Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

by Bradley K. Martin

  Impressive as those measures were, questions remained. In particular: Did Kim Jong-il envision a market economy in a communist party-ruled country—a structure similar to the hybrid structure that China had created? Or was he trying, yet again, to shore up a basically socialist, non-market—in large part unchanged—economy? Analysts differed on that question.20 Skeptics noted that the new prices, while reflecting market realities, still were not market-set prices but state-set prices.

  Would the changes, regardless of intent, lead to more fundamental changes? A reporter for Seoul’s Dong-A Ilbo first visited North Korea at the time of the July announcement of the new measures. He returned three months later and found intriguing anecdotal evidence. During the summer Pyongyang had hosted a festival called Arirang, to celebrate the country’s return to economic growth after the horrible period of famine—now dubbed the “arduous march.” The festival represented a huge drain of funds with few discernible gains, and to that extent suggested that the regime might have failed to learn the lesson of the 1989 youth festival. Just as in 1989 a prime motive was rivalry with the South—-which, with Japan, co-hosted soccer’s 2002 World Cup matches. On the other hand, though, the Arirang festival had been the occasion for officials to issue operating permits for Pyongyang street stalls selling beverages, snacks and takeout food. The permits were temporary. However, as the Dong-A Ilbo reporter observed, after the festival concluded in August the bustling stands continued to line busy streets near sub-way stations and bus stops. Their operation now had been legitimized by the July measures. Such stands were not confined to Pyongyang but could be found in other places such as the parking lot for tourists visiting Mount Myohyang. The reporter quoted a guide as saying the mania for street vending had affected bricks-and-mortar enterprises. “During the summer, street vendors sell more soft drinks than regular stores. Many enterprises want to branch out into the street vendor business, which has triggered a fierce competition for good spots.”

  A new spirit had affected farmers, as well. “It was the normal practice for civil servants and soldiers to go out to help with the weeding,” the reporter wrote. “This year, however, the farm workers informed them that no one needed to come because they would do it on their own.” The farmers, he explained, “have realized that each person can make more money by increasing production and reducing costs. They have also come to understand that accepting nonessential helping hands in exchange for daily wages chips away at their profits.” Income of goat-and-corn farmers whom the reporter visited had soared thanks to the July price increases. Introduction earlier of an “individual competitive system” had transformed many of the farmers’ attitudes and work habits. “Based on last year’s output, the difference in income between those who worked cleverly and the lazybones is five-fold,” the farm manager said. The former “herded goats up the hill at eight in the morning with a lunch box and returned at eight in the evening.” The slackers “slept late. Then they came down the hill with the goats to have lunch and take a nap before climbing back after two in the afternoon, only to come back early.” As the reporter asked rhetorically, “Is it not natural that there is a difference between the goats that grazed the whole day and those that came and went with the shepherd?”

  Buzz words appearing often in the North Korean media included “innovation” and “good at calculation,” the reporter found. “In the past, ‘good at calculation’ meant ‘selfish,’ an utterly insulting expression in North Korean society. At present, however, being good at calculation for both companies and individuals is turning into a virtue.”21

  One could look for further clues in subsequent events. It would be difficult for North Korea to join the world economy if the U.S. market remained essentially closed to its products. On that point, the outlook did not seem promising. Both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, citing security, had restricted the scope of the relaxation of U.S. sanctions that Clinton had promised. The Bush administration had rather contemptuously rained on Kim Dae-jung’s sunshine policy, starting with a reception of the South Korean president in Washington in which Bush presented a studied and insulting contrast to the deference and hospitality that Kim Jong-il had provided.

  In April 2002 South Korea hoped to invite Pyongyang delegates to the annual assembly of the Asian Development Bank, to which North Korea had applied for membership. But politics, once again, thwarted business deals. Washington, the bank’s leading shareholder, vetoed the invitation.22 Even more ominously, the Dong-A Ilbo reporter noted during his October visit that “our delegation caught sight of six Mercedes-Benz sedans taking U.S. delegates to Pyongyang, including James Kelly, U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs.” As we shall see in chapter 36, Kelly’s visit would slam the door on hopes for U.S. cooperation in the near term.

  And there was still more bad political news to come. In 2003 allegations surfaced in Seoul that Kim Dae-jung’s aides, through Hyundai, had bought Kim Jong-il’s participation in the 2000 summit by transferring $500 million or more to the North Korean leader’s account. Chung M.ong-hun, fifth son of Hyundai founder Chung Ju-yung and chairman of the Hyundai group company that had developed the North Korea projects, was to be tried for violating foreign currency regulations with the secret transfers. On August 4, 2003, Chung M.ong-hun leapt to his death from the twelfth floor of the Hyundai Building, leaving a note saying: “This foolish person has committed a foolish thing.” The following month six Hyundai and government officials were convicted in the case but given suspended sentences. The scandal called into question both Kim Dae-jung’s Nobel Prize and Kim Jong-il’s sincerity about reconciliation. Pyongyang bitterly blamed the right-wing main opposition party in the South for pushing the investigation, saying instigators would be unable “to escape the crimes that they committed in the face of their people and history itself.”23

  THIRTY-SIX

  Fear and Loathing

  While events around the turn of the millennium suggested that Kim Jong-il had become willing to yield some points on economic and legal policies, he had other, less peaceable things on his mind as well. His continuing policy of placing heavy emphasis on military readiness led to a high-stakes war of nerves with Washington, Tokyo and Seoul. That struggle put at risk any gains the North Korean people might hope to derive from his other initiatives.

