Return to *North Korean Studies*

Pyongyang Watch (January ~ February 2005)

CHINA READY TO INCREASE OIL DELIVERIES TO DPRK ON TERMS 

by Stanislav Varivoda, Itar-Tass, 22 February 2005

China is ready to increase oil deliveries to North Korea if it returns to the six-nation talks on its nuclear programme, a source close to the Chinese embassy in Pyongyang told Itar-Tass on Tuesday. He said the deputy chief of the international relations department of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, Wang Jiarui, made such statement at his meeting with North Korea's leader Kim Jong Il on Monday.

Other options of engaging North Korea in the negotiation process were discussed at the meeting, including economic moves. After Pyongyang had declared its suspending the talks on the nuclear issue indefinitely, China drastically decreased oil deliveries to North Korea. "This is not the sole lever of pressure on Pyongyang that Beijing has," the source said. 

A five-member Chinese delegation lead by Wang Jiarui arrived in Pyongyang on Saturday with a plan to persuade North Korea to resume the talks that engage North and South Korea, the US, Russia, China and Japan. Pyongyang recently said it suspended its participation in the talks because of a "hostile policy of the US" that which is understood in North Korea as Washington's imposing economic sanctions against the republic and frequent military manoeuvres on the territory of South Korea seen by the North as a rehearsal of a war against it. 

North Korea is also irritated by the "activity aimed at destruction" of its state order and the US' passing last year a North Korea Human Rights Act considered as stepping up a psychological war against it. The North Korean official Central News Agency said on Tuesday that Kim Jong Il told the Chinese emissary during their meeting that Pyongyang was ready to return to the negotiating table "at any time", with the provision that "necessary conditions are met" for it. 

THREE LITTLE WORDS BUSH HAS AVOIDED: "NO HOSTILE INTENT"

by Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, 22 February 2005

What's in a phrase? Everything, in the craft of diplomacy. This is the story of three little words -- "no hostile intent" -- and the fierce tussle within the Bush administration over them as officials tried to develop a policy to confront North Korea's nuclear ambitions. To a non-diplomat, the phrase might seem typical of the awkward and diffuse verbiage frequently uttered by men in pinstriped suits. But to the North Korean government, hearing those words from the United States looms large as the diplomatic equivalent of the Holy Grail. 

Yet President Bush has never uttered them. Neither has Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Former secretary of state Colin L. Powell did, especially in the final months of his tenure -- and he frequently suggested Bush had said them, too. But we're getting ahead of the story. Government officials around the world pay close attention to the words spoken by US officials, especially the president. But few countries devote as much time or effort as North Korea. For half a century, the reclusive government in Pyongyang has viewed the United States as its primary enemy -- the only country with the military might to possibly crush it.

Peter Hayes, executive director of the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability in San Francisco, said studying and analyzing the comments of US officials is a significant career track in the Pyongyang bureaucracy. "They watch like hovering hawks," said Hayes, who has made seven trips to North Korea. "They monitor American rhetoric, statements and the policy process much more closely than we monitor them." In 2000, the final year of the Clinton administration, a senior North Korean official visited Washington and met with President Bill Clinton and other top officials. At the end of his visit, on Oct. 12, the governments issued a joint communiqu?that declared that "as a crucial first step, the two sides stated that neither government would have hostile intent toward the other."

Wendy Sherman, a former top State Department official who was the chief US negotiator of the communiqué text, said her counterpart made it clear that including the phrase about "hostile intent" was critical to North Korea's making concessions on its missile program. What does "no hostile intent" mean? As with a lot of diplomatic shorthand, a precise definition can be elusive, in part because the phrase's meaning depends largely on the ear of the beholder. For North Korean leaders, diplomats say, the phrase goes beyond a pledge not to invade, conveying an implicit message of respect between two peer nations. "Ultimately, it is about regime survival," Sherman said. As part of negotiations, the Clinton administration placed the statement in a section that stressed the need for peace and security in the region, so allies would not think a declaration of "no hostile intent" would mean an abandonment of US protection.

Fast-forward to the Bush administration. The talks with North Korea started by Clinton were put on hold. In his State of the Union address in 2002, Bush identified North Korea as part of an "axis of evil" that included Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In October 2002, the United States accused North Korea of having a clandestine nuclear program and, with its allies, cut off fuel deliveries promised under an agreement reached with Clinton. In December, North Korea kicked out international inspectors and restarted a shuttered nuclear facility. To stem the sense of crisis -- coming as the United States readied an invasion of Iraq -- on Dec. 29, 2002, Powell hit five Sunday-morning talk shows. In every appearance, he resurrected the "no hostile intent" phrase that had appeared in the Clinton communiqu?-- and attributed it to Bush. 

"This year, the president made a clear statement that he had no hostile intent toward North Korea," Powell said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "And he said that in South Korea earlier this year." On Fox News, Powell quoted Bush as saying, "I have no hostile intent toward the North." Actually, Bush had said no such thing. Speaking to reporters in Seoul one month after the "axis of evil" speech, Bush again said that North Korea's government was evil and that he would not "change my opinion on the man, on [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Il, until he frees his people."

But Bush added: "We have no intention of invading North Korea. South Korea has no intention of attacking North Korea, nor does America." Experts say this language does not impress the North Koreans, especially after they were labelled part of an "axis of evil." Powell's language on "no hostile intent" was picked up by the State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, when he briefed the news media in the weeks after Powell's television appearance. But the language disturbed hard-liners in the administration, who believed that North Korea had clearly demonstrated a hostile policy toward the United States -- and that the phrase limited the administration's options in using economic and other weapons to pressure Pyongyang. They began to press for its elimination from the administration's talking points.

Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld raised the issue with Rice, who was then national security adviser, an official familiar with the conversation said. Rice agreed that the language should be dropped, and that only Bush's earlier comment about not attacking and invading be used. Language shifts of this sort are rarely formally announced. Boucher did an impressive job of dancing around the question when sharp-eared reporters at the State Department asked about it. On Feb. 19, 2003, Boucher cut off a reporter just as he was about to ask whether "no hostile intent" was still the policy. "Yes, we have no plans to attack or invade North Korea. I can say that without a problem," Boucher said.

Powell also dropped the phrase. But when United States began holding six-nation negotiating sessions with North Korea in 2003 and 2004, the language began to creep back into his statements, especially after the Bush administration hinted that it might join in a multilateral security guarantee for North Korea. Powell again frequently suggested that Bush had "repeatedly" used the words "no hostile intent."  But an extensive search of presidential statements finds that the closest Bush ever got to North Korea's magic phrase was during a speech on Jan. 7, 2003, although he made it clear he was not talking about the North Korean government: "We have no aggressive intent, no argument with the North Korean people."

A White House official said last week that there was "no hidden meaning" behind Bush's not using the phrase -- just that the president wanted to be more specific in dealing with North Korea's fear of a military attack. Powell and Bush "are two different men using different words," he said. The issue flared again as Rice prepared for her confirmation hearings, when the State Department's Asia bureau proposed that she use the phrase "no hostile intent." But she simply repeated the president's "no attack or invade" language.

In this year's State of the Union speech, Bush appeared to take pains not to denounce North Korea and noted that he was working with allies to solve the crisis through diplomacy. But Sherman said it might have made a significant difference if Bush had finally uttered the phrase "no hostile intent." "It could have had real meaning to North Korea and moved the negotiations forward," she said. Instead, a week later, North Korea announced that it had nuclear weapons and was pulling out of the negotiations, citing what it called the administration's "hostile policy."

Going Into Business

by DONALD MACINTYRE, The TIME Magazine, February 21, 2005 Vol. 165, No. 7, With reporting by Kim Yooseung/Seoul 

As a crumbling vestige of Stalinist economic planning, North Korea is one of the last places on earth where you would expect to find a bustling

central market. But the city of Hoeryong, located beside the Tumen River on the border with China in the northeast of the country, has just such a venue, and it is helping its inhabitants improve their lives. In the 1990s, untold numbers of locals starved to death during a North Korean famine that may have killed some 2 million or more nationwide. Life under the country's dictator Kim Jong Il remains brutal for Hoeryong's estimated 100,000 residents, but at least they no longer need to depend completely upon the state and foreign donations for food and a few simple pleasures. 

Today, according to interviews with more than a dozen smugglers, traders and migrant workers who routinely slip between China and North Korea, and with many refugees from the North now in South Korea, the market teems with shoppers' inspecting sacks of rice and corn, boxes of apples, bananas and tangerines. On wooden tables under makeshift awnings, pork and fish are on sale; so are Japanese TVs and VCRs, South Korean cosmetics, fashionable sportswear from China, illegal imported sex videotapes—and if you know who to talk to, North Koreans say you can even purchase a home, an outrageous capitalist sin in a country where private property is anathema. "You can buy anything and everything in the market," says Park, a Hoeryong trader who sells televisions she brings in from China. (Like all North Koreans TIME talked to for this story, Park spoke on the condition that her real name not be used.) "Everybody wants to be in business."

That image of entrepreneurialism in flower is very different from the conventional view of a destitute, desperate Hermit Kingdom. Since the end of the Korean War, the North's borders have been almost entirely closed to Westerners, so learning what's going on inside Kim's black box is difficult. Yet this knowledge is vitally important to diplomatic efforts designed to persuade Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons program. In Washington, Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing, negotiating strategies remain polarized. There are those, like some hawks in Washington, who believe the rotting economy of the North is close to a complete breakdown that would topple Kim—and that his demise can be hastened as long as the regime is not propped up with donations of money, food and oil, which Kim in the past has demanded in exchange for peace. But others doubt that the North is on the edge, and argue instead that Kim can be coaxed into abandoning failed command-economy policies and begin a slow transition to capitalism. South Korea's President Roh Moo Hyun is in the latter camp. On a visit to Warsaw in December, Roh stated that economic pressure was a waste of time. "There's almost no chance North Korea is going to collapse," Roh said.

The tales from Hoeryong's traders suggest neither camp has got it exactly right. In 2002, Pyongyang implemented cautious economic reforms. Strict price controls on staples such as rice were relaxed, factory bosses were ordered to start earning profits, and workers were encouraged to perform longer hours to earn more pay. But the reforms had consequences that went far beyond what the government planners seem to have intended. Black-market prices for rice and corn soared by more than 10 times, while salaries, fixed by the state, stagnated. To make up the shortfall, North Koreans started trading among themselves, setting up bakeries, tailor shops and makeshift gasoline outlets. An unofficial market of smugglers and loan sharks, whose services were now much in demand, is flourishing while bureaucrats look the other way—or go into business themselves.

In a country where telephones are considered a security risk, a few citizens even drive their own cars—a privilege previously reserved for high-ranking officials—while along the borders, some use smuggled Chinese-made mobile phones and Chinese cellular networks to arrange business deals with partners in China and South Korea, according to North Korean traders and defectors. The North continues to be plagued by chronic shortages of everything from food to fuel to electricity. But an entrepreneurial class is developing, news from the outside world is filtering through, and expectations of a better life are rising. "This is exactly what was happening in the Soviet Union in 1989" before it collapsed, says Leonid Petrov, a North Korea expert at the Academy of Korean Studies in the south of Seoul. "Nobody believes in the old socialist ideology anymore—they believe in money."

Of course, it's impossible to gauge just how extensive and entrenched the mercantile ethic has become. But anecdotes from those who live in Hoeryong suggest the reforms accelerated changes that have quietly been gathering momentum for years as North Koreans looked for new ways to survive. Park  the trader, is a woman in her late 30s who started selling cigarettes and medicinal herbs in the mid-1990s to supplement her meager government handouts.

On a recent trip, she went to China to sell salted fish bought with money she borrowed from relatives, intending to return with a truckload of clothes and TVs. Japanese models sell especially well. "Color," she says, "and the bigger screens, the better." This is hardscrabble, black-market work, and Park must be careful that she isn't caught or cheated. "If you don't use your head right, you lose everything you have," Park says. "But if you have five Chinese yuan (about 60), you can double them."

Park says demand for her goods is strong. North Korea experts and aid workers say less than a third of the country's nonmilitary factories are still running. Almost all the electronic products and other manufactured goods on sale in the North come from China, along with more expensive luxury goods from Japan and South Korea, according to North Korean traders. Outside Pyongyang and a few other big cities where the lite still get government rations, the majority of the inhabitants in urban centers can now buy almost everything they need from officially sanctioned markets. Says Hwang, an architect turned trader who visits Hoeryong regularly: "Nothing comes from the state anymore."

For a growing proportion of Hoeryong residents, say those interviewed by TIME, the central marketplace provides a livelihood. Transport services and cottage industries are springing up to keep the market supplied with items such as baked goods, candy and moonshine. More sophisticated forms of commerce are developing too. It's illegal to sell your government-supplied house, but informal real estate brokers will put buyers and sellers together for a fee, say traders and North Korea watchers. A small bribe is usually enough to persuade a city-hall bureaucrat to change the name on your residence permit. In a country with no consumer-banking system, selling your house is one way to raise money to get into trading. Another option: the local loan shark, who charges interest of up to 30% a month (he'll demand furniture or real estate as collateral). Need a car? Private car ownership is illegal; however, people can buy a nice secondhand Japanese sedan on the black market. Those who can afford to can protect their enterprises and their private belongings by paying off officialdom through large "patriotic" donations to the government.

