NORTH KOREA IN CRISIS

CONTENTS

❖POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE IN SEOUL

❖SUMMIT DIPLOMACY AND THE FOUR PARTY
❖THE SUBMARINE INCURSION
❖NORTH KOREA’S STEEP DECLINE
❖THE PASSSAGE OF HWANG JANG YOP
❖THE TWO KOREAS IN TIME OF TROUBLE
 INTRODUCTION

With waning of nuclear struggle, North Korea only briefly left the list of pressing
concerns of the major powers.Regime inability to feed its people and its
unprecedented appeal for outside help. The question being urgently discussed
among the expert was, “Is this the beginning of the end of North Korea?”
General John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed
the view of many when he said, “We are now in a period where most who
watch the area would say it’s either going to implode or explode—we’re just
not quite sure when that is going to happen.”
Defense William Perry, who had been perhaps the most influential policy
maker in the nuclear crisis, popularized the metaphor of North Korea as a
disabled airliner rapidly losing altitude, as well as the metaphor of seeking a
“soft landing,” meaning a gradual unification or accommodation with the
South, rather than a destructive crash.
 NORTH KOREA IN CRISIS
For the outside world, realization that North Korea was in deep trouble began
with an act of nature. On the sticky midsummer day of July 26, 1995, rains
began to pound the earth, rains that were heavy, steady, and unrelenting and
that soon turned into a deluge of biblical proportions. The DPRK Bureau of
Hydro-Meteorological Service recorded twenty-three inches of rain in ten
days; in some towns and villages, according to the United Nations, as much as
eighteen inches of rain fell in a single day, bringing floods that were
considered the worst in a century.
In late August, for the first time in its history, the bastion of self-reliance openly
appealed to the world for help, asking the United Nations for nearly $500
million in flood relief as well as fuel and medical assistance.
People scavenging in the fields looking for roots and wild plants to prepare soup
for their families.
UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization and its World Food Program reported
that the floods “were extremely serious and caused extensive damage to
agriculture and infrastructure.” The experts also reported, however, that “the
floods made an already and rapidly deteriorating food supply situation much
worse, rather than caused the situation in the first place.”
 NORTH KOREA IN CRISIS

The DPRK had been historically able to till only about one-fifth of its
mountainous territory and that usually for only one crop annually,
since much of the northern land was frost free only six months of the
year. In addition, overuse of chemical fertilizers in pursuit of higher
yields, failure to rotate crops, and shortsighted denuding of hillsides
that accelerated erosion had all severely affected the country’s capacity
to grow sufficient food.
In the past, Pyongyang had coped with dwindling harvests by importing
larger amounts of grain under subsidized terms from its communist
allies. Such imports were no longer possible when the Soviet Union
collapsed and China, whose domestic consumption was rising in a
swiftly growing economy, became a grain importer itself and began
demanding hard cash for exports to Pyongyang.
 NORTH KOREA IN CRISIS

Long before the floods began, North Korea had been quietly asking
selected countries for help in dealing with its food shortage. In the early
1990s, according to the then director of the ROK intelligence agency,
Suh Dong Kwon, the North requested 500,000 tons of rice from the
South on condition that it be supplied secretly. The idea was dropped
after Seoul responded that in its increasingly open society, it would be
impossible to hide the rice shipments to the North.
A more extensive effort began in January 1995, when Pyongyang appealed
to Japan and South Korea for emergency food. Japan agreed to supply
500,000 tons. On June 21, after semiofficial North-South talks on the
issue were held in Beijing, the ROK government announced it would
donate 150,000 tons of rice to the North in unmarked bags “in a spirit
of reconciliation and cooperation.”
 POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE IN SEOUL
A meeting, in the Crystal Ballroom of the Lotte Hotel, on October 16, 1995,
was the occasion for an unplanned encounter that touched off an
earthshaking political scandal, uncovering a system of payoffs that had
undergirded South Korean politics for decades. The political earthquake
made the ROK’s democracy more responsive to public opinion and
thereby less controllable by the central government, affecting and often
complicating the government’s dealings with the United States and with
the North.
The problem dated from February 1993, as President Roh Tae Woo was
leaving office. Ha, in a small family business with his father as brokers
for shipping companies, received a strange request from the local branch
of the Shinhan Bank, where his firm did business. The bank manager
asked permission to deposit 11 billion won (about $14 million) of
someone else’s money in an account using the father’s name. Because of
favors owed to the bank, Ha agreed.
 POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE IN SEOUL