  The official position, expressed at the beginning of 2000 by an economics professor at Kim Il-sung University, was that Kim Jong-il’s emphasis on “military-first” politics meant guns and butter. Yes, it was intended to “defend the nation from the invasion of hostile forces.” But it was “a comprehensive plan which includes an effective means for an economic buildup.” The policy had “nothing to do with military rule or a military regime.” And the “powerful state” that the Dear Leader wanted to create did not mean a country pursuing hegemony. Rather, the policy had “two goals: defending the system and restoring the economy”1

  Following September 11, 2001, and the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, speech-writers working on President Bush’s State of the Union address for 2002 liked the catchy phrase “axis of evil.” Partly to avoid making it appear the United States focused only on Muslims in the new War on Terror, they added North Korea to the original “axis” members Iraq and Iran. Many people felt that the stance was justified when Washington acquired evidence suggesting that North Korea might be continuing secretly—despite the 1994–95 agreements—to develop nuclear weapons. A second nuclear weapons crisis erupted.

  Even as international attention focused again on North Korean weaponry, however, Kim Jong-il’s regime continued to experiment at home with potentially far-reaching adjustments to the Stalinist-Kimilsungist system. By early 2004 foreign visitors and other outside analysts were hopping aboard what seemed to be a developing consensus: Pyongyang was more serious than before about accepting—and even encouraging—economic change.

  Early in 2000 South Korea’s Ministry of Natio
nal Defense reported that North Korea had stocked enough food for a yearlong war and enough oil for at least three months, in addition to ammunition. Interpretations varied. A substantial body of foreign opinion held that North Korea, far from being an aggressive state that might attack the South at any moment, was a weak country that simply sought to defend itself against a feared attack by the United States and South Korea. Of course that school of thought had long included sympathizers with North Korea and its socialist ideal. But quite a few others coming from elsewhere on the ideological spectrum had concluded in the 1990s that the North—-with the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and especially with the economic disaster that afflicted the country through much of the decade—had irreversibly fallen into weakness. Pyongyang must know that the days were past when it could have mounted a successful south-ward invasion. Looking at the matter from that point of view, the North could be squirreling away war rations, fuel and ammunition purely for the sake of deterring its enemies from attacking. After all, the South Korean ministry claimed to know where the North’s storage facilities were—presumably thanks to satellite photos and other intelligence. Knowing it was being watched and hoping to discourage attack, Pyongyang would have to make sure it put up a credible front of being ready, indeed eager, to fight effectively.

  There were plenty of reasons for being skeptical about that argument, and I was skeptical. One could suspect that the Pyongyang regime’s adamant refusal for so many decades to change in any basic way applied fully to its more than fifty-year-old objective of ruling the whole peninsula. For the regime to relinquish that goal and settle permanently for taking its chances in peaceful competition with its Southern brethren, wouldn’t there have to be an enormous change? There might be temporary policy shifts, such as emphasizing deterrence more than preparations for aggression whenever the regime felt itself temporarily weakened. But if such a huge change of long-term policy as the renunciation of conquest were to occur, wouldn’t we know about it? How could it be accomplished without internal turmoil sufficient to register on Pyongyang-watchers’ seismographs? Remove one element of the “unitary idea,” Kim Jong-il himself had warned for decades, and the whole system would start to unravel. Along with such a major policy change, wouldn’t we see, at the minimum, some new faces at the top, rather than continuing to watch a country being ruled for better or for worse—usually for worse—by the same people who had been in charge for decades?

  But people who met Kim face to face continued to get the impression he was prepared to make deals that would permit him to abandon old policies so that the country could move on. One of those people was then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, whose memoir includes a chapter describing a visit to Pyongyang in the waning days of the Clinton administration.2 She found Kim “an intelligent man who knew what he wanted.” Exuding confidence, he made clear he wanted normal relations with the United States that would “shield his country from the threat he saw posed by American power and help him to be taken seriously in the eyes of the world.”

  Albright was in Pyongyang for preliminary talks looking toward a possible summit meeting between President Clinton and Kim—and what both sides hoped would be a comprehensive agreement on missiles and the other issues that kept the two countries at odds. In her first meeting with Kim (“I was wearing heels, but so was he”) she told him she could not recommend a summit meeting without having an agreement on missiles. Kim told her his country was selling missiles to Iran and Syria because it needed foreign currency. “So it’s clear, since we export to get money, if you guarantee compensation it will be suspended.” Indeed, he offered to halt not only exports but also production for deployment within the country. “If there’s no confrontation, there’s no significance to weapons,” he explained.

