The Hidden People of North Korea (48 page)

In some respects North Korea has already collapsed, but the collapse has gone unnoticed because it happened gradually and out of view of foreigners, who expected it to be marked by millions of North Koreans swimming across the Yalu River into China, escaping in small boats to Japan, rushing across the minefields of the Demilitarized Zone, or battling police and ransacking government buildings. But collapse need not be that dramatic. The North Korean leadership system has already seriously eroded as people ignore the official ideology and the words of Kim Jong-il. The more often the media claim that Kim is the “respected and beloved general,” the more it can be inferred that people still need to be convinced of this. Party officials have less influence on the lives of the people than they used to (although they can still impose their will on individual citizens when they wish). Government officials must be bribed to do their jobs, which is understandable because their salaries are virtually worthless. With few resources to work with, the government can do little for the people anyway, other than irritate them. Rules and laws are not obeyed unless someone is watching, and lawbreakers avoid punishment by bribing the police.

As for signs of economic collapse, foreigners and defectors alike estimate that North Korea’s industry has been operating at no more than 25 percent capacity since the early 1990s. The military economy is probably in somewhat better shape than the civilian economy, but not by much to judge from the condition of military equipment. Even North Korea’s showpiece nuclear industry is barely able to function—its temporary shutdown under the most recent nuclear agreement is hardly a loss for the economy or the military.

Given the many variables involved, it is futile to predict North Korea’s near-term future, although in the long term—twenty to fifty years out—it is a certainty that the political and economic shape of North Korea will have dramatically changed to accommodate international economic practices and social norms. When Kim Il-sung died, we predicted that Kim Jong-il’s rule would be short, but we were wrong for several reasons. First, we did not consider the lack of alternatives to Kim. It now appears that the military, which is an important institutional power holder, has no desire to rule North Korea. Apart from their strong loyalty to Kim Il-sung, who personally designated Kim Jong-il as his successor, the senior generals probably do not think they have the talent to govern the country. Second, we could not imagine how generously and patiently the international community would assist North Korea. Most of the food aid goes directly to the government-run Public Distribution System, ensuring that Kim’s supporters are first in line for assistance. Nor could we guess that the South Korean government, beginning with the Kim Dae-jung administration in 1998, would provide strong support for the North rather than try to take advantage of its weakness and promote reunification on South Korea’s terms.

If the Kim regime was able to make it through the 1990s, in the wake of Kim Il-sung’s sudden death and during a time when the bodies of starved people lay in the streets, it is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Kim himself may not have long to live, but a successor regime very much like his could continue to play his cards. For now, Kim has given absolutely no indication that he is willing to relax his control over the people, transform North Korea into a market economy, or tolerate any political opposition. He cautiously opens North Korea’s door to the outside world when he sees some profit in it for himself and his supporters, but when things begin to look threatening, the door is closed again. His deft handling of foreign policy, especially his skill at playing on the nuclear phobia of the United States, seems likely to guarantee him continued international attention and support. As it turns out, no country, including the United States, wants to see North Korea collapse, so the very threat of it should be sufficient to extract foreign aid and political support for the regime, even without nuclear and missile programs to bargain with.

What could bring an end to the Kim dynasty? Collapse scenarios would include a military coup, an assassination before Kim had prepared a successor, widespread protests in which the military sided with civilians, a natural disaster of unprecedented proportions, or a plague or famine that killed, say, as much as a quarter of the population. External circumstances that could trigger a collapse might include a total cutoff of foreign aid by China or a preemptive attack by the United States. None of these scenarios appears likely at this time.

In an article written back in 1999, we surveyed experts’ predictions for North Korea’s future.
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Out of some forty papers and articles, mostly written since 1996, three studies (by a South Korean, a Russian, and a Chinese) predicted that North Korea would adopt reforms and pull out of its downward spiral. This did not happen. Twenty-one experts correctly predicted that North Korea would manage to muddle through for some years without serious reforms, and ten overly pessimistic experts predicted North Korea would collapse within the next few years. Another set of predictions, made by fifty Korean experts on North Korea affairs and published in a South Korean newspaper at about the same time also gave the Kim regime the benefit of the doubt: 16 percent predicted a collapse within five years, 29 percent saw it coming within ten years, and 53 percent believed North Korea would survive longer than ten years.
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And in a 1997 South Korean survey, two experts predicted collapse by the year 2000, fifteen by the year 2005, seventeen by the year 2010, and six by the year 2020.
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In light of these predictions, should one conclude ten years later that the regime has run its course, or could it be that its survival to date portends even greater staying power in the future?

The survey conducted in 2006 by the Korea Institute for National Unification, cited in chapter 6,
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asked defectors to predict how long the Kim regime would survive: 23 percent predicted less than five years, 48 percent between five and ten years, 16 percent between ten and fifteen years, and 14 percent longer than fifteen years.
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These predictions foresee bleak prospects for the North Korean people, many of whom will never live to see prosperity or reunification. As for those languishing in prison camps, even a few more years of the Kim regime will be too long.

U.S. Policy Options

Should the United States sit back and wait for the Kim regime to run its course, should it offer support and security to the regime in the hope that it will transform itself, or should it take steps to pressure the regime to change its policies and improve the lives of its people? As it stands, the Kim regime essentially holds its people hostage, and accomplishing hostage rescues, especially when the hostage taker is heavily armed, is not easy. In the current case, it can be argued that the United States is much more interested in the hostage taker’s weapons of mass destruction than in the fate of his hostages.

