Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH: The case for appeasement



	September 25, 1999	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH: The case for appeasement
By Bradley Martin

TOKYO - Although the idea is heresy to the generation of Westerners who grew up watching Adolph Hitler, there are cases in which an argument can be made for appeasement. North Korea in 1994 was growing weaker by the day, and there seemed a real danger that it would choose the last-ditch means of war to avert the extinction of its regime and system. It made a certain amount of sense then for the United States, South Korea and Japan to agree to a deal in which Pyongyang would receive $4.5 billion worth of light-water reactors to boost its energy output, in exchange for freezing its nuclear weapons development program. The unspoken assumption was that the war threat eventually would peter out as the regime continued to decline.

This time around, the North Korean extortionist is wielding long-range missiles in place of 1994's nuclear weapons. But the real difference that Washington, Seoul and Tokyo must take into account is that Pyongyang is no longer growing weaker. Its slide has bottomed out and the country is already on the upswing, growing stronger. The food crisis has abated somewhat - in large part thanks to aid from the West and South Korea. Leader Kim Jong-il clearly has consolidated his domestic position, keeping the allegience of the military - in large part thanks to his demonstrated ability to wring lucrative concessions out of old enemies. The country can now at least think about starting to rebuild its economy - and it has already begun beefing up its conventional warfare capability.

So before former defense secretary William Perry's ''comprehensive'' approach to Pyongyang goes much further, all concerned would be well advised to ponder whether it is ever wise to appease an adversary who is gaining strength.

The problem is not what Washington did last week in easing some of its economic sanctions against North Korea, pending further negotiation of a possible freeze of Pyongyang's missile development program. Most analysts agree that the gesture will not result in a major immediate windfall to Pyongyang. The reason is that prospective investors, now legally freed by the sanctions-lifting to rush into the country, have other reasons not to consider North Korea a high-priority investment target. Infrastructure is poor, for one. Trust of a country that since the 1970s has refused to pay its foreign debts is close to nonexistent, for another.

Rather, the problem is where the ''comprehensive'' approach will lead - especially with regard to Japan. Well in advance of bagging the interim deal in their bilateral talks on missiles with the United States, the patient plotters in Pyongyang had Japan in their sights as a major target.

Kim Jong-il naturally sees the missile program as his big remaining card. He will not relinquish it cheaply. North Korean representatives will demand large sums of cold cash. In earlier talks with Washington they are reported to have said the price for suspending missile exports would be $1 billion a year.

Pyongyang has little production of any sort left to export other than missiles, counterfeit US dollars and drugs such as heroin. Thus it schemes to find new ways of earning foreign exchange. It needs hard currency, at the most basic level, to buy weapons it cannot make at home and to maintain the standard of living of the ruling class and military. Restoring the devastated manufacturing and agricultural sectors to the levels of the 1980s - not to mention achieving a real takeoff into third-generation Asian tigerdom - is no more than a dream, barring a huge influx of foreign exchange.

North Korea knows that it would be all but impossible both politically and legally for the Clinton administration to pay cash to a blackmailing country. This is where Tokyo comes in. In the wake of the Berlin deal, Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi said Japan would consider lifting its own sanctions - including its freeze on diplomatic normalization talks - ''in the event the North clearly shows a positive attitude'' of suspending its missile launch. Renewed Tokyo-Pyongyang normalization talks would, of course, quickly focus on money. Pyongyang has resumed demands for Japan to ''compensate'' the North for the colonization of Korea in the first half of this century, among other offenses. A North Korean government statement on August 10 restated that demand - in more official form than usual - while warning that Japan ''cannot safely enter the 21st century while leaving the current situation intact''.

There is a precedent: Japan sent South Korea more than $500 million in grants and loans following their 1965 normalization of relations. Factor in generous amounts for interest on that sum and such ''compensation'' to Pyongyang could mount up to as much as $5 billion, by some South Korean and Japanese estimates. (Pyongyang itself, in a typical reach, is demanding $10 billion, with the extra amount to represent compensation for damage Japan did to North Korea by backing the United Nations side in the Korean War.) Compensation in the billions of dollars, of course, could serve in part as a payoff for an end to North Korea's missile threat to Japan.

