist nations, shipped machine tool industries and industrial factories to North Korea. Because North Korea urgently needed this foreign aid, it fell into a seemingly unavoidable dependent relationship with the communist states and risked becoming an economic satellite of the socialist bloc.

Since 1954 North Korea continued to depend on foreign aid from East European allies for reconstruction, annually entering into trade agreements with East Germany until 1957 and then reaching a long-term agreement for 1958–1961. East Germany provided machinery and equipment for the chemical industry and synthetic textiles in exchange for North Korean minerals and agricultural and marine products. Czechoslovakia signed a long-term agreement for 1954– 1960, providing $12.6 million in credits, including technological assistance. Romania agreed to below-market rates of payments in 1954, and Bulgaria provided medical assistance to North Korea. Poland signed an aid agreement for 1954–1957, and both Bulgaria and Mongolia agreed on noncommercial terms of payments in trade with North Korea in 1955. The Eastern European states each provided assistance to specific industrial sectors of North Korea, which proved to be a highly successful approach for transferring technology and technical
expertise to North Korea while minimizing political dependence on any specific aid donor.

North Korea was heavily dependent on Soviet assistance for most of this period. The Soviet Union signed an agreement with North Korea, in 1955, to share technological information at a minimal cost. As a result, more than 40 new industrial plants were constructed in North Korea with Soviet technical assistance. The Soviet Union also provided economic aid of some 300 million rubles between 1956 and 1958. The total amount of Soviet grants and credits to North Korea between 1953 and 1959 was 2.8 billion rubles, equivalent to U.S. $690 million.

In the late 1950s, while Kim Il-sung increasingly disagreed with the economic and political revisionism of the Soviet Union under Khrushchev’s leadership, North Korea received substantial financial assistance from the Eastern European allies. Romania gave 25 million rubles to North Korea between 1956 and 1958; Bulgaria provided 30 million rubles; and Hungary gave 7.5 million rubles. Albania offered assistance in the form of 10,000 tons of pitch.
¹⁸
Because of this large-scale East European assistance, North Korea secured considerable independence in its relationship with the Soviet Union. North Korean relations with other communist states were successfully established on a footing fairly independent of its relationship with the Soviet Union.

In the 1950s and 1960s the two Koreas had virtually no dialogue, only open hostilities. In the 1950s North Korea had the initiative in North-South Korean relations, as its successful reconstruction put the communist country in a better position to extend the “revolution” to South Korea.

While internally strengthening the “capacity for revolution,” North Korea externally declared a soft line on reunification. Between 1954 and 1958 North Korea vigorously offered a series of unification proposals to its southern neighbor, including a North-South Korean conference or a joint session of the Supreme People’s Assembly and the
ROK
National Assembly; a nonaggression pact with troop reductions on both sides; conversion of the Korean Armistice Agreement into a peace treaty; an international conference for peaceful reunification; simultaneous withdrawal of Chinese and American forces; North-South Korean negotiations on economic and cultural relations; and all-Korea elections under the supervision of neutral nations.
¹⁹
South Korea, however, viewed all these proposals only as propaganda exercises and rejected them all. It also considered
this outreach a Trojan horse. Thereafter North Koreans repeated some of the proposals according to circumstances.

In December 1962 the Central Committee of the Korean Workers Party established four basic military policies: “turning the entire country into a fortress”; “arming the entire population”; “modernizing the entire armed forces”; and “training the entire army as a cadre army.” In accordance with these military policies, ambitious military plans were enforced in the mid-1960s by constructing underground airports, harbors, and storage and warehouses, and organizing a militia of 1.2 million men.

In the mid-1960s Kim Il-sung was deeply impressed with Ho Chi Minh’s attempts to reunify Vietnam through guerilla warfare, and he believed a similar approach might be possible in Korea. Thus infiltration and subversion efforts were greatly stepped up against South Korea.

A month after holding ten-day military maneuvers in June 1967, North Korea organized a 2,400-man commando unit with specially selected members from the Korean People’s Army trained for guerrilla missions in South Korea. In the first ten months of 1967, 423 major and 117 minor incidents occurred involving North Korean intruders in the demilitarized zone. Some 215 armed clashes broke out between South Korean security forces and North Korean guerrillas; 224 North Korean commandos infiltrating South Korea were killed and 50 were captured by South Korean security forces.
²⁰

North Korea’s hostility toward South Korea reached its climax in early 1968. On 21 January 1968 a squad of 31 North Korean commandos disguised in South Korean Army fatigues penetrated the
DMZ
and reached the northern edge of Seoul with the acknowledged mission of assassinating South Korean President Park Chung-hee. When they were within one mile of the presidential mansion, they were detected by
ROK
police. In the ensuing gun battle, all but three commandos were killed and one was taken prisoner, and 37 South Korean security forces were killed. This incident traumatized many South Koreans, as they felt that North Korean soldiers could infiltrate South Korea at any time. Unfortunately their fear was well grounded.

