The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (91 page)

The currency revaluation is usually viewed in isolation, but it may have been part of a larger plan to smooth the way for Kim Jong Un’s succession, which at that point was moving into a new phase. By introducing new elements into the economy, Kim Jong Il may have hoped to provide better economic conditions later in 2010, when he planned to hold a major party conclave at which Kim Jong Un would step into public view. Seen in that context, the failure was not only a bad surprise; it risked completely upending the succession planning.

A scapegoat was necessary, and one appeared in the guise of Pak Nam-ki, a longtime party functionary then serving as the chief of the party’s finance department. Pak had regularly accompanied Kim Jong Il in 2009 on the leader’s public inspection visits, but disappeared after appearing with Kim one more time, in early January 2010, as public opposition to the revaluation was growing. He was reportedly executed in March, possibly on the same day that Kim Jong Il, along with a few party veterans who no doubt had known Pak well, traveled to a cooperative farm in North Hwanghae Province. Looking at their faces in the photographs from that visit, one wonders what they were thinking.

In mid-December 2009, just as the effects of the currency reevaluation were taking hold, Kim Jong Il made a rare visit to Rason, on the country’s northeast coast.
*
Two weeks later, Pyongyang declared Rason a “special city,” conferring upon it an administrative status that would give it more freedom to host foreign business activity. Port facilities were improved, the
Chinese paid to improve the road from the crossing point over the Tumen River all the way to the port, and the Russians moved ahead to upgrade the rail line from their own crossing point at Khasan down the east coast to Rajin port. At the same time, Kim and other officials made numerous visits to inspect developments elsewhere on the east coast: tourist facilities, factories, mines, and especially Tanchon, a port some 140 miles south of Rason and designed to handle the output of the North’s rich but still underdeveloped magnesite mines.

YEONPYEONG ISLAND

Months after the
Cheonan
sinking, the West Sea witnessed one more violent clash. On the afternoon of November 23, 2010, North Korean artillery on the mainland and a small island off the coast shelled one of the five South Korean–held islands, Yeonpyeong-do. Several days before, North Korean artillery units in the vicinity had moved to new positions. That morning the North passed a message to the South Korean military, warning of a “resolute physical counterstrike” if the South did not cancel an artillery exercise on Yeonpyeong-do planned for later in the day.
*
The warning did not seem serious to the South Koreans, so the exercise went ahead on schedule. Around 2:45
P.M
., not long after it ended, North Korean shells began to fall on and around the island—eventually around 170 over the next hour. Rattled and caught by surprise, South Korean Marines asked for guidance up the chain of command, then returned fire as best they could given failures in their equipment. Two Marines and two civilians who had been working on one of the island’s military posts at the time were killed. Several more Marines and a few civilians were listed as wounded. The North Korean shells caused several fires, and scenes of the smoke rising from the island were quickly available on the cell phones of the South Korean population on the mainland.

The South Koreans, stung by their losses and seeming inability to respond quickly and forcefully to an attack on their soil, announced they would hold another exercise in December. The North Koreans issued a warning that such a move would result in its army carrying out “a second and third unpredictable self-defensive blow.” Washington, worried that another clash would escalate out of control, attempted to persuade the South not to proceed. Amid thunderous warnings from the North, US
officials held tense meetings in Washington to decide what to do, and the JCS chairman, Admiral Mike Mullen, was sent to Seoul to lay out the case for restraint before President Lee. South Korea went ahead with a slightly altered exercise. The North Koreans did nothing, beyond noting that “the revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK did not feel any need to retaliate against every despicable military provocation,” dismissing the South’s move as “child’s play” and claiming that for fear of additional retaliation, the South had changed the direction in which its artillery had fired.