Park isn't yet rich enough to buy protection. But she says she owns a Japanese color TV, a stereo and a VCR. She's got a Chinese-made generator to run the appliances when the power grid fails, as it does regularly. She eats fish and white rice and, on holidays, meat, which is a luxury for most North Koreans. And she can afford to frequent the new restaurants and karaoke rooms that have opened in Hoeryong recently. She has no plans to leave her homeland. "I'm happy," she says.

Still, few people can make that claim in a country where, according to the United Nations, much of the population suffers from malnutrition. Unable to earn enough to buy food, many of Hoeryong's residents have fled to China or South Korea. Others are forced to go into the mountains to grow their own food on small, illegal farms, according to refugees and foreign aid workers. And many of the populace can't afford to buy rice in the market—it hit 56 a kilo in some areas last summer, up by a factor of nearly 20 from two years earlier, traders say. That's more than half of a teacher's monthly salary. Song, who started selling shoes in the central market last year, clears $14 a month after taxes and other expenses. More than two-thirds of her income goes to buying rice for her family of three. "With the leftover, you need soap, clothes for the kids," says Song. "One person working in a family is not enough to survive." Her husband smuggled TVs and frogs used in Chinese medicine until he was caught by state security last year. He wants to work in China for a few months but has had no luck so far.

Most of the men in Hoeryong are worse off, forced to show up for work at factories that are barely operating. Many men spend their days playing cards, occasionally receiving paid salaries that are shriveled by inflation. Some bosses have allowed more enterprising workers to punch in and then go off to work at side businesses, as long as they give some of their earnings to the factory. Many managers have simply quit. "Why bother to be a manager when you can just cut out and make lots of money on your own?" asks Kim, who left Hoeryong and made his way to Seoul last year.

It's doubtful that Kim Jong Il intended his reforms to burnish an entrepreneurial spirit. More likely, he wished to allow citizens only the most basic of tools to feed themselves, hoping that would shut down any willingness to defect or revolt. Kim Jong Il hasn't proclaimed that getting rich is glorious, the exhortation used by the Chinese government to kick-start its own economy in the 1980s. And recently it appears that Pyongyang may be trying to put the lid on economic activity that it thinks is moving too far, too fast. Under a criminal code revision last year, according to South Korean media and North Korea experts, Pyongyang banned "individual commercial activities" and declared it a crime to participate in real estate brokering, money lending and private hooch production. In a statement last week announcing its pullout from talks that were aimed at getting North Korea to scrap its nuclear program, Pyongyang included a gibe at American support for reform: "We advise the U.S. to negotiate with dealers in peasant markets it claims are to its liking."

That's a reminder that, for all the signs of reform, the North Korean regime remains one of the most brutal in the world. Last month, a South Korean human-rights group released a video it claimed was shot in Hoeryong, showing posters urging North Koreans to "rise up and drive out the dictatorship." Authorities in the city later confiscated videotapes; they also rounded up entire families of North Koreans who have defected and sent them to prison camps, according to refugees living in Seoul who have contacts with the North. Says Lee Suk, an expert on the North Korean economy at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul: "North Korea wants to revive the system, not change it."

But Pyongyang's control over events in the provinces is weakening, say defectors and human-rights activists with North Korean contacts. Citizens with new access to radios and DVD players are learning their wretched status is not inevitable—that capitalistic, democratic South Korea is a modern economy and one of the wealthier places on earth. "Now, people's minds are more open," says Park, the trader. "They are all demanding better living standards." Says Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at the Australian National University: "Reforms are very dangerous. The problem for Kim [Jong Il] is they are happening anyway." Dragging a color TV from China to sell in a North Korean market may not be the way that revolutions normally start. But in the North's miserable conditions, such flickers of enterprise could yet light a fire that would consume the regime.  

A Long-term Strategy for North Korea

by Georgy Bulychev, JapanFocus

With the North Korean announcement that it now possesses nuclear weapons, (simply meant to intensify pressure on the US to formulate a coherent strategy vis-a-vis Pyongyang) world attention is focused on the issue of solving the nuclear crisis: finding a way to force, or induce, or make North Korea do away with its nuclear program and nuclear aspirations. Millions of words have been written about the methods and tactics best suited to tackle the issue, including the strategy of six-party talks. However, it is rarely mentioned that the nuclear issue can probably not be solved without addressing the deeper issue -- the future of North Korea itself. Without a clear-cut strategy on this, all efforts to solve the nuclear issue are probably doomed, or worse, they could even pave the way for a military solution. So, what is preferable -- collapse or transformation of the DPRK? And if transformation was to occur, would that help alleviate the tension and solve security problems? What should the world community do?
 
As Communism worldwide came to its end, scores of experts predicted the collapse of North Korea. It never happened, however, because the North Korean system was specifically designed by Kim Il Sung to withstand external pressures and to control and crush emerging internal challenges. The DPRK was no "ordinary" socialist country, but a bureaucratic authoritarian society -- a blend of Communist rhetoric and oriental despotism, based on Confucian tradition, nationalism and a semi-religious ideology. Economic and humanitarian crisis does not always weaken such a system (as can be seen in the examples of Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China) but it fed a deep feeling of insecurity on the part of North Korean leaders. Perhaps predictably, in the 1990s, as Pyongyang sought ways to cope with both external and internal threats, it turned North Korea into a self-declared nuclear state (although it is impossible to confirm or deny such declarations). The result was spiraling confrontation and tension in the region. So, are the possibilities of the regime change/collapse any higher today than 15 years ago? What are the options?
 
Collapse?
 
We don't even want to analyze a military scenario of regime change, which would result in unimaginable loss of lives both in the North and South and reduce the economic potential and opportunity for a normal life in the peninsula to ashes.
 
But even short of such a scenario, regime change (internally generated or assisted from the outside) would be a disaster for Korea and its neighbors. The grave mistake the well-wishers and geo-strategists make is to suppose that North Korean people will generally welcome a momentous "liberation" and that things will eventually work out well for them in the aftermath. Yet even in the less complicated Iraq case the outcome is still far from positive. Regime change in North Korea would mean the disappearance of the country itself. North Korean statehood as such would be finished, as South Korea could not possibly accept any new separate power in North Korea formed "on the local base". Such a new power constellation is anyway highly unlikely, simply because there is no human potential for it in the North in the short run, and would seem even more unlikely in a crisis likely to involve massive refugees and local conflicts with arms falling into the hands of warlords. This means that any change of regime in North Korean case would boil down to the absorption of North by South, with the North becoming an "occupation zone".
 
Given the differences between Northerners isolated and brainwashed for generations and Westernized Southerners, would a Southern occupation be peaceful? Are more than twenty million North Koreans ready to become a "second rate people" in a unified Korea? What would happen if they were suddenly to be thrown into a 'raw capitalist' environment, when we know that most North Korean refugees today cannot adapt in the South even after coming there on their own volition? And what about the numerous (two to three million) North Korean nomenklatura and military? They would expect the worst -- not just being left out in the cold like their colleagues in East Germany, but repression. That means that they would be likely to resort to armed, guerilla-type opposition, which would be viewed at least with sympathy by the population. There is evidence that such contingency plans already exist in North Korea. And what if the hypothetical nuclear weapons were in the posession of these rebels?
 
 The lesson of many centuries of Korean history is that region-based strife, as slow-burning conflict with the prospect of involving neighboring countries, can continue for decades. This would derail the prospering South Korean economy as well.
 
Evolution?
 
Are there other, less radical options? What about the gradual rise in living standards and liberalization of the social and spiritual environment in parallel with modification of the system, while preserving North Korean statehood for the foreseeable future? Provided it behaves responsibly, at least internationally, in the short term the world community should accept the continued existence of North Korea. At present, North Korea has no reason for aggression. It shows no interest in attempting to dictate its ideology to anyone, or to capture territory or economic resources. Moreover, it would not have the slightest chance of winning in case of such an adventure, and that fact is no secret to its leaders.
 
In that respect Kim Jong Il's state differs most from that of his father, who dreamed of unification by absorbing South Korea. Kim Jong Il, who is now rumored to be choosing his successor, is neither Nero nor Louis XIV -- he thinks about "après moi" and wants to keep the state in place, but he also understands that it is impossible to do this without change. The change of paradigm of the regime, rather than the change of the regime itself, looks more and more like the proper resolution not only to the nuclear crisis but to broader concerns about North Korea.
 
With every passing day there is ample evidence of change in North Korea. The turning point was the advent of the new century, although subtle undercurrents were obvious from late 1998 after Kim Jong Il was officially recognized as the formal state leader in the course of the September constitutional reform. Changes in North Korea have become especially noticeable since 2002. They include economic transformation to a multi-sector economy employing market principles, social stratification, changes in the ownership system (more property rights falling into the hands of certain classes, institutions and individuals). Sooner or later, such changes are bound to influence the system of political power. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea can no longer be accurately described as a Stalinist country.
 
The economy has already changed from a centrally planned socialist type to a mixed type, combining state, capitalist (joint ventures and trading companies), semi-private (especially in agriculture and services) and "shadow" (criminalized) sectors. And there is no way back.
 
The reigning ideology has changed from mostly communist (Marxism-Leninism plus Juche) to national-egalitarian (Songun or "military first") and "prosperous strong nation" theories.
 
The political system has become more military based than party based, and there is a tendency to move from totalitarianism towards autocracy.
 
Foreign policy priorities have changed from supporting "national liberation struggles" to the more pragmatic goal of bridging the gap between North Korea and the world, especially the West.
 
There has been a marked turn from animosity to broad cooperation with South Korea. This is designed not only as a tool to revive a sagging economy, as is often assumed, but also to gain security and a strategic edge over "foreign devils" by appealing to Korean nationalism. In fact a new historic period of North-South national reconciliation has begun. It has survived the nuclear crisis and even pressure on Seoul from its allies, and the trend has become (despite the usual ups and downs, especially in 2004) a new factor in the Korean situation at the dawn of the 21st century.
 
Roadmap for Transformation
 
Kim Jong Il seems to be firmly committed to the change. If such positive intentions, rather than media clichés, are taken into account, how can he be helped? What is needed is a long-term (perhaps 20 years) roadmap of Korean settlement including a comprehensive prioritization of targets and stages for implementation.
 
1. The chief strategic goal should be peace, development and friendly cooperation in Northeast Asia. This consideration now is more or less shared by China, Russia, and South Korea. Therefore it is necessary to solve the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and related issues peacefully and step-by-step, in a manner that will not jeopardize these main issues. In fact solving the main task is the key to solving the "secondary" issues.
 
2. The most efficient way to implement a peaceful scenario is to transform North Korea into a peaceful, non-aggressive, developing state, open to international cooperation, a state that should have sufficient guarantees of its security, including some degree of assurance that no subversive action will be carried out against it, so that there would be no need felt for WMD. Not only state security but human security should be maintained. By this we do not mean only people's security as this is broadly understood, but the interests of the ruling class also need to be taken into account. This means that North Korean leaders and managers should know exactly what position they will occupy under the new system, what to expect from reform.
 
3. The international community should, in accordance with the above-mentioned roadmap, assist North Korea to transform both economically and socially without challenging its sovereignty and statehood, though the source of such changes should, of course, come from within the country. What is needed is an internationally sponsored Marshall Plan for North Korea. A long-term program for economic and social transformation is needed to engage North Korea, bring it into the international division of labor and introduce international managerial experience.
 
The members of the 6-party talks (US, Japan, Russia, China, South and North Korea) should take the initiative, bringing in the European Union and the United Nations as well, although probably South Korea should play the leading role in preparation and later financing of such a program. Japanese "compensation" to North Korea, in order to settle issues arising from the colonial past, could also be an important financial source. Aid, assistance and investment should be delivered not spontaneously, but in accordance with such a program, and its implementation should be regularly accounted for, not only to the initiating group of countries but also, through the UN, to the wider international community.
 
The program should not raise suspicions as being aimed at regime change -- forcefully or by way of a "velvet revolution." Rather it should provide for the gradual transformation of the current political elite, many of whom are relatives or comrades within the framework of clan politics, by melting it gradually into a more liberal government system. The program should include many stages and the term of its implementation could well exceed 10 or 15 years
 
Transformation Imagined
 
How might such a positive scenario look (constructed somewhat imaginatively)? Its main features might be something like the following:
 
It would include modification of the economic system based on creating North Korean chaebol (conglomerates) -- first based on state property and step-by-step privatization led by their managers, who will be members of the North Korean elite. This would ensure their support for political stability and the introduction of market principles into commodity flows, and for the emergence of a financial system and ownership relationships based on liberalized government control. Later, small and medium businesses (starting from agriculture) could spring up. It would amount to a combination of Chinese, South Korean and Russian models.
 
Deregulation of the economy will increase popular economic activity, bringing about foreign investment and an increase in international cooperation. Labor-intensive export-oriented production could mean the start of a "Taedong River Miracle."
 
Increased affluence will diminish the outbound flow of refugees and bring about socio-political stabilization. An increasing proportion of investment should be channeled to civil production, health and education, while the proportion of military expenditure should decrease as North Korea's security concerns are alleviated.
 
A rise in living standards and a decrease in opposition to the government on economic grounds will enable the authorities -- provided no external subversive actions take place -- to soften their grip on the population, slowly promote social liberalization (less rules and red tape, freedom of movement, etc), and a liberalization in the ideological and spiritual sphere.
 
Communist ideology will give way to "patriotism" (with the founder of the state assigned a sacral role) as the foundation of a societal mentality. Increased cooperation and exchanges with South Korea will help promote this "national uniqueness" mythology as a cementing force.
 
