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Famine, Nuclear Threat Raise Stakes in Debate Over N. Korea
By Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan
These scenes, a rare unfiltered view of life inside North Korea, were secretly filmed several months ago by a young defector who returned to his homeland with a high-tech camera hidden under his ragged clothes. Although the film is only a fleeting glimpse into the misery of a few hundred North Koreans, American and South Korean officials have sifted through it looking for meaning. So little good information exists about North Korea that even a few minutes of shaky videotape are a valuable tool in the effort to figure out the improbably resilient and well-armed Stalinist fortress in the middle of East Asia. Such fragments are among the evidence contributing to one of the most important reassessments of U.S. policy toward North Korea since the end of the Korean War. Within the month, former defense secretary William J. Perry is scheduled to deliver recommendations to President Clinton for a new, more comprehensive approach toward the isolated, impoverished and often hostile state. According to interviews with dozens of North Korean specialists in Tokyo, Seoul and Washington in the past month, the collage of images Perry has to consider paints a disturbing picture: one of a gangster state that produces and traffics in illegal drugs and counterfeit money, that sells missiles to Syria and Pakistan and threatens to make nuclear weapons while letting millions of people starve. The Clinton administration's response to the menace of North Korea is now a matter of intense debate. Washington has made Pyongyang a major recipient of humanitarian aid, sending hundreds of millions of tons of food aid. It also continues to send multimillion dollar shipments of fuel oil as part of a 1994 agreement in which North Korea agreed to shut down its nuclear weapons program -- even though virtually no one believes it has stopped working toward making nuclear bombs. Many members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats, want the United States to deal with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il the way it has with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein: with swift and unmistakable consequences for actions such as Kim's refusal to allow inspections of suspected nuclear-weapons development sites. But administration officials have argued that engaging, rather than isolating, Pyongyang is still the wisest course. South Korean President Kim Dae Jung is now lobbying hard for Washington to follow his "sunshine policy" of trying to draw out North Korea. Hyundai and smaller South Korean companies have pledged more than $1 billion in ski resorts, hotels, tourism and other investments and the Seoul government has sent huge aid packages, everything from rice to vitamins to milk. Kim and Clinton agree that pushing hungry and belligerent North Korea too hard could lead to unthinkably bloody consequences. They also say that North Korea has shown some positive response to courting by Washington and Seoul, agreeing to peace talks, allowing more foreign investment and sending some officials overseas to learn about international law. Sources close to Perry say his recommendations will not move radically toward either fringe. Rather, he is expected to lay out a broad plan of further economic inducements -- perhaps even an offer to lift some economic sanctions -- as well as stern warnings of harsh consequences for broken promises or continued threatening behavior. Perry's deliberations have been complicated by a simple problem: He is trying to prescribe a cure without being able to examine the patient. Mystery continues to be North Korea's most potent weapon abroad. By maintaining a tomblike silence within the country, and by refusing to meet most foreigners and all Americans, Kim Jong Il has kept Washington and its allies off balance. "The world may be in the midst of an information explosion," but North Korea is a "statistical blackout," said Nicholas Eberstadt, one of the leading American scholars on North Korea. "We have no idea precisely how bad it is inside North Korea. It is somewhere between terrible and catastrophic." Critical questions remain unanswered: How close is North Korea to possessing a nuclear bomb? How extreme is the humanitarian crisis? Would Kim Jong Il start another Korean war? In some ways, however, information from inside North Korea flows more freely than it did even two or three years ago. More foreign business leaders, aid workers and politicians have been allowed restricted visits. A widening stream of refugees and defectors have also described what the government keeps hidden. Evermore sophisticated surveillance systems record radio and telephone conversations from behind the mine fields and barbed wire. Satellites and U2 spy planes can tell how many North Koreans it takes to change a flat tire on an army truck, and what tools they use. The portrait that emerges from these sources is partial, a collection of anecdotes, snapshots, and intelligence reports. But its elements reveal the dire conditions inside North Korea and the dilemma faced by the Clinton administration and its allies in designing a new approach at a critical moment. A Criminal Enterprise As North Korea grows poorer, it is increasingly becoming a criminal state, selling anything to make a buck: cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, counterfeit U.S. $100 bills, bootlegged cigarettes and liquor, illegal ivory and rhino horns. Perry must now consider how Congress feels about sending millions of dollars in aid to a country that appears to act like an organized crime family. A recent Congressional Research Service report documented at least 30 instances of North Korean diplomats smuggling drugs. Last year alone North Korean diplomats were arrested in