 At that point, businessman Ha had a serious problem. He had learned

that the money deposited under his father’s name actually belonged to
former president Roh—yet his father would soon be liable for paying
nearly $1 million in taxes on the accumulated interest.
 Assemblyman Park, a member of the opposition Democratic Party got
from Ha a statement of the status of the account, but instead of taking it
to be “fixed,” he rose on the floor of the National Assembly and delivered
a bombshell accusation. Roh, he declared, had deposited the equivalent
of $500 million in city banks around the time he left office, with 30
billion won ($37 million) deposited in the bank branch where Ha had his
account. He then produced Ha’s bank documents as evidence.
 Eight days after the revelation in the National Assembly, via television
from his home, Roh addressed the nation. Saying that raising and using
such funds was “an old political practice,” Roh declared it to be wrong
and said, “I will wholeheartedly accept any kind of punishment you hand
out to me.”
 POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE IN SEOUL

 The gigantic size of the funds involved as well as Roh’s retention of

massive wealth after leaving office shocked the public.
 Roh was summoned by the prosecutors on November 15 and jailed on
corruption charges the following day. Prosecutors soon extended their
investigation to his predecessor Chun, who refused to cooperate and, like
Roh, destroyed the account books of his contributors. According to
prosecutors, Chun collected 950 billion won ($1.8 billion) in slush
funds— nearly twice as much as Roh—and left office with 212 billion won
($265 million).
 On December 16, 1996, the Seoul High Court commuted Chun’s sentence
to life imprisonment and reduced Roh’s to seventeen years. The court
also reduced the sentences of all the other military and civilian
defendants.
 A year later, in the Christmas season of 1997, President Kim Young Sam
pardoned Chun and Roh, who returned quietly to private life.
 SUMMIT DIPLOMACY AND THE FOUR-PARTY
PROPOSAL
 As had been the case with the last three South Korean leaders, summit
diplomacy with the American president was important to the domestic
standing of President Kim Young Sam, a fact that contributed to
Washington’s leverage in South Korea. In the summer of 1995 and the
spring of 1996, the United States sought to use this leverage on North-
South issues. Its efforts had mixed success.
 In response, the ROK Foreign Ministry devised a “two plus two” formula,
whereby the two Koreas would negotiate a permanent peace treaty to
replace the Korean War armistice, with the United States and China
acting as facilitators and eventual guarantors.
 The “two plus two” proposal, while still confidential, was enough to
obtain the recognition Kim wanted. He was granted a four-day state visit
with full honors, including an address to a joint session of Congress.
 SUMMIT DIPLOMACY AND FOUR-PARTY
PROPOSAL

