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PYONGYANG WATCH
Kim Jong-il's Grouch(o)
Marxism
By Aidan Foster-Carter
It's been more than a decade since North Korea
banished the last vestigial reference to
Marxism-Leninism from its constitution. Yet we can
exclusively reveal that the spirit of Marx is alive and
well in Pyongyang.
That's Marx as in Groucho
rather than Karl, mind you. Not the walk, the cigar, the
mustache, or the sense of humor. (Though we wish, on all
counts.) No, we're thinking of the funny man's famously
ironic resignation telegram: "I don't want to belong to
any club that will accept me as a member."
Kim
Jong-il's 15,000-strong movie collection may or may not
run to Horse Feathers or Duck Soup. But in
his ambivalence about club membership and its
obligations, the Dear Leader seems to be acting out one
of the wittier graffiti from the walls of Paris in May
1968: "Je suis marxiste - tendance Groucho."
Or maybe just plain grouch. What isn't so funny
is that North Korea seems not to accept that it has any
wider obligations whatsoever: whether to the global
community, or to bodies of which it is or was a member.
Rather, it insists, against all logic, that its nuclear
issue is no business of anyone's - not even its
immediate neighbors' - but can only be settled
bilaterally with the United States. Us and them, is the
thinking.
In practice, the fact that Pyongyang
insists on this probably means it will get its way,
eventually. After all, that's what happened last time;
so Kim is hardly going to settle for less now. Back in
1994, the first North Korean nuclear crisis was defused
not by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),
but by an Agreed Framework (AF) with the US - which in
effect usurped the IAEA's role, much to its chagrin.
At the time, this made sense. Not just because
the Dear Leader stamped his foot and insisted, but there
were two major collateral gains. One: This led to the
first ever US-DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of
Korea) bilateral dialogue (other than the shouting
matches at Panmunjom). On the nuclear foundations of the
AF, a wider relationship began to be built: including
food aid, missile talks, joint searches for MIA (missing
in action) remains, mutual visits, and more.
Two: At a time when the North was trying to
exclude South Korea - whose leader, Kim Young-sam, was
in turn suspicious of Pyongyang - US insistence on a
consortium (the Korean Peninsula Energy Development
Organization, or KEDO) to deliver the AF goods gave a
big boost to inter-Korean ties. Oil from ROK (Republic
of Korea) refineries headed north, as did Southern
nuclear and other engineers to prepare the Kumho site
for new reactors. Such concrete North-South cooperation
was unprecedented, and helped pave the way for Kim
Dae-jung's "Sunshine Policy" of recent years.
A
decade on, the novelty has worn off. It's no longer a
big deal for North Korea to sit down at a table with
either Seoul or Washington - though one would wish it to
happen more often, more consistently, and with more
solid results. Today Pyongyang's bilateralism brings no
new gains, and many losses.
Take the IAEA, whose
website gives an excellent account
of its long and difficult relations with North Korea.
Reading this, alongside Pyongyang's shrill and specious
arguments, it's impossible to avoid two conclusions.
First: From the start, the DPRK did everything it could
to evade both the letter and spirit of its full
obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT). Second: It couldn't care less.
For Kim
Jong-il, it seems, the very idea of any external duty is
a constriction too far. North Korea even claims it has
spent the past decade in NPT limbo: having only
suspended, not canceled, the withdrawal it announced in
1993, it feels free now to leave on the spot - without
the statutory three months' notice.
Similarly,
Pyongyang is angry at the idea of its misdeeds now
coming before the United Nations Security Council.
Sanctions, it says, would be tantamount to a declaration
of war. (It said that last time, too.) In fact the
Security Council has handed the matter over to experts
for further study, and is unlikely to do anything
concrete. But few would dispute that it has every right
to, when a state so brazenly defies the world community.
True, North Korea is sensitive about the UN for
reasons of history. By committing troops to assist the
South after Kim Il-sung invaded in 1950, the UN was a
belligerent in the Korean War. To this day US forces in
the ROK are officially under UN Command (UNC). So you
might say this is a special case.
But I fear
you'd be wrong. No matter what the forum, North Korea
just doesn't do multilateralism. The latest case in
point is the Non-Aligned Movement. While hardly the
force it used to be in the Cold War - what's to be
non-aligned about, these days? - the NAM remains, along
with the United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development (UNCTAD), a major meeting ground for what's
left of the Third World. Its 13th summit, held in Kuala
Lumpur and which closed on Tuesday, drew 116 member
nations. No prizes for guessing which two were the
subject of most discussion.
Iraq was easier.
Baghdad was urged to comply with UN resolutions, while
the NAM opposed a military solution. But North Korea,
having first accepted a draft that "underlined the
importance" of its NPT participation - a pretty
limp-wristed slap - then reneged: rejecting draft after
draft, and insisting that its own right to self-defense
be stated. With this row threatening to delay the final
summit, Pyongyang got its way. The final text merely
notes North Korea's NPT withdrawal, and calls for a
peaceful settlement.
Another triumph for brazen
petulance and stonewalling. But a defeat for what little
clout, or even moral authority, the NAM still has - just
as Pyongyang's flouting and quitting the NPT damages the
already frayed cause of non-proliferation. True, it's
not the only one. Under President George W Bush, the
United States set a lousy example by quitting both the
Kyoto Protocol on the environment and the Anti-Ballistic
Missile (ABM) Treaty. And now, of course, the US and a
few allies may yet ignore the Security Council and
attack Saddam Hussein anyway.
What price world
order and global law? Dubya and the Dear Leader, Groucho
Marxists both. If the world's sole superpower won't
play, there's not a lot we can do. But for small
nations, unity is strength: to insist on rules, and put
the common good before self-interest. Despite its
origins in a doctrine both collectivist and
universalist, today's North Korea admits no higher
authority than its own interests, as defined by its
leader's unruly and antisocial will. Karl Marx called
this national egotism. Too right.
Aidan
Foster-Carter is honorary senior research fellow in
sociology and modern Korea, Leeds University,
England.
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