North Korea: A Cry for Help
By Gwynne Dyer
9 October 2006
In psychobabble, what North Korea has just done would be
characterised as "a cry for help," like a teenage kid burning his parents'
house down because he's misunderstood. Granted, it's an unusually loud cry
for help, but now that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il has got our
attention, what are we going to do about him?
North Korea's nuclear weapon test early Monday morning makes it the
ninth nuclear power, and by far the least predictable. It probably has
only a few nuclear weapons, and it certainly cannot deliver them to any
targets beyond South Korea and Japan, but the notion of nuclear weapons in
the hands of a "crazy state" frightens people.
So relax: Kim Jong-Il is not crazy. Former US Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright, who has negotiated with him, says he is well informed
and not at all delusional. He pretends to be unstable because his regime's
survival depends on blackmailing foreign countries into giving it the food
and fuel that it cannot produce for itself. Rogue nukes are a big part of
that image, but like any professional blackmailer, he would hand them over
for the right price.
Put yourself in Kim's (platform) shoes. In 1994 he inherited a
country from his father, Kim Il-Sung, that was already in acute crisis.
The centralised Stalinist economy had been failing for a decade, and in
1991 post-Soviet Russia cut off the flow of subsidised oil, fertiliser and
food, effectively halving North Korea's Gross Domestic Product.
Yet Kim needed the support of the military and the Party officials
who controlled North Korea's "command" economy, and derived their power and
privileges from it. Radical economic reforms would threaten their
positions. Kim's inheritance was far from secure, so he left the economy
alone and used the threat of going nuclear to extort aid from foreign
countries.
The younger Kim had been put in charge of North Korea's nuclear
weapons programme by his father in the late 1980s. By 1993, Washington was
so concerned that it offered Pyongyang a deal: stop the programme, and the
US would give North Korea huge amounts of foreign aid. Kim Il-Sung died in
July, 1994, and it was his son who approved the "Framework Agreement" with
the United States that October in which the US promised to send Pyongyang
half a million tonnes of oil a year and eventually to build the North
Koreans two nuclear reactors.
China, South Korea and other neighbours chipped in, sending grain,
other food, and medicines. Kim Jong-Il won some breathing space to
consolidate his rule -- but then a series of floods and droughts
overwhelmed the country's inefficient collective farms, and up to a million
North Koreans starved. By 2002, in desperation, Kim Jong-Il played the
nuclear card again.
American intelligence picked up the renewed nuclear activity, and
in October, 2002 the North Koreans admitted to US Assistant Secretary of
State James Kelly that they had a secret nuclear weapons programme in
defiance of the 1994 Agreed Framework. (Blackmail only works if the target
is aware of the threat.)
This time, the US refused to yield to blackmail, so the past four
years have seen North Korea withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty, throw out International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, test-fire
missiles near South Korea and Japan on several occasions, and now test an
actual nuclear weapon. Kim Jong-Il only has one card, and he keeps trying
to play it.
Kim's crude tactics were always intensely irritating to the other
parties to the Six-Power Talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons (the US,
Russia, China, Japan and South Korea), and now they are furious with the
little dictator. Even China, North Korea's only ally, called Pyongyang's
test "stupid." But what are they actually going to do about it?
Sanctions, I hear you cry. But the US has had sanctions against
North Korea since 1953, and Japan has had them for more than a decade
already -- and if China stops sending aid, the entire economy will
collapse, millions will starve, and millions more will flee the country. I
was at the Foreign Ministry in Seoul in 1994 on the day that Kim Il-Sung
died, and I remember the panic that reigned as South Korea's diplomatic
elite contemplated the prospect of 25 million starving North Koreans
suddenly landing in their laps.
The regime in Beijing is equally appalled at the notion of millions
of North Korean refugees pouring across its border, so there may be
sanctions, but they will not be life-threatening for Pyongyang. Which
brings us back to the distasteful business of bargaining with blackmailers.
Kim would probably relinquish his nuclear weapons if he were
offered enough food and oil aid, an end to trade embargoes, and a firm US
promise not to try to overthrow him. None of that would cost very much, and
the US is not going to attack him anyway. Nor has Kim any intention of
attacking anybody, especially with nuclear weapons: he would have no hope
of surviving the instant and crushing retaliation by American nuclear
weapons. So it's just a question of persuading him to stop the nonsense.
But what about the principle of the thing? Won't other countries
be tempted to follow North Korea's example if we don't punish it for
developing nuclear weapons? You know, like we did when Israel, India and
Pakistan developed theirs.
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