North Korea: the last Stalinist state

Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) The official name of North Korea. The DPRK came into existence in 1948 under the leadership of Kim Il-Sung.

China was not, however, the only or even the most serious threat to regional security in the 1990s, for that honour went to the last surviving (as of 2007) Stalinist state, North Korea, or to give it its proper name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

see Chapter 10

As noted in Chapter 10, the DPRK came into existence in 1948 as the result of both superpower and Korean disagreements about how to unify the peninsula under one administration. As its launching of a full-scale war in 1950 shows, from the very first it saw itself as the legitimate government of the whole of the Korean peninsula and was determined to oust what it saw as the puppet regime in Seoul. It is, of course, hardly peculiar that this should have been such an important goal, but what is surprising is the tenacity with which the government in Pyongyang was to pursue this aim over the following half-century. To a great extent this was down to the drive, vision and beliefs of one man — Kim Il-Sung.

When the Soviet Union backed Kim Il-Sung for the leadership of North Korea from 1946 onwards, it elevated from relative obscurity a man with a good revolutionary pedigree who it appeared would be loyal to Soviet interests.

of not being a Russian-born Korean, of not being strongly linked to the CCP and having not had a dubious collaborationist past under Japanese colonial rule. If the Soviets thought, however, that he would be a malleable figure who could provide uncontroversial leadership, they were soon to be faced with uncomfortable reality, for Kim was his own man whose outlook on the world was primarily shaped by his harsh, isolated experience as a guerrilla fighter. For Kim, the priority above all else was Korean unification under communist rule, to such an extent that the DPRK became a means to that end. Thus for his regime, economic growth was largely seen as having the primary purpose of creating a strong military that was ready to take advantage of any sign of weakness in the Republic of Korea (ROK). Moreover, his rule was shaped by profound suspicion of those, both inside and outside North Korea, who had not been through similar adversity. He was therefore intolerant of domestic opposition and determined to pursue an independent line in terms of relations with the Soviet Union and the PRC.

Republic of Korea (ROK)

The official name of South Korea. The ROK came into existence in 1948 under the leadership of Syngman Rhee.

Initially Kim's policies in government were not out of keeping with develop­ments elsewhere in the socialist bloc. Influenced by his wartime years in the Soviet Union, his ideas for building a socialist society drew heavily on the Stalinist model, including the collectivization of agriculture and the construction of an extensive personality cult. By the mid-1950s, however, it became clear that Kim was seeking to pursue a more independent line. He began to introduce a more autarkic economic policy and in December 1955 referred for the first time to the idea of ‘juche' (self-reliance) as the ideological underpinning of the state.

autarky

A policy that aims at achieving national economic self-sufficiency. It is commonly associated with the economic programmes espoused by Germany, Italy and Japan in the 1930s and 1940s.

With his domestic political situation strengthened and with the Sino-Soviet split allowing him greater autonomy, Kim was well placed from the late 1950s to accelerate the policies that he believed would ready the state for reunification. In 1962 an Equal Emphasis policy was introduced, which stressed the need for high economic growth to go hand in hand with high levels of arms production. This was followed in 1964 by the announcement of the ‘three fronts' policy, which called for the building up of military power, support for the Left in the ROK, and confronting the United States in order to persuade it to withdraw from the Korean peninsula. In pursuit of the ‘first front', military spending was vastly expanded. In 1964 it took up 6 per cent of total state expenditure, but by 1967 this had grown to 30 per cent. This excessive focus on the militarization of the DPRK led to some discontent in the KWP but in October 1966 a fresh purge was introduced which silenced the opposition and filled the top ranks of the party with Kim loyalists who had fought alongside him in the 1930s.

Unfortunately Kim’s excessive emphasis on the development of an autarkic, militaristic state based on the tenets of ‘juche’ had a disastrous effect on the country. In the 1950s the DPRK, having inherited a fairly advanced industrial infrastructure from the period of Japanese colonial rule and having used state control to expand production, had an economy that rivalled that of the ROK. By the 1970s, with Park Chung-hee’s regime beginning its export-orientated economic growth, the DPRK’s obsession with military spending meant that it fell far behind.

In the 1980s there was an attempt to change, when relations improved with the Soviet Union and a deal was struck that allowed the DPRK access to cheap oil and gas. This, however, proved to be a double-edged sword, for when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the DPRK found that the new Russia was no longer prepared to settle for anything less than the market price for its fuel. The end of the Cold War had, however, another potentially harmful ramification, for, with the PRC increasingly turning towards capitalism and seeking trade relations with South Korea, it appeared that the DPRK was becoming increasingly diplo­matically isolated and thus open to a security threat from Seoul and Washington. There were two potential answers to the DPRK’s twin dilemma of its need for security and its lack of fuel: it could either negotiate a new relationship with its neighbours, which would give it a security guarantee and access to oil, or it could kill two birds with one stone by developing an indigenous nuclear energy pro­gramme. The latter option, though, had the extra advantage that it could also be used to blackmail North Korea’s neighbours into agreeing to the former.

Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)

Proposed by the USSR and the United States in 1968, and subsequently approved by the UNGA, the treaty prohibits the proliferation of nuclear weaponry to ‘new’ countries. It has been ratified by more than 180 nations but has not prevented some states from either openly or secretly acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.

In 1993 the increasingly isolated regime in Pyongyang acted to reassert itself by withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), thus raising the fear that it intended to acquire nuclear weapons. The United States reacted with great alarm and in 1994 there was talk of a pre-emptive strike against North Korea’s nuclear facilities. The crisis was only averted in June when former President Jimmy Carter flew to Pyongyang for talks with Kim Il-Sung. This meeting laid down the basis for an agreement whereby North Korea would continue to respect the NPT in return for American, South Korean and Japanese assistance with oil supplies and developing light-water nuclear reactors. This agreement, which was signed in October 1994, led to an uneasy peace returning to the peninsula. Almost at the same time another development occurred which confirmed the image of the DPRK as a mysterious, contradictory regime, for in July 1994 a dynastic succession took place when Kim Il-Sung died and was succeeded as leader by his son Kim Jong-Il. The dynastic nature of the regime appeared perverse to the West, but in reality it was once again an expression of the elder Kim’s extraordinary obsession with reunification on his terms. He had decided as early as the 1970s that if his ideas were to continue to shape the DPRK’s future, this could only be done by someone of his own blood.

By the end of the 1990s there was some hope that a period of detente was emerging. In part this was due to the DPRK’s clear economic plight and its failure to deal with the dire effects of a number of natural disasters that left it unable to feed its own population. In June 2000 the newly elected South Korean President Kim Dae-jung inaugurated his ‘sunshine policy’ by flying to Pyongyang for a

summit meeting with Kim Jong-Il. This temporary thaw in relations did not, however, develop much momentum. In the face of the clear hostility of the George W. Bush administration, which in January 2002 declared the DPRK to be part of the ‘axis of evil', Kim pushed ahead with the policy of developing a nuclear capacity. At the end of 2002 it expelled the last two remaining UN inspectors in the country and then in January 2003 once again announced its intention to leave the NPT. A few months later, as American forces were invading Iraq, the North Koreans restarted their nuclear programme in earnest, arguing that this was necessary for self-defence and in October 2005 duly declared that it had become a nuclear power. It then used this capability to negotiate for itself a deal with the United States, the ROK and Japan that guaranteed its security and access to energy resources. In essence, as a result of the fact that even its conventional forces could bring down a rain of death on Seoul, the DPRK had finally managed to blackmail the West into allowing it to survive.

see Chapter 22