The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (63 page)

After alternating for months between taking a hard line against the North, calculated to bring about its early collapse, and backing an accommodation to bring about a “soft landing,” Kim Young Sam shifted powerfully to the hard side. He declared on September 20 that “this is an armed provocation, not a simple repeat of infiltration of agents of the past,” and began almost daily condemnations of the North, eventually declaring that any further provocation against the South—which he said was likely—would bring a “real possibility of war.” Announcing that his government was reconsidering its entire northern policy, Kim suspended inter-Korean economic cooperation and halted ROK activities in KEDO, which was charged with providing the light-water reactors under the 1994 Agreed Framework. In an interview with Kevin Sullivan of the
Washington Post
in early November, Kim said he would not proceed with the four-party peace proposal or provide aid to the DPRK until its leaders apologized for the submarine incursion.

North Korea initially issued a remarkably gauzy statement that “as far as a competent organ of the Ministry of the People’s Armed Forces knows,” the submarine encountered engine trouble and drifted south, leaving its crew “with no other choice but to get to the enemy side’s land, which might cause an armed conflict.” As the clash over the incursion deepened, however, the North’s rhetoric hardened into threats of retaliation “a hundred or a thousand fold” against the killing of its personnel. When the activities of KEDO were halted by ROK objections, Pyongyang publicly threatened to abandon the Agreed Framework and resume its nuclear program at Yongbyon.

In diplomatic meetings, North Korea notified the United States that it was ready to express regret about the submarine incident and to accept a US-ROK briefing on the proposed four-power peace talks, but it insisted on a package of economic benefits in return. A package deal including the briefing arrangement had been extensively discussed in US-DPRK talks in May and June 1996 and virtually agreed to at the end of August, during
a visit to the United States by North Korean diplomat Ri Gun, deputy director of American affairs of the DPRK Foreign Ministry. Representative Bill Richardson, who had taken it on himself to become a political-level emissary to North Korea, was heading to Pyongyang on his third trip, ready to conclude the arrangements, when news of the submarine incursion arrived. His trip was canceled.

Immediately after the incursion, South Koreans were angered by an off-the-cuff comment by Secretary of State Christopher that “all parties” should avoid further provocative steps, a statement that seemed to put the United States equidistant from both the antagonists. The State Department made corrective statements, but the damage had been done. A senior ROK official telephoned Daryl Plunk, a Korea expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to say that the highest levels of his government found the Clinton administration’s response to the incursion “shameful” and its policies to be “appeasement” of the North.

As hard feelings festered and deepened, American civilian officials in Seoul became alarmed by the gap in thinking between themselves and their allies. In a symbol of the new mood, ROK officers were reluctant to permit a US defense attaché to inspect the North Korean submarine and then, after relenting, subjected him to a body search when leaving the sub. The US Embassy protested. In Washington analysts looked skeptically at Seoul’s reports on its findings.

More ominously, the Korean-language
Joong-ang Daily News
reported in mid-October that ROK forces had selected twelve strategic targets in the North for air, naval, and ground retaliation in case of further provocations. The report shocked the US Command, which had theoretical “operational control” of the ROK military in wartime but had heard nothing of these attack plans until publication of the newspaper report. Although ROK defense officials denied that the plans represented serious policy making, the Americans were unable to get what they considered satisfactory assurances that ROK forces would not launch retaliatory military action against the North without US consultation and consent. The issue was quietly taken up in numerous senior-level US-ROK discussions—military, diplomatic, and intelligence—all without clear resolution.

Adding to the American concern, in early November, was Kim Young Sam’s abrupt ouster of foreign minister Gong, amid reports that he had expressed reservations about the president’s hard line against the North. Gong’s resignation was officially attributed to health reasons, but Korean and American officials close to him believed that the precipitating factor was a dossier of remarks reportedly provided to Kim by the NSP, the ROK intelligence agency. In these remarks, believed to have been gathered through telephone taps, Gong expressed personal differences with the president’s policy in the aftermath of the submarine incursion. (Another
former foreign minister told me he had been cautioned by aides when taking his job that he should assume his telephone conversations were tapped.) Gong was replaced as foreign minister by Yoo Chong Ha, Kim’s Blue House assistant for national security, who was considered much more conservative and more independent of US policies than any of his recent predecessors.

In mid-November, with these cross-currents flowing just beneath the surface of the nominally close alliance,
New York Times
correspondent Nicholas Kristof visited Seoul and summarized the consequences of the submarine incursion as “a surge of tension; fears of further military provocations or even war; stalling of the engagement process; a growing number of hungry North Korean peasants who can count on little international help; and a reminder that it is hard to find a place more dangerous and unpredictable than the Korean peninsula.” ROK officials did not disagree with that analysis, but they were infuriated by Kristof s further observation that due to a newly created rift between the two allies, “some U.S. officials seem to feel that their biggest headache on the peninsula is the government in the South, not the North.” As I learned from conversations in Washington and Seoul, Kristof was on the mark.

North-South relations and US-ROK relations were still tense when President Clinton met President Kim Young Sam on the occasion of the summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Manila on November 24. As a result of negotiations before the meeting, the two sides agreed on a three-paragraph statement that avoided the word
apology
, which Kim Young Sam had been demanding, but that called on the North “to take acceptable steps” to resolve the submarine incident, reduce tension, and avoid provocations in the future. Three days after the meeting, however, in the face of criticism that he had given in to Clinton, Kim reverted to his demand for a full-scale apology.

