U.S. Trying to Prevent Tailspin by North Korea

The Clinton administration believes that North Korea, beset by an immediate food shortage and longer-term economic woes, may be in the initial stages of a collapse similar in some ways to those that toppled the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe in 1989.

A number of recent signs from North Korea--severe food and energy shortages, a sharp upsurge in defectors, social disorder and seemingly erratic and desperate behavior by the regime--have put Washington on alert to the possibility that the country may be falling apart.

As a result, over the past few months the Clinton administration has for the first time quietly begun to alter American policy to try to make the changes in North Korea more gradual. The aim is to stave off an explosive collapse that could lead to a massive wave of refugees or other upheavals.

“The big question is, ‘Is this the beginning of the end for the North Korean regime?’ ” one administration official said. “We continue to get anecdotal evidence that law and order may be breaking down. We see signs of incoherence in their decision-making.”

American officials say that there are no signs of mass starvation, of the sort seen in Somalia or Ethiopia, and that there is clearly still food in stockpiles set aside for the country’s huge army of 1.2 million. But U.S. officials say the shortages are severe enough to cause malnutrition, particularly in remote areas.

Witnesses in North Korea say the food shortages are only part of the problem. Last week, Trevor Page, director of the U.N. World Food Program’s office in the capital, Pyongyang, visited the southwestern port of Haeju, near the demilitarized zone with South Korea, and found that schools had been closed for the month of January because of a lack of heat and electricity.

“The kids are really freezing in the province that is usually the most prosperous in North Korea,” Page said in a telephone interview. He added, “On four separate main street corners there was also no traffic, only bicycles and oxcarts.”

Even the optimistic U.S. scenarios for North Korea now have relatively short time frames.

“It’s not likely to collapse right away, but it’s very brittle, very fragile, and if I had to make a guess, I’d say they’d muddle along with the possibility of a collapse in two or three years,” said Harvard University professor Ezra Vogel, who served until last summer as the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst for Asia.

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With North Korea exhibiting increasing desperation, Clinton administration officials decided in recent meetings to start supplying it with small amounts of food.

The food is portrayed as humanitarian aid, but senior administration officials acknowledge that an upcoming $2-million shipment may be the first step by the United States and its allies in using aid to coax Pyongyang out of its isolation.

The delivery might come after elections are held in April in South Korea, where food aid for Pyongyang is politically sensitive. South Korean President Kim Young Sam was humiliated last summer when he agreed to supply rice to Pyongyang and then the ship providing it was seized on spying charges at a North Korean port.

“No one’s talking about a Marshall Plan,” said Stanley Roth of the U.S. Institute of Peace, referring to the United States’ economic recovery plan for Europe after World War II. “We’re not saving them [the North Korean leaders]. We’re trying to stave off an imminent collapse because this ‘softer hard landing’ is in our own interest. . . . What people are talking about is to stretch it out, avoid starvation, avoid refugee flows.”

Roth, who just stepped down as director of Asian affairs for the National Security Council, noted that Pentagon officials have become concerned that North Korea’s growing desperation could prompt it to take military action now, before its economic plight makes the army a “withering resource.”

Despite the potential stakes, the decision to provide even small amounts of food aid has touched off debate about how the food should be distributed and under what conditions.

Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) said last month that economic help should be conditioned on Pyongyang’s willingness to reduce its armed forces and limit deployments along the demilitarized zone with South Korea.

Others say the United States should insist on having Americans hand out the food supplies--particularly to make sure they don’t end up in military stockpiles.

“The best example for this was the [Herbert] Hoover mission to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, where the United States went in on the condition that Americans would control the distribution of food, and Stalin agreed,” said James R. Lilley, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea.

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The root cause of North Korea’s economic problems is that over the past five years it has lost the large-scale help it was getting from two longtime patrons, the Soviet Union and China.

Even before then, the North Korean economy had been suffering from the inefficiencies of central planning and from huge outlays--about a quarter of the country’s gross national product--for the military.

Although statistics are scarce and unreliable, estimates indicate that the economy has been contracting, not growing. According to one study, in the four years from 1989 to 1993, production of coal in North Korea dropped 23%, electricity 25% and rice 40%.

