The Prospects for North Korea Survival

David Reese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781136059568
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

North Korea's economic and security policies imperil both itself and its neighbours. The economy has been contracting for almost a decade, and the regime appears unwilling or unable to arrest the decline. Instead, Pyongyang has resorted to begging for international aid. This approach alone cannot work: fundamental reform is needed; without it, the regime cannot survive. In the meantime, the North's problems will be destabilising for the region. Pyongyang has secured short-term international humanitarian assistance, but in the long term the South is its best hope for investment and economic help. Despite Pyongyang's defensive approach to the South, limited commercial arrangements are in place, and may moderate the North's policies and help to ease the unpredictable consequences of Pyongyang's collapse. Pyongyang has tried to improve relations with the US in a bid to ease economic sanctions and attract investment. However, the nuclear deal reached with the US in October 1994 – under which the North agreed to give up its ambiguous nuclear programme – is in difficulties.
In this paper, David Reese argues that, despite these problems, the North's neighbours must persevere with engagement policies. At the same time, South Korea and the US must maintain their security posture on the Peninsula.
South Korean President Kim Dae Jung's attempts to establish commercial links with the North need time and patience, and should not be derailed by relatively minor incidents. Both Seoul and Washington must ensure that they coordinate their policies to prevent the North from playing one off against the other. Selectively easing sanctions on a case-by-case basis could allow the North to earn desperately needed hard currency. Although it is difficult for Washington and Seoul to maintain political support for engagement, both should make further efforts to draw the North into making significant policy changes.
The US and South Korea should ensure that they involve the interested regional parties in efforts to draw the North into the international community. China has a key role to play in developments on the Peninsula. Both Seoul and Washington should therefore ensure that they work closely with Beijing. While historical sensitivities make it difficult for Japan to play a leading role, Tokyo would be central to the North's economic recovery, and must not be marginalised. Russia also has a contribution to make to the broader security guarantees which could develop from accommodation between North and South.
Ultimately, the course of events on the Peninsula will depend primarily on the North. Pyongyang shows little sign of being prepared to engage constructively with the US and South Korea. As its economy deteriorates, its options will narrow further. Until domestic forces in North Korea shift, the US and its allies should expect a protracted phase of desultory and sometimes destabilising diplomatic manoeuvres by Pyongyang.

chapter 1

Struggling to Survive

North Korea’s regime and system of government are increasingly anachronistic. Pyongyang’s bizarre propaganda and adulation of its leader seem extreme, even by the standards of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao Zedong’s China. The regime’s totalitarian character precludes dissent and ensures control through the ruthless suppression of its people by the security apparatus and military. The regime has become increasingly beleaguered as the economy contracts, and appears unable to find solutions beyond appealing for international help.

‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong Il

Kim Il Sung ruled North Korea from its formation as a state in 1948 until his death in July 1994, when his son, Kim Jong Il, succeeded him in the first dynastic succession in a communist state. Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) doctrine had opposed hereditary succession, deeming it ‘feudal’, but this changed in the 1970s to prepare the way for Kim Jong Il’s accession. On his father’s death, Kim Jong Il had been Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) since December 1991. He waited more than three years before assuming Kim Il Sung’s position of KWP Secretary-General, apparently reflecting the traditional period of respect shown by a Korean son on his father’s death. Once KWP Secretary-General, Kim Jong Il’s next step was his election to the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA), the country’s rubber-stamp parliament, in July 1998. From there, he could have been elected state President. However, when the SPA met on 9 September 1998, prior to celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of North Korea’s foundation, Kim Jong Il chose instead to make his position as Chairman of the National Defence Commission (NDC), which he had assumed in 1993, the state’s ‘highest post’.¹ The problem of nomenclature was side-stepped by declaring Kim Il Sung ‘Eternal President’. The protocol functions of head of state, which his death put beyond the Eternal President, were to be carried out by the president of the SPA Presidium, Kim Yong Nam. This arrangement, which is similar to the practice followed by Kim Il Sung before he became state President, has given the regime a more military hue, but has also allowed Kim Jong Il to retain the authority of head of state without the burden of the public role that he so dislikes.

Juche

North Korea’s form of communism, with its dynastic leadership and emphasis on juche (most commonly translated as ‘self-reliance’), is unique. Juche first emerged as a reaction to the personality cult surrounding Stalin and to the Soviet-Chinese ideological split. It provided a rationale for Kim Il Sung’s authority and acted as the vehicle for developing the personality cult around him. It was also a means of defining North Korea’s ‘separateness’ from both the Soviet Union and China, and was developed to replace Marxism-Leninism as the North’s own approach to communism. Later, it was used to elevate Kim Jong Il as his father’s rightful successor. Western scholars have found it difficult to grasp juche’s meaning; ‘self-reliance’ is both insufficient and disingenuous since Pyongyang has relied on both Moscow and Beijing since 1945, and now hopes to win the help of others. Bruce Cumings suggests that juche involves Korean identity and is thus inaccessible to non-Koreans.^a This view does not, however, help the West to distinguish between what might be thought Confucian, and what is simply authoritarian. Nor does it help in coming to terms with North Korea’s particular form of communism. Essentially, juche can mean whatever the regime wants it to mean.

