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Date: 2024-03-29 Page is: DBtxt001.php txt00011551 |
SCENARIO ... Country ... North Korea |
Burgess COMMENTARY |
POLITICS ... IF THE NORTH KOREAN REGIME COLLAPSED ... NIGHT AND DAY ... THE WORLD IF 2016 America and China have done too little planning for a Korean crisis AS ERIC CLAPTON played the first bars of “Cocaine”, the country’s transformation seemed complete. The former “May 1st” stadium in Pyongyang, renamed “December 1st” to commemorate Korean reunification in 2018, was packed. Before the fifth-anniversary concert, the organisers had shown that their old mastery of mass pageantry had not been lost. After a stunning callisthenic display, children from the Ban Ki-moon High School arranged themselves to form portraits. Mr Ban himself, first president of a unified Korea, was followed by President Hillary Clinton, whose staunch support had eased reunification. Then came Kim Jong Chul, “special adviser” to the interim governments of the northern provinces, grandson of North Korea’s founding leader, Kim Il Sung, and elder brother of its last leader, Kim Jong Un. After Kim Jong Un died in mysterious circumstances, apparently poisoned by a radioactive prawn consumed when visiting a factory making frozen tempura for the Japanese market, his two brothers came to prominence. Believing the dynasty remained essential to any hope of stability, the country’s neighbours had turned to them. China backed the oldest, Jong Un’s half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, whom it knew well from his days of dissolution in the casinos and massage parlours of Macau. After all, North Koreans were in blissful ignorance of his disgrace in 2001, when he was caught by Japanese immigration officials trying to sneak into the country on a forged passport from the Dominican Republic, to visit Tokyo Disneyland. He was soon outmanoeuvred, however, by Kim Jong Chul, who hitched his wagon to the incoming South Korean forces and their American allies. As a reward, he was given his cushy “advisory” sinecure. It was on his advice, indeed, that Mr Clapton was invited. An approach to the musician to perform in Pyongyang in 2007 had been rebuffed, and this was the first time Jong Chul had seen his idol since two memorable gigs at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2015. In retrospect, it was perhaps not surprising that China had backed off so quickly. For decades its North Korea policy had been based on the need for a “buffer” between it and the South, ally to America and home to some 25,000 American troops. But as the regime in the North crumbled after Jong Un’s death, several truths dawned on China’s leaders: that a reunified Korea would never, out of its own self-interest, be hostile towards it; that with North Korea’s nuclear sites scattered and the number of warheads unknown, it had to co-operate with America to eliminate them; and that to back one faction of the fractured regime would lead to instability on its borders, risking a flood of refugees. It helped that Mrs Clinton honoured her pledges not to station American soldiers anywhere in the former North Korea. Five years on, North Koreans were better-fed and freer than they had ever thought possible. The new government (in effect the old one, of the South) had stepped carefully, but gradually statues of Kim Il Sung were disappearing. Portraits of his son, Kim Jong Il, forever associated with the famine of the 1990s, had been quick to go. A massive building boom had introduced South Korean efficiency to the country’s 1930s infrastructure. Former soldiers used to building dirt tracks by hand now used modern machinery to carve expressways linking the South to China. The changes were even visible from space. Satellite photos used to show North Korea at night as an area of darkness next to the bright glow of the South. Steadily, the pinpricks of light were spreading. It was like a dream. Indeed it would be. Many analysts believe that the collapse of the Kim dynasty in North Korea is, if not imminent, then quite possible, and that the most likely upshot would be Korean reunification under the South’s leadership. That should be good news. North Korea is ruled by the most repressive and closed regime on Earth. Hardly anyone, however, believes its end will be smooth or peaceful. Think not German unification, says Andrei Lankov, a Russian expert on the North who teaches in Seoul, the capital of the South, but “Syria with nukes”. And how would the outside world know if the regime was imploding? “Fighting on the streets.” The cold light of today Much work has been done in South Korea, America, China and Russia on scenarios for North Korea’s implosion. Most envisage some or all facets of a complex disaster: humanitarian emergency; civil war; international conflict; nuclear proliferation; economic hardship; social tensions between northerners and southerners. But preparations for these contingencies are difficult. Not only are the circumstances of collapse unforeseeable, but the co-ordination between America, China and South Korea is politically impossible, beyond talking-shops where scholars engage in speculation. Even now, angry though it seems to be with the recalcitrant Kim Jong Un, China is unwilling to discuss the possible end of its longtime ally. China’s displeasure with Mr Kim is one reason some analysts think collapse may have become more likely. When he took over on the death of his father in 2011, Mr Kim, then in his late 20s, and without any administrative experience, seemed to some the face of a ruling clique. Yet he has ruled ruthlessly, purging potential rivals, including even his uncle, Jang Song Taek, who had been seen as the power behind his throne, and the country’s main interlocutor with China. He was executed in 2013. Mr Kim seems solidly in control. In May this year he convened the ruling party’s first congress since 1980, rewarding himself with a new job as its chairman, and showing the world evidence of his people’s adulation in a mass parade. But he has many potential enemies: generals fearing they may be next to be purged; members of the elite fearing they will be impoverished by Chinese sanctions; a lone hungry madman with a gun. His is, in a phrase of Chun Yung-woo, a former South Korean delegate to talks with North Korea, a “theocratic” regime. Unlike other ruling