Over the past few years, China has begun to insist on payments in hard currency for the goods it supplies North Korea, including oil. Since the Soviet collapse, North Korea has also lost its supply of cheap fertilizer and farm equipment. Because Pyongyang could not afford to import these from elsewhere, crop yields have fallen.

Already plagued by these acute agricultural problems, North Korea last summer suffered heavy flooding in some areas.

“The floods deposited debris on the paddy fields in all the river valleys and reduced the area that is cultivable for harvest,” said Page of the World Food Program. “It also caused tremendous infrastructure damage to railways, bridges, dams, coal mines. . . . I’ve seen major bridges just lying in the blooming riverbed.”

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Both U.S. and South Korean officials say that North Korea has exaggerated the impact of the floods because it prefers to blame its food shortages on a natural disaster rather than on chronic structural problems in its agricultural system.

Even Page, who believes the flood damage was serious, says it was “the straw that broke the camel’s back, that caused them to go out into the international community and ask for help.”

Among the many groups and governments dealing with North Korea, no one contends that the country faces wide-scale famine or starvation. Still, reports by the World Food Program say the food shortages are so serious that they are threatening the health of children and lactating mothers.

They are also, to a lesser degree, affecting the North Korean military. While North Korea preserves separate food supplies for the military, the amount seems to be dwindling.

At a news conference in Seoul last week, defectors from the Pyongyang regime said North Korean soldiers have been suffering from malnutrition and fatigue because of reduced rations.

“Because of the scarcity of food, North Korean soldiers are skinny and small,” defector Lim Young Sun said.

One of the key policy questions that has been debated in Washington over the past few months is how North Korea’s economic woes will affect the behavior of its leaders.

Some believe the troubles could prove beneficial, causing Pyongyang to open up its economic system. But there is also fear that increasing desperation could prompt North Korean military leaders to go to war, both as a diversion from domestic hardship and to try to win or extort economic aid.

In Washington, there was a brief scare and a flurry of high-level meetings late last year when North Korea suddenly moved its warplanes much closer to the DMZ, shortening the time it would take to launch an attack against South Korea.

But administration officials concluded that military action by North Korea is unlikely.

“Their winter exercises have been scaled back, and if anything their readiness [for war] seems less than before,” Roth said.

“The South [Koreans] have been more alarmist than we have [about the possibility of a North Korean attack], and the military has been more alarmed than civilians in both places,” Roth said. Nevertheless, he added, “The consequences of being wrong are so high, who wants to take the risk?”

U.S. officials say that in recent negotiations, North Korean officials have shown increasing signs of strain. At talks in Honolulu about remains of American prisoners of war, they suddenly changed positions on the last day, suggesting there were conflicts between civilian and military officials.

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Even if it gets food aid, many experts believe North Korea may not survive long, at least not without some drastic change.

“The events of the past year must increase the likelihood of instability in North Korea and decrease the likelihood of either gradual economic or political reform,” Marcus Noland, a North Korea specialist at the Institute for International Economics, wrote recently.

He and others noted that apart from its economic woes, North Korea seems to have serious political problems. Kim Jong Il, the son and political heir of North Korea’s longtime leader, Kim Il Sung, still has not taken over his father’s titles and has passed a long series of deadlines and anniversaries on which it was predicted he would get the top jobs.

Several American analysts have begun to compare North Korea to the East European Communist regimes that fell in 1989. Under one scenario, for example, Kim Jong Il might try to resist change and be overthrown, as was Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu. Under another, North Korea might simply collapse as East Germany did, paving the way for reunification of a divided country.

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“The situation doesn’t look self-sustaining,” said Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, who studies long-term trends in North Korea. “I don’t see how they’re doing it now. How much more can be bled out of the population? As far as I can see, there are next to no systemic reforms either. . . .

“Basically, Pyongyang is now looking for new patrons. Who can they turn to as new sources of aid for North Korea? The deep pockets are Seoul, Tokyo and Washington.”

Times staff writer Teresa Watanabe in Tokyo and researcher Chi Jung Nam in Seoul contributed to this report.