The attack on Yeonpyeong-do is usually lumped together with the sinking of the corvette
Cheonan
earlier in the year, but the two events were fundamentally different. Sinking the
Cheonan
was almost certainly a retaliatory move by North Korea for an earlier naval defeat in the West Sea. Yeonpyeong-do was not. The
Cheonan was
attacked by stealth, a particularly deadly part of a long game of black operations by the two sides. The Yeonpyeong-do shelling was openly prepared and executed by the North Korean People’s Army Fourth Corps and set off an artillery duel, the first such large-scale exchange of fire between the two armies in decades. What we do not know is why, at a time when there was every indication that Kim Jong Il wanted a stable environment externally to help secure the succession, he would have approved such a blatant large-scale attack so much out of character with past North Korean practice.

KIM JONG IL’S DEATH AND BEYOND

Kim Jong Il did not pay taxes, but he could not avoid the second of the inevitable fates. When he died in December 2011, his plans for the political succession of his son Kim Jong Un were under way but incomplete. In August 2010, Kim had visited China, perhaps to inform the Chinese of his intention to proceed in September with a Workers Party conference (only the third such meeting since the party’s founding in 1945) at which he would publicly debut his son. Some sources contend that he brought Kim Jong Un on the trip, especially to show him those parts of northeast China where his grandfather Kim Il Sung had conducted anti-Japanese guerrilla operations.

After a slight unexplained delay, the party conference was held in September, and as part of the succession scenario, in addition to Kim Jong Un’s emergence, a number of personnel changes were announced, bringing in or elevating figures to support the succession. The very fact the conference was held reinforced earlier signs that Kim Jong Il was moving to put the party back in place as the regime’s leading political force, after years of emphasis on “military first.” Over the next year, Kim Jong Un appeared regularly with his father on inspection visits, with the media using photographs to make clear what was not expressly stated in public, that he was the designated
number two and preparing to step into the post of top leader. In May 2011, as a test, it appears Kim Jong Un was left in charge of the country when his father traveled to China. When the senior Kim’s train returned, the son greeted it at the station, and North Korean television showed high-level cadre bowing low to the younger man as they emerged from the train.

The elder Kim would not survive to see these rituals reach their logical conclusion. According to an official North Korean announcement on December 19,2011, Kim died of a heart attack—brought on by “physical and mental exhaustion”—on the morning of the seventeenth while on his train traveling to yet another on-site inspection. The delay in announcing the death was not unusual for the North—the announcement of Kim Il Sung’s death in July 1994 had been similarly held up for nearly two days. One of Kim Jong Il’s last public appearances, reported two days before his death, was to the Hana Electronic Joint Venture Company—a joint venture with a European group—only a few hundred yards from the Tongil Market, one of the markets that his July 2002 economic measures had helped establish.

From time to time, North Korean television has carried a program for children called
World’s Classic Fairy Tales
. In the past, the selections had included “The Snow Queen,” “The Little Match Girl,” and even “Fine Dog Lassie.” In October 2012, the choice was “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” For many foreign observers—and perhaps for a few North Koreans in positions of authority as well—there were questions when Kim Jong Un, the relatively untested successor, was suddenly thrown into the role of Supreme Leader in December 2011. Was he really ready to assume power? Like the emperor in the children’s tale, would he walk essentially naked, clothed in imaginary trappings of power until someone in the leadership, perhaps a disgruntled army general brandishing a revolver, pointed out that a twenty-eight-year-old had no business ruling a nuclear-armed country of 24 million people? On December 30, the day after the memorial service for Kim Jong Il, North Korean media announced that Kim Jong Un had “assumed the supreme commandership of the KPA at the bequest of leader Kim Jong Il on October 8, 2011.” That put the new leader in control of the army explicitly at the direction of the former Supreme Leader—a bequest no one would dare (or so it was hoped) contradict.

