North Korea: the Communist Invalid That Refuses to Expire

Stalinist North Korea may be a seriously ailing nation, but in characteristic defiance of Western predictions, it is inconveniently refusing to die.

Now, conventional wisdom in Japan and the United States is shifting. Instead of preparing for imminent collapse, North Korea-watchers in Tokyo, Washington and other capitals are trying to work out the best way--if one exists--to deal with a Kim Jong Il regime that could survive for an unknowable time to come.

“Back in March, people were ready to write North Korea’s obituary, but now, since the victim refused to die in the time period allocated, there’s been some revision,” said Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

U.S. officials are braced for a diplomatic marathon scheduled to begin Tuesday, when, after a 44-year hiatus, the combatants in the Korean War--North and South Korea, China and the United States--will sit down in Geneva to try to negotiate a peace treaty to replace the armistice that ended the war.

The stated agenda for the four-party talks is “the establishment of a peace regime on the Korean peninsula and issues concerning tension reduction there.”

Mindful of the militarized enmity that now prevails, one senior American official predicted that the talks could last “at least a few years.” Others believe they could take a decade.

The cynical view is that the North Koreans will engage only in “meetings for money” and will attempt to play Washington and Beijing against each other to the North’s benefit.

The most optimistic view is that the negotiating process--in Geneva or at other talks--could lead to a pullback of troops on both sides of the tense demilitarized zone; more progress on locating American MIAs; and even the scrapping of North Korea’s suspected chemical, biological and long-range missile arsenals in exchange for trade and investment.

Russia--which is now supplying arms to both North and South Korea--and Japan will eventually want to be included in the talks and should be guarantors of any final pact, said Hajime Izumi of Shizuoka University.

To some observers, North Korea’s survival up to now seems nothing short of miraculous.

It has been seven years since the Soviet Union abruptly pulled the foreign aid plug on the client regime of the late President Kim Il Sung.

The Seoul-based Bank of Korea estimates that the North Korean economy shrank about 30% between 1991 and 1996, and three years of floods and drought have gutted the North’s food supply, which was already meager.

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Nevertheless, “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il has managed to wheedle enough humanitarian aid out of nations he brands as enemies to ride out the food shortages without straying from his father’s ideology of self-reliance.

North Korea has a perennial shortfall estimated at 2 million tons of grain a year, and next year it could be worse.

But for the moment, Rand Corp. scholar Norman D. Levin said, North Koreans--thanks to the international aid to stem a famine whose true dimensions are still unclear--were probably better fed this fall than in autumns past.

“They have more food available now than they have had most years,” said Levin, author of a new article titled “What If North Korea Survives?”

Energy shortages are deemed even more severe in the North than the food problems, but the government is trying to secure supplies, Levin said.

Moscow is now talking to the North about the possibility of restarting an old Russian-built oil refinery in the Sea of Japan seaport Sunbong, a Russian Foreign Ministry official confirmed.

Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to deliver heavy fuel oil each month as part of a 1993 deal in which North Korea abandoned its dangerous plutonium program in exchange for international construction of two light-water nuclear reactors on its territory.

Hong Kwan Hee, a researcher at the Korean Institute for National Unification in Seoul, notes that although Beijing is supplying a huge amount of food aid that may well be going directly to the North Korean military, the Chinese government’s efforts to encourage Chinese-style economic reforms have gone nowhere.

Thus, Kim Jong Il’s day of reckoning may yet arrive--and the sudden collapse of the North cannot be ruled out.

Still, recent events have reminded outsiders of how little they know about what goes on inside the Hermit Kingdom.

“Somebody once said that North Korea is the longest-running intelligence failure in the world,” former U.S. diplomat Charles B. Salmon Jr. said.

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According to an analysis by L. Gordon Flake, director of research at the Korea Economic Institute, a straw poll of 40 international North Korea experts assembled for a conference in Washington in September found that 25% believed the North will be fundamentally unchanged in five years’ time; 40% predicted it will adopt reforms; 26% thought it will be under foreign or South Korean control; and 9% foresaw internal chaos but no foreign control.

Nevertheless, experts in the U.S. and Japan agree, a consensus has emerged that the desirability of change in repressive North Korea is outweighed by the need for stability.

One reason for the shift is fear that a cornered North Korea could send starving refugees flooding over its borders or could lob shells at Seoul. Another may be that its neighbors are secretly more comfortable with the status quo, economist Marcus Noland argued in a recent article in Foreign Affairs magazine.

“China, Japan, Russia and arguably even South Korea may well prefer a muddling, domesticated North Korea to a capitalist and possibly nuclear-armed unified state on the Korean peninsula,” Noland said, concluding: “North Korea may muddle through for years before turning toward reform or chaos, especially if external powers find this solution to be in their interests.”

Moscow Bureau Chief Carol J. Williams contributed to this report.