The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (35 page)

How strongly Shevardnadze argued these points within the Kremlin inner circle during the consideration of Korea policy is uncertain. Gorbachev’s aide Anatoly Chernyayev, who sat in on Politburo meetings, recalled that “Shevardnadze more than once reminded the Politburo that certain things might evoke irritation on the part of North Korea.” According to his account, however, Shevardnadze did not throw the full weight of his influence against the rapid improvement of relations with the South in 1990 but instead told Gorbachev, “You do whatever you want but without me.”

Following Gorbachev’s meeting with Roh, the decision was made in Moscow to establish full diplomatic relations with South Korea as of January 1, 1991. In discussing how to inform Pyongyang, it was suggested that Shevardnadze send his Asia chief, Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Rogachev, to do the distasteful job. However, Shevardnadze, a man of courage and honor, felt obligated to go himself, knowing that convincing North Korea to accept the change would be formidable.

On his plane en route to Pyongyang, Shevardnadze worked hard on his brief and his tactics. He decided to tell North Korean foreign minister Kim Yong Nam in a one-on-one meeting at the start of his
talks, then to try to persuade Kim Il Sung, later in the visit, to accept the Soviet reversal calmly.

In the one-on-one meeting, Shevardnadze gave the bad news to Kim. He argued that North Korea would benefit from Moscow’s diplomatic relations with Seoul because Soviet officials would be able to talk directly with the South on North-South issues, the problem of US troops and nuclear weapons, and other topics of importance to Pyongyang. Kim responded with passion against recognition of the South, saying it would reinforce the division of the country and severely aggravate relations between Moscow and Pyongyang. He asked that it be reconsidered.

After more than an hour of private discussion, the two ministers invited the other members of their delegations into the large, high-ceilinged conference room. Shevardnadze repeated the decision he had brought from Moscow and elaborated the reasons for it. He said the Soviet Union could not ignore such an important country as South Korea, which had become a major economic and political factor in the region and the world. He insisted that recognition of the South would not change the nature of Soviet relations with the North or Moscow’s views on Korean unification. Specifically, he declared, all Soviet obligations toward North Korea, including the 1961 treaty of alliance, would remain in force.

There were three microphones on each side of the long conference table, and the Soviet officials noticed that the Korean foreign minister spoke into his as if addressing an unseen audience of greater importance than the delegation in front of him. At first he said he was not ready to reply to Shevardnadze’s presentation but would do so later. Then, after being handed a note by an aide who entered the room from outside, he pulled out a prepared document and launched into a lengthy and bitter response, which featured the following points:

       
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Establishment of ties between the Soviet Union and South Korea would give international legitimacy to the permanent division of Korea. Formal recognition by Moscow would be fundamentally different from and more serious than that by other nations because the Soviet Union, along with the United States, had been responsible for the division of the country in 1945, and because the Soviet Union had been the first to recognize the DPRK as the sole legitimate state in Korea.

       
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Recognition would embolden South Korea to try harder to destroy socialism in the North and swallow it up, along the lines of the East German scenario. It would lead to deepening confrontation in the peninsula.

       
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If Moscow recognized another part of Korea as legitimate, Pyongyang would be free to recognize other parts of the Soviet
Union, which would create trouble for Moscow. (According to one participant, Kim named several places where Pyongyang might establish diplomatic relations, including Khazhakstan and other Central Asian republics of the USSR and the Baltics, which were straining to obtain independence.)

       
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Soviet recognition of the South would destroy the basis of the 1961 security treaty. Then the North would feel free to take its own actions in the Asia-Pacific region and not be obligated to consult the USSR in considering its policy.

       
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With the alliance a dead letter, North Korea would consider itself no longer bound by pledges not to create any weapons it desired. (On this point, some Soviet participants recall Kim specifically threatened to create nuclear weapons, but in any case the meaning of his words was clear.)

At the end of the meeting, Shevardnadze asked for time to consider what Kim had said, and he promised to reply the following morning. When he did so, he reiterated that the Soviet Union intended its relationship with North Korea to remain unchanged despite impending recognition of South Korea. As to the threat to take up relations with Soviet republics, Shevardnadze was unconcerned, saying that such contacts could be in the mutual interest of everyone.

Shevardnadze bore down hardest on the threat to create nuclear weapons. As a friend, he said, he would advise against this. Production of nuclear weapons would severely harm the DPRK’s relations with the West and the international community, and the Soviet Union would have to react as well. He added, in an echo of Kim Il Sung’s official line for years, that there was no possibility of using nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula, because they would devastate not only the South but the North as well, and also damage China.

In reply, Kim Yong Nam repeated, in even harsher terms, his statements from the previous day. In response to a direct question, he said it would be “very difficult” for the Soviet foreign minister to see President Kim Il Sung, who—he said—was out of Pyongyang.

Shevardnadze took this news in good grace at the meeting, but privately he was angry and upset, inasmuch as trying to explain the Soviet policy to Kim Il Sung had been his principal purpose in coming to Pyongyang. Back at his guesthouse—a notably smaller and less well-appointed one than that he had occupied two years earlier—Shevardnadze decided to leave at once, abruptly gathering his staff and departing several hours earlier than scheduled.

The Soviet foreign minister was still smarting from his treatment in Pyongyang when he went to New York for the UN General Assembly
meetings later in September. While there, he planned to make a joint announcement with South Korea to establish Soviet-ROK diplomatic relations as of January 1. At a diplomatic reception several days before the planned announcement, South Korean foreign minister Choi Ho Joong, under instructions from Seoul, buttonholed Shevardnadze and pleaded with him to move up the date, arguing that “this is a good and right thing, so why not do it immediately?” To Choi’s surprise, at their meeting on September 30, Shevardnadze readily agreed. With a flourish, the Soviet foreign minister took out his pen and struck through “January 1, 1991” on the prepared announcement, substituting “September 30, 1990” as the date for inaugurating the new relationship. As Shevardnadze crossed off one date and entered the other, he said under his breath in Russian, loud enough for his party to hear, “That will take care of our friends.”