In early November 1968 teams of more than 100 North Korean commandos landed on the eastern coast of South Korea, the Ulchin-Samch’
ŏ
k area, apparently to establish a base for guerrilla warfare in the sparsely populated and impoverished hinterland. Most of the North Korean infiltrators were killed by South Korean security forces. Even though such armed infiltrations brought the two Koreas to the brink of open conflict, the results disappointed the North
Korean leadership. By 1969 the number and scale of infiltration incidents declined as North Korea reconsidered its options.

The North Korean commando incursions had enormous repercussions in South Korea. On 1 April 1968 the South Korean government organized the Homeland Reserve Force, comprised of all discharged soldiers under age 35. Under the “Seoul fortification plan,” shelters that could accommodate 300,000 to 400,000 citizens in an emergency were built by 1970. Simply put, sustained tensions between the two Koreas in the two decades following the Korean War seriously threatened South Korea’s survival.

Unpredictability and hostility have generally characterized North Korea’s relationship with the United States. Throughout most of the post–Korean War period, North Korea sought a peace treaty with the United States and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea, and to achieve its goals it pursued a contradictory policy of mixing provocations with the occasional olive branch. But it failed to achieve its goals mainly because of the firm U.S. commitment to South Korean security.

The Berlin meeting of foreign ministers from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union, in February 1954, produced an agreement that the countries involved in the Korean War, including China and the Soviet Union, should meet in Geneva to discuss questions regarding the future of Korea. There, the ministers also agreed to settle issues related to Indochina. The Geneva Conference, convened on 26 April 1954, was attended by North and South Korea, 16
U.N.
member nations that had troops fighting in the Korean War—except for South Africa—and China and the Soviet Union. This international conference was a chance for the international community to influence the Korean problem. As expected, however, the conference became a hot debating match between the two opposing sides and failed to produce any meaningful result.

After the Geneva Conference, which came to a close on 21 July 1954, the only contact between North Korea and the United States took place at P’anmunj
ŏ
m, a so-called truce village designated as a neutral area in the
DMZ
. There U.S. military personnel representing the
U.N.
Command faced their counterparts from North Korea and China at the Military Armistice Commission meetings. The Commission dealt mainly with violations of the Korean Armistice Agreement, mostly perpetrated by North Koreans.

In the 1950s and 1960s the North Koreans demonstrated an extremely hostile attitude toward the United States in harsh verbal attacks, occasionally accompanied by military provocations, always demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea and the end of
U.N.
intervention in Korea’s internal affairs. The U.S. military presence in South Korea and
U.N.
intervention, they argued, obstructed peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula by the Korean people themselves.

When relations between the United States and South Korea became strained following the military coup on 16 May 1961, North Korea saw a chance to drive a wedge between the two allies. In the early 1960s, at the same time that North Korea strongly demanded the withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea, it made conciliatory gestures to establish direct contacts with the United States that would split the United States from South Korea. North Korea’s efforts failed, however, as South Korea and the United States restored positive relations again.
²¹

During 1966–1969, emboldened by the U.S. preoccupation with Vietnam, North Korea waged another Korean conflict, with numerous border clashes along the
DMZ
. In those clashes, U.S. casualties numbered 82 killed and 114 wounded. During that same period, on 23 January 1968, just two days after the attempted assassination of the South Korean president, four North Korean naval vessels seized the USS
Pueblo
off the country’s eastern coast, igniting a major confrontation with the United States. The
Pueblo,
with its crew of 82 men under Commander Lloyd M. Bucher, was an intelligence-gathering ship, which North Korea claimed had entered its territorial waters in W
ŏ
nsan Bay. The United States insisted that the
Pueblo
had been at sea, at least 13 miles beyond the 12-mile limit imposed by North Korea. During the ship’s seizure one crewman was killed and several others, including Bucher, were wounded. Bucher, along with his 81 surviving crew members, were taken prisoner. Already facing an untenable situation in Vietnam, the United States did not want to settle the
Pueblo
case by military force. Thus the United States initiated secret talks with North Korea at P’anmunj
ŏ
m in February 1968. Ten months of negotiations finally led to the release, on 22 December 1968, of Commander Bucher and his crew after the United States issued a statement of apology on 21 December acknowledging that the
Pueblo
“had illegally intruded into North Korean territorial waters.” Americans also pledged that no U.S. ships would enter North Korea’s territorial waters in the future. North Korea claimed a great moral as well as diplomatic victory over this incident. Moreover, North Koreans never returned the ship.