The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (60 page)

*
For KEDO’s rise and fall, see Charles Kartman, Robert Carlin, and Joel Wit,
A History of KEDO, 1994–2006
(Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, 2012).

15

NORTH KOREA IN CRISIS

W
ITH THE WANING OF
the nuclear struggle, North Korea only briefly left the list of pressing concerns of the major powers. Within months it was back, but this time with an abrupt shift in the angle of vision brought on by the regime’s inability to feed its people and its unprecedented appeal for outside help. After dealing with the DPRK almost exclusively as a strong and nightmarish threat to peace, policy makers in Washington and other world capitals began to focus on a failing state whose very weakness was a menace, albeit of a different kind. The question being urgently discussed among the experts was, “Is this the beginning of the end for North Korea?” And if so, how would its neighbors and the world deal with a potential economic collapse, the flight of massive numbers of refugees across land and sea boundaries, and civil war that might spread across tense borders?

General John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed the view of many when he said, “We are now in a period where most who watch the area would say it’s either going to implode or explode—we’re just not quite sure when that is going to happen.” Secretary of Defense William Perry, who had been perhaps the most influential policy maker in the nuclear crisis, popularized the metaphor of North Korea as a disabled airliner rapidly losing altitude, as well as the metaphor of seeking a “soft landing,” meaning a gradual unification or accommodation with the South, rather than a destructive crash.

The altered optic with which the great powers viewed the northern half of the Korean peninsula was evidence of how much the world had changed in the quarter century since 1972, when the two Koreas had begun to interact peacefully with each other. South Korea had decisively won the economic race, with enormous consequences in the diplomatic and military fields. Although the North retained a formidable armed force,
it was no longer a serious competitor to the South in any other field of endeavor, and the disparity of its resources was swiftly eroding its military competitiveness. Following the death of its Great Leader, it was forced to center its attention and energies on sheer survival and little else—and in so doing to ask the assistance of the outside world. Prideful North Korea sought to deal with this reversal of fortunes with a minimum of humiliation, but it was not easy.

For the outside world, realization that North Korea was in deep trouble began with an act of nature. On the sticky midsummer day of July 26, 1995, rains began to pound the earth, rains that were heavy, steady, and unrelenting and that soon turned into a deluge of biblical proportions. The DPRK Bureau of Hydro-Meteorological Service recorded twenty-three inches of rain in ten days; in some towns and villages, according to the United Nations, as much as eighteen inches of rain fell in a single day, bringing floods that were considered the worst in a century.

North Korea traditionally had said little or nothing about domestic disasters. This time, as the rains ended in mid-August, it broke its silence and described the tragedy in expansive terms, even exaggerating the admittedly severe impact of the flooding. In late August, for the first time in its history, the bastion of self-reliance openly appealed to the world for help, asking the United Nations for nearly $500 million in flood relief as well as fuel and medical assistance. Because the UN agencies and other aid givers had no confidence that aid they sent would reach the country’s people, they demanded and obtained access to flood-stricken parts of the North Korean countryside as a condition of providing assistance. Whatever the secretive DPRK military and security forces thought of this trailblazing access to some previously inaccessible areas, they had no other choice than to accept it.

Trevor Page, chief of the newly opened UN World Food Program office in Pyongyang, visited the Korean hinterland late in 1995 and found malnutrition rampant and hungry people nearly everywhere. In an area where much of the country’s rice was normally harvested, Page observed “people scavenging in the fields looking for roots and wild plants to prepare soup for their families. People were anxious, restless. They are not getting enough to eat.” Farther south near the demilitarized zone, in one of the country’s prime food-producing areas, Page found “not a cabbage to be seen” after authorities reduced the already-minimal food ration under the Public Distribution System to the bare subsistence level: a bowl or two of rice or corn per person per day. Even that was uncertain due to frequent supply failures.

Based on a visit to farming areas, cities, and DPRK government agencies in early December, a team of experts from the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization and its World Food Program reported that the
floods “were extremely serious and caused extensive damage to agriculture and infrastructure.” The experts also reported, however, that “the floods made an already and rapidly deteriorating food supply situation much worse, rather than caused the situation in the first place.”

The DPRK had been historically able to till only about one-fifth of its mountainous territory and that usually for only one crop annually, since much of the northern land was frost free only six months of the year. In addition, overuse of chemical fertilizers in pursuit of higher yields, failure to rotate crops, and shortsighted denuding of hillsides that accelerated erosion had all severely affected the country’s capacity to grow sufficient food. The country had never been self-sufficient in food, and many outside experts considered it crazy to try, given the climate and small amount of land available for cultivation. Better agricultural techniques and inputs could increase harvests, but there would always be a shortfall to make up through imports.

In the past, Pyongyang had coped with dwindling harvests by importing larger amounts of grain under subsidized terms from its communist allies. Such imports were no longer possible when the Soviet Union collapsed and China, whose domestic consumption was rising in a swiftly growing economy, became a grain importer itself and began demanding hard cash for exports to Pyongyang. Despite its need to make up for massive shortfalls of more than 2 million tons of grain in both 1994 and 1995, North Korea lacked the foreign currency or access to credit to do more than very modest buying on international markets.

Long before the floods began, North Korea had been quietly asking selected countries for help in dealing with its food shortage. In the early 1990s, according to the then director of the ROK intelligence agency, Suh Dong Kwon, the North requested 500,000 tons of rice from the South on condition that it be supplied secretly. The idea was dropped after Seoul responded that in its increasingly open society, it would be impossible to hide the rice shipments to the North. After a skimpy harvest in 1992, the regime began to propagandize to the public “Let’s Eat Two Meals a Day,” a program of austerity. Later, during the 1994 Geneva negotiations with the United States, DPRK officials had spoken with urgency of their severe food problems, but the US team was so fixed on nuclear issues that the comments made little impression.