Japan will not be as easy a sell as it might have been earlier. When North Korea lobbed a Taepodong I missile over the Japanese archipelago on August 31 last year, the effect was not - as Pyongyang almost certainly expected - to soften up the Japanese people and frighten them into a submissive mood. Rather, the launch electrified many Japanese and got their backs up. With public opinion finally amenable, the government in Tokyo has been able to push ahead with a defense buildup that it sees as intended to make constitutionally pacifist Japan a more ''normal'' country. Among other things, Japan plans to launch its own spy satellites in 2002 and it has formally agreed to do joint research with the United States on a missile defense system. A law passed in May authorizes the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, during a regional crisis, to give stronger support to the US military than was permitted formerly.

But there is considerable interest in Japan in resolving longstanding problems with North Korea. And to make it easier for Tokyo to agree to a payoff, Pyongyang - in a show of newfound flexibility - has embarked on a program to round off some of the hard edges of the image it presents to the Japanese. To a visiting group of Japanese parliamentarians early in August North Korean authorities suggested, according to a Kyodo dispatch, that a joint Red Cross effort could be mounted to search for missing Japanese. Searchers would seek not only those who were abandoned in northern Korea in the confusion following 1945's surrender. They would look also for at least ten other Japanese who are suspected of having been abducted by North Korean agents in more recent years. Pyongyang's refusal during earlier bilateral talks to discuss the abduction charges - which it denies - led to the failure of those talks.

On August 24, Kyodo also reported, a North Korean official told a visiting group of Fukuoka prefectural assembly members that Kim Jong-il was ''deeply interested'' in improving bilateral relations and had stated that ''the past must be liquidated''. The official added, in conciliatory fashion: ''We are not giving harsh words, but we hope Japan will deal with North and South [Korea] equally.''

Should Tokyo take the bait and reach for its wallet? The Japanese have to ask themselves if they would, in effect, be financing a North Korean conventional and biochemical weapons buildup. Such a buildup could restore the Pyongyang leadership's confidence in its ability to carry out the long-term plan of invading the South whenever the time seems ripe - preferably at a moment when the United States is distracted by a conflict elsewhere or has lost interest in Seoul's defense - and have a good shot at taking over the whole peninsula. (If Kim Jong-il should ever sit just across the Tsushima Strait, would he make a good neighbor for Japan?)

A clue to what Pyongyang might do with a windfall comes in recent reports that the country has imported parts for assembly into MiG 29 and MiG 21 fighter planes. The 10 MiG 29s, said to have been imported in knock-down form, sell for $50 million used - suggesting a possible outlay of $500 million. The question facing Tokyo is similar to one that faces the South Korean government: should Seoul permit Hyundai Corporation to continue sending $150 million a year to Pyongyang as ''fees'' for Hyundai's tours to North Korea's scenic Kumgang mountains? For weeks the South Korean press tried to pin down whether it was Hyundai's money that paid for MiG imports. The question is a naive one. Obviously if money - from Hyundai, Japan or wherever - increases the total amount of foreign exchange available to the regime, and if there are not strictly verified external controls on how it is spent, it facilitates big military purchases. And that's true regardless of precisely which account the money might go into initially.

That's not to say that the case against ''appeasement'' this time is open-and-shut. The theory behind the Perry Report's comprehensive approach (and behind South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's ''Sunshine Policy'') is that, yes, North Korea would strengthen as a result of aid - but not just militarily. It would strengthen economically, and in the process it would begin to join the global market economy. With its survival guaranteed by no less a power than the United States, its interests would grow intertwined with those of its old enemies.

It's at least conceivable that this attempt to engage Pyongyang can work that way. But North Korea has an impressive history of refusing to change itself in any fundamental way. As Perry himself has emphasized, it will be necessary to maintain strong military deterrents. And any aid given to Pyongyang should be tied to particular projects in the non-threatening civilian sector and supervised closely to head off diversion to the military.

(Special to Asia Times Online)

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