There will be a transition to a sort of "constitutional monarchy," in which the Leader of the Nation relies on "collective leadership" for the day-to-day running of the country and there is greatly expanded feedback from the society's grass-roots -- especially when Kim Jong Il's heir assumes the throne. The state will change first from being totalitarian to authoritarian, and then eventually to an Oriental-style managed democracy (consider South Korea for example, or the modern monarchical regimes of Asia).
 
The military confrontation of North Korea with the outside world will considerably diminish. Maybe by this time it will be called by a different name, perhaps Kimilsungia or Great Korea (Dae-Chosonguk). That will set the ground for military confidence-building measures. A system of international arrangements for Korean security, with checks and balances cross-guaranteed by USA, Japan and China and Russia, will emerge.
 
North Korea will no longer need any absolute strategic deterrent and will voluntarily abandon its nuclear and other WMD ambitions, a variant of the South African case.
 
In a couple of decades, the last remaining obstacles between North Korea and the world will disappear. North Korea would become a vibrant member of regional cooperation, an international transportation hub and ecological tourist destination, adding computer science to export-oriented industries as a source of earnings.
 
The reduction of military threat and confrontation would also provide for increased cooperation and understanding between the two Koreas to bring about in the long run -- but only when conditions permit -- a voluntary integration of the two Korean states.

 Chairman Kim's Dissolving Kingdom

 
Michael Sheridan, Rajin, North Korea, January 30, 2005 

FAR across the frozen river two figures hurried from the North Korean shore, slip-sliding on the ice as they made a break for the Chinese riverbank to escape a regime that, by many accounts, is now entering its death throes. It was a desperate risk to run in the stark glare of the winter sunshine. We had just seen a patrol of Chinese soldiers in fur-lined uniforms tramping along the snowy bank, their automatic rifles slung ready for action. 

Police cars swept up and down the road every 10 or 15 minutes, on the look-out for refugees. A small group of Chinese travellers in our minibus, some of whom turned out to have good reasons to be discreet, pretended not to notice. The two made it to shelter and we ploughed on towards a border post that offered us a rare opportunity to cross into the north-eastern corner of the last Stalinist state, posing as would-be investors in an experimental free trade zone. 

We had already witnessed one sign that North Korea's totalitarian system is dissolving, even as its leaders boast of owning nuclear weapons to deter their enemies. "It's just like the Berlin Wall" - Pastor Douglas Shin, a Christian activist, said by telephone from Seoul. "The slow-motion exodus is the beginning of the end." 

In interviews for this article over many months, western policymakers, Chinese experts, North Korean exiles and human rights activists built up a picture of a tightly knit clan leadership in Pyongyang that is on the verge of collapse. 

Some of those interviewed believe the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il, has already lost his personal authority to a clique of generals and party cadres. Without any public announcement, governments from Tokyo to Washington are preparing for a change of regime. 

The death of Kim's favourite mistress last summer, a security clampdown on foreign aid workers and a reported assassination attempt in Austria last November against the leader's eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, have all heightened the sense of disintegration. 

The Japanese intelligence agency, in an unclassified report issued on December 24, referred to "signs of instability" inside the political establishment and predicted a feud among the elite as they strive to seize power from Kim. 

Jang Song-thaek, Kim's ambitious brother-in-law, was purged from party office after he tried to build up a military faction to put his own son in power. Mystery surrounds the fate of Vice-Marshal Jo Myong-rok, the 
soldier once sent as Kim's emissary to meet Bill Clinton in the White House. 

The dictator's favoured heir apparent, his son Kim Jong-chol, 23, who was educated in Geneva, is reported to have staged a shoot-out inside a palace with Kim Jang-hyun, 34, an illegitimate son of Kim Il-sung, father of the dictator and founder of the dynasty. 

Rumours of rivalry and bloodshed have multiplied since the Dear Leader's last meetings with dignitaries from Russia and China last September. Since then Kim has vanished from view. 

Analysts in Seoul say that in recent propaganda pictures the bouffant-haired dictator is wearing the same clothes as in photographs from two years ago, suggesting that they may have been taken then. Observers await Kim's official birthday, February 16, to see if the state media accord him the usual fawning adulation. 

According to exiles, North Korean agents in Beijing and Ulan Bator are frantically selling assets to raise cash "an important sign", says one activist, because "the secret police can always smell the crisis coming before anybody else". 

Once we had crossed the steel bridge into this hermetic member of President George W Bush's "Axis of evil" much of what we saw suggested that the party's reign is a facade. As we shivered in the frontier post the portraits of Kim and his late father, Kim Il-sung, stared down from the wall as if nothing had changed. But the cult of the Kim dynasty, its "perfect" theory of Juche "patriotic self-reliance" and the utopian society of which the official guides boast are visibly breaking down. 

Word has spread like wildfire of the Christian underground that helps fugitives to reach South Korea. People who lived in silent fear now dare to speak about escape. The regime has almost given up trying to stop them going, although it can savagely punish those caught and sent back. "Everybody knows there is a way out", said a woman, who for obvious reasons cannot be identified but who spoke in front of several witnesses. 

"They know there is a Christian network to put them in contact with the underground, to break into embassies 
in Beijing or to get into Vietnam. They know, but you have to pay a lot of money to middlemen who have the Christian contacts." 

Her knowledge was remarkable. North Korean newspapers are stifled by state control. Televisions receive only 
one channel which is devoted to the Dear Leader's deeds. Radios are fixed to a single frequency. For most citizens the internet is just a word. 

Yet North Koreans confirmed that they knew that escapers to China should look for buildings displaying a Christian cross and should ask among Korean speakers for people who knew the word of Jesus. "The information blockade is like a dam and when it bursts there will be a great wave", said Shin, the crusading pastor. 

Here in the north of the country, faith, crime and sheer cold are eroding the regime's grip at a speed that may surprise the CIA's analysts: facts that should give ammunition to conservatives in Washington who call for a hardline policy. 

Bush's re-election dealt a blow to Kim, 62, who had gambled on a win by John Kerry, the Democratic candidate. Kim used a strategy of divide and delay to drag out nuclear talks with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea through 2004. 

Kim lost his bet and now faces four more years of Bush, who says that he "loathes" the North Korean leader and has vowed to strip him of atomic weapons. 

The regime is fighting to save itself from subversion. Its agents kidnapped Kim Dong-shik, a South Korean missionary, from the turbulent Chinese border town of Yanji in 2000. Last week the South Koreans demanded a
new investigation: the clergyman has never been seen again. 

The secret police cannot staunch the word of the gospel. Two of our party turned out to be Christian businessmen who had come from China carrying wads of cash. Korean-language Bibles have been smuggled in by the hundreds. 

The veneer of communist propaganda is still kept up. "There is no need for religion in North Korea", said our loyal tour guide. "Personally, I believe in the Korean Workers' Party and our Dear Leader." 

Fifty miles south of the border we watched as schoolchildren obediently filed out in a shrieking gale to follow their teachers in pilgrimage along the seashore to a shrine to Kim Il-sung, who is still revered as the "Great Leader". 

Lined up outside a fisherman's cottage where the Great Leader stayed in 1953, they listened to a revolutionary harangue by a woman teacher with more attention than most seven to 12-year-olds might muster. They had marched two miles, wrapped up like small bundles against a wind that blew off the Sea of Japan so bitterly that the spray froze on the lines of the fishing boats. It was -15C that day. 

These are children whose average weight and height after years of malnutrition are 20% less than those of their equals in South Korea, according to the United Nations. Their rations were recently cut from 300g to 250g of staple food a day. 

Yet the proverbial hardiness of the Koreans "a quality that amazed British soldiers who fought in these conditions from 1950 to 1953 to keep South Korea out of Kim Il-sung's hands" is no longer enough to make up 
for his son's deficiencies. 

Two years ago the younger Kim introduced free market reforms in a half-hearted attempt to restart an economy that has been dying since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. 

Rajin, a deepwater port that is open to foreign trade, is supposed to be a showpiece of the new economy in the potentially rich northeast next to China and Russia. However, here we saw economic chaos that has led to unheard-of social disorder. At the central market child beggars chased us along alleys of shoddy Chinese goods, past stalls heaped with decaying fish. A group of dead-eyed teenagers kicked and shoved the younger boys to go after the foreigners. The guides hastily warned us against robbers. 

To most North Koreans the prices must have seemed insane. A crab caught locally cost more than a driver's monthly wages of GBP 1.40. A Chinese cotton vest cost two weeks' money. 

Still hundreds of people jammed the officially sanctioned market and dozens of illegal vendors froze outside as they touted vegetables, clothes and hunks of rancid meat. No official intervened to stop the illicit trade. Judging by the aggressive pushing and arguing over the goods, there might have been a riot if they had. A few North Koreans are clearly making money. Many more, though, are falling into penury. 

Later we were taken for lunch to a state restaurant where lukewarm fish, vegetables and rice were produced from a chilly kitchen. There were iron bars on the windows and a heavy padlock on the door to prevent looting. Marxists, if there were any remaining in North Korea, might have described the situation as pre-revolutionary. 

Last April an unknown number of North Koreans died in an explosive fireball that wrecked the railway station at Ryongchon, near the Chinese border, on the day when Kim's personal train was due to pass through. Foreign diplomats initially accepted the regime's explanation of an accident. But two well informed ambassadors in Pyongyang say that they now have doubts. 

In a telltale measure, frontier guards ordered us to leave all mobile phones at the Chinese border post -- rumour has it that the Ryongchon blast was triggered by a mobile phone. 

An attempt to kill Kim would come as no surprise. Defections by party officials and army officers have increased as the elite senses that it faces disaster. Japan is considering economic sanctions to retaliate for the kidnappings of its nationals by North Korea and some American policymakers think that the regime should be pushed to the point of self-destruction. 

Nonetheless, Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, wants to keep pressurising North Korea through 
negotiations. "The military option is not on the table for the United States", said an American aid official who is up-to-date with her thinking. 

To the children of the No 5 junior school in Rajin, that would come as a surprise. Their classrooms boast lurid posters of American marines murdering Koreans and greedy warmongers ganging up on a proud nation, as though Kennedy and Khruschev still held the world in thrall. 

Their teeth chattering with cold, the children staged a classic communist song-and-dance routine for visitors, the boys clad in miniature military uniforms in tribute to Kim's Songun "army first" policy. Paranoia and brainwashing remain the regime's most effective tools. Yet even as it tries to fight off God it has made its peace with Mammon. 

On a freezing night when Rajin was sunk in gloom, its oil refineries empty, its power stations inert, one building stood ablaze with lights on the bleak seashore northeast of the city. It was a casino, where slate-faced Chinese gamblers squandered thousands of dollars at the baccarat table while impassive guards scrutinised them for any hints of dodgy play. Given the record of North Korean's secret police it was hard to imagine anyone daring to cheat.  

"Boycott or Business?"

by Aidan Foster-Carter, Pacific Forum CSIS

In a cliche beloved of British soccer commentators, inter-Korean relations in 2004 were a game of two halves. Until mid-year all seemed to be going well, including unprecedented military talks to ease border tensions. On land, symbolically, propaganda loudspeakers fell silent along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), while at sea, substantively, direct radio contact between the KPA and ROK navies began, so as to avoid clashes. Meanwhile
the usual channels of Seoul-Pyongyang dialogue at various levels met routinely, appearing to make progress on a range of substantive issues, such as cross-border road and rail links.

But July saw a U-turn. Angry on several fronts (more on motives below), North Korea pulled out of most of its hitherto regular talks with the South. By early 2005 it had not relented, and showed no sign of doing so. Of course, Seoul was not the only one to feel Pyongyang's wrath. On a wider canvas, the North also notoriously refused to return to Six-Party Talks (both Koreas, the U.S., China, Japan, and Russia) in Beijing on its nuclear issue, so a fourth round, due by September, failed to take place. Kim Jong-il was widely assumed to be awaiting the U.S. presidential election - and praying for Kerry. Yet on this front too, as of early January Pyongyang is still stalling, saying it now wishes to see the character and policy contours of the second Bush administration. For good measure, as reported elsewhere in this issue of Comparative Connections, North Korea is also embroiled in a row with Japan - over its continued failure to come fully clean on the fate of most of the young Japanese whom it admits to kidnapping in the 1970s and 1980s.

In that sense, the current stasis in inter-Korean ties partly reflects the fact that right now North Korea is no mood to talk seriously to anyone about anything. But there are also specific aspects to this always distinctive relationship between two halves of a divided land. Rather than discuss non-events - such as rumors throughout the quarter of plans for a second inter-Korean summit - it seems more sensible this time to focus on two specific matters. One is the refugee issue: a salutary reminder that there is more to inter-Korean ties than merely what the two governments cook up between them, or fail to. The other is the one field of cooperation that Pyongyang is still keen on, doubtless because there is money in it. The first goods made by an ROK firm in the Kaesong Industrial Zone (KIZ) - saucepans, as it happens - hit the stores in Seoul just in time for Christmas, and sold out in two days. So maybe an otherwise bleak New Year is not wholly without hope after all. [...]

