THE NORTH KOREAN regime is apparently so bad that even George Galloway has never been there to offer his support. Or maybe that’s because it’s so broke.
And just in case you think that I’m indulging in a little neocon demonisation (perhaps you heard Andy Kershaw’s two-part Radio 3 series on North Korean music three years back and agree with him that the lifestyle in the Democratic Republic is simply a little quaint) then let’s recall that up to 400,000 have died as a consequence of political persecution, that on occasion entire families have been murdered because of one member’s drunken disloyalty to the Dear Leader — the “Sun of the 21st Century” — that there is no press or broadcasting freedom whatsoever, and that as many as two million may have died in recent famines.
With only 22 million living in the country, North Korea’s totalitarian system is both far more complete and far less porous than ever Stalin’s was. It is also far more capricious, as its various bizarre adventures in the worlds of assassination, counterfeiting and kidnapping will attest.
That’s the country that has just tested a nuclear weapon. The regime is so secretive that we don’t actually know the reason, though we can speculate. For the moment Korea hawks blame Bill Clinton, the South Korean “sunshine policy” towards its northern neighbour and the Geneva meeting of 1994 for talking nice to Pyongyang, and allowing it to get the idea that it could pretty much get away with anything. On the other side there are plenty of takers for the idea that this test is a logical outcome of the hardline Bush policy, which has effectively pushed a paranoid but defensive state towards acquiring its own means of ultimate defence. Clinton or Bush — choose your villain.
Then there’s the suggestion that, actually, this may not matter too much. The bomb probably isn’t very portable yet (I’m not quite sure how we know this, but it’s widely repeated), they haven’t got good delivery systems, in any case North Korea — if and when it does develop the capacity to deliver the bomb — would be mad to do so because the rest of the world would combine to wipe it out. So we shouldn’t really fret any more about this than we have with, say Pakistan or Israel, or than anyone else might fret about our own bomb.
This is all a bit unconvincing. What has guaranteed the North Korean Government’s survival over the years has not been niceness from others, or a hard response to toughness. It has been the adamantine nature of the regime — combining a quasi-religious cult of the personality, extreme nationalism, unyielding repression and a huge and powerful army. It may suit our current preoccupation with Iraq to argue that the invasion was the factor that decided Kim Jong Il and his shadowy company to go ahead with nuclear testing, but it is worth remembering that the Koreans have been researching nuclear weapons for years and announced back in October 2002 that they were creating an enriched uranium programme. It was this announcement that led to the six- party talks being set up in the late summer of 2003.
No, it’s more likely to be the economy again, stupid. In the old days of the late Soviet Union the North Koreans would play Moscow off against Beijing, and receive aid from both. It was the country’s neutrality — what it did not do — that earned it assistance and money. In Geneva in 1994 Pyongyang was promised aid for not pursuing an atomic weapons programme — and then probably went ahead and did it anyway.
The North Koreans announced that their test had come, “at a stirring time when all the people of the country are making a great leap forward in the building of a great, prosperous, powerful socialist nation”.
Naturally the truth is the polar opposite; the underlying problem being, of course, that North Korea is an economic basket case. The irony of North Korea’s state policy of juche — or complete self-reliance — is that it has been maintained largely through foreign aid or subsidy. Under pressure from China, Pyongyang has tinkered with economic reform, but its limited policies have backfired, pushing up basic prices without creating new industries. The country today is immiserated, defenceless against natural disasters and prone to famine.
It could well be that the regime sees a possibility in bargaining the development and deployment of its new weapon against substantial further aid.
What should we do? There are some remarkably sanguine people out there, but not only does North Korea’s bomb present a threat in itself — nuclear proliferation per se is a threat. So far, since the first test of the first A-bomb, dangerous and undesirable though it is, only large countries or countries with functioning democracies have come to possess the bomb. But we can reasonably surmise that if North Korea can do it, then at least a dozen other states might think it worth their while too. And we have no idea — none at all — under what circumstances the “Sun of the 21st Century” or future Suns, Moons or Cosmic Knights might think it worthwhile to assist some terrorist group in its quest for a really big weapon.
And there is always the question of what the regime might do in extremis. North Korean defectors have told Western experts that many sufferers under the juche regime might welcome a second Korean war that put some kind of an end to their miseries.
At the moment both Japan and the United States are using appropriately angry words. What isn’t at all clear is what they — or we — can do. We won’t invade and we almost certainly won’t try to take out the atomic research facilities with a famous surgical strike.
When it comes to sanctions we conduct just about no business with North Korea as it is. China, however — which condemned the tests as “brazen” yesterday — does. It could restrict oil or food supplies and create massive hardship. The odds are, however, that despite being made to look impotent by Kim , the Chinese will go along with symbolic sanctions and block economic measures. Once again the United Nations Security Council — which coincidentally proposed a South Korean to succeed Kofi Annan as General-Secretary yesterday — will be seen to have failed. Why should anybody ever listen to it ever again? In many ways this is a greater test of international resolve and diplomacy than even Iraq was. And above all it is a test of China’s emerging superpower status. It is surely up to China to suggest realistic strategies to neutralise the nuclear threat from North Korea, and to assist reform and change in that country. It may even be that a quid pro quo, involving an opening-up of contacts to North Korea in exchange for disarmament, is appropriate. In this, China’s interests — so dismally different from ours over issues such as Darfur — are the same as everyone else’s. Mr Hu, we need some Korea advice.
David Aaronovitch’s blog is at:
timesonline.co.uk/davidaaronovitch