It did not take long for Kim Jong Un to make clear that, unlike his father who had seemed emotionally paralyzed after Kim Il Song’s death in 1994, he was going to move quickly to assert himself. North Korean media over and over conveyed the message to the population that as bad as it was to lose their Great Leader, Kim Jong Il, no one should stop work, but rather turn their “grief” into increased production. After the funeral was over, the younger Kim immediately began appearing in public, showing off his new, youthful, hands-on style of leadership. On the first day of the new year, he appeared at one of the army’s premier tank units. North
Korean television showed Kim meticulously inspecting the base, exactly as his father had in the past, and then appearing with the soldiers who deliriously chanted his name.

Besides attending to the business of consolidating power internally, the new leader had a pressing foreign-policy matter. One of the main pillars for the succession, putting relations with the United States back on track, was still in process when Kim Jong Il died. US and North Korean negotiators were in Beijing on the day of his death, waiting to put final touches on the first agreement Washington and Pyongyang had reached since the Obama administration took office in 2009.

Pyongyang had laid the groundwork for the negotiations in March 2011, when, following discussions with Russian deputy foreign minister Aleksei Borodavkin, the North announced it was “not opposed to” discussion of “a moratorium on nuclear test and ballistic missile launches, access of IAEA experts to uranium enrichment facilities in the Yongbyon area, and discussion of the issue of uranium enrichment.” In July US-DPRK talks began, focusing on these points. The talks continued in October and were prepared to wrap up in Beijing in December after nailing down details, under the overall deal, of US provision of 240,000 tons of food assistance. Kim’s death put off the final agreement until February 29, 2012, when it was announced in parallel but not completely identical press releases from the two capitals. This was not a case of postmeeting press statements with different nuances, but actually different versions of what had been agreed on—and the differences were not minor.

For the Americans, the most important result of the talks was the North Korean agreement to “implement a moratorium on long-range missile launches, nuclear tests and nuclear activities at Yongbyon, including uranium enrichment activities. The DPRK has also agreed to the return of IAEA inspectors to verify and monitor the moratorium on uranium enrichment activities at Yongbyon and confirm the disablement of the 5-MW reactor and associated facilities.”

The North Korean version of this key section was different in important respects, adding the proviso that the moratorium would last “while productive [US-DPRK] dialogue continues” and limiting the description of the IAEA’s activities to monitoring “the moratorium on uranium enrichment.” In addition, the North Korean version of the overall results was much fuller than Washington’s. Pyongyang presented the outcome in the form of a joint agreement, noting at a few points that “both” sides had agreed to particular provisions: for example, “Both the DPRK and the U.S. agreed to make a number of simultaneous moves aimed at building confidence as part of the efforts to improve the relations between the DPRK and the U.S.” The American version avoided any sense that there had been common agreement and went out of its way to downplay the results, pointing out that they were “limited” and underlining that the “United States
still has profound concerns regarding North Korean behavior across a wide range of areas.”

If the so-called Leap Day Agreement had lasted, these differences might have become serious points of contention. As it happened, the deal turned out to be not even a first “limited” step; it fell apart quickly and acrimoniously. In early March, a high-level DPRK Foreign Ministry official was in New York at an academic conference also attended by US and ROK officials. The North Korean told participants that the DPRK’s new leader wanted a new, peaceful relationship with the United States. That olive branch was soon swept away when on March 16, barely two weeks after the talks in Beijing had concluded, Pyongyang announced that in April it planned to launch into polar orbit a “working satellite” from its newly completed launch center on the country’s west coast.
*

For all the differences in the two sides’ announcements of the results of the Leap Day Agreement, the sticking point turned out to be North Korea’s claims to a space program, for which it would need ballistic missiles as launch vehicles—forbidden to the North by a series of UN Security Council resolutions. In late March, a DPRK diplomat told Americans at a conference in Europe that at the talks leading up to the Leap Day Agreement, the North several times had rejected US formulations on the missile issue on the grounds that these precluded the North’s “right” to a space program. The chief US negotiator, Ambassador Glyn Davies (who had replaced Stephen Bosworth at the end of 2011), has said that at the final session of the talks, in February 2012, he impressed on the North Koreans that a space launch would completely scuttle the deal and that they indicated they understood.