Pressure Grows on North Korea to End Isolation

The giant armies of North and South Korea confront each other here across a strip of pavement and a few old barracks.

For a few hours one frosty morning earlier this month, the soldiers were at ease. South Korean reporters drifted across this heavily armed border, greeting their northern counterparts like old friends. North Korean army officers in gray wool overcoats walked shoulder-to-shoulder with their khaki-clad South Korean rivals. Young girls in brightly colored Korean dresses presented flowers to dignitaries from the north.

It was another scene in what has become an increasingly routine exercise in inter-Korean diplomacy. This time, however, the two sides surprised each other by signing, at a hotel on the outskirts of Seoul, a historic agreement calling for sweeping changes with an intent to bring peace and ultimately reunification to the bitterly divided peninsula.

North Korea is not about to join the march of socialist nations to democracy, free trade and international cooperation. Experts believe it is close to being able to make an atomic bomb, although it denies that and refuses to allow inspection of its nuclear facilities. The two sides will be discussing the issue at Panmunjom the day after Christmas.

And North Korea makes no pretense about preserving human rights. Amnesty International says the Pyongyang government has never answered its request for permission to look into reports that tens of thousands of people are being held for political reasons at correction camps around the country.

But a picture of that hermit nation pieced together from interviews with North Korea watchers, including government officials, academics and defectors, reveals a nation under intense pressure to break out of its isolation to stave off economic collapse.

“Those closest to (President) Kim Il Sung and (the president’s son) Kim Jong Il know the regime can’t last for long if things remain as they are,” says Ko Young Hwan, a 38-year-old North Korean who became the highest-ranking diplomat to defect from North Korea when he left his post in Congo earlier this year. “Politically, economically and diplomatically we are lost.”

Ko comes from a prominent family. His father was governor of a northern province, while one of his brothers-in-law is a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. As a diplomat, Ko had special privileges, but some of his family, including an engineer brother who works in a missile plant, complain of a lack of food and basic necessities, he says.

“The standard of living is worse than Africa,” says Ko, who has served as an interpreter for Kim Il Sung and was speaking in fluent French. Factories are having trouble operating and stores can’t restock their shelves, he adds.

“One day, you go to the shop and suddenly they no longer have any matches,” Ko says. “Last year they ran out of salt.”

North Korea is seeking a way out of its isolation in hopes of getting aid for its tottering economy. It has recently joined the United Nations, opened talks with Japan and is now seeking rapprochement with the United States.

“They made far greater concessions than we anticipated (in recent talks) because they feel they need to do something about their isolation,” says Lee Dong Bok, special assistant to South Korean President Roh Tae Woo on unification issues and one of the delegates representing the south in talks with the north.

But Lee is skeptical about how far the north is willing to go toward promoting the open economic and social exchanges, including free travel, pledged under the new agreement. His doubts are fueled by the country’s erratic past.

North Korea has long behaved as an outlaw state. The country’s agents killed 17 South Korean officials, including four Cabinet ministers, in a 1983 bombing in Myanmar and are believed responsible for an in-flight explosion aboard a Korean Air Lines jet in 1987 that killed 115 passengers and crew. Its diplomats commonly trade in black market cognac and diamonds to earn foreign exchange, says Ko, who says he was expected to do such things in Congo.

Kim Il Sung, a 79-year-old dictator who has ruled North Korea with an iron fist for 46 years, has chosen as his heir his son, Kim Jong Il, an impulsive man who loves Western films and is accused of arranging the bizarre kidnaping of a South Korean actress and film director in 1978 to develop North Korea’s film industry.

As has happened in other Communist countries, North Korea finds its economy deteriorating in today’s changing world. The old Soviet Union, which once gave North Korea cheap “friendship” oil in barter trade, now demands hard currency. North Korea, which exports little and consequently doesn’t have enough foreign exchange to pay interest on its debt, has been forced to run its factories at less than half capacity.

When diplomats visit clinics in Pyongyang, doctors often ask them if they have any aspirin or penicillin to share. “They have nothing in these clinics,” says Ko.

Agricultural production is down sharply, and, for the first time ever, there are reports of small-scale riots breaking out in the countryside when workers haven’t been given their promised rations, according to Kim Chang Soon, chief director of South Korea’s Institute of North Korean Studies.

North Korea blames its food shortage on six years of drought. But Kim Chang Soon says the north’s agricultural policies are to blame. Monumental efforts to terrace steep mountains for paddy fields and scrape the topsoil from other hills to replace depleted soil in the lowlands have caused landslides and erosion, silting up rivers and contributing to floods. Efforts to increase rice cultivation with shoreline landfills have served only to destroy important fisheries, Kim says.

Ideological indoctrination calling for harder work and greater loyalty has been the primary antidote to economic problems in the past. Now, says Kim Chang Soon, “People no longer believe the talk that Kim Il Sung is capable of bringing forth rice from sand.” Now, North Korea is looking for ways to earn foreign exchange while at the same time providing its people with such basics as soap and toothpaste.