Kaesong: First Fruits

Meanwhile, seemingly a world away from such skullduggery, on at least one front North Korea deigned to maintain active contact with the South. Work has continued apace on the Kaesong Industrial Zone (KIZ) - near  Korea's ancient capital and close to the DMZ, 70 km north of Seoul - which Southern visionaries hope will in time become Korea's Shenzhen: a dual growth pole, both for cross-border cooperation and its own hinterland.
For a few lucky South Koreans, the must-have item this Christmas was not some luxury designer brand, but a workaday set of steel saucepans retailing at Won19,800 ($19). The Lotte department store in downtown Seoul sold all of its 1,000 sets in two days. The lure was where they were made: these were the first fruits of the KIZ, made by Livingart, a small Southern kitchenware manufacturer, using Northern labor. 

From Pans to Plans

There are grand plans, or dreams, for the new Kaesong. A decade hence, once the three-phase project is fully completed, a site of 66 sq km (to include a new town covering 40 sq km) is projected to employ 700,000 North Koreans and 100,000 from the South in 2,000 factories, turning out exports worth $20 billion each year. (By contrast, Pyongyang's entire annual exports currently barely top $1 billion; Seoul's exceed $250 billion.) According to the Hyundai Research Institute, the KIZ will eventually generate annual profits of $8.5 billion for South Korea and $811 million for the North, a disparity unlikely to please Pyongyang. The first phase, with 300 firms, is intended to be open by 2007.

Actual accomplishments so far are much more modest. Four years after this project was first mooted, all that exists so far on the ground is a 92,400 sq m pilot site. Fifteen tenants, all small firms, were due to start up in 2004, but so far just two are operating. Livingart, the panmaker, invested W4.5 billion in its kitchenware plant; it has 255 Northern employees. In January, another Southern firm, SJ Tech, is due to start making semiconductor parts in a W4 billion plant with 200 workers. Monthly pay is just $57.50, half that of China, 17 times lower than South Korea, yet three times the average DPRK wage at the official exchange rate - or 19 times at the market rate. Naturally the North Korean nuclear crisis, still unresolved after two years, casts a long shadow. There is the small matter of the Wassenaar Arrangement, restricting technology transfers to rogue regimes. Seoul is a signatory, yet chafes - as does Pyongyang, loudly - at U.S. pressure to ensure that nothing sensitive that could have military applications crosses the DMZ. Two of the first 15 are still awaiting security clearance on this score.

A Pioneer's Pitfalls

Being a pioneer has its pitfalls. With the zone's power supply not yet set up, Livingart had to bring its own generator. From January, KEPCO, the ROK's monopoly electricity provider, is due to supply 15,000 kilowatts per hour across the border - with safeguards to ensure no diversions elsewhere to a North desperately short of power. Pyongyang had demanded a power station within the zone, but that looks a long way down the road.

Similarly, on Dec. 30 Korea Telecom - now privatized, unlike KEPCO - reported that it had finally agreed on the Kaesong zone's telephone service, after eight months of discussions. Yet it provided no details, except that call rates will not exceed $0.50 per minute (North Korea normally bills international calls at $4 per minute.) 100 phone/fax lines are anticipated, with no high-speed Internet access at this stage. As so often, Pyongyang has blown hot and cold. The Kaesong zone was originally a gift to Hyundai from Kim Jong-il: compensation, perhaps, for its (until recently) loss-making tourism to Mt. Kumgang on the east of the Peninsula. At first the North offered Sinuiju, far away on the northwestern border with China; but Hyundai said it could not make a profit there. Owing to the ex-leading chaebol's financial woes, the Kaesong zone is now a joint project between Hyundai Asan and the ROK parastatal Korea Land Corp (Koland).

Korea's Shenzhen?

Its location could not be better: close enough to Seoul to become as Shenzhen is to Hong Kong. The long-impenetrable DMZ remains the world's most heavily armed frontier, but two corridors now breach it: in the east tourist buses head for Kumgang, while in the west workers commute to Kaesong daily or weekly from Seoul. This is progress indeed. Yet over four years after June 2000's North-South summit, and despite ceremonies in 2003 to mark notional relinking of railways in the DMZ, the North shows no sign of finishing its side of either rail link or the eastern motorway - even though the South, whose own share was long ago ready, is providing nearly all materials and shouldering most of the cost.

Will Kaesong too prove stillborn? The Dec. 15 celebration of Livingart's first output was ominous. Seoul's 380-strong delegation was headed by Unification Minister Chung Dong-young, on his first visit to North Korea, yet Northern media did not report his presence. Pyongyang sent a less senior official, who berated the South for alleged foot-dragging and even walked out during Chung's speech, to Hyundai's embarrassment. 

Business Beats Bombs

Seoul puts up with such uncouthness, hoping Kaesong will be a "win-win" deal to convince Pyongyang that business is a better way than bombs. The trouble is that, Wassenaar apart, an ongoing nuclear standoff will limit investment. Selling the product is a further hurdle. The U.S. and Japan may levy tariffs, and will raise eyebrows at the idea of a bland "Made in Korea" label - although Singapore has accepted this, in talks toward a bilateral FTA. Livingart has plans to export to Europe, where its products already have a market. Already the zone is broadening. In December, Woori Bank opened a branch, albeit with neither telephone nor Internet so far. A Pusan hospital will open a clinic on Jan. 11. Seoul's Korea National Tourism Organization plans to set up an office later this year.

If (as Mao Zedong famously said) a single spark can start a prairie fire, then perhaps one truckload of steel saucepans can also spearhead a revolution. It will not be plain sailing. Politics apart, Livingart admits Northern workmanship is not yet up to scratch; though it is confident that training will do the trick. Meanwhile, one of its workers told the Korea Times that few in Kaesong were keen to apply for what they did not consider great jobs. Another, however, told the JoongAng Ilbo: "It's very good for me to work here."

It is early days yet. As ever, the onus is on North Korea to show it is serious and sincere, not just seeking symbolic gestures - and to milk the  South. So far Kaesong is little and late. Yet it is a start. Twenty-five years ago, few expected Shenzhen to become today's metropolis, producing inter alia 70 percent of the world's artifical Christmas trees, for customers including the White House. But if Kaesong is to follow suit, Kim Jong-il needs to show more peace and goodwill on other fronts. Alas, a belligerent New Year message gives no hint of that.

ICG Notes What Unites and Divides

It is unsurprising if South Koreans are confused about such contradictory developments. A new study by the International Crisis Group (ICG), which last year opened an office in Seoul, astutely summarizes complex attitudes in South Korea toward its "brother from another planet." ICG sees emerging consensus in some areas. North Koreans should be helped to overcome their economic hardship, while North-South economic cooperation can be mutually beneficial. Gradual reunification is preferable to sudden collapse and absorption; war is unthinkable. The North's nuclear program is a negative, but not directed at the South and hence not a reason to end engagement. This last is surely more contentious, along with five areas that ICG identifies as such. South Koreans disagree on the wisdom of dealing with the North, how much reciprocity to demand, and whether Kim Jong-il's regime can change. They differ too on how to tackle human rights issues in the North, and whether to end curbs on information about and contact with Pyongyang.

Seoul Blocks Northern Websites

The latter issue is especially anomalous. While Seoul now puts almost no restrictions on trips to Pyongyang, it remains formally illegal in the ROK to read DPRK websites. These have grown in quantity and (to a degree) quality; in late November Seoul blocked access to about 30. The usual perverse outcomes ensued: some sites remained reachable, either directly or (for the tech-savvy) indirectly. North Korea, most of whose own citizens have no Web access at all, loftily denounced this "unprecedented fascist suppression [that is] quite contrary to the requirements of the information technology age."

The mystery is why the South did not just quietly leave matters be, rather than intervene in a way that is heavy-handed, undemocratic, and contrary to its own professed "Sunshine policy." The restriction was requested by the police, who bizarrely claim to fear that North Korea's eccentric and narcissistic cyberspaces will corrupt young Southern minds. After protests, Unification Minister Chung said in January that the ban will be reviewed.

South-South Conflict Rages, too

One way would be to amend the National Security Law (NSL), under which this ban was imposed. But "progressives" in the ruling Uri Party demand the NSL's total repeal, which conservatives regard as throwing out the baby with the bathwater. As the year ended, Uri hardliners rejected a compromise that party leaders had thrashed out with the opposition Grand National Party (GNP), causing a standoff that nearly saw the world's 10th largest economy enter 2005 with no budget (the bill had been stuck in the National Assembly for months). Uri's leaders later resigned en masse. All this guarantees that, over and above North-South spats, what in Seoul is called South-South conflict (nam-nam galdeung, i.e., internecine) will rage on in 2005. Indeed, the latter is not infrequently about the former.

A brave bid to bridge such gaps came in December from an unexpected quarter. A GNP thinktank, the Youido Institute, offered a new stand on Nordpolitik that belied the party's normally hawkish image. Under Park Jin - once a UK-based academic, now a rising star seen as a future presidential contender - this advocates "accommodative engagement," and calls for a Marshall Plan to offer a "landmark incentive" for Pyongyang to ditch its nuclear programs. Despite also pledging activism on human rights and other concerns, Park drew flak both from the GNP's right wing and critics who claimed there is nothing new here. Both accused him of overestimating Seoul's ability to influence Pyongyang.

Marital Metaphors

In a battle of metaphors, one academic critic said South Korea should behave as a subtle lover: carefully and secretly wooing the North, rather than openly declaring its intention to win the other's heart. Park demurred: "I think the inter-Korean relationship is more like a husband [and] wife . it's like we're trying to help a spouse come back who left home after a huge fight." Either image may raise eyebrows in Washington, whose own hawks had better note that at least some South Korean conservatives are scarcely kindred spirits. Park's view, and his pledge of bipartisan cooperation, is a world away from rants like that by the Hudson Institute's Michael Horowitz, an architect of the NKHRA, who shocked many in Seoul on a December visit by comparing Roh's North Korea policy to "making love to a corpse." Plain speech is fine, yet it is hard to see the Horowitz-Bolton school of "diplomacy" winning friends or influencing people in any part of Korea.

Pyongyang Lashes Out

Pyongyang has yet to weigh in on the necrophilia front, but it lost no time in rubbishing Park Jin. On Dec. 26 an article on the DPRK's "Uriminzokkiri" website attacked the GNP, not for the first time, as "a group of pro-American traitors and fascists opposed to democracy," and dismissed its new overture as stirring "anti-north confrontation."

If that seems unfair, so was another diatribe the next day laying into the ROK government with equal hostility. Perhaps to justify half a year cold-shouldering Seoul, the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland (CPRF) accused what it called "the south Korean authorities" - not government, nor was Roh Moo-hyun named - of systematically colluding with the U.S. to worsen inter-Korean relations. Specific charges included barring Southern activists from visiting Pyongyang to pay "homage to President Kim Il-sung on the 10th anniversary of his demise." Besides "hand in glove with the U.S. and its satellites, they seduced and abducted civilians of the DPRK abroad and took them to south Korea in groups under the cloak of 'defectors from the north.'" 

Also mentioned were blocking the North's websites, seeking the DPRK's collapse via Chungmu 3300 and 9000, and staging joint military exercises "almost every day in league with war maniac Bush." Needless to say, these are annual maneuvers that were also held during Kim Dae-jung's presidency. 

As John McEnroe would say: You cannot be serious. Even by Pyongyang's standards this is nonsense. All serious analysts regard Roh Moo-hyun as continuing the Sunshine policy, whether or not they approve. (One might hope that so ungrateful a slap in the face might prompt a rethink in Seoul, or at least some fine tuning; but don't hold your breath.) What then is the North's game? Playing for time, probably, or driven by policy disagreements or even - it is rumored - power struggles. That could result in policy paralysis, or at any rate putting everything on ice until the dust settles and a clear line emerges. Watch this space. 

North Korea Slashes Meagre Food Rations

By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor, Independent, 25 January 2005

North Korea has slashed daily food rations for its people, fuelling concerns for the health of the country's children who are already showing signs of stunted growth from a lack of proper nourishment.

World Food Programme (WFP) monitors in the reclusive hardline Communist state said yesterday that the government handouts had been cut from 300 grams of cereals a day to 250 grams. That is half of the minimum daily required cereal ration of approximately 500 grams.

There was speculation that the move may have been prompted by the economic reforms in North Korea, which have led to the introduction of farmers' markets. It could be that the government wants to encourage the privatisation measures, which have led to farmers holding back some of their produce that would otherwise go into the public distribution system. But the 16 million Koreans who depend on the government rations are likely to go hungry as a result.

James Morris, the executive director of the World Food Programme, said he did not know why the North Korean government had cut the rations, but there was much concern about the long-term impact on children. The WFP distributes aid to 6.5 million of the most vulnerable people in North Korea, including nursing mothers and children.

He said: "You look at the average seven-year-old North Korean boy and compare him to the average seven-year-old South Korean boy, he's 20cm shorter and 10kg lighter.

"The future of the Korean peninsula is tied to the development of these children who are showing signs not only of the famine years in the 1990s but also from inadequate nutrition in general. A child who's compromised early in life will never recover, in terms of intellectual and physical development."

Mr Morris stressed that the WFP food supplements, distributed through orphanages, hospitals and schools, would not be affected by the government decision which concerns the public distribution system. "There's no reason for our ration to be cut," he said.

Gerald Bourke, the World Food Programme's public affairs officer for Asia, said the cut was likely to be in effect at least until the middle of the year. "That it is this early in the year is of concern," Mr Bourke said.

It is difficult to assess exact food shortages in North Korea, because of restrictions on foreigners, who are mostly confined to Pyongyang where goods are in relatively good supply because of the presence of the political and military elite. The WFP distributes little aid in Pyongyang but is active in the north and east. 