North Korea comes to the world’s attention only in connection with nuclear and missile programs and its recurring humanitarian crises. The rest of the time, thanks in large part to the Kim regime’s policies of secrecy and isolation, North Korea is a hidden country. Kim Jong-il controls the pace of foreign engagement: when the regime wants attention, it creates a disturbance, gets at least some of what it wants, and then goes back into its shell. The 1993–1994 nuclear crisis was virtually identical to that of 2003 (when North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and restarted its nuclear reactors), and in both cases North Korea was compensated for signing a nuclear-freeze agreement. We would not be surprised if more North Korean–provoked crises of a nuclear and nonnuclear nature occur in the future. When Kim is willing, the Six-Party Talks on the nuclear issue go forward. When he is unwilling, the superpowers have to wait him out. Likewise, every few years floods or other natural disasters strike North Korea, and humanitarian aid is rushed to the scene, but the underlying weakness of the country’s infrastructure is never addressed.

Americans should be somewhat cautious about offering policy suggestions for dealing with North Korea because the North Korean people and their neighbors will feel the consequences of dramatic changes in the regime more strongly than Americans living thousands of miles away. And yet, we believe policy suggestions should be rooted in principles as well as in practical considerations. Our policy preference, now as it was eight years ago when we wrote our first North Korea book, is based on the idea that it is best to deal as directly as possible with the North Korean people and to bypass the Kim regime because we believe the success of a North Korea policy should not depend on gaining cooperation from a regime whose goals are often diametrically opposed to those of the United States and, indeed, to the best interests of the North Korean people. It might not be too much of an exaggeration even to say that any U.S. policy or initiative approved by the Kim regime will likely be detrimental to the North Korean people, and any policy that the regime opposes will probably benefit them. Needless to say, the preference for dealing with the people rather than the regime seriously complicates policy formulation because policy talks are government to government, not people to people, and in any case, the ordinary North Korean people remain relatively well hidden from us.

More specifically, our favored policy is to target the North Korean people with information about their government and the outside world and to let them choose how to act on that information. This policy places a heavy burden on the people, but it is, after all, their country. In the final analysis, as an eighteenth-century French diplomat observed, every country has the government it deserves. The North Korean people have supported, often reluctantly, the Kim regime for over half a century, and it is for them to withdraw that support or take action against the regime. What information might be communicated to them and how it would be delivered is suggested by the steps that the Kim regime has already taken to block outside information, for example, by outlawing videos and unfixed radio sets and railing against “imperialistic propaganda” transmitted by the Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, and South Korean radio stations.

We suspect, however, that U.S. government policy toward North Korea will continue to focus primarily on reducing or eliminating Pyongyang’s weapons of mass destruction—a policy that unfortunately involves communicating with and rewarding the actors who are the very cause of the many problems that the North Korean people face. We also suspect that nonproliferation agreements with the regime will simply encourage it to brandish new threats in the future. The North Korean people are left out of these negotiations, except to the extent that a few of the economic benefits provided to the regime finally reach them. It is this trickle-down theory that provided the rationale for the engagement policy as pursued by South Korea during the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations. That so-called sunshine policy was supposed to melt or soften the regime by providing it with economic and political security. In our opinion, for this approach to succeed, Kim Jong-il must be persuaded to transform his country into a democracy in which the people have the power to vote him and his supporters out of office—just as Communist Party officials were voted out of office in Eastern Europe. We doubt if Kim will be attracted to this option.

How much humanitarian aid to offer North Korea is a tricky issue. Aid organizations such as the United Nations’ World Food Program strongly condemn the politicization of humanitarian aid, as do most governments, including the U.S. government. However, it can be argued that when political decisions create humanitarian crises, as they do in North Korea where the regime has devoted its best resources to the military rather than the civilian sector, there is strong justification for including political criteria in decisions about humanitarian aid. We suggest that humanitarian aid be offered to the North Korean government contingent on its acceptance of strict foreign monitoring (by Korean-speaking aid workers) and clear labeling of the aid’s origin. In this way the foreign aid will become part of the foreign information program. If the regime objects to the strings attached to foreign aid, as it almost certainly will, then the rejected aid offer should be communicated to the North Korean people so they know that the only thing standing between them and food is their government.

Our policy recommendation of information operations comes up short on at least two accounts. First, it does not take into account the policy preferences of the South Korean government, which will bear the brunt of any chaos created if the North Korean people choose to rise up against their government. We cannot think of a way to please all parties, and the needs of the North Korean people seem to us to outweigh the economic concerns of the relatively prosperous South Koreans, who in any case should not be optimistic about their own future until they resolve the reunification issue. We would hope and expect that a collapse of North Korean society would prompt the United States and international aid and financial organizations to provide robust economic assistance in order to maintain stability in the region and reduce the economic burden on the South Korean government.

Our second reservation is based on the realization that the U.S. government lacks the capability and interest to mount a serious information campaign. The current level of efforts involving Radio Free Asia, Voice of America, and a few surrogate organizations and radio stations are unlikely to enlighten the North Korean people sufficiently to move them to action if they so choose. The U.S. Department of Defense spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting its wars but only a few million on “information warfare.” Considering that individual American companies each spend up to $2 billion a year on advertising, it is naı¨ve to expect that an annual information budget of a few million dollars can successfully introduce the North Korean people to a new way of thinking about their government and their society.