Russia, Germany, Egypt and Japan on drug-smuggling charges. Japan has seen a sharp increase in North Korean drug-smuggling, last year seizing more than 500 pounds of methamphetamine from North Korean ships. North Korea uses state-run poppy farms to produce heroin. One U.S. official said that when international observers visited the Yongbyon nuclear reactor in 1994, there was a three-acre poppy field growing "not 10 feet from the front door." The North Koreans are notorious for the excellent quality of their counterfeit U.S. $100 bills, known as "super notes," which were part of the reason Washington switched to the new, harder-to-copy $100 bills now in circulation. North Korea has stopped paying most diplomats abroad, and that has led to their using their diplomatic privileges to pursue lucrative illegal trade. North Korean diplomats in Africa have reported being forced to fish for food and to smuggle elephant ivory and rhino horns to raise money. In India, where killing cows is illegal, North Koreans have slaughtered cows in the embassy basement to sell black-market beef. "The scariest part about North Korea is that any means justifies the end," which is survival of the regime, said Katsumi Sato, head of the Modern Korea Institute, a Tokyo research organization. A Merciless Famine Most international aid groups estimate that that famine has killed 2 million to 3 million North Koreans since 1995. Intelligence officials and defectors say thousands of North Koreans are now migrating from one part of the country to another, looking for food. Armed soldiers keep them from leaving North Korea altogether. Refugees who manage to cross the border into China tell horrific stories of starvation. They also describe food distribution determined by political and military connections -- raising questions in Congress about whether U.S. aid is reaching those who need it most. Millions of people live with little electricity or food in remote towns. Satellite photos taken at night show a land with virtually no electricity outside the capital. Hospitals have almost no food, water or medicine -- surgery is sometimes performed without anesthesia in unheated rooms, say foreign officials who have seen the procedures. Indian economist Amartya Sen, in an interview during a recent visit to Seoul, said that despite fears that emergency food aid may be diverted to the military or the elite, cutting it will only hurt the hungry. "You might as well send food -- it does some good for the poor people who are suffering," said Sen, who won the 1998 Nobel Prize for his famine analysis. "Any idea that stopping it will weaken the regime is not true. Dictatorial regimes are not strengthened by sending food or weakened by not sending it. They can take a lot of beating of their population. They are quite willing to make sacrifices -- just not their own." That kind of thinking has guided U.S. policy on giving emergency food aid to North Korea: U.S. contributions rose from $2 million in 1995 to more than $170 million last year. But as Perry weighs how to proceed, critics abound. "The Clinton policy has been a disaster," Sato said. "It's disastrous not just because the U.S. has given millions in food and oil and gotten nothing back, but because the U.S. has given money and support to a country that is killing its own people and is developing weapons of mass destruction to kill even more people." A Military Menace U.S. Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, deputy chief of staff of U.S. Forces in South Korea, said the poor state of the economy has probably eroded the overall readiness of North Korea's military. But Hayden said North Korea is still capable of a quick, massive strike against South Korea that would almost surely involve chemical weapons and 1 million or more casualties. Every U.S. soldier in South Korea gets a chemical-weapons protective combat suit; Hayden keeps his under his desk. U.S. officials also believe North Korea is developing biological weapons. Most observers believe North Korea also has hidden enough plutonium to make one or two nuclear bombs -- but whether such bombs exist is an open question. Suspicions about Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions have risen recently with satellite photographs showing thousands of workers swarming around an underground facility that U.S. officials suspect is nuclear-related. Those suspicions are a key reason Congress has demanded a policy overhaul. If North Korea does not agree to outside inspections of the suspect site, Congress is unlikely to continue funding the 1994 agreement that underpins current Clinton administration policy toward North Korea. Under that deal worth more than $5 billion, North Korea agreed to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions in exchange for two nuclear power reactors and fuel oil. U.S. officials said this week that they had made progress in negotiations with the North Koreans for access to the site. Japanese media reports today said that North Korea had agreed to a deal by which it would allow long-term inspections of the site in exchange for 700,000 tons of food aid and easing of some U.S. economic sanctions against Pyongyang. An administration official said no final deal had been reached but the "makings of a deal" are there. North Korea's ability to present a credible military threat to the region is the major source of its diplomatic leverage. Kim Jong Il commands the world's fifth-largest military. The regime has most of its million soldiers dug in along the border with South Korea, with 11,000 pieces of artillery within range of more than 10 million South Koreans and 37,000 American soldiers stationed in South Korea. The largest concentration of conventional military firepower sits as far from Seoul as Dulles Airport is from Washington. "If they couldn't scare or coerce people into dealing with them, then they would cease to be