Северокорейцы сбежали от голода в Японию

Юлия АЛИСОВА, 24 января, Утро.ру

Один мужчина, пять женщин и двое детей, все - граждане КНДР, сегодня рано Yтром проникли на территорию школы при посольстве Японии в Пекине с целью получить политическое убежище. Директор школы позвонил представителям внешнеполитического ведомства, и позже северокорейцев автобусом перевезли в японское посольство. Согласно положениям китайско-северокорейского договора о дружбе и взаимопомощи, Пекин обязан выдавать Пхеньяну беженцев. Однако не делает этого, когда о побеге становится широко известно, а переправляет их в Южную Корею через третьи страны.

Это не первый подобный случай. Корейцы в массовом порядке начали бежать из страны со второй половины прошлого года. Так, в сентябре через забор с колючей проволокой на территорию японской школы в Пекине пробрались 29 человек, заявив, что спасаются от голода в своей стране, и требуя предоставить им политическое убежище. В декабре по тому же маршруту прибыли еще 12 граждан КНДР.

Нынешнее бегство может быть связано с новым ужесточением политики Пхеньяна по отношению к своим гражданам. Дело в том, что власти урезали пайки населению до половины той нормы, что рекомендована Всемирной продовольственной программой. По словам представителей ООН, государственный паек упал с 300 г крупы в день до 250 граммов.

При этом, по данным Всемирной продовольственной программы, жизни 16 млн северных корейцев напрямую зависят от этих пайков. Многие из них не могут позволить себе мясо или овощи. "Цены на основные виды продуктов на частных рынках значительно выросли, они превышают возможности многих людей", - говорит Геральд Бурк из Всемирной продовольственной программы. На рынке 1 кг риса стоит 30% средней по стране месячной зарплаты.

Пострадают от последних нововведений прежде всего городские жители. Еще в прошлом году эксперты ООН отмечали, что частные фермерские рынки, вместо того чтобы утолить потребность в дополнительных продуктах, лишь взвинтили инфляцию в стране. А решение об урезании пайков Пхеньян принял, несмотря на хороший урожай прошлого года - лучший за последние десять лет.

При этом, как сообщало "Yтро", президент страны Ким Чен Ир проявляет наклонности самого изысканного гурмана. Это бы оставалось в тайне, если бы не личный повар северокорейского вождя, который прошлой весной изложил в своей книге большие и маленькие слабости товарища Кима. 56-летний повар из токийского суши-бара уехал в Северную Корею еще в 1982 г. готовить для представительства японской торговой компании, получая зарплату в $5 тысяч. Как-то о его кулинарной славе узнал Ким Чен Ир, и с тех пор десяток лет повар трудился на кухне у главы КНДР. Причем повар фактически находился "в золотой клетке", так как вернуться на родину ему удалось только после того, как он заявил, что для стола Ким Чен Ира ему надо достать морских ежей, которые обитают исключительно у побережья Японии. Теперь он живет в страхе перед северокорейскими шпионами.

Гурманство Ким Чен Ира достигало верхов изысканности. Так, ему очень нравилось свежее сашими, и повар получал приказ резать рыбу так, чтобы не были задеты жизненно важные органы. Вождь начинал есть рыбу, когда она еще шевелилась и била хвостом. Ким Чен Ир также оказался ценителем изысканных вин: в его погребе хранится около 10 тыс. бутылок.

На еду Ким Чен Ир никогда не жалел денег. Его личный повар ездил за дынями в Китай, за свининой – в Данию, за икрой – в Узбекистан, а за суши – в Токио, на крупнейший рыбный рынок. Один раз Ким Чен Иру захотелось пирожков с рисом. Для этого Фухимото был отправлен в японскую столицу. Пирожков повар купил на $100, а вот перелет и проживание в гостинице обошлось для Пхеньяна примерно в $1,5 тысячи.

О гурманстве Ким Чен Ира писал в своей книге "Восточный экспресс" и полпред российского президента в Дальневосточном федеральном округе Константин Пуликовский, сопровождавший генсека в его путешествии по России. По его воспоминаниям, Ким любил живых омаров, а к его поезду доставляли ящиками французское вино.

Kim Jong-il and the 'A' word

By David Scofield, Jan 21, 2005, Asia Times On-line 

There is no shortage of stories these days suggesting that the North Korean regime is coming apart at the seams. There's even talk of the "A" word - not "assassination", but rather "asylum" or "amnesty". It would free the oppressed Korean people, but it it also would free Dear Leader Kim-Jong-il from the justice he has denied to his subjects. 

First there were the stories of Kim Jong-il's portraits being removed from public places in Pyongyang. Then an increase in anecdotal testimony by recently escaped North Koreans suggesting a growing underground movement of dissent. Last Monday, a South Korean website operated by North Korean refugees living in Seoul, posted a link to a video purportedly smuggled out of North Korea. The video, the first half disjointed shots of a cold, desolate-looking city in what certainly looks like North Korea, seems designed to confirm to the viewer that this has not been staged in a Chinese border town, where life is more prosperous and livelier. 

The videographer entered a warehouse and filmed a sign taped to the wall that said "Overthrow (North Korean leader) Kim Jong-il. Comrades, let's fight ..." Later the camera moved to a picture of the Dear Leader himself, with the words "Kim Jong-il, we demand freedom and democracy ..." written in red script across his beaming face. 

The South Korean authorities were quick to cast aspersions upon the film's authenticity. After all, the video seemed to be depicting some sort of organized opposition to the Dear Leader's rule, assertions his supporters in South Korea's Blue House refuse to acknowledge because they are seeking entente and eventual reunification with their misunderstood and much-maligned brethren to the North. 

The risks taken by those who smuggled the video out are not hard to fathom. In the best-case scenario, to be caught filming such a defacement would mean certain death, and if the criminal were lucky, a quick death. However, defiling the image of the Dear Leader in such a way as depicted in the video, would very likely mean a slow and painful exit from this world, as a lesson to other dissidents, lest they underestimate the cost of discord. 

On Tuesday, the Monthly Chosun related a story of how Kim Jong-il, his fund manager and his girlfriend managed to be granted US visitors visas, by submitting forged passports to the US Embassy in Brazil in 1997. He apparently didn't travel, but Cho Gab-je, the author of this and other articles questioning the stability of the Northern system, postulated that Kim has been feeling out possible escape routes in case his rule continues to unravel, drastically so. As his children have been educated in Switzerland, and bank accounts in the same country are thought to hold a least a few hundred million of the billions of dollars the Kims have squirreled away over the years, Switzerland, the article suggested, may be a likely first stop for Kim and Co. Of course, given that Kim was born outside of North Korea in a small village in the Russian far east, it would seem he would have a legitimate claim to Russian citizenship as well. 

Recent stories concerning possible chaos in North Korea's senior leadership are, by definition, difficult to gauge. High-ranking defectors, such as Hwang Jang-yop, the father of North Korea's juche ideology and the most senior government official to defect to South Korea, has at times stated Kim's regime is strong, while at others times he has asserted that it hangs together by a thread; personal ambitions sometimes muddy the elder official's perceptions. 

But while the validity of recent reports concerning undercurrents of dissent in the North are virtually impossible to definitively judge, it is obvious that there are far more stories, pictures, videos and testimony in the public domain originating from the North than ever before. The implication being, if nothing else, the regime's ability to thwart the smuggling of people, video and photographic material out of the North has diminished. Indeed, the recently passed US North Korean Human Rights Act provides a budget of US$2 million to those who aid and abet refugees while exposing the system they flee - a paltry sum easily lost in the US budget, but perhaps an incentive for those committed to exposing the atrocities of the North to take greater risks in securing evidence of dissent. 

Whatever the case, the untenable nature of the Kim regime is becoming clearer, at least to those outside South Korea's Unification Ministry. That Kim Jong-il is not capable of making the sorts of changes necessary for his regime to comply with previous promises concerning his ending his nuclear program, much less any consideration of sundries such as human rights, should be obvious by now. Given this, the question of what to do with the Kims is beginning to gain currency, with some floating the "A" word, meaning amnesty and asylum. 

Supporters of amnesty and asylum for the Kims argue that it would remove the leadership and emancipate the people of North Korea with a minimum of bloodshed and instability. On the other hand, it would not hold Kim and Co accountable for their crimes, though dictators from Idi Amin of Uganda to Jean Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, among others, have been granted residence in other countries. 

Images of Kim lapping Hennessy Paradis from the belly of one of the thousands of young girls who comprise his pleasure team, hardly approach the justice those most familiar with his reign know must be applied. Indeed, with others in the leadership structure likely no less ambivalent to the suffering and despair than Kim, the option of an escape to a walled villa in an undisclosed nation, while expedient, hardly ensures justice. 

There are other ways of course. He and his immediate family's deaths could be staged, their DNA scattered around the scene of a massive explosion, such as the one at Ryongchon, where a blast occurred at a train station last April, hours after Kim Jong-il had passed through on his way back from China. His "death" and then absolute seclusion might be possible. Of course, this is Kim Jong-il, and it is unlikely that he and even a minimum complement of lackeys would be able to live out their days in seclusion, and not demand the attention of the world, or work to influence the newly managed North in some self-serving way. 

Consider Charles Taylor, the former dictator of Liberia. At least 250,000 died when Taylor seized the nation's capital in coup in 1990. After 10 years of bloody rule, the solution, with a minimum of additional bloodshed, was for Charles, his wife, bodyguards and other essential lackeys to be moved to another locale. This it turns out was the easy part. Far from living out their days comfortably expelled to a palatial villa in an exclusive suburb of Lagos, Nigeria, Taylor is still reportedly using his remaining influence in the country to affect decisions made by the new government in Liberia. Is it any less likely the "Sun King" wouldn't do the same? 

As for justice, last year the US Congress added a line item to a large bill which provides a reward, $2 million, a bounty some might call it, to whomever produces Charles Taylor to a United Nations-backed war-crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone, where he is wanted for war-crimes violations stemming from his backing of rebel groups. So with Taylor as an example, it is unlikely Kim would be interested in a deal that could see him outside the comparatively safe confines of North Korea, exposed, with a price on his head. 

That Kim Jong-il is the fundamental impediment to regional peace and national development in North Korea should be obvious. But bundling his bouffant and even a fraction of his pleasure team off to an undisclosed location in order for him to live out his days is reprehensible at the most basic human level. That he must go is without question. That his exit should be painless and impermanent would be a grave injustice to all who suffered and died under his rule. 

David Scofield, former lecturer at the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University, is currently conducting post-graduate research at the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. 

Kim Jong-il Obtained U.S. Visa in 1997

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and two other North Koreans obtained U.S. entry visas using fake Eastern European passports in 1997, the February edition of the Monthly Chosun reports.

The magazine, published Tuesday, said that several months after the visas were issued, U.S. intelligence officials realized that the photos on the ledger were those of Kim Jong-il, a secretary by the name Park, and Kim’s mistress Chung Il-son. Investigations revealed that Park and Chung went in and out of the U.S. several times. It was not clear why Kim wanted a visa. 

The monthly also reported that Ko Yong-suk, the sister of Kim Jong-il's recently deceased wife Ko Young-hee, defected to the United States in May 1998 with her husband, a man in his late 40s identified only as Park, through the U.S. Embassy in Switzerland. Ko tipped off U.S. officials that Kim was investing in the New York stock market. Kim's investments were subsequently frozen. 

North Korea's Only Talking Head Loves the US

By Jeremy Kirk, Jan 19, 2005, Asia Times on-line 

SEOUL - Meet Kim Myong-chol, perhaps North Korea's only avid and available talking head for one of the world's most mysterious regimes. This very unofficial diplomat is a short, graying, gregarious man of 60 who lives in Japan, talks non-stop and rapid-fire and prefers the United States to Japan, where he now lives. Of course, he loves North Korea, and his mission is to try to educate the world about the Pyongyang government, but he does so - despite his pointed messages - in a tactful, friendly manner, not as a shrill, angry polemicist who alienates his audience. 

"When I go to Pyongyang, I am spokesman for America," the engaging Kim told Asia Times Online with a laugh. "But in Washington, I am a spokesman for North Korea." His business cards show US and North Korean flags. Some people call him a traitor. 

He agreed to be interviewed by Asia Times Online both in person in Japan and by e-mail from Seoul. Kim speaks in heavily accented English and has an impressive vocabulary. His writing in English on foreign-policy issues is nearly flawless. He pens papers and books in Korean, Japanese and English, attempting to educate the world that he says does not understand Pyongyang. 

Kim said he feels more comfortable in the United States than in Japan, though he did not expand beyond saying that he likes the people and has quite a few friends among US military officers, scholars and university professors. He has no problems with Americans as people - it's the government policies on the Korean Peninsula and North Asia that he objects to. 

Kim frequently delivers sharp messages about the correctness of North Korean policy and what he calls benighted US policy. But he's no clone of the North's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). He views politics as distinct from people and enjoys engaging the press and pundits on North Korean theory. He has an intimate knowledge of Korean culture and history and how it relates to the current political atmosphere with both Japan and the US. 

Kim travels to the US several times a year, giving talks and speeches at universities and think-tanks about North Korea. As for his statements about foreign policy, Kim said that North Korea's seemingly warm reception to six-party nuclear talks after a US congressional visit last week does not mean its leaders have budged on their core agenda: a peace treaty with the United States and the lifting of economic sanctions. 