Pyongyang responded bitterly in
Rodong Sinmun
under the headline, “Diplomatic Relations Sold and Bought with Dollars.” Citing past promises from Gorbachev and Shevardnadze not to recognize South Korea, the article declared that “the Soviet Union today is not the Soviet Union of past days when it adhered to socialist internationalism but it has degenerated into a state of a certain other character. . . .The Soviet Union sold off the dignity and honor of a socialist power and the interests and faith of an ally for $2.3 billion” (the amount of a reported South Korean economic cooperation fund for Moscow). The article appeared under the byline “Commentator,” a designation meant to signal a highly authoritative statement from North Korea’s leadership.

North Korea’s relations with Moscow were headed into a deep freeze, with immense practical as well as political consequences. The Soviet Union was by far Pyongyang’s most important trading partner, providing North Korea with most of its imports of weapons and weapons technology and large amounts of machinery and equipment. Moscow was also an important supplier of petroleum, though not as large as China. Soviet exports to North Korea were supplied on a highly concessional basis that most other nations would not have accepted. Even so, North Korea had failed to pay for much of what it bought, leaving huge overdue bills to the Soviet Union. Now that trading relationship, and more, was in doubt.

“HOW LONG WILL THE RED FLAG FLY?”

The Soviet Union’s rapid movement to diplomatic relations with Seoul was only the latest in a string of developments that were making Kim Il Sung’s globe spin out of control. Within little more than a year, the South had established full diplomatic and important economic ties with Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania,
all of them Kim’s former allies, all of which had previously shunned the Seoul regime. The maverick Romanian communist leader Nicolae Ceauşescu, who had been Kim’s special friend, had been overthrown and executed. Kim’s other special European friend, East German leader Erich Honecker, had been deposed, and the East German regime was in the process of being taken over by the capitalistic West. As a result of the fall of communism in Europe, there was intense speculation that Kim Il Sung and his regime would be the next to go.

In advance of the sensational Gorbachev-Roh meeting in San Francisco, it had been highly uncertain how North Korea would react. Three days before the meeting, the State Department’s Korea desk had speculated in a confidential briefing paper that “the shock of Gorbachev’s meeting with Roh—especially when he has avoided visiting North Korea—could spark a major leadership crisis in Pyongyang, which could heighten military tensions on the peninsula. It will be hard for the North to let an insult of this magnitude pass. In their rage and frustration, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il might lash out at the USSR, the ROK, or us.” The department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), in a separate confidential memorandum, speculated that in the aftermath of the San Francisco meeting, a “firestorm” was likely in Pyongyang. In talking points submitted by the State Department to the White House in preparation for President Bush’s conversation with Roh following the meeting, a central question on the minds of American officials was, “Could Pyongyang strike out irrationally?”

In fact, rather than turn inward or “lash out,” Pyongyang sharply intensified a flurry of diplomatic activism with China, Japan, and South Korea that it had started several months earlier. Overtures were also being made to the United States, but Washington wasn’t listening. In sum, North Korea sought to match the diplomatic accomplishments of its rival below the thirty-eighth parallel. However, it was less prepared and less well equipped to make serious gains.

Only a week after Shevardnadze’s abrupt departure from Pyongyang, Kim Il Sung traveled to Shenyang, in northeast China, for unannounced meetings with Jiang Zemin, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, on September 11 and Deng Xiaoping, the senior Chinese leader, on September 12. Among old friends, Kim did not disguise the fact that he had been severely shaken by the loss of his friends and allies in Europe and even more by the Soviet Union’s decisions. According to a former Chinese diplomat who had access to the details, Kim Il Sung’s central question for Deng was, “How long will the red flag fly?” In other words, how long will communism last, in view of the European and Soviet developments? Deng responded optimistically that the outlook was still bright. Although the Soviet Union was faltering, Deng insisted that Asian countries were
defending the faith and that Marxism-Leninism was still strong in China, Vietnam, and Cuba as well as in North Korea.

Kim also raised the question of North Korean economic reforms. Deng, who had been urging Kim for years to follow his reformist example, encouraged him anew. The North Korean leader also made a subtle plea that China not follow the Soviet lead in recognizing the South, or at least slow down its moves in this direction. Beijing’s trade with Seoul was rapidly growing, sea and air routes were opening, and informal contacts initiated among business and government leaders. Despite Kim’s plea, China agreed with South Korea a month after the Shenyang meeting to exchange trade offices equipped with quasi-diplomatic consular functions, an important step but not a dramatic one. China was willing to go slow but not to stop the advance toward Seoul.

Kim Il Sung’s interaction with the other great Asian power, Japan, was more dramatic. On September 24, as a result of contacts that had begun in the spring, a chartered Japan Air Line plane landed in Pyongyang bearing forty-four Japanese Diet members with accompanying Foreign Ministry officials, aides, and journalists—by far the most important Japanese official mission to that point to visit the North. Over the next four days, Kim deployed all his personal charm and diplomatic skill to negotiate an unexpected breakthrough.

Japan had normalized its relations with South Korea in 1965, expressing deep regret for the “unfortunate period” of Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945 and providing $800 million in grants and credits as compensation. In the years that followed, Japanese trade, investment, and technology had been powerful forces behind the South’s rapid economic development. Allied with both countries, the United States strongly supported the South Korean rapprochement with Japan.