B00BY4HXME EBOK (25 page)

No Korean speakers were allowed into the country, and until 2004 the authorities even banned World Food Program (WFP) personnel from attending Korean language classes. Monitoring teams were always accompanied by the government-assigned interpreters who filtered all questions and answers. North Koreans often assumed—probably correctly—that these people were by default on the payroll of the political police, so they were unlikely to say anything dangerous in this menacing atmosphere. The number of WFP monitors was kept small, and their inspection trips had to be approved by the authorities well in advance—so everything could be arranged and monitors usually saw only what their handlers wanted them to see.
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Things changed after the so-called second nuclear crisis. The crisis erupted in October 2002 when Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly was visiting Pyongyang. By that time the US government had acquired intelligence indicating that North Koreans were cheating, and that Pyongyang was secretly pursuing a uranium enrichment program. In Pyongyang, James Kelly confronted North Korean officials. What followed is not exactly clear: according to Kelly, the North Korean deputy foreign minister admitted the existence of the highly enriched uranium (HEU) program, but the North Koreans eventually denied that such admission had taken place. They came out with a different interpretation: according to Pyongyang’s version of the story, the North Korean diplomat in question merely said that North Korea was entitled to have an HEU program since it was facing a hostile superpower—implying that the entitlement was more or less theoretical. At any rate, this exchange was taken as proof of the clandestine HEU program. With the wisdom of hindsight, this seems to be a correct assumption, since in 2009, after years of denial, Pyongyang admitted that it had the HEU program. In November 2010 North Korean officials proudly showed off a huge uranium enrichment facility to visiting US nuclear scientists.

It is possible that North Koreans hoped to acquire an additional source of income by negotiating a buyout of their HEU program for a hefty price—a scheme somewhat similar to the buyout of plutonium program in 1994. However, even if it was indeed the initial plan, it did not work as
intended. With George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisers in the White House, things took a different turn. Instead of bargaining for another buyout, the United States cited the HEU program as proof that North Koreans should not be trusted. Large-scale aid was discontinued. The KEDO project was closed down, with all personnel being withdrawn from the construction sites between 2005 and 2006. In 2003 North Korea formally withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, becoming the first state to ever do so (and, actually, creating a dangerous precedent).

Obviously some Washington hard-liners assumed that without US aid North Korea would soon collapse. However, North Korean diplomats have been successful in finding substitutes for the US aid—from 2002 to 2010 aid shipments came from South Korea and, later, China compensated for the sudden halt of the US food and economic assistance. Indeed, the North Korean economy actually began its partial recovery right around the time when US aid was halted. At any rate, the Bush administration was not in the mood to talk to Kim Jong Il, whom Bush despised and once even described as a “pigmy” (North Korea itself was described as a part of the “axis of evil”).

As an important part of efforts aimed at pressing the North Korean regime and driving it to denuclearization and/or collapse, the US government used Section 311 of the Patriot Act and targeted financial institutions it knew handled the money of the North Korean government and Kim family. They were accused of money laundering—an accusation not completely unfounded but perhaps exaggerated, as only a relatively small part of the Pyongyang income comes from illegal activities. In September 2005 a small bank in Macao, Banco Delta Asia (BDA), was singled out as a “money laundering outlet”—indeed, it was very involved in dubious transactions with Pyongyang. As a result, $25 million of North Korean funds were frozen and US banking institutions ended operations with the BDA.

Obviously, the US government wanted to set a precedent by issuing a warning to all banks that might wish to become too cozy with the North Korean regime. When it comes to state finances, $25 million is not a large sum of money even for a poor state like North Korea, but the decision produced a surprisingly strong reaction from Pyongyang—perhaps
because the funds seemed to be the private treasure of the Kim family. For a brief while, international bankers avoided any interaction with their North Korean peers, and in some cases large transactions had to be conducted in cash. It was argued that such measures interrupted the supply of perks to the Kim family and top North Korean bureaucrats, whose appreciation for Swiss cheese and French cognac is well known.

An important byproduct of the “second nuclear crisis” was the launch of the six-party talks, which began in 2003 with the stated goal of laying the ground for the eventual denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. The talks were attended by the six powers involved in the ongoing nuclear crisis—the United States, China (the host of the talks), South Korea, Russia, Japan, and, of course, North Korea. From the very beginning there was little doubt that the talks were not going to achieve their stated goal, since the Kim family regime has never had the slightest intention to surrender its nuclear program. Nonetheless, the six-party talks were not useless: negotiations helped to ameliorate tensions and created a useful forum where Korea-related security issues could be discussed freely.

However, because the United States provided so little aid to Pyongyang between 2002 and 2006, relations between North Korea and the United States remained very tense. North Korean leaders therefore decided that it was time to dramatically raise the stakes.

By that time North Korea had amassed enough plutonium to produce a few crude nuclear devices. In early 2010 it was estimated that North Korea had manufactured 40 to 60 kg of weapons-grade plutonium, of which 24 to 42 kg was available for weapons production. Siegfried Hecker believes that North Korea is “most likely to possess a nuclear arsenal of four to eight primitive weapons,” even though it still “appears a long way from developing both a missile and a warhead to launch a nuclear weapon to great distance.”
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What followed was yet another exercise of Pyongyang’s favorite tactics. When North Korean strategists are not happy about the situation and suspect that more aid and concessions can (and therefore should) be squeezed from the outside world, they follow the same routine. They first manufacture a crisis and drive tensions as high as possible. They launch missiles,
test nukes, dispatch commandos, and drop all sorts of menacing hints. When tensions are sufficiently high, with newspaper headlines across the globe telling readers that the “Korean peninsula is on the brink of war,” and foreign diplomats feeling a bit uneasy, the North Korean government suggests negotiations. The offer is accepted with a sigh of relief, giving North Korean diplomats the leverage to squeeze maximum concessions out of their negotiating partners as a reward for Pyongyang’s willingness to restore the precrisis status quo. Usually, they succeed.