"The North Koreans have been knocking on the door for more than 30 years since they made their first proposal for Pyongyang-Washington talks to discuss a peace treaty," said Kim, an ethnic Korean who says he has close ties with the Pyongyang regime."Their policy goal remains unchanged. They will display great patience, waiting for another 100 years." 

The six-party talks with North Korea, which include the United States, South Korea, China, Russia and Japan, have not resulted in an agreement since they started in August 2003. North Korea indicated in November to US officials in New York that it would be receptive to more talks but it did not propose a schedule. The talks are aimed at persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear-weapons program. 

But the strongest positive signals about the talks came last week after the return from Pyongyang of a delegation led by Republican Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, senior member of the House Armed Services Committee. The entourage met with Kim Yong-yam, second in charge after leader Kim Jong-il, and they held talks with the country's foreign minister and vice foreign minister. 

"Obviously the congressional delegation's visit has gone well," Kim Myong-chol said. "They will be welcome back in Pyongyang. Weldon is much more reliable than [US President George W] Bush or [Secretary of State Colin] Powell. He has a very good program. However, what matters in the eyes of Kim Jong-il and his policymakers is what the White House says and does. The legislative branch is important as well." 

Although he holds Japanese citizenship and lives in Japan, Kim is firmly Korean, attracted to North Korea because of its policy of self-reliance and independence from the outside world. "Why do I like North Korea? Its political will to be independent from all foreigners - from China, from Russia - this is a point that attracts me," Kim said. "Which is better, hungry wolf or fat dog?" 

Kim said his writings have been designated as required reading by Kim Jong-il. He said he received a doctoral degree in political science from North Korea's National Degree Examination Commission in 2001. 

What North Korea wants to see is an attitude change from the United States, Kim said. "Unless the second-term administration by George W Bush offers to end the US policy of hostility in a complete and irreversible way, the Kim Jong-il government will never give up its nuclear deterrence," Kim said. "In the meantime, the North Koreans are ready for talks on simultaneous coordinated piecemeal actions, while increasing its nuclear capability." 

Kim is not without critics who question his connections with the North Korean regime. He admits he's at odds with the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, a pro-Pyongyang group, a relationship he said was strained by the fame he claims he has received because of his writings. "They told Pyongyang I was a pro-American agent, a traitor," Kim said. 

The animated, garrulous writer recently summed up his mission by holding a soy-sauce bottle: "Americans and Japanese only look this way" at North Korea, he said, pointing to one side of the bottle, adding that he shows all sides. 

Kim, who is the executive director of his own organization, the Center for Korean-American Peace, which he founded in 1999, does offer a colorful, impassioned perspective on North Korea and how the country deals with the outside world. Kim says that to make progress on the nuclear issue, the United States must sign a peace treaty with North Korea, officially ending the 51-year-old armistice agreement. 

The United States has shunned North Korea's bid for a bilateral peace treaty with Washington, seeing it as a move by Pyongyang to splinter ties with allied countries who participated in the 1950-53 Korean War. "From the North Korean point of view, unless America is willing to concede on that point, North Korea has no reason to give up nuclear deterrence," Kim said. 

Kim scoffed at the widely quoted US Central Intelligence Agency estimate that North Korea may have one or two functioning nuclear weapons. He said the country has between 100 and 300 weapons based on a nuclear program active since the 1960s. He maintains that it was North Korea that aided Pakistan with its program. 

Nuclear weapons, Kim says, are the only way for a small country such as North Korea to balance the scale against the United States. Nuclear weapons are also cheaper than conventional forces, Kim said: an army must be fed, and soldiers could be prone to division. 

"For the moment, North Korea sees no sense in selling nuclear technology," Kim said. "But as long as America remains hostile, we have every reason to sell whatever we have." 

That kind of talk causes US policymakers to bristle: an estranged North Korea aiding terrorist groups with nuclear technology is among the worst imaginable scenarios. Kim Jong-il is unlikely to give up his nuclear card easily even though he wants a peace treaty and diplomatic relations with the United States, Kim Myong-chol asserted. 

"Kim Jong-il's goal," his unofficial spokesman said, "is to neutralize or nullify the American military presence." 

‘A Little Off the Top?’ 

January 16, 2005, by Daniel V. Smith, JINSA’s Manager for Research and Communications. 

Eccentric Social Campaign May Signal North Korean Leadership Struggle
A recently-announced campaign by North Korea’s state-controlled media to promote the benefits of shorter hairstyles may be the latest indicator of a significant power struggle between Kim Jong-Il and competing government officials.

The campaign, running extensively on North Korean state television over the last few months exhorts the ‘mental benefits; of short haircuts, particularly amongst men. According to the a January 8, 2005 report on the BBC’s website, the campaign stresses the “negative effects” of long hair on “human intelligence,” reasoning that both the brain and hair draw from the same nutritional sources and by reducing the amount of hair, North Koreans can increase their intellectual capacity. 

At the 2nd World Congress of Korean Studies held at the People’s Palace of Culture, August 4 and 5, 2004, in Pyongyang, only the portrait of the late President Kim Il Sung is hung on the wall in contravention of past policy. At first glance, this may appear to be just another eccentricity in a nation known for its bizarre and sometimes outrageous displays of ‘national pride’ and the ‘socialist ideal,’ but the ramifications are likely to run far deeper than simply promoting a uniform appearance for North Korean men: it appears to be an attack against Kim Jong-Il. Shorter than most Koreans, Kim has typically worn lifts in his shoes and sported an odd-looking bouffant hairstyle aimed at giving him a notionally larger physical appearance. With an official proclamation that equates long hair with relatively-low mental capacity, Kim’s government has essentially forced the highly-vain dictator to reduce his apparent stature, or risk public doubts about his intelligence. In a state as tightly-controlled as North Korea, such embarrassments would not be promulgated by the official media, if Kim Jong Il was firmly in control. 

Doubts about Kim Jong-Il’s grip on power have been on the rise since a massive explosion took place in the small town of Ryongchon, shortly after Kim rode through, returning from a state visit to Beijing on April 22, 2004. While the official North Korean explanation for the massive explosion, which leveled seven square miles of the town and injured thousands, was a train accident that took place hours after Kim Jong-Il passed through, based on the fact that many of those injured and killed were facing the same way and that optical injuries represented a large proportion of those treated, it is possible that the explosion occurred much closer to the time of Kim’s arrival and may have been an assassination attempt. 

Further evidence of the growing leadership crisis in North Korea is illustrated by a spate of reports since August and September 2004 that the official portraits of Kim Jong-Il, seen hanging in every state building alongside the portrait of the late-Kim Il-Sung since the elder Kim’s death in 1994, have been removed for unknown reasons, although the portraits of Kim Il-Sung, otherwise known as “Great Leader,” remain. Additionally, since Autumn, the Korean Central New Agency (KCNA), the official state press agency, has ceased using Kim Jong-Il’s reverential appellation, “Dear Leader,” although he is still referred to as “General Secretary of the Worker’s Party of Korea” and “Chairman of the National Defense Commision,” according to the January 2005 issue Jane’s Intelligence Review. While these changes were initially dismissed as an attempt by Kim Jong-Il to soften the outward appearance of his personality cult, the evidence is mounting that they are harbingers of much more drastic changes underway in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) power structure. 

According to unconfirmed reports by South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, even Kim Jong-Nam, the eldest son and likely heir to Kim Jong-Il is a target in the apparent battle to control North Korea. During a November 2004 trip to Europe, Yonhap’s reports claim that the 33 year-old Kim was the target of an assassination attempt. In the months since, reports from Japan, including one from Kyodo News, indicate that Kim Jong-Nam has been oddly communicative, sending emails and cards wishing reporters and foreign officials a ‘Happy New Year.’ Such communication efforts are largely uncharacteristic and may indicate a sense of desperation on the part of the younger Kim. 

In the latest example of the North Korean government’s schizophrenic behavior, on Saturday, January 15, when Pyongyang accused the U.S. of being a “nuclear criminal” one day after offering to become a “friend” of the United States if Washington did not make inflammatory remarks about Kim Jong Il’s regime, the Associated Press reported. The friendship offer was made to a bipartisan Congressional delegation led by Representative Curt Weldon (R-Penn.). The delegation, in Pyongyang to discuss ending North Korea’s nuclear program, never met with Kim Jong-Il but discussed the crucial issue instead with Kim Jong-Nam, Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun and Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan during their three-day visit. Weldon characterized the meetings as more positive than expected, “[w]ithout any hesitation, they have agreed that there will be a way in which the end result would result in them giving up their nuclear capability,” Weldon said. 

The already murky internal politics of North Korea appear to grow more dangerous by the week. The closed nature of North Korean society makes it difficult to determine the actors at work in this apparent power struggle, and thus determining the possible repercussions are nearly impossible. 

N Korea Wages War on Long Hair 

Men's hairstyles reflect their 'ideological spirit' 

North Korea has launched an intensive media assault on its latest arch enemy - the wrong haircut. A campaign exhorting men to get a proper short-back-and-sides has been aired by state-run Pyongyang television. The series is entitled Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle.

While the campaign has been carried out primarily on television, reports have appeared in North Korean press and radio, urging tidy hairstyles and proper attire. It is the strongest media campaign against men's sloppy appearances mounted in the reclusive and impoverished Communist state in recent years.

The propaganda drive on grooming standards has gone a stage further than previous attempts. This time television identifies specific individuals deemed too shoddy. Pyongyang television started the campaign last autumn with a five-part series in its regular TV Common Sense programme. 

Stressing hygiene and health, it showed various state-approved short hairstyles including the "flat-top crew cut," "middle hairstyle," "low hairstyle," and "high hairstyle" - variations from one to five centimetres in length. The programme allowed men aged over 50 seven centimetres of upper hair to cover balding. It stressed the "negative effects" of long hair on "human intelligence development", noting that long hair "consumes a great deal of nutrition" and could thus rob the brain of energy. Men should get a haircut every 15 days, it recommended.

A second, and unprecedented, TV series this winter showed hidden-camera style video of "long-haired" men in various locations throughout Pyongyang. Hair is a very important issue that shows the people's cultural standards and mental and moral state. In a break with North Korean TV's usual approach, the programme gave their names and addresses, and challenged the fashion victims directly over their appearance. 

The North Korean media normally reserves the reporting of names of its citizens to exemplary individuals who show high communist virtues. The series was shot at various public locations - on the street, at a sports stadium, a barbershop, a bus stop, a restaurant, a department store. 

Some unruly-haired pedestrians or customers captured on camera "meanly ran away", the programme said, while others made excuses about being too busy to get a trim. Television newsreels such as "Employees of Pyongyang Textile Plant keep their hairstyle and dressing neat and tidy" and "Hairdressers at Ch'anggwangwo'n manage men's hair according to the demands of the military-first era" have also aired.

State radio programmes such as "Dressing in accordance with our people's emotion and taste" link clothes and appearance with the wearer's "ideological and mental state". People who wear other's style of dress and live in other's style will become fools and that nation will come to ruin 

Tidy attire "is important in repelling the enemies' manoeuvres to infiltrate corrupt capitalist ideas and lifestyle and establishing the socialist lifestyle of the military-first era," the radio says. Newspapers too highlight the civic advantages of short hair and smart shoes. 

Hair is a "very important issue that shows the people's cultural standards and mental and moral state", argues Minju Choson, a government daily. "No matter how good the clothes, if one does not wear tidy shoes, one's personality will be downgraded."

For party papers such as Nodong Sinmun, the struggle against foreign and anti-communist influence is being fought out in the arena of personal appearance. "People who wear other's style of dress and live in other's style will become fools and that nation will come to ruin," it says.

North Korea: Amnesty for the Kims and their Kith

By Andrei Lankov International Herald Tribune Saturday, January 8, 2005 

SEOUL One has to feel a bit of sympathy for North Korean leaders. Yes, they run a brutal dictatorship, but they are also victims of their own system. They know their system doesn't work, but they have no decent exit strategy. This is a disaster, for them and for their hapless subjects.

As somebody who witnessed the collapse of the Soviet system from within, I can testify that popular discontent was only one of many factors. The final blow to the Communist system was dealt when its elite decided that it would make sense to jettison their formal allegiance to Communist ideology (by the 1980s, few of them believed it in any case). Politically this proved wise: Many of these people are still in power in most post-Soviet states.

Why did North Korean leaders not follow suit? After all, the born-again capitalists of Russia or Ukraine or Kazakhstan now enjoy standards of living no top-level Communist bureaucrat could dream of. 

Alas, in North Korea this turn of events is prevented by the presence of the problem known as South Korea. The very existence of this affluent and free country makes serious attempts at reform in the North politically risky. Reforms in other Communist countries, like China or Vietnam, led to a fast economic recovery. But this recovery was possible in dramatically different political circumstances: There was no "South China" (Taiwan is way too small), and South Vietnam went out of business 30 years ago.

The North Korean elite seems to believe that large-scale reforms would lead to disaster. They are probably right. If, as a result of reforms, ordinary North Koreans start learning more about South Korean prosperity and become less fearful of persecution, what will stop them from behaving the way East Germans did in 1990? In North Korea, unification with the South will be seen by a majority as a quick fix for all their problems. 

Then what would be the fate of North Korea's leaders? Unlike their ex-Soviet comrades, they have few if any ways to transform themselves into successful capitalists or democratic politicians. Even if they manage to follow the example of the new Russian super-rich and stea... sorry, privatize state-owned companies, these rusty, antiquated plants will not be of great value, especially if large South Korean conglomerates move in. Capitalism in the North will be built by the managers of Samsung and LG Korea, not by born-again Communist apparatchiks.