Note ^a Bruce Cumings, North Korea’s Place in the Sun (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 404

Although Pyongyang’s propaganda portrays Kim Jong Il as pre-eminent, the extent of his authority and the nature of his relationship with other senior figures in the regime are unclear; it is not known whether any collective decision-making takes place. Since taking over from his father, Kim Jong Il, who was born in 1942, has replaced senior figures with people of his own generation, and many of the regime’s top positions are held by family members or their spouses. Kim Jong Il’s sister, Kim Kyong Hui, is the KWP’s Director of Light Industry, for example.² According to Hwang Jong Yop, a senior KWP figure who defected in Beijing in 1997, Kim Jong Il is firmly in power.³

The extent to which Kim Jong Il ran the country before his father’s death is unclear. Kim Il Sung and others gave contradictory accounts; in 1992, Kim Il Sung claimed that his son was running the country’s internal affairs. Yet when the extent of the economic crisis became apparent in 1993, Kim Il Sung, not his son, addressed the nation to advise of policy changes.⁴ Similarly, when North Korea and the US reached an impasse over the North’s nuclear programme in June 1994, Kim Il Sung dealt with former US President Jimmy Carter during his self-appointed mission to Pyongyang. Although Carter asked to see him, Kim Jong Il did not appear.⁵

Kim Jong Il’s reclusiveness – in contrast to his father’s more gregarious style – means that he is largely unknown to Western observers; his knowledge of the outside world is likely to be equally scanty. He rarely meets foreigners, and is not known to have met an American. Kim Jong Il’s known foreign trips have been to Indonesia, Malta, China (in 1983) and, undisclosed to his hosts, to East Berlin in his father’s entourage in 1984. Reports in the Western press of Kim Jong Il’s excessive drinking and womanising cannot be verified, and may have their source in South Korea’s security organisation, the Agency for National Security Planning (ANSP). Similarly, claims that Kim Jong Il suffers from various ailments, including heart trouble and diabetes, must also be treated with caution.

the failings and foibles of Kim Jong Il

The only insights into Kim Jong Il’s personality have come from Hwang and from a South Korean actress, Choi Eun Hee, and her film-director husband Shin Sang Ok, who were kidnapped from Hong Kong in 1978. Following their escape from the North in 1986, they characterised Kim Jong Il as confident, bright, temperamental, quirky and very much in charge of the government – as well as theatrical affairs.⁶ Hwang’s account is similar, although he also claimed that Kim Jong Il is ‘arrogant, obsessively conspiratorial and inflexible. He is very wily and manipulative. His only concern is to perpetuate his power. Everything is approached in terms of personal profit and loss’. According to Hwang, Kim Il Sung was also a dictator, of course, but he asked for and the opinions of others and showed flexibility. On the whole I respected him. The trouble is that he completely spoiled his son by giving him absolute power to run the day-to-day affairs of the country as a relatively young man’. Kim Jong Il ‘won’t listen to anyone else, and to make matters worse, he is often indecisive, changing his mind according to his mood’.⁷

The regime appears to have a problem in presenting Kim Jong Il as his father’s rightful successor. Kim Il Sung was an imposing figure who had fought against the Japanese. His son is a small man with no military record and an aversion to making public appearances or speeches; his only recorded address to the people was in April 1992, when he marked the KPA’s sixtieth anniversary with the words: ‘Glory to the officers and soldiers of the heroic Korean People’s Army’.⁸ On North Korean television, his image is nearly always projected by still photographs. Kim Jong Il’s appointment as Supreme Commander by his father, his frequently reported visits to military units and references to him in state propaganda as ‘General Kim’ could be designed to overcome his lack of a military background. Similarly, the state media has sought to elevate his stature with reports of his ‘heroic’ achievements, whether shooting a bull’s-eye on a target range or giving sagacious advice to the nation.

State Institutions

Kim Jong Il’s relationship with the state’s three main arms – the KPA, the KWP and the SPA – is unclear, although his choice of the military as a power-base suggests that he views the armed forces as of primary importance. There is a high degree of overlap between these arms of the state, with senior KWP figures also holding positions in the KPA and SPA, and military leaders dominating the Assembly. Kim Jong Il has developed his links with the KPA to enhance his status and to buy the military’s loyalty in uncertain times. The successful launch of the Taepodong 1 missile in August 1998 suggests that the industrial sector’s military component is still favoured.

The KPA’s central role was conveyed in a report by North Korea’s Rodong Shinmun newspaper in April 1997, which stated that ‘the army is exactly the people, the state and the party’.⁹ Although the overlap of office-holders in both the KPA and the KWP is a long-established practice, the military’s leading role in and through the Party seems to have become more pronounced since Kim Il Sung’s death. A photograph of Kim Jong Il at the KWP’s fiftieth anniversary parade in 1995 shows him adorned with medals and surrounded by figures in military uniform; most of his reported travel outside Pyongyang has been to inspect KPA posts.¹⁰ Whether it is in his KPA or KWP capacity, Kim Jong Il appears to retain command-and-control authority, and officers along the DMZ communicate directly with him.¹¹

The regime places importance on security and military matters to the point where they can override other policy considerations. In one example, dating from Kim Il Sung’s time, the regime in 1983 mounted a bomb attack on South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan in Yangon, Myanmar. The attack took place the day after China had passed a message to the US on North Korea’s behalf stating that Pyongyang would participate in three-way peace talks with Seoul and Washington. In 1996, the North mounted a submarine incursion into Southern waters that coincided both with efforts by Pyongyang to secure food aid from its neighbour, and with the start of the KEDO project. Further submarine incidents in 1998 suggested that priorities had not changed.

Nonetheless, it appears that the military does not always prevail in policy disagreements with other parts of the government. US officials have observed apparent tensions between the KPA and the Foreign Ministry, and the military seems to have lost some of these disputes. In December 1994, a US military helicopter which strayed into North Korea was shot down, its pilot killed and co-pilot captured. The Foreign Ministry, concerned to protect the Agreed Framework nuclear deal, overrode KPA opposition and returned the officer across the DMZ.¹² During the US–North Korea nuclear talks, Foreign Ministry officials claimed that the KPA had a tougher negotiating st...