This policy was applied to Moscow and Beijing during the 1960s and 1970s (without missile launches, of course—but different and subtler ways were used to manipulate Moscow and Beijing). It also worked well during the first nuclear crisis of 1990–1994.

Consequently, during October 2006, North Korean leaders decided to make a point by conducting their first nuclear test. The yield was surprisingly low and it is possible that the nuclear device did not work as intended, but the underground explosion in remote northern mountains was enough to demonstrate that North Korea was indeed moving toward creating an effective nuclear weapons capability.

After the test, the UN Security Council immediately passed a properly stern Resolution 1718, which was supported by all permanent members (including Russia and China). At the time, optimists cheered the news and began to persuade themselves and everybody around that China had finally done the right thing and from now on would be in the same boat as the United States and major developed countries. This was not the case, of course: China was not in the same boat—and never will be. While unhappy about nuclear proliferation, China is not going to do anything that might trigger an acute domestic crisis in North Korea. Even though they professed to participate in the sanctions regime, the Chinese did not let it influence their position: on the contrary, 2006, the year of the first nuclear test, also marked an upsurge in the scale of Chinese aid to and economic cooperation with Pyongyang—and this scale has been increasing ever since.

As we will see below, South Korea, with left-leaning administrations in control from 1998 to 2008, was even more willing to shower North Korea with aid without asking too many questions about aid use and distribution.

The Bush administration belatedly realized that sanctions and pressure had not achieved the desired result. On February 13, 2007, a joint statement was produced during another round of the six-party talks. The joint statement promised the resumption of US and foreign aid in exchange for North Korea’s theoretical commitment to eventual denuclearization. Around the same time, the State Department effectively halted the measures aimed at Banco Delta Asia and scaled down the operations against the real or alleged money laundering by the North Korean regime.

The present author learned about the 2007 joint statement while in Moscow, eating lunch with a group of Russian diplomats. An ambassador who was sitting next to me read the faxed text of the statement and said: “Well, from now on the North Koreans will know what to do when they run out of money next time.” This was a really perceptive remark: the return to talks might have been a correct (or, at least, an unavoidable) decision, but the timing of the February 2007 joint statement was most inappropriate. Indeed, from the North Korean point of view, it did not merely confirm that blackmail works, but rather confirmed that blackmail works wonders. One could hardly find a better confirmation of the efficiency of Pyongyang’s usual tactics—first make a crisis, then escalate tensions, and finally extract payments and concessions for the restoration of the status quo.

Under the George W. Bush administration, Washington discovered that the US approach to North Korean issues seriously differed from that of the South Korean government, hitherto the United States’ most reliable ally in East Asia. Some people even argued that the US-led sanctions were derailed by a soft-line policy that dominated the South Korean approach in the years between 1998 and 2008. This is probably not the case, since the hard-line stance was likely to fail anyway, but the discord between Seoul and Washington was nonetheless all too open and real. Needless to say, North Korean diplomats have made the most of these disagreements.

This discord has, above all, domestic roots, being brought about by slow but important changes within South Korean society. It makes sense to have a look at these changes—not least because they are likely to influence the situation for years to come.

From the end of the Korean War and until around 1980, South Korean politics and ideology were almost completely dominated by the Right. South Korean rightists were hard-line anti-Communists; they favored a long-term alliance with the United States as the cornerstone of their nation’s foreign policy and saw the eventual unification of Korea under a capitalist and liberal regime as their primary long-term goal (although as time went on, their commitment to and interest in the unification began to wane slightly). These views were predominant among the political and intellectual elite, and were widely shared by the broader South Korean population. There were dissenters, of course, and some individuals, especially in academia, might have secretly held leftist views, up to the point of being orthodox Leninists. However, these people had almost no impact on the general political climate—living under a repressive and militantly anti-Communist regime, they had to keep their opinions to themselves.

Things began to change in the early 1980s, following a generational shift. The new generation of Koreans did not have firsthand memories of the Korean War and the destitution of the 1950s. They did not survive on cans of US food aid and they came to see three daily meals of rice (an unattainable dream for their parents’ generation) as a natural and unexciting part of one’s daily life. They also were the first generation in Korean history that had almost universal access to secondary education—and many of them proceeded to college as well. Much later, in the 1990s, this group was nicknamed the “386 generation,” since they were born in the 1960s, attended universities in the 1980s, and were in their 30s in the 1990s when this term was coined.

This “386 generation” took spectacular economic growth for granted, despised the military dictatorships, and were skeptical about the market economy. They were a generation that managed to live through one of the greatest success stories in the history of capitalism without even noticing it. Where their once-starving parents saw growth, prosperity, and security,
they saw inequality, social injustice, and subservience to foreign powers. The new generation of young Koreans—or rather its politically active minority—was passionately anti-authoritarian, but also anti-American, nationalist, and left wing.

The trademark combination of nationalism and hard-core leftism, as well as their deep disgust with the military regimes in Seoul, made a significant number of the 386ers into North Korean sympathizers. The early 1980s was an era when the works of Marx and Lenin were much perused by young South Korean intellectuals. Some of them went further: they read treatises on Juche thought and exchanged smuggled North Korean publications and transcripts of North Korean radio broadcasts. The more radical of these young dissenters began to imagine the North as a land of social justice, unspoiled Koreanness, and, somehow, democracy.