And then there is a fear of persecution. This is not paranoia. The regime has committed many crimes. For decades, the North Korean population has been treated with a systematic ferocity the world has not seen since the collapse of Pol Pot's Kampuchea. Torture is a normal part of any investigation, and the families of more serious political criminals are also sent to prison. About 200,000 people are incarcerated in prison camps which rival Stalin's in their brutality. 

The Communist bosses cannot even hope to run and find asylum somewhere. Even if a country like Russia or China agreed to accept them (and that's a big if), there are few chances that they would be safe if Seoul demands their extradition. We saw it before when the former East German strongman, Erich Honecker, sought asylum in Moscow but was arrested and extradited by a new Russian government. Moscow didn't feel much loyalty for a man who had been Moscow's best (and very efficient) ally for decades.

Thus the North Korean elite is cornered. These people do not want to tamper with the existing system, since they are afraid it would collapse. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose - not only their privilege and power, but also their freedom and perhaps even their lives. 

They know how they would treat the South Korean elite if they won, and they do not see why they would be treated differently by a victorious South. This means they have to continue with their policies, believing that their choice is kill or be killed. So the government does its best to keep the system going, at a cost of many human lives and dangerous international brinkmanship.

What can be done? The short answer is amnesty. People who run the country should be granted immunity from persecution for all crimes committed during the 60-odd years of their rule. I am fully aware that we are talking about people who were in many respects as bad as Stalin and Hitler. But amnesty is necessary - not for them, of course, but for countless people whose lives would be so much better if the North Korean leaders were less persistent in their rejection of reforms. 

North Korean leaders are unlikely to take a promise of amnesty at face value. Hence to make such a promise believable, it should be public, unequivocal and all-inclusive, leaving as few loopholes for future revenge-seekers as possible. 

Perhaps international involvement will be necessary. The overthrown leaders will not feel too secure in their native land where they spilled so much blood, and they are likely to become a political burden for their former patrons in Moscow and Beijing. Thus it will probably help if some neutral country agrees to provide the Kims and their confidants with the right to stay there, freely spending their ill-gotten millions. 

This sounds quite cynical. But it's a compromise that would save many lives. The North Korea's leaders' stubbornness has contributed to huge numbers of deaths in the famines of 1996 to 1999 (between some 600,000 and 900,000 perished), and it played a major role in the development of a nuclear crisis. So it might make sense to let a few overweight and retired executioners spend the rest of lives somewhere else.

Street life in North Korea

 January 08, 2005

A still taken from a videotape shows a homeless girl in Cheongjin, 

North Hamgyeong province, in North Korea. Courtesy of Nippon TV

Click here to watch the video clip

We've seen pictures of emaciated North Korean babies starving to death, which alone were appalling enough. While the images are still vivid in our memories, here are more photographs that speak louder than words about the harsh reality of conditions in North Korea. These photos are still cuts from a 90-minute videotape that Japan's Nippon Television Network first obtained. Allegedly filmed by a North Korean army officer, who reportedly said he wanted to "show the suffering of the North Korean people," the videotape vividly captures scenes of the city of Cheongjin, capital of North Hamgyeong province, not far from the Chinese border. 

The JoongAng Ilbo received a copy of the tape from the TV network, and the first few images appeared in yesterday's JoongAng Daily. Today's photos show children with unfocused eyes smoking cigarettes, rummaging in a waste bin in a desperate search for something to eat or just too feeble to stand up. The number of such beggar boys has increased so substantially after years of economic crisis that they have earned the nickname of kkotjebi, or flower swallows, which does not quite befit their ragged look. You may not want to believe what you are seeing. But this is not fiction, from which you can easily avert your eyes. This is what is happening in the northern part of the peninsula. Stills courtesy of Nippon TV. 

Cautious Development Looms in North Korea

By BURT HERMAN, The Associated Press, Sunday, January 2, 2005

SEOUL, South Korea - Streets in the North Korean capital Pyongyang are lined with sidewalk stalls selling snacks and beer, the restaurant scene is growing and semi-liberalized markets are becoming centers of trade in imported food and clothes. 

This is the new face of North Korea, say recent visitors, and the most visible result of changes to the communist state's economy that are starting to bear fruit - and potentially dim the prospects for an economic meltdown disrupting leader Kim Jong Il's hold on power. 

It's hardly an economic boom, especially compared with rival South Korea, the world's 11th-largest economy. Still, times in the North are not quite as tough as they once were for the fortunate few able to afford it - amounting to a sea change in a nation where all forms of capitalism previously were banned. 

A stroll through Pyongyang provides proof of the positive economic trend, visitors say. 

North Koreans perch in ground-floor apartment windows selling dumplings and cakes, smoked fish, beer and soft drinks, said Leonid Petrov, a fellow at the Korea Foundation in Seoul who visited Pyongyang in August. People sew or repair clothes from small workshops. At night, vendors set up pojangmachas - small tents selling street food that are a frequent sight in Seoul. 

In markets, vendors hawk Chinese noodles and candy, clothes, bags and boots, Petrov said. People also can buy secondhand computers and are increasingly going online to chat on the country's internal version of the Internet that is blocked off from the outside world. 

"Everything is on sale in North Korea," Petrov said. 

New restaurants are springing up in Pyongyang, where business-savvy owners offer dishes on the house and discounts for return customers - part of a new sense of entrepreneurship that has emerged in the past year, said Kathi Zellweger of the Roman Catholic charity Caritas, who has visited North Korea 47 times - the last time in September. 

"Before, people had no idea about costs or prices. Now, it's dinner table conversation," she said. 

A new report by the South's Unification Ministry says there are 350 restaurants and 150 bars operating in Pyongyang, with some even selling hamburgers. There are also 24-hour stores and computer cafes, and karaoke and pool halls stay open late, the report said. 

The opening of markets also has led to harder times for many, however. 

U.N. agencies say that rising prices and harvest shortfalls mean food aid still will be required for more than 6 million North Koreans this year. There are price caps at the new markets on key items like rice and corn, but that has not stopped costs from soaring out of reach of many North Koreans, with a whole month's regular salary only enough to buy about 8.8 pounds of rice. 

The changes also have yet to make much of an impact outside the capital, and government spending still is heavily focused on the country's vast military. 

Analysts differ on whether the opening of North Korea's economy amounts to a real change in the isolated regime's thinking or is just a reaction to people taking matters into their own hands to survive.

The government is moving slowly to avoid any instability, and so far the economic changes do not appear to have weakened the regime, said Peter Beck, director of the North East Asia project for the International Crisis Group think tank. 

But a recent report from Japan's intelligence agency warned the widening gap between rich and poor could lead to a shake-up, saying increasing theft and robbery show the regime's tight grip on the country is being pried open. 

The cautious growth in North Korea's economy was fostered by moves in July 2002 to scale back elements of the centrally planned economy and allow prices to be set by the market. The North also has been boosted by foreign aid that helped the country cope with disastrous floods and poor harvests in the 1990s. 

"We believe that the North Korean economy is not getting worse," said Yang Jeong-hwa, a spokeswoman at South Korea's Unification Ministry, in charge of handling policy with the North. 

The country's gross national income went from $15.7 billion in 2001 to $18.4 billion in 2003, Yang said, an increase of 17 percent. 

"There is some achievement," she said. 

Roger Barrett, managing director of Hong Kong-based Korea Business Consultants that advises companies seeking to enter the North Korean market, is bullish about opportunities there. His firm has helped foreign companies doing everything from gold mining to textiles to consumer goods work in the North. 

"There is economic reform and there's been significant shifts in thinking," Barrett said. "Those who are employed in companies to develop profitable business are thinking on exactly the same lines as everybody doing business around the world." 

There are also risks to investing in a country where money safeguards and the regime's stability are issues of concern, along with the fact that, in the past, politics have always trumped business. 

Still, the lack of competition enables the few willing to work there to negotiate favorable deals, Barrett said. "Business is not as difficult as you might think," he said. 

Joint economic projects between the Koreas are also starting to see results and provide a way for the North to circumvent its pariah status. 

In December, the first products - kitchen pots - were shipped from a special economic zone in Kaesong, just inside the North's border, and delivered to a Seoul department store where they were snapped up by shoppers looking to own a piece of history. 

Whatever the economic prospects, the continuing crisis over North Korea's refusal to abandon its nuclear weapons programs means the country remains off-limits to many and subject to sanctions that ban it from receiving foreign loans. 

"There are real changes going on, but unless North Korea is given access to international assistance, they are not going to succeed," Beck said. 

SATELLITE PHOTOS SHOW OUTDATED N. KOREAN MILITARY FORCES

Kyodo News reported that a US environmental group unveiled Wednesday some 100 commercial satellite photos of DPRK defense, nuclear and other facilities taken over the past two to three years, concluding that its conventional military weapons are outdated and do not pose a threat to the US and ROK. "From what has been seen of North Korea's capability, certainly not a threat to the United States...not much of a threat to South Korea," Thomas Cochran, the nuclear program director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in releasing the photos at a press conference. Cochran also said the photos suggested that there is no need for nuclear weapons, especially the earth-penetrating bunker busters being developed by the US, to remove targets, adding that the DPRK can be dealt with using conventional weapons. ("SATELLITE PHOTOS SHOW OUTDATED N. KOREAN MILITARY FORCES", 2005-01-06)

NORTH KOREA ISSUES WARTIME GUIDELINES

The Associated Press reported that the DPRK has ordered its citizens to be ready for a protracted war against the US, issuing guidelines on evacuating to underground bunkers with weapons, food and portraits of leader Kim Jong Il. The 33-page "Detailed Wartime Guidelines," published in the ROK's Kyunghyang newspaper on Wednesday and verified by Seoul, was issued April 7, 2004, at a time when the DPRK was claiming it was Washington's next target following the Iraq war. "The United States has cooked up suspicion over our nuclear programs and is escalating an offensive of international pressure to strangle and destroy our republic," the booklet said. "If this tactic doesn't work, it plots to use this (nuclear) problem as an excusefor armed invasion." ("NORTH KOREA ISSUES WARTIME GUIDELINES", None)

NK READY FOR WAR SINCE LAST APRIL

Korea Times reported that the DPRK enhanced its war readiness in April last year, putting emphasis on self-defense, according to top-secret documents signed by Kim Jong-il. Kim issued a two-page directive and a 31-page bylaw on April 7, demanding the Workers Party, the military and all people assume wartime readiness, the Seoul government confirmed. The Dear Leader ordered people to be ready to mobilize all possible resources within 24 hours following the outbreak of war, increasing the number of available troops through recruiters in each province, city and county. "The US is trying to suffocate us by fanning nuclear suspicions," the introduction of the bylaw said. "The US will take advantage of the nuclear issue as a reason to invade us." ("NK READY FOR WAR SINCE LAST APRIL", 2005-01-05) 

MOBILIZATION WITHIN 24 HOURS FOLLOWING THE OUTBREAK OF WAR

Donga Ilbo reported that it was revealed Wednesday that the DPRK distributed a directive and a wartime bylaw by National Defense Committee Chairman Kim Jong Il nationwide on April 7, 2004. According to the bylaw, wartime will progress in three phases of defense, attack, and attrition. It ordered to carry out aggressive psychological and operational warfare against freed local people in the phases of attack and attrition. It was said that the DPRKs police and intelligence authorities would establish command centers in underground tunnels, and commanding officials must secure the personnel, weapons, and military equipments in hiding places in the tunnels, and must make eating places, drinking water, sanitary and purification facilities ready for a protracted war. ("MOBILIZATION WITHIN 24 HOURS FOLLOWING THE OUTBREAK OF WAR", 2005-01-05)

NORTH KOREAN WAR PLAN MAY BE PROPAGANDA

Chosun Ilbo reported that the DPRK strengthened its war plans on April 7, 2004, when it published an updated set of bylaws outlining how a potential war would be conducted, it was learned Wednesday. Some intelligence officials, however, are raising suspicions about the content of the document. An intelligence official said that from the DPRK's position, it was suspicious that the bylaws focused on defensive concepts and double-checking contingency plans. He said if this were a war contingency plan, the DPRK would have also considered pre-emptive strikes, which it is capable of carrying out, but no such plans appeared in the document. He said that given the consideration that such content may have been intentionally omitted, the document may have been manufactured for propaganda purposes to demonstrate that the DPRK could withstand US-applied pressure. ("NORTH KOREAN WAR PLAN MAY BE PROPAGANDA", 2005-01-05) 

SPECULATION ABOUT N. KOREA RESURFACES; RUMORS ABOUND ABOUT POSSIBLE REGIME COLLAPSE

Boston Globe reported that a decade ago, it was taken as a matter of faith that the DPRK would soon be relegated to the same historical dustbin as the Soviet Union. But Kim Jong Il defied predictions of his political demise, and embarrassed pundits stopped even broaching the topic of the regime's life expectancy. "The idea that North Korea is about to collapse is back in fashion," said Jeung Young-Tai, a member of the team at the Seoul-based Korea Institute for National Unification studying the likelihood of collapse. ("SPECULATION ABOUT N. KOREA RESURFACES; RUMORS ABOUND ABOUT POSSIBLE REGIME COLLAPSE", 2005-01-03)

SUSPICIOUS CONNECTION BETWEEN N. KOREAS POWER STRUGGLE AND REFORMS

Donga Ilbo reported that the Independent, a British newspaper, reported in its article on December 29 that the DPRKs internal power struggle could be connected to its scope and pace of economic reforms. The paper quoted some anonymous diplomats as saying that DPRK leader Kim Jong Il may have purged Vice Director of the ruling Korean Workers Partys Organization and Guidance Department Chang Song Taek, his brother-in-law, and 80 close associates for that reason. The daily also wrote that Kim Jong Il may announce new policies on politics and the economy before his birthday in February. ("SUSPICIOUS CONNECTION BETWEEN N. KOREAS POWER STRUGGLE AND REFORMS", 2005-01-03)

N. KOREA ISSUES NEW ID CARDS, REPORT SAYS

Yonhap reported that the DPRK has issued new ID cards to its people for the first time in five years, an Internet news outlet claimed Monday. The Seoul-based Daily NK, which specializes in DPRK affairs, said the new ID card has been issued to people in major cities since September but delivery has been delayed to those in the countryside. ("N. KOREA ISSUES NEW ID CARDS, REPORT SAYS", 2005-01-03)

N.KOREA PRIORITIZES FOOD PRODUCTION

United Press International reported that DPRK leader Kim Jong Il has placed top priority for this year on increasing agricultural production, Pyongyang's media said Monday. "Great General (Kim) said the whole nation should exert all of its efforts for agriculture in 2005, which marks the Party's 60th anniversary," said Rodong Sinmun, the organ of the ruling Workers' Party. "Rice is our gun and our national power," the paper said. "If armed with rice in addition to the strong military and defense industry, we are not afraid of any future attacks from enemies," it said. ("N.KOREA PRIORITIZES FOOD PRODUCTION", 2005-01-03)

North Korea Likely to Start Household-based Arable System in March 

by Suk-Ho Shin Dong-A Ilbo,  JANUARY 03, 2005 

North Korea, in an effort to enhance the productivity of collective farms, has decided to implement agricultural reform policies in March or April that would divide the current group unit into a group of two or three households. 