A more extensive effort began in January 1995, when Pyongyang appealed to Japan and South Korea for emergency food. Japan agreed to supply 500,000 tons. On June 21, after semiofficial North-South talks on the issue were held in Beijing, the ROK government announced it would donate 150,000 tons of rice to the North in unmarked bags “in a spirit of reconciliation and cooperation.” Although after Kim Il Sung’s death he wavered between wanting to bring the North down and seeking
an accommodation, this time President Kim Young Sam enthusiastically declared that the government would purchase the grain on international markets if domestic stocks were insufficient, telling the Blue House press corps that the rice would build trust with the North. In a grand gesture, Kim sent his popular prime minister, Lee Hong Koo, to the port to see off the first rice ships.

Within a few days, events turned this enthusiasm into anger, laying the basis for an abrupt policy reversal. First, a DPRK local official, apparently without central authorization, required a South Korean rice ship to fly a North Korean flag as it entered port on June 27. Although the North promptly apologized, the ROK government demanded a more formal apology and suspended rice shipments until it was received. The incident infuriated the public in the South, as did a later incident in which a sailor on a South Korean rice ship was arrested, also on a local security official’s initiative, for taking photographs of a North Korean port. The sailor was quickly released, but the damage had been done.

Another key event was the dramatic losses by Kim Young Sam’s ruling party in the June 27 nationwide elections for local offices—the first such elections since the military coup of 1961. It was widely perceived that Kim had been manipulating the rice aid for political gain before the vote and that his strategy had backfired. A political consultant told officials of the ruling party that anger at the aid package and at North Korean ingratitude cost the ruling party a million votes. Although the ROK government eventually provided the undelivered portion of the 150,000 tons, the election results led to a sharp reversal in Kim Young Sam’s posture.

As was evident in the nuclear negotiations, Kim had long been ambivalent about the North. A prominent South Korean told me, “I had the feeling from early in his administration, based on several private talks, that [the president] felt it was his destiny to bring about the collapse of North Korea on his watch, and be the man who made history by reunification of the country. He seemed to feel that if he pressed them hard, they’d give way.” Ambassador James Laney, who dealt with him frequently, said Kim was a man divided in his own mind: “His more rational side says the collapse of North Korea would be a disaster, and he tells us all the things he’s doing or is willing to do to cooperate with North Korea. On the other hand, his emotional side wants North Korea to collapse on his watch, so he can be the first to preside over a united Korea.”

Kim’s estimate of the situation in the North was repeatedly in flux. In July 1995, according to a State Department official, Kim told President Clinton, “I think [the North Koreans] are going down the tubes, and we should seek a gradual change” north of the thirty-eighth parallel. Four months later, after the flood, Kim told Vice President Gore in a bilateral meeting in Osaka, Japan, “There’s no possibility of a soft landing. There’s going to be a crash.”

In early-January 1996, Kim spoke out publicly against providing additional food aid for the North, declaring in his New Year policy speech that “it is a crime and a betrayal of the Korean people for North Korea to hope to receive aid from the international community while pouring all its natural resources into maintaining its military power.” A senior aide to Kim, whom I saw shortly after the policy speech, made little effort to disguise the essentially domestic political nature of the president’s turnabout, predicting that he would continue his hard line at least until after the National Assembly elections scheduled for April.

In the meantime, not only was the government unresponsive to UN and humanitarian appeals for food; it also sought to dissuade others from providing aid. In a Honolulu meeting with the United States and Japan in late January, Seoul officials argued disingenuously that North Korea’s plight was not so serious, and that in any case Pyongyang should be pressured to resume the formal North-South dialogue as a condition of obtaining more food. A week after the meetings ended, however, Washington announced a $2 million contribution to the UN’s emergency appeal without conditions. Whatever Seoul’s feelings, it was at that time a tenet of US policy to respond to UN humanitarian appeals, no matter the recipient.

Before the American contribution was announced, North Korean officials had been disheartened by the tepid response to the initial UN appeal. Washington’s action, however, opened the way for additional contributions from governments and private groups. On March 29, the DPRK ambassador in Geneva informed UN agencies of North Korea’s “urgent need” for additional food and requested a second UN appeal on its behalf.

In this context, it was hard to understand that only a week later, North Korea announced it would no longer accept the duties and limitations of the Korean War armistice and sent 130 soldiers armed with AK-47 automatic rifles, light machine guns, and antitank recoilless rifles into the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom, in deliberate violation of the armistice. Under the agreement that had been generally observed for four decades, each side was limited to thirty enlisted men and five officers armed only with pistols. After two hours, the troops withdrew, but twice as many returned the next night in a further demonstration. After a third night of armistice violations, amid intense international nervousness and widespread condemnation, the demonstrations subsided.

Well before the DMZ incursions, intelligence analysts in Washington and Seoul had been closely watching the growing clout of the KPA in Pyongyang. Since succeeding his father in July 1994, most of Kim Jong Il’s public appearances had been visits to military units, in his capacity as supreme commander of the armed forces. Moreover, since Kim Il Sung’s death, high-ranking military officers had been elevated in the hierarchy of North Korean officialdom. A large-scale military parade was staged for
the anniversary of the founding of the Workers Party, an event that had previously been of a nonmilitary character; the newly appointed defense minister, Choe Kwang, made the keynote address. At the same time, however, Kim Jong Il seemed to have held the military in check on key policy issues involving the United States, overruling military objections in negotiating the Agreed Framework to halt the nuclear activities at Yongbyon and again in releasing American helicopter pilot Bobby Hall.