The most important exchange of the meeting took place in a private conversation between Clinton and Kim in a corner away from most of their aides. Clinton bluntly sought to obtain an ironclad commitment that South Korean forces would not initiate military action against the North without American consent. A senior ROK official who participated in the summit told me he believed Clinton had been reassured by Kim’s remarks, but an American official said Kim’s reaction had still left room for doubt.

Three months later, after Clinton began a new presidential term with a new foreign-policy team, Kim moved preemptively to resolve the issue. During his first meeting with Madeleine Albright in late February, Kim began by volunteering that the new secretary of state could be assured that no South Korean military action would be undertaken without full coordination with the United States. Albright crossed it off her list of issues to discuss. General John Tilelli, the US military commander in South Korea,
said later he was completely satisfied there would be no unilateral military action on the part of ROK forces. Nevertheless, the top-level exchanges over the issue demonstrated how strained and mistrustful US relations with South Korea had become.

In the wake of the Manila meeting of Clinton and Kim, the United States renewed its efforts to obtain a settlement of the submarine issue. Mark Minton, the State Department country director for Korea, met North Korea’s director general of American affairs, Lee Hyong Chol, in New York on nine separate days in December to hammer out a multifaceted accord, including US insistence that the North issue an authoritative-level statement of regret and transmit it not once but twice via the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

On December 29, North Korea issued a statement of “deep regret” for the submarine incursion and a pledge that “such an incident will not recur.” Pyongyang also agreed to attend the long-offered joint US-ROK briefing on the four-power peace talks. As part of a package accord, Washington agreed to resume the supply of heavy fuel oil, and Seoul removed its objections to continued work on the light-water nuclear reactors promised under the 1994 Agreed Framework. North Korea, in turn, permitted work to resume on preserving the fuel rods that had been unloaded from the Yongbyon reactor. In a last-minute accord arranged by the United States, South Korea agreed to return the remains of the North Korean personnel killed in the submarine incursion. When the transfer took place at Panmunjom, DPRK officials were shocked to find that they received only cremated ashes. US officers believed the bodies were too riddled with bullets to be presentable.

Diplomatic delegations from the United States and the two Koreas met in New York in March 1997 for the “joint briefing” on the four-party proposal, the first such meeting about peace on the peninsula ever held among these three parties. That was followed by several preparatory meetings at Columbia University. North Korean officials—who already knew the answer—asked the Americans why the Chinese were there. Once the preparatory work was out of the way, higher-level diplomats from the four nations met in Geneva in December 1997 to officially begin the four-party peace talks. Altogether, there were six four-party meetings held in Geneva, the last in August 1999. Procedurally awkward, and held at a time when inter-Korean relations were at their nadir, when the North Koreans could barely focus on long-term issues because of the pressing problem of the famine, and when the Chinese were still very tentative in their participation in a multiparty setting that included the two Koreas, the talks accomplished nothing. The Swiss were gracious hosts throughout, but in the end one participant observed that the croissants seemed to get smaller as the meetings bogged down.

NORTH KOREA’S STEEP DECLINE

By the winter of 1996, most observers who were following the situation in North Korea had watched the progressive sinking of the economy for many months and had become inured to the adverse trends. Portents of disaster and predictions of impending collapse had become commonplace, yet the North’s ability to absorb external and internal reverses had been demonstrated time after time as it accepted the loss of its allies, the death of its founding leader, and the increasingly steep decline in its standard of living. Thus, it seemed possible to assume, in the face of all logic, that the country could continue indefinitely on its downward slope without experiencing a crisis.

Reports from travelers to North Korea, however, suggested this could hardly be the case. In fact, a principal debate among American government analysts was whether the DPRK economy was collapsing or had already collapsed. Deteriorating or flooded coal mines and reduced petroleum imports produced insufficient energy for industry, so many factories had closed or were operating at only a fraction of their previous output. Fuel was so scarce in some provincial cities that only oxcarts and bicycles could be seen on the streets. Many office buildings and dwellings, even in the much-favored capital, were unheated during large portions of a very cold winter. Electrical blackouts were commonplace. Even the state television station was off the air for long periods of time due to lack of power. Many trains, some of them coal fired and others powered by electricity, were idle. An American intelligence official who in the past had been sanguine about North Korea’s prospects compared its plight to that of a terminally ill patient, whose physical systems were weakening one after another, with each expiring organ reducing the performance of the others.

A drop in fertilizer production had diminished agricultural yields in the autumn 1996 harvest, adding to the serious shortages caused by flooding. In many cases, crops that had been harvested could not be moved to where they were needed due to lack of transport, and more was lost to rain and rats. The meager public distribution of food in the countryside, which averaged three hundred grams per day earlier in the year, was cut back to half or less, barely enough to sustain life, or had stopped completely. To survive, North Koreans were consuming oak leaves, grasses, roots, tree bark, and other nonstandard foods, many with little nutritive value, and buying or bartering food, clothing, and fuel at markets that had sprung up in many towns in violation of government policy. In some areas, dormant factories were being dismantled and turned into scrap metal, which was then bartered across the Chinese border for the cheapest food available.

Although the authorities had no choice but to accept these transgressions and local officials appear to have abetted or even sponsored them,
the remarkable thing was that the authority and cohesion of the regime seemed undiminished, so far as the outside world could see. Song Young Dae, the former ROK vice minister of national unification and longtime negotiator with the North, described the DPRK scene in late 1996 as “stability within instability,” with Kim Jong Il at the top of a crisis-management system controlled by the military. Among the greatest unknown factors was how the trauma of the North Korean economy and society would affect the country’s political and military systems.