  Describing a meeting the following day, Albright wrote, “I said we had given his delegation a list of questions and that it would be helpful if his experts could provide at least some answers before the end of the day. To my surprise Kim asked for the list and began answering the questions himself, not even consulting the expert by his side.”

  Kim told Albright that he could see a post–Cold War role for U.S. troops in South Korea: maintaining stability. But he said his military was split down the middle on whether to improve North Korea–U.S. relations and that some in his foreign ministry had argued against his speaking with the Americans. “As in the U.S.,” he said, “there are people here with views differing from mine, although they don’t amount to the level of opposition you have.”

  Kim confirmed that his country was in severe economic difficulty, and Albright asked if he would consider opening the economy. Not if it would “harm our traditions,” he replied. He said he was not interested in the Chinese mix of free markets with socialism, preferring the model of Sweden, which he saw as more socialist than China.

  “On a personal level,” Albright wrote, “I had to assume that Kim sincerely believed in the blarney he had been taught and saw himself as the protector and benefactor of his nation. … One could not preside over a system as cruel as the DPRK’s without being cruel oneself, but I did not think we had the luxury of simply ignoring him. He was not going to go away and his country though weak, was not about to fall apart.”

  Albright concluded that Kim was serious about negotiating a deal on missiles, and that the costs to the United States “would be minimal compared to the expense of defending against the threats its missile program posed.” But efforts to arrange for Clinton to meet with Kim and seal such a deal ran into obstacles. First, Albright wrote, there was considerable opposition in Washington from people who “feared a deal with North Korea would weaken the case for national missile defense,” or who “argued that a summit would ‘legitimize’ North Korea’s evil leaders.” But what really scuttled the proposed trip was a competing demand for Clinton to deal with the latest Mideast crisis during his fast-dwindling time in office.

  The George W. Bush administration took over in Washington early in 2001. Republican officials in charge of foreign policy, suspicious of the Clinton administration’s efforts to find accommodation with Pyongyang, set out to review U.S. policy. After President Bush’s Axis of Evil speech, there was more to come. In October 2002 U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly and other officials visiting Pyongyang surprised their hosts with evidence that North Korea was continuing nuclear weapons development using uranium enrichment, a different and separate process from the plutonium process the country had frozen earlier. The delegation returned to Washington to report that its counterparts had come clean on the uranium project, defiantly insisting there was no reason why the country should not have its own nukes.

  Washington sought to keep the issue on the back burner while it took on Iraq first. North Korea used various provocations to try to force the United States into making concessions while the Pentagon was occupied in the Middle East. In December 2002 the country expelled International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and started reactivating a reactor that had produced plutonium before the 1994 freeze. In January 2003 North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

  The quick initial success of the Iraq war most likely was blood-curdling news to Kim Jong-il, whose whereabouts were not known for a number of days. He was presumed to be in hiding for fear one of those smart U.S. weapons, launched in the preemptive attack that the Bush administration openly contemplated, would find him. After all, Bush had told author and Washington Post reporter Bob Wood-ward that he “loathed” Kim Jong-il, whom he referred to as a “pygmy.”

  In October 2003, Pyongyang said it had reprocessed some eight thousand spent fuel rods that had been in storage during the period of the freeze. “If that is indeed the case, it could have produced enough fissile material for an additional five or six nuclear weapons,” Kelly said.3 When Pyongyang hinted broadly that it might simply declare itself a nuclear power, China, for one, did not like that idea and cut off North Korea’s oil supplies for several days to
enforce a demand for negotiations. By early 2004 Pyongyang had offered to re-freeze its plutonium-based program (evidently realizing its admission had been a tactical error, it now denied it had acknowledged having a uranium enrichment program) while negotiating with the United States, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia to see what sort of deal it could get. What it wanted from Washington included a non-aggression pact and diplomatic relations.

  While the first nuclear crisis had appeared pretty much to halt movement toward economic change, Pyongyang the second time around kept moving on a parallel track—to the extent that quite a few foreign skeptics started to become believers that something major could be happening this time.

  One implication of Kelly’s confrontation with North Korean officials on the bombs-from-uranium issue was, of course, that there would be no progress for the time being on resolving economic issues between Washington and Pyongyang. The month after the Kelly visit, however, Kim Jong-il’s brother-in-law, Chang Song-taek, led a high-powered delegation to South Korea to learn from the Southern economy. Ignoring super-high-tech, capital-intensive operations that were way out of their league, the Northern visitors focused on what seemed within their reach: standard industrial commodities such as steel and fertilizer, which they had been producing and could hope to produce more efficiently, and smaller businesses including golf and tourism. “So while their South Korean guides expected they would like to see Samsung Electronics’ cutting-edge technology,” reported a Seoul newspaper, “they were more interested in how an LG subsidiary makes toothbrushes.” Pak Nam-ki, the North’s chief economic planner, looked intently at what he was shown and asked many detailed questions. South Koreans speculated that the travelers, upon their return to Pyongyang, would first disabuse Kim Jong-il of his misconceptions about the South Korean economy and then draft a new blueprint for restoring and reforming the North’s economy.4