Asia Times: North Korea in Southeast Asia: comradeship bombs


	July 18, 2001	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH
North Korea in Southeast Asia: comradeship bombs
By Aidan Foster-Carter

As North Korea's President Kim - Yong-nam, not Jong-il: (Pyongyang Watch, Jul 9,) continues his tour of Indochina, this seems an apt moment for another in our occasional series examining the DPRK's ties with assorted parts of the globe.

Previous pieces have looked at Pyongyang's adventures in Africa, and in Central and South Asia. So let's now come closer to home and see how North Korea has fared in its own quasi-backyard of Southeast Asia. This article focuses mainly on Indochina. A future one will extend the story to the major Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) member states.

Back in the Cold War era, Southeast Asia was seen as split into two camps. Then, Asean was an anti-communist bastion against the red virus assumed to be seeping in from Vietnam. Hence you might expect that North Korea's closest ties in those days would have been with comrades, meaning the trio of communist regimes in the former French Indochina: Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The first book I ever read on Korea - Again Korea, by the controversial Australian communist Wilfred Burchett, published in (of course) 1968 - portrayed the DPRK, North Vietnam and indeed Cuba as a heroic intercontinental trio, united in struggle against US imperialism and its lackeys.

Dream on, comrade. The solidarity was more rhetorical than real, although it had some substance: we now know that DPRK pilots flew in Vietnam. But in truth, none of Burchett's troika were ever that close. To this day North Korea and Cuba, despite being the last red true believers left on the planet, mistrust each other deeply. Culture is a major barrier. (Cubans make some of the world's best music: have you heard North Korea's?) As for Vietnam, a modest Ho Chi Minh despised Kim Il-sung's personality cult; while Hanoi's fidelity to Moscow vexed the DPRK, which favored an independent line in the Non-Aligned Movement. Pyongyang openly criticized Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia to dislodge Pol Pot in 1978, but was silent when its friend China waged war on Vietnam as a reprisal.

Today Vietnam is indeed friendly with Korea - but a different Korea. It's all the more staggering as South Korea was one of the few countries that sent troops - over 340,000 between 1966 and 1972, including future coup-maker and president Roh Tae-woo - to fight on Saigon's side. America paid them well, in dollars that fueled South Korea's industrial take-off. And fight they did, with a grim reputation for brutality (skinning victims alive a speciality, allegedly.) In bars in Seoul, hard-faced men still rant that, left to them, Vietnam would not have been lost. Last year when the Hankyore Shinmun, a radical Seoul daily, ran an expose of ROK forces' atrocities in Vietnam, irate veterans' groups trashed the paper's offices. There's a wider blind spot here. Koreans, North and South, endlessly rehearse their own grievances as victims: witness the current row over a revisionist Japanese school history textbook, which glosses over pre-1945 atrocities. Yet many an old POW recalls that the cruelest guards in Japanese camps were Korean.

Vietnamese, by contrast, seem readier to forgive and forget - or at any rate to move on. South Korean business is welcomed, despite regular cases of violence by male Korean managers against female Vietnamese workers. (Lest I seem to harp on this theme, my defense is twofold: it's true, and Korean hypocrisy gets my goat.) But the odd slap hasn't stopped Hanoi from forging far warmer political ties over the past decade with Seoul than Pyongyang. This has its ironies. The first South Korean prime minister to visit Hanoi, a former refugee from North Korea, looked less than enthused by the statutory trip to pay respects at Ho Chi Minh's shrine. Still, business is business. By contrast, the unspoken question from his hosts to Kim Yong-nam will have been: So, comrade, but what have you got to offer?

In Phnom Penh, where he was due to arrive on Tuesday, North Korea's head of state may get a warmer welcome - at least from his counterpart. DPRK ties with Cambodia are founded on the personal friendship between the late Kim Il-sung and that great survivor, the now ailing King Sihanouk. When Lon Nol ousted Sihanouk in 1970, the Great Leader gave him a villa in Pyongyang - monarchs of all countries, unite? - and for many years he lived there or in Beijing. The grateful king sang his savior's praises at every opportunity, but complained in private that the hours hung heavy.

Restored to his throne, Sihanouk retains a 30-strong North Korean bodyguard. But his promise to the Great Leader never to recognize South Korea vexed Cambodia's pragmatic premier Hun Sen, depriving them as it did of aid and investment from Seoul. Then, as so often, Pyongyang shot itself in the foot. In a bizarre incident in 1996, Interpol captured a wanted Japanese Red Army terrorist, loaded with fake US $100 bills, who had crossed illicitly from Thailand to Cambodia and was about to do the same into Vietnam - in a car belonging to the DPRK embassy in Phnom Penh. Hun Sen saw his chance, expelled the North Korean ambassador and forced Sihanouk to recognize Seoul. So when Hun Sen takes Kim Yong-nam on a tour of Angkor Wat, they'll have lots to talk about besides temple statuary.

Laos was also on Kim's itinerary. Here there's not a lot to say (Is there ever?) Vientiane too now recognizes both Koreas, and finds Seoul of more use. End of story.

Finally, a word on a nearby land that Kim Yong-nam isn't visiting. Myanmar used to be buddies with North Korea, as you'd expect of two regimes sharing a suspicion of the wider world and happy to pauperize their people. So how does Pyongyang treat a friend? In 1983 its agents blew up Myanmar's national shrine and half the South Korean Cabinet (but missed their target, ROK president Chun Doo-hwan). Myanmar caught and hanged one bomber and broke off relations. But now they're yielding. DPRK Vice Foreign Minister Pak Kil-yon visited Yangon in June - to discuss radiation cooperation (eh?), it's said. And last November, a delegation from Myanmar was in Pyongyang, seeking arms sales. Looks like the old comradeship hasn't totally bombed after all . . .

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