In Pyongyang, neon signs saying “Praise for the Great Leader” are now accompanied by new signs that say, “Let’s Realize an Export-Oriented Economy” and “Let’s Solve Daily Necessities Problems.”

North Korea has converted a military airport on its scenic east coast to civilian use in an effort to attract tourists. And it has drawn up a list of 83 projects it wants to pursue to manufacture everything from cloth to nuts and bolts. It hopes to attract from overseas roughly half of the required $1.56-billion investment.

The South Korean government hopes to open cracks in the north’s totalitarian system by encouraging trade and investment. This year, South Korean firms have imported $152 million worth of coal, fish, young deer antlers and mung beans from the north, while exporting just $24 million worth of televisions, refrigerators and cigarette filters. So far, the trade has done little more than earn North Korea a little extra foreign exchange.

But South Korean businessmen are looking at more ambitious projects to help develop the north’s plentiful coal and iron ore deposits. And they hope to take advantage of the north’s cheap, industrious labor force by setting up factories to make labor-intensive commodities such as toys, textiles, electronics and fishery products. Some companies are even proposing to use North Korean labor to develop natural resources in Siberia.

Kim Il Sung wants to limit the impact of foreign investment by building special economic zones, similar to ones established in China, and he has traveled to study the Chinese model. Chung Ju Yung, founder of South Korea’s Hyundai Engineering & Construction Co., whose family village is in the north, will travel to North Korea next year to discuss plans to develop a free-trade zone there.

The recently signed nonaggression pact is designed to speed development of the transportation, communications and legal codes required for trade.

The agreement is also supposed to improve ties between people of the two sides by, for example, bringing together millions of families separated when the peninsula was divided.

But analysts expect Kim Il Sung to attempt the tough balancing act--failed by most other Communist nations--of pursuing economic reform while keeping society fundamentally closed.

“Since 1990, North Korea has given the appearance of opening up, but actually things are getting even tighter internally,” says Ko. “Even ambassadors have all their bags checked when returning from overseas. Anything with signs of imperialism, even a trademark on a shoe, is confiscated.”

Many recent defectors, including Ko and a judo wrestler, said their primary reason for defecting was a belief that authorities planned to send them to concentration camps.

Some analysts speculate that the dictator may be trying to reinforce his strength to set the stage for transferring power to his son next year when he turns 80 and his son turns 50. The transfer is critical, analysts say, because Kim Il Sung wants to avoid the sort of statue-toppling that characterized the end of Mao Tse-tung’s era in China.

That may be difficult. In the 10 years since the son, Kim Jong Il, was given a central role, he has earned little respect. Ko, the former North Korean diplomat, says the young Kim’s reputation is one of an impulsive man who doesn’t work during the day and calls officials at home at odd hours of the night.

Kim Jong Il’s personal lifestyle is also shocking to Korean Confucian traditions. Ko said he and his fellow diplomats were “stupefied” at a reception for a visiting African diplomat at Kim Jong Il’s home when topless dancers performed under blazing spotlights in an after-dinner show.

“It was not like a socialist country, it was more like Las Vegas or Monte Carlo,” Ko says. Ko said he later learned that the young Kim has special agents who scour the country to recruit young women to pour his drinks, sing and entertain him.

Analysts believe Kim Jong Il could cling to power no more than two to three years after his father’s death. Only after Kim Jong Il leaves the scene, they believe, will North Korea be able to distance itself from its isolationist policies and ideology.

President Kim Il Sung, who has a large and unsightly--but benign--tumor on his neck, could live for many years. He has a health institute conducting experiments whose sole purpose is to extend the life of the “Great Leader.” His bed is placed precisely 500 meters above sea level, the level his experts decided was best for his heart. His pillow and mattress are stuffed with rare herbs, according to a defector who was the manager of one of Kim’s many palaces.

South Korea isn’t waiting for Kim’s death to begin the process of reunification. The recent nonaggression pact is a first step, officials here say. And the south is considering including North Korea in its next 10-year land-development plan. They will push forward on projects to rebuild train lines south of the border in preparation for linking up with train lines in the north. There is also talk of a “Peace City” industrial park to house as many as 100 joint ventures in the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas.

The South Korean government doesn’t want North Korea to fall too soon, fearing that it may have to absorb many of the north’s 20 million people at huge cost.

“Germany is a far more powerful economy than we, and even they are facing problems,” says Kim Jong In, special adviser on economic affairs to President Roh who has sent scholars to Germany to study its unification process. “The lesson was that we should first achieve solidarity socially before unification.”

But businessmen are eager to get a hand on North Korea’s more fundamental problems. “Their real problem is primitive infrastructure and manufacturing,” says Chung Hoon Mok, president of Hyundai. “If we have the chance, I think we could integrate the economy at a much lower price than the officials think.

“North Koreans are different from workers in socialist countries like East Germany,” Chung says. “You can’t accuse them of being lazy.”