If this policy is to approve de-facto family farming in North Korea, the first phase of the socialistic agriculture reform that China had implemented in 1978 will start again in the hermit kingdom, experts said. 

North Korea provided collective farm members private arable land beside common arable and let them cultivate the lands. This private arable system was introduced nationwide last year as a pilot project. 

“This year, North Korea decided to start a household-based arable system nationwide which would group two or three household a single unit,” said a Chinese high-ranking official source Monday. 

North Korea has prepared for this system since late last month, and basic content of the new system was already distributed to working-level officers, including agriculture management committees of each province, the source said. 

According to the source, the new system would be revised or some detailed parts added in consideration of regional differences of each province, and if this is done early, the system will be adopted nationwide at the final determination of the Agricultural Ministry. 

And each collective farm has not received any orders yet, so that North Korean people are not aware of contents of this new arable system. 

“When a single unit composed of two or three households in close relationship such as relatives, private or household farming in disguise of collective farming is possible,” explained Professor Yang Moon-su at the graduate school of North Korean Studies. 

“North Korea intends to carry out a large scale reform based on a new group management system adopted in 1996, and by reducing the number of members to 10 and using the selfishness of family, they try to increase productivity,” analyzed Professor Nam Sung-wuk of North Korea studies at Korea University. 

In its New Year joint editorial published on January 1, 2005, North Korea said that this year the main goal of establishing a socialistic economy would be agriculture, and people should focus all their capacity on farming to get the best output.

DPRK SUGGESTS THREE GOALS IN NEW YEAR'S EDITORIAL

Donga Ilbo, 2 JANUARY 2005

On January 1, North Korea, in a common editorial run in three state-run newspapers -- the party, army, and youth league papers -- urged its citizens "to advance altogether with the military-first revolution." In the common editorial with the title "The Party, the Army, and the People should unite as one and make the military-first policy be more powerful," North Korea said that "unity always wins, and it is a stronger sword than nuclear weapons." North Korea's common editorial outlines its policy goals for the New Year.

In the editorial, under the slogan of "Military-first Revolution," North Korea presented its goals "to improve agricultural productivity"; "to strengthen the unity of society"; and "to strengthen Inter-Korean cooperation" as the three goals of this year.

IMPROVING AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY

The editorial said, "Agriculture is the main front of socialist economic construction this year." It stressed, "We should focus and mobilize all our capability towards successful farming." An official in the Ministry of Unification analyzed, "It seems that the North Korean regime has found the fundamental cause of the crisis in its regime in lowered agricultural productivity, the starvation of its people, and a withering loyalty to the country."

PROSPECTS FOR THE INTER-KOREAN RELATIONSHIP

"The year 2005 is significant as it is the fifth anniversary of the landmark 6-15 inter-Korea summit," the editorial said. It also stressed that the two Koreas should realize three cooperations: "cooperation for national independence"; "cooperation for opposing war and achieving peace" and "cooperation for unification and patriotism." In its report, "Analysis of the New Year's Common Editorial," the Ministry of Unification said, "With the celebration events for the 60th anniversary of the independence of Korea and the inauguration of its Labor Party, North Korea will actively hold non-governmental-level events, and will focus on forming solidarity and union with Koreans overseas." An expert, who wanted to be left anonymous, said, "This can be interpreted to mean that North Korea is pursuing another 'united front strategy' to rally civil groups who follow their line instead of their governments."

PROSPECTS FOR NORTH KOREA-AMERICA RELATIONS

The editorial said "The US policies against the DPRK have become evermore pronounced, and this is increasing the danger of a war on the Korean peninsula." It reiterated, "The US should make a switchover in its hostile policy towards the DPRK." However, Professor Yu Ho-yeol of Korea University, who specializes in North Korea, said, "As it didn't mention the nuclear issue directly and lowered the level of censure towards the US than in past years, it seems that North Korea will return to the six-party talks after the second Bush administration starts and it finds just cause for the action."

JOINT NEW YEAR EDITORIAL

Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), 1 January 2005

The papers in Pyongyang on January 1 carried a joint editorial "Let the Whole Party and Army and All the People Unite as One in Mind and More Strikingly Demonstrate the Might of Songun!" released by Rodong Sinmun, Josoninmingun and Chongnyonjonwi on the occasion of the New Year Juche 94 (2005). The editorial recalls that last year Juche 93 (2004) was a year of worthwhile struggle in which a revolutionary offensive was conducted on the three fronts -- politics and ideology, anti-imperialism and military affairs and economy and science -- to make a breakthrough toward fresh success in the efforts to build a great prosperous powerful nation.

Last year the army and people of the DPRK strikingly demonstrated their faith and will to unswervingly follow the road of the Juche-oriented revolution started by President Kim Il Sung, united close around the headquarters of the revolution, the editorial says, and goes on: 

The year has been recorded as a historic year in which our people reviewed with pride the days when they had staunchly struggled to defend the red flag under the guidance of the headquarters of the revolution, remembering with deep emotion the immortal revolutionary life of President Kim Il Sung, the eternal sun of Juche, and exploits performed by him. Shining successes were made in socialist economic construction and cultural construction last year. The army and people of the DPRK powerfully demonstrated the spirit of socialist Korea advancing with the might of Songun by resolutely foiling the US imperialists' vicious moves to stifle the DPRK. 

These shining victories and successes made by our army and people last year are a shining fruition of leader Kim Jong Il's unquestioned leadership prestige and invincible political calibre. Juche 94 (2005) is a worthwhile year which will witness a great turn in the Korean revolution and in the efforts to accomplish the cause of building a great prosperous powerful nation. This year we will mark the 60th anniversaries of the Workers' Party of Korea and national liberation in grand style with great pride and dignity as victors.

60 years ago President Kim Il Sung liberated the country and founded the WPK, a historic event that ushered in a new bright era for the country, the revolution and the nation. It will be a political event of special mention for the Korean army and people to mark those anniversaries this year while waging a worthwhile struggle to glorify the new era of Juche-oriented revolution, demonstrating the national dignity with the might of Songun under the leadership of Kim Jong Il. The past decade in the WPK's 60 year-long history is shining as an immortal decade as great victories have been won and miracles wrought despite the worst difficulties. 

The two anniversaries will offer important occasions in glorifying for all ages the immortal revolutionary history of President Kim Il Sung, the founder of the WPK and father of the nation, and exploits performed by him and demonstrating to the world the fixed will of the army and people to accomplish the revolutionary cause of Juche under the WPK's Songun leadership. The whole party and army and all the people should turn out as one and bring about a fresh revolutionary surge with the might of Songun to glorify the two anniversaries as the greatest festivals of victors in the history of the Party and the country. This is a general task facing the Korean people this year. 

We should vigorously speed up the general onward march for the Songun revolution holding aloft the slogan "Let the Whole Party and Army and All the People Unite as One in Mind and More Strikingly Demonstrate the Might of Songun!" It is necessary to powerfully demonstrate the political and ideological might of our revolutionary ranks of the servicepersons and people united as one around the headquarters of the revolution.  This unity in mind serves as a bottom line of the Korean revolution and a treasured sword for winning sure victory as it is more powerful than a nuclear weapon. What makes the WPK feel most proud in its 60 year-long history is that it has achieved the unbreakable unity in one mind. 

It is necessary to protect the headquarters of the revolution, the core of this unity, at the cost of one's life. We revolutionary soldiers should enshrine the unshakable resolution to share their destiny with Kim Jong Il to the last no matter how thorny our road may be and no matter what a stern tempest we should weather out and the revolutionary view on life that it is pleasure for us to feel joy or sorrow and undergo an ordeal when following him. It is essential to more thoroughly establish a revolutionary discipline and order throughout the Party and the society whereby the people move as one under the WPK's unitary leadership. 

We should protect the unity and cohesion based on the Songun idea of Juche as our own eyeballs. It is also necessary to hold fast to the WPK's Songun revolutionary line and increase the country's military capacity in every way. We should deeply grasp the revolutionary history of the President who achieved the cause of national liberation with arms under the uplifted banner of Songun, defended the country and the revolution and built an invincible powerful socialist country on the principle of attaching importance to the army and giving priority to military affairs and creditably carry forward the exploits he performed in the army building and tradition established by him in its course.

We should burnish as the eternal cornerstone of the Juche-oriented revolution, the most precious treasure of the nation, all the exploits, traditions and wealth provided by Kim Jong Il while making endless long journeys of Songun for the last difficult decade since he inspected the post under pine trees. The People's Army is the mainstay and main force of the Songun revolution. The entire army should more dynamically conduct the movement for winning the title of the O Jung Hup-led 7th Regiment under the uplifted slogan "Let's Defend the Headquarters of the Revolution Headed by the Great Comrade Kim Jong Il at the Cost of Our Lives!" and become the first line death-defying corps and first line human bullets and bombs to protect the supreme commander. It is necessary to thoroughly establish the revolutionary command system and military discipline in the People's Army whereby all the servicepersons move as one by the order of the supreme commander so that it may powerfully demonstrate the invincible might of the strong revolutionary army of Mt. Paektu.

We should accelerate the process of revolutionizing the people and equipping them with socialist patriotism as required by the Songun era with a view to steadily perfecting the noble trait of the revolutionary army. The defence industry is the foundation of the nation's military and economic potentials. It is necessary to increase in every way the might of the defence industry for self-defence which our people have built up in the spirit of fortitude by beginning it from scratch. It is imperative to supply everything necessary for the defence industry on a preferential basis, pursuant to the Party's line of economic construction in the Songun era. 

It is necessary to give fuller play to the fine trait of attaching importance to military affairs and sincerely assisting the People's Army now prevalent in our society and everybody should actively learn from the People's Army's fighting spirit, work style and traits. We should effect a great revolutionary surge on all fronts of socialist construction to bring about a decisive turn in economic construction and in the efforts to improve the standard of people's living this year which marks the 60th anniversaries of the WPK and the liberation of the country. This year the army and the people will witness with great joy and excitement events in which they will feel the worth of the hard struggle they have waged despite the grim ordeals and difficulties under the leadership of the Party, looking toward the hopeful morrow. 

We should effect an unprecedented boost in production, just as we did in the period of the great Chollima upswing in the 1950s, on the basis of the solid foundation for building a great prosperous powerful nation which has been laid under the banner of Songun so as to mark the significant holidays this year in grand style and make the whole country hum with activities. This is the intention and determination of the Party. Agriculture is the main front of socialist economic construction this year. It is necessary for the agricultural field to continue implementing the policy of bringing about a signal turn in seed improvement, the policy of cultivating two crops a year, the policy of bringing about a signal turn in potato farming, the policy of successfully growing bean and their Party policies of making the agricultural revolution, the validity of which has been proved in practice. To this end, it is required to widely sow high-yield varieties, supply a sufficient quantity of fertilizers and agricultural chemicals to the countryside, actively introduce modern farming methods and raise the rate of mechanization of farm work.

The whole Party and country and all the people should give sincere manpower and material assistance to the countryside. The editorial underscores the need for the fields of electricity, coal production, metal industry and the railway transport to take the lead in effecting a great surge in high spirit. It calls on the field of light industry to rebuild and modernize its factories and mass-produce a variety of good quality consumer goods. The editorial underlines the need to spruce up the city of Pyongyang and build many more modern dwelling houses in the urban and rural areas. The editorial calls for establishing the unique Korean-style economic management system and method and giving full play to their vitality and dynamically pushing ahead with the technological reconstruction of the national economy based on modern science and technology.