Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH: Blackmail as development policy



	August 13, 1999	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH: Blackmail as development policy
By Uwe Parpart

According to a Wednesday statement by Chun Yong-taek, head of South Korea's National Intelligence Service, before a closed-door parliamentary hearing, North Korea has finished work on its new long-range Taepodong 2 missile and will be ready to test-launch it in three to four weeks as Pyongyang has repeatedly threatened. The missile, he said, will have a range of over 4,000 miles, which would not only put all of Japan but Alaska and Hawaii within its reach. Armed with a crude nuclear warhead, it would constitute a potent threat against which Japan and the U.S. have no reliable defense at this time.

Chun also said North Korea was assembling at least 30 MiG-21 fighter jets in a plant near Pyongyang. The planes were apparently purchased from the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan for the price of US$40 million. Kazakh Ambassador to Seoul Tulegen Zhukeyev had visited Foreign Affairs-Trade Minister Hong Soon-young on Tuesday to explain his country's position on the suspected sale.

These are the latest Pyongyang moves in its long-practiced policy of blackmail and extortion as national development strategy. Starving its population and eliciting international concern while feeding the armed forces and building up stockpiles for emergency use in war are elements of the same gambit.

To date, the strategy has met with an astonishing degree of success.

* In return for North Korea's giving up its own nuclear ambitions and disassembling its graphite-moderated reactors, KEDO, the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (established in 1995 following the crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons program inspections), has pledged or allocated well over $5 billion to build two ''proliferation-safe'' light-water reactors (LWRs) in North Korea and supply some 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil per year to the country in the interim period.

* Since the summer of 1996, the United States, South Korea, Japan and other countries and international organizations have supplied some $500 million in food aid and cash grants to North Korea in return for Pyongyang agreements to enter into diplomatic talks on everything from assent to four-way talks between the US, North and South Korea, and China to agreement to participate in missile proliferation negotiations and resumption of talks on inspection of a second suspected nuclear site.

On the latter issue alone, North Korea initially asked for $300 million for a single inspection, but then said it would accept another large donation of food instead. The asking price for discontinuing the practice of ballistic missile exports to countries such as Iran and Pakistan - a practice publicly admitted by North Korea in August 1998 - is $1 billion. This ''compensation'' demand has now been repeated in advance of the expected Taepodong 2 launch. It remains to be seen how the US - the principal addressee of the demand - will react.

Why North Korean ''Dear Leader'' Kim Jong-il continues his extortion strategy is no great puzzle: it works and relieves him and his cohorts of the unpalatable task of contemplating and initiating alternative development strategies. All of those, whether communist China's or Vietnam's were taken as a model, would involve opening the country to foreign investment and the influx of information and people - a process which in all likelihood would in relatively short order lead to the demise of the current regime.

Why the United States, South Korea, Japan and others continue to give in to blackmail and extortion is rather more difficult to comprehend. The threat of war waged on the South by a North Korean leadership quite happy with being portrayed as desperate or crazy is apparently accorded significant enough credibility for them to do so. What's a few billion dollars in comparison to the horrors of another war on the Korean peninsula, seems to be the reasoning behind such appeasement - and is not easily dismissed. South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's ''sunshine'' (moonshine?) policy appears to be based on the same premise.

The sad fact is that at present, absent credible and reliable ballistic missile defense in the region, there are few policy alternatives. The bill just introduced into the Japanese parliament by some LDP lawmakers to prevent transfer payments from some 300,000 North Koreans living in Japan estimated at $600 million per year (the amount of total North Korean annual export revenues) should a new missile launch take place may indicate a stiffening of Japanese policy attitudes. So, perhaps, is the US decision to park a carrier battle group near the Korean peninsula.

We predict that neither policy precept will make much difference. Korean money transfers from Japan need not - and a large percentage now does not - go through normal commercial banking channels. And what exactly is a carrier group to do if and when the missile is launched?

For years now, Japan and the US have stalled on developing the missile defense systems that are technically eminently feasible and would put a quick end to the North Korean threat. Until they - at long last - get around to deploying such systems, Kim Jong-il will be sitting pretty and we will continue to watch the despicable spectacle now called Korea policy.