SEOUL: North Korea, one of the world’s poorest, most isolated countries, is a difficult place to employ the containment strategy the United States is now pursuing. The world has little left to withdraw or withhold, according to diplomats and specialists. What levers exist largely have been pulled already — most recently when the Bush administration cut fuel shipments upon learning that North Korea has a programme to create enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.
“Economically, there really isn’t that much else that we can do to pressure North Korea,” said Lee Chung Min, a North Korea expert at Yonsei University in Seoul.
For the Bush administration, simply intensifying economic and political pressure on the North involves enormous political obstacles. South Korea has embraced engagement and dialogue as the best way to address the reclusive country to its north. It appears committed to that course — a fact underscored on Monday as South Korea’s president, Kim Dae Jung, rejected containment as a failed doctrine.
“Pressure and isolation have never been successful with communist countries,” Kim told his Cabinet, in remarks distributed by the presidential Blue House. “Cuba is one example.”
Nonetheless, the Bush administration has concluded that the regional powers in Asia, especially China and Russia, must take a greater role in resolving the crisis over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, and it is urging those nations to exert maximum pressure on Pyongyang, US officials said on Monday.
Effective economic pressures will all but certainly need the backing of the UN Security Council, Lee said. But one council member, Russia, sells military equipment to North Korea and has been openly critical of the Bush administration’s handling of the confrontation. “Attempts to isolate North Korea can only lead to a new escalation in tension,” Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said.
Another Security Council member, China, now provides North Korea with food and fuel, and appears unlikely to embrace the US approach.
“Of course, China will not support containment,” said Jin Linbuo, an Asian security expert at the government-affiliated China Institution of International Studies in Beijing. “If North Korea is in turmoil, then lots of refugees will crowd into China. Moreover, if North Korea collapses, then the Korean Peninsula would be wholly controlled by the United States and its coterie. North Korea’s existence protects China from American military domination.”
In one respect, the logic of containment rests on indisputably solid ground: North Korea is in dire straits, its economy vulnerable and its livelihood dependent on outside largess.
Beyond North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, people sometimes freeze to death in darkened, unheated homes because of a shortage of energy, according to defectors. Power stations are idled for lack of fuel, and factories run at about 30 per cent of capacity, said Park Suhk Sam, a North Korea expert in the research arm of the Bank of Korea, South Korea’s central bank. What energy is available is directed mostly toward the capital, and at factories that make weapons, say recent visitors.
According to Kim Tae Woo, an arms control expert at the Korea Institute for Defence Analyses in Seoul, North Korea’s government secures about $580 million a year through the sale of missiles and missile technology to countries including Yemen, Syria, Egypt and Iran. In an economy whose annual output is estimated at $15.7 billion, those sales are a crucial source of hard currency. Stopping the trade is a requirement for making containment work, Kim said.
Roughly half of North Korea’s energy supplies are derived from domestically mined coal, according to Oh Seung Ryeol, an economist at the Korea Institute for National Unification, a research group affiliated with the South Korean government. The other half comes from imports — the bulk of it from China, as well as some from the Middle East. When the Bush administration halted fuel shipments, that lopped off another portion of North Korea’s electricity supply, Oh said.
Agriculture makes up nearly a third of North Korea’s economic output. But the UN World Food Programme estimated that half of North Korea’s tractors are now idled because of a lack of spare parts, tires and gasoline. Oxen are increasingly being pressed into service to compensate for the shortage, an example of the backward steps for which the country is known.
Food is in critically short supply. Though the World Food Programme concluded that this year’s harvest was slightly better than last year’s, North Korea still lacked more than 1 million tons of grain needed to satisfy minimum caloric needs for its 22 million people. According to Oh, North Korea typically produces about 80 per cent of the food it needs while importing the rest, most of it from China.
Japan, South Korea and the United States have all made significant contributions of food to North Korea in recent years. But that aid is now in doubt. The World Food Programme recently warned that it will not be able to feed nearly 3 million people in need, including 760,000 children in nurseries.
The United States has enunciated tough new rules for further food aid to the North. South Korea, which ships nearly $300 million in clothing and food to North Korea, would be deeply reluctant to follow suit.
Even if containment does make life more miserable for millions of North Koreans, it would not necessarily translate into sufficient pressure on the regime. North Korea’s history has proved the endurance of the Great Leader, Kim Jong Il, whose life of excess against the backdrop of broad suffering often draws comparisons to Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.