communist parties, the Korean Workers’ Party probably does rely on a dynasty for its legitimacy and durability. With its linchpin gone, it might swiftly fall apart. Uncertain who is in charge and remembering the shortages of the past, those with guns might start seizing food and looting. Fighting would break out, and people start fleeing—probably not for the well-mined and fortified “demilitarised zone” on the 38th parallel that forms the border with the South, but to the more porous one with China in the North. Those guarding the gulag housing tens of thousands of “political” prisoners—ie, people suspected of even the mildest dissent—might turn their guns on the inmates; they are said to have orders not to leave any evidence or witnesses of the regime’s crimes. The South, backed by America, would feel compelled to intervene. It has a detailed plan for a military occupation. South Korean forces would dominate, keeping hated American faces well in the background—except for those highly trained special forces who would be airlifted to known nuclear sites to secure them. At some sites in the far north, they might find the Chinese had got there first. There has, after all, been no co-ordination. But some sites are unknown, as are the actual number of nuclear devices and the amount of fissile material, let alone the identity of the most important nuclear scientists. An intensive propaganda drive to convince them they will be well treated in a unified country may not work. Some may find terrorists willing to protect and reward them. Even if the headline number for the active front-line personnel in North Korea’s armed forces—some 700,000—includes many who are in fact deployed in construction work, some soldiers would fear punishment or at least a loss of privileges. They would “almost certainly” oppose outside intervention, concluded a study in 2013 by Bruce Bennett of the RAND Corporation, a think-tank, “in some combination of regular combat, insurgency and criminal behaviour”. However secure its nuclear weapons, North Korea has plenty of conventional artillery and the ability, as it likes to remind the world at times, to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire”. Its special forces might infiltrate the South. THE KINSHIP THAT LINKED THE PENINSULA HAS WEAKENED In the unfolding chaos, China, South Korea and America, their troops perhaps eyeball-to-eyeball in remote nuclear sites, would need to scramble through negotiations on issues unsettled for more than six decades. China would have to decide whether to install a puppet regime, to maintain its buffer. At least it has party-to-party ties with the Workers’ Party, and army-to-army links; and it has a number of defectors it might have been grooming for such an eventuality. But imposing order might be beyond it without unacceptable military risks. It seems to have a particular fear of mass migration. Some South Korean experts think this is misplaced: food is now more available on private markets, so migrants may not be driven by hunger; and most North Koreans live far from the border. But as early as 1994, on Kim Il Sung’s death, China was examining where it might put refugee camps. After regime collapse, disorder could engulf North Korea. China might conclude that reunification is not, after all, the worst outcome. So the issue would become: what assurances would China need? Would all American troops have to leave the peninsula, or would a pledge to avoid the North suffice? Would South Korea’s security treaty with America have to be abrogated? And, if that was the condition for reunification, might South Korea accept it? Two into one won’t go How the emotions of such a tumultuous time would play out is anyone’s guess. Many in the South fear reunification. The kinship that linked the peninsula (where as late as 2000, 7.7m South Koreans were estimated to have family in the North) has weakened as divided family-members have died. And the two countries have drifted apart, linguistically and even physically: a study of North Korean refugees in the South suggested that boys were on average 10cm (4 inches) shorter than southerners the same age, and girls 7cm. The experience of integrating defectors from the North in the South has not been encouraging. Even comparatively well-off, highly educated defectors struggle to find white-collar jobs. They have left not just one country for another, but the past century. South Koreans are put off by the cost of reunifying Germany (see the final story in this supplement), and North Korea is far poorer than the old East Germany. In the initial chaos, the North’s currency would be deemed worthless; people would use Chinese yuan or scarce American dollars, or barter. America and South Korea would find themselves having to guarantee the value of the North’s won, before quickly replacing it with the South’s—at a generous exchange rate. That in itself would be a costly subsidy to the 25m people in the North. But many would still be dependent on state handouts. Taxes in the South, and the national debt, would climb quickly. Those in the South clinging to hopes that they might one day reclaim their ancestral homes in the North would also be disappointed. To avoid legal wrangles or vigilante evictions, ownership rights would have to be given to current residents. All this perhaps explains why the South’s current president, Park Geun-hye, realising the reunification may be a fact not a choice, emphasises the “bonanza” of North Korean resources, cheap labour and unfulfilled potential. Even if they are sceptical, many in the South would see reunification as a moral necessity, ending the ugliest legacy of the cold war and of a form of politics that turned the 20th century into a nightmare for much of the world. Nor has the dream of Korean unity faded altogether. In that concert, the final encore would see Slowhand tackle “Arirang”, a folk-song indispensable to karaoke-singers in both North and South. The crowd would sing along, waving cigarette lighters and hugging. There would be not a dry eye in the house. |
May 16th 2016, 18:37 |
The text being discussed is available at http://worldif.economist.com/article/12135/night-and-day?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/nightandday?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/nightandday and |
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