After returning to Seoul, however, Kim executed another of his sudden

reversals in the face of the conservative political tide following North
Korea’s interference with ROK ships delivering rice to DPRK ports.
Without consultation with or notification of the United States, Kim
scuttled the initiative he had proposed to Clinton. American diplomats
were not pleased.
In the spring of 1996, summit diplomacy reappeared when Clinton planned
a state visit to Japan.
Meeting in Jakarta, Indonesia, on July 24, Secretary of State Christopher
and his South Korean and Japanese counterparts formally agreed to
supply additional food aid and ease some American economic sanctions
if North Korea would participate in a joint US-ROK briefing on the four-
party peace plan.
 THE SUBMARINE INCURSION
 A few minutes after midnight on the morning of September 18, 1996, a
taxi driver speeding along a seaside road near Kangnung, on the east
coast of South Korea, noticed a group of men crouched near the highway .
 It appeared to be a man-made object. Certain that it wasn’t a fishing
boat, he reported it to the local police. Within hours, ROK troops and
police identified the object as a thirty- seven-yard-long North Korean
submarine.
 South Korea, with dense vegetation close to the peninsula-spanning DMZ
and fifteen hundred miles of irregular coastline dotted with offshore
islands, is highly vulnerable to infiltration. North Korea has penetrated
the South’s defenses on many occasions.
• Kim Young San said he would not proceed with the four-party peace
proposal or provide aid to the DPRK until its leaders apologized for the
submarine incursion.
 THE SUBMARINE INCURSION
 In diplomatic meetings, North Korea notified the United States that it
was ready to express regret about the submarine incident and to accept a
US-ROK briefing on the proposed four-power peace talks, but it insisted
on a package of economic benefits in return.
 In the wake of the Manila meeting of Clinton and Kim, the United States
renewed its efforts to obtain a settlement of the submarine issue.
 On December 29, North Korea issued a statement of “deep regret” for the
submarine incursion and a pledge that “such an incident will not recur.”
Pyongyang also agreed to attend the long-offered joint US-ROK briefing
on the four-power peace talks. As part of a package accord, Washington
agreed to resume the supply of heavy fuel oil, and Seoul removed its
objections to continued work on the light-water nuclear reactors
promised under the 1994 Agreed Framework.
 NORTH KOREA’S STEEP DECLINE
 By the winter of 1996, most observers who were following the situation in
North Korea had watched the progressive sinking of the economy for
many months .
 In fact, a principal debate among American government analysts was
whether the DPRK economy was collapsing or had already collapsed.
 Deteriorating or flooded coal mines and reduced petroleum imports
produced insufficient energy for industry, so many factories had closed
or were operating at only a fraction of their previous output. Fuel was so
scarce in some provincial cities that only oxcarts and bicycles could be
seen on the streets. Office buildings and dwellings remain unheated in
severe cold.
 Electrical blackouts were commonplace. Even the state television station
was off the air for long periods of time due to lack of power. Many trains,
some of them coal fired and others powered by electricity, were idle.
 A drop in fertilizer production had diminished agricultural yields in the
autumn 1996 harvest, adding to the serious shortages caused by flooding
 NORTH KOREA’S STEEP DECLINE
 The meager public distribution of food in the countryside, which
averaged three hundred grams per day earlier in the year, was cut back to
half or less, barely enough to sustain life, or had stopped completely.
 To survive, North Koreans were consuming oak leaves, grasses, roots,
tree bark, and other nonstandard foods, many with little nutritive value.
 In January 1997, despite the catastrophic state of the economy, Kim as
commander in chief ordered a return to the full-scale conduct of the
winter training exercises, which had been severely truncated the previous
year.
 Beginning in 1997, the supply of food to alleviate the devastating
situation at home became increasingly the central focus of North Korean
diplomacy and of international concern,.
 The regime’s statist and shortsighted policies, as much or more than the
floods, were to blame for its current crisis, but it refused to undertake
major changes in economic policy.
NORTH KOREA’S STEEP DECLINE
 A team of researchers from the Buddhist Sharing Movement interviewed
1,019 refugees from North Korea just across the Chinese border during
eight months in 1997-1998 and reported that a shocking 27 percent of the
family members of the refugees had died since mid-1995. The
movement’s executive director estimated that 2.5 million people or more
may die—“a famine that may be among the worst in human history.”
 THE PASSAGE OF HWANG JANG YOP

 On the morning of February 12, 1997, a South Korean businessman in

Beijing telephoned the South Korean Consulate in the Chinese capital with a
momentous request: that a car and escort be sent to initiate the political
asylum and defection of party secretary Hwang Jang Yop, the architect of
North Korea’s juche philosophy.
 A few minutes later, Hwang, accompanied only by his longtime aide and
fellow defector, Kim Duk Hong, arrived by taxi and walked into the
consulate, asking for protection and safe transit to Seoul.
 Hwang was the first high-level insider ever to take refuge in the other side.
 However, what he had to say was complicated by his messianic belief that
his mission was to prevent a devastating war on the peninsula, to liberate
the North from feudalism, and to pave the way for the reunification of
Korea.
 Based on his close relationship with the Great Leader, Hwang became an
important—and unusual—figure in Pyongyang. From 1972 until 1984, he
was speaker of the Supreme People’s Assembly, the country’s compliant
parliament, and after that secretary of the Workers Party for international
affairs and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the parliament.
 TWO KOREAS IN TIME OF TROUBLE

 In November the financial and economic crisis that had begun in Southeast
Asia spread without warning to Korea. By December 31, South Korea’s
currency, the won, had lost 40 percent of its value against the US dollar as
investors fled the country, and the value of securities on the Seoul stock
market had dropped by 42 percent.
 Amid this turmoil, Kim Dae Jung, the longtime opposition leader, was elected
president in the December 18 national election. “We’re just entering a dark
IMF tunnel,” he told the public in a televised “town hall” meeting.
 North Korea, meanwhile, continued to suffer devastating problems. As a result
of failed policies, its economy continued to shrink in 1997 for the eighth
consecutive year since the collapse of its alliance with the Soviet Union.
 An International Monetary Fund mission that visited Pyongyang in September
1997 issued a confidential report, on the basis of data largely provided by
DPRK officials, Industrial output had fallen by two-thirds, according to the
report, and food production by 40 percent. Estimates of starvation varied
widely, but US Census Bureau estimates suggested that about 1 million North
Koreans may have died as result of famine between 1994 and 1998.
 CL

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