significant," said one U.S. official. "The only way they have managed to make themselves important is by threatening world peace." Last August, North Korea fired a sophisticated three-stage missile over Japanese territory into the Pacific Ocean. Surprised intelligence officials said Pyongyang's missile program was years ahead of most analyst estimates. Intelligence officials say North Korea has nearly perfected a missile that could carry a warhead to Hawaii or Alaska. They also fear that long-range missiles that could strike the continental United States are only a few years away. There is growing belief among American, Japanese and South Korean intelligence officials that scientists from Russia or other former Soviet states are helping North Korea's missile program. The senior South Korean intelligence official said he has "absolutely no doubt" that out-of-work Russians or Ukrainians are in North Korea. "We don't believe there has been any official connivance between the governments; it's all been private deals," the official said. He said South Korean agents had learned names of Russian scientists invited by North Korea. When those scientists were traced to their home addresses, they could not be found: "Maybe they are somewhere else, but there are some missing scientists we suspect are in North Korea," he added. Child Warehouses Untangling North Korea's humanitarian disaster from the cruelty of the regime is nearly impossible for any outside aid program. As more children lose their parents to starvation, for example, North Korea is warehousing orphans in sparse detention centers called "9-27" camps. Named for the date Kim Jong Il created them, Sept. 27, 1995, the camps were reportedly Kim's way of what he called "normalizing" society -- that is, clearing raggedy orphans off the streets. According to defectors and other witnesses, the camps have become prisons for unwanted children, some of whom are reportedly tattooed with a three-digit code that identifies where they are from. The video smuggled out of North Korea late last year shows a 9-27 camp: a four-story building where soldiers live downstairs and children are housed on the top two floors -- reportedly to keep them from jumping to freedom. On the tape, one young boy said he jumped from a third-floor window, breaking an arm, rather than stay in the camp, where he was not being fed. "It is not so much a socialist country as a 15th- or 16th-century kingdom where the king does not care about ordinary people," said Hajime Izumi, a North Korea specialist at Japan's University of Shizuoka. An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 North Koreans are believed held in harsh conditions in gulags for offenses such as criticizing Kim Jong Il, according to a just-released State Department human rights report. Choi Joo Hwal, who defected to South Korea in 1995 after 22 years in the North Korean military, said in an interview in Seoul that in many cases, an offender is shot immediately and his family is imprisoned for life. Thousands of North Koreans also work as forced laborers in logging camps and construction sites in the Russian Far East and Libya. Some of the nation's most famous artists and sculptors have painted large war-scene murals in Egypt and Syria. The artists, like the loggers, earn millions for Pyongyang while being paid a dollar or two a day. For the Elite, Plenty North Korea has become a nation with its hand in the world's pockets. At every turn, North Korean diplomats demand cash. The price for U.S. inspectors to visit the suspected underground nuclear site? $300 million. Since Washington refused to pay cash, Pyongyang is reportedly seeking more food before it agrees to inspections. North Korea has also collected more than $1 million from the United States since 1996 to recover remains of American soldiers missing since the 1950-53 Korean War -- and it will get $1.2 million this year. The U.S. government refuses to pay for soldiers' remains, but will compensate governments for the cost of searching for them. As in all its dealings with the United States, North Korea requires those payments in new $100 bills -- wads so big that the North Koreans check them with a currency-counting machine. For the release of Evan Carl Hunziker, an American who swam the Yalu River from China into North Korea on a drunken whim in 1996, North Korea demanded a $5,000 "hotel fee." Hunziker's mother paid. In a scene resembling a back-alley payoff, a U.S. government official counted out 50 new $100 bills on the tarmac at Pyongyang's airport. The dividends of such practices appear to be shared among the elite in Pyongyang, who continue to enjoy a relatively stable lifestyle, according to accounts by recent visitors. A foreigner who travels regularly to Pyongyang said that half the cars on the roads are Mercedes sedans. Shops and restaurants are relatively well-stocked. To confine outside influence, the 120 or so foreigners who live in Pyongyang, mainly aid workers, reside in one compound. There is only one state-run television station and information about the outside world is carefully selected. However, while much of the lifestyle and living conditions in other nations are not well known, say foreigners who live there, Monica S. Lewinsky is a well-known name in Pyongyang. State television occasionally shows CNN footage. Said a foreigner: "Something bad about the U.S. is always popular." Isolated, Renegade North Korea North Korea has been cut off from the outside world for years, and the only information filtering out is brought by business executives, politicians, aid workers and refugees. North Korea has kept its economy afloat by selling missiles, drugs and other illegal products and threatens to break the nuclear accord it reached in 1994 with the United States.
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company |
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