Scripps Howard News Service July 9, 2006
Why North Korea has us worried
What is Pyongyang up to? Tom Hyland goes searching for answers to a question that has world leaders baffled.
By Tom Hyland
The North Koreans are crazy, right?
You'd be forgiven for thinking that. This is a regime that develops weapons of mass destruction while its people starve, has carried out state-sponsored terrorism (including murdering four members of the South Korean cabinet in 1983) and engages in currency counterfeiting and heroin smuggling.Paranoia rules in Pyongyang, the capital, and the regime is among the world's most repressive. Its human rights record is dismal, with arbitrary arrests and widespread use of torture. There is no organised political opposition, trade unions or independent civil society.
It is illegal to possess a radio or television capable of picking up foreign channels.
Log on to the website of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and you enter a parallel universe. Here you'll find the official histories of the country's Dear Leader, Comrade Kim Jong-il and his predecessor, his father, The Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung.
The "histories" are a classic case of a totalitarian personality cult, copies from the textbook of 1930s Soviet Stalinism.
There's no mention of the diminutive bouffant-haired Kim jnr's fondness for beautiful women or his capacity for cognac.
Instead, you learn that from his childhood, Kim was "extraordinarily clever and wise" with "the power of keen observation, the power of clever analysis and extraordinary perspicacity".
"Comrade Kim Jong-il did everything in a big way; he had a strong and daring character which enabled him to carry out any difficult tasks to completion with his own efforts, once he started it," the website says.
He's still doing things in a big way but is he and the regime he leads crazy? "No, they are severely rational," says Dr Adrian Buzo, a former Australian diplomat in Pyongyang. "They just inhabit a separate world that's more understandable the more that one looks at the various currents of the 20th century that have eddied around them."
The key eddy, says Dr Buzo, is Stalinism which has given the North's leadership, comprising "ageing military leaders who are survivors of an extremely exacting system of political and military discipline", a blueprint on how to seize and hold power.
While the regime is regularly portrayed as lunatics in charge of the asylum, the country is run by "extremely intelligent and very rational people with a strongly developed sense of self-preservation", according to the US defence and intelligence website GlobalSecurity.org.
The North's leaders are experts at exploiting fears that they are not rational. They have "dined out on speculation that they are irrational" to win attention in the past, says Dr Ron Huisken of the Australian National University. "It's a huge asset — if you know yourself not to be mad but your opponent thinks you are."
So what's the logic in launching these missiles now?
The widely held theory is that the firings are Mr Kim's way of jumping up and down and declaring: "Look at me! Look at me!" The theory is that Mr Kim, resenting the focus on Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program, wants to remind the world he's still around with his own nuclear weapons. After all, he once said: "I know I'm an object of criticism in the world but if I am being talked about, I must be doing the right things."Mr Kim is a master of diplomacy by extortion. In this case, the missile firings are another attempt to wring concessions from the United States, from whom Kim wants security guarantees, economic aid and recognition.
If that was the aim, the tactic has backfired. The US is now even less likely to enter bilateral talks with the North and ease sanctions on its financial system, imposed because of alleged counterfeiting, money laundering and drug smuggling by the North Korean Government.
The tests have damaged hopes that the so-called Six Party talks — involving the two Koreas, the US, China, Japan and Russia — will resume with the aim of resolving the stand-off over the North's nuclear program.
Isn't this regime an economic basket case?
It can barely feed its people and is in its 11th year of food shortages. Massive foreign food aid has prevented mass starvation but the people endure malnutrition and poor living conditions. Military spending eats up resources. Its neighbours are more alarmed by its economic weakness than they are by its military might, as they would have to deal with the social and economic fallout of any implosion. "I think this is one of the real ironies of the regime," says Professor Bruce Jacobs of Monash University. "Its actual weakness in some ways is the biggest plus the regime has."Does the North have nukes, and what's the risk of all this leading to war?
North Korea's nuclear weapons program — not its missiles — is the key issue, according to Michael Levi, an expert on weapons technology with the American Council on Foreign Relations. In an interview on the council's website, he said missiles are a "multiplier" on the North's nuclear weapons capacity, which "by itself is the number one danger".Last year the North declared it had nuclear weapons but no one knows how many, of what type or whether they are able to deliver them. American reports have put the number at anywhere between two and 20.
While the US has condemned the missile tests, it has also played down their military importance. "There are attempts to try to describe this almost in breathless World War III terms," said White House spokesman Tony Snow. "This is not such a situation."
Even so, the Korean Peninsula is one of the most militarised places on Earth, with the North and the South still technically at war after the 1953 truce halted the Korean War. The South's capital, Seoul, is within range of the North's artillery and chemical weapons.
Imposing a state of siege since 1953, the regime has an army of almost a million men and is believed to have more than 800 ballistic missiles. Its military doctrine focuses on eventual reunification of the Korean Peninsula, and the survival of the North's leadership. While President Bush has branded North Korea part of the "Axis of Evil", the last thing the Americans — let alone their allies in the South — want is another war on the peninsula. "It would be a really nasty little place to do business militarily," says Dr Huisken of the ANU.
War game scenarios predict America would suffer thousands of casualties in such a war, while South Korean civilian deaths would be in the tens of thousands.
What do South Korea, Japan and China make of all this?
They've all expressed alarm at the missile tests but each has different interests at stake. South Korea and China don't want to impose tough sanctions on the North. The South, which is the North's second-largest trading partner and aid donor after China, has a policy of engagement with the North, seeing the collapse of the Pyongyang regime and a flood of millions of refugees as a threat equal to war. China, the North's main ally, also fears any implosion could spill across its border.Japan, fearing it would be a target if the North ever armed its missiles with weapons of mass destruction, is pressing for a harder line and will now step up efforts to establish a missile defence shield with the US.
Those maps showing missiles able to reach Australia are a bit scary. Where do we fit in all this?
Don't believe everything you see in the papers. Maps showing Darwin within range of the Taepodong-2 are based on theoretical extrapolations. Even if they had the technical ability to hit Australia — which is doubtful — the North would have no motive to do so, given the abundance of targets closer to home.We would, however, be drawn into any war on the peninsula through the Anzus Treaty. Australians fought in the Korean War, with 339 deaths.
In the meantime, we are concerned spectators. Australia is one of the few Western countries to have diplomatic relations with the North but these are kept at a low level until it abandons its nuclear program.
What Canberra has done, beyond joining the chorus of condemnation of the latest tests, is urge China to use its influence with Pyongyang — not that there's any guarantee the North will listen.
"Although China has a lot of influence on North Korea, we shouldn't make the simplistic error of assuming that China runs North Korea. It doesn't," John Howard said last week. "North Korea is a worry to everybody."
© Copyright 2006, Scripps Howard News Service
