Rarely has the arbitrary time unit of a
quarter so neatly framed real events as on the
Korean Peninsula these past three months. For
South Korea, like all of Pyongyang's other
interlocutors, the third quarter was topped and
tailed by two ominous bookends.
It began
with, and was dominated by, the seven missiles
(including a long-range Taepodong 2) which North
Korea test-fired
on
July 4, US time. Inevitably, this rude gesture of
defiance cast a large shadow, at least partially
and temporarily, on the Sunshine Policy of
engagement and outreach that Seoul has pursued for
the past nine years. At that stage it was too
early to tell whether this was just a temporary
hiccup, or marked a lasting sea-change in the
balance and thrust of Seoul's Nordpolitik.
For reasons hard to fathom, North Korea's
leader Kim Jong-il chose to settle that question
in the negative by ending the quarter with a far
graver threat. After weeks of rumors of
preparations spotted by spy satellites, on October
3 North Korea for the first time gave notice of
its intention to conduct a nuclear test. Still,
some analysts hoped that this might be just a
sharp negotiating ploy, as arguably the missile
tests were: intended to break almost a year's
stalemate in the suspended six-party talks and
jolt the US and others into concessions on
financial sanctions.
Such hopes were
dashed on October 9 when Pyongyang announced, with
typical pride, that it had carried out its first
nuclear test. Outside opinion seems to agree,
though at this writing it is unclear whether it
was completely successful. The implications of
this are considered at the end of this article.
July's missile launch had put most of the
now quite dense network of regular official
inter-Korean contacts on ice for late summer and
early autumn. Seoul struggled to strike a balance
between showing its disapproval and keeping the
semblance of a common front with Washington, while
seeking to ensure that the overall framework and
achievements of the Sunshine Policy were not
jeopardized.
Walking such a tightrope was
no easy task, and as often with the administration
of President Roh Moo-hyun, which now has little
more than a year left to run before his successor
is elected in December 2007, some of the specific
policy decisions and judgments made thus far
appeared questionable.
A bigger
splash Until October's nuclear shock, all
other political events on the peninsula in the
past quarter were overshadowed by the seven
missiles - one long-range Taepodong 2, which
failed, and six short to medium-range Rodongs and
Scuds, which did not - that North Korea fired into
the East Sea (Sea of Japan) from Musudan-ri on its
northeast coast on July 5, local time.
In
the US it was still July 4, and a space shuttle
was being launched. Kim Jong-il's choice of date
was surely no accident. Unlike the first and only
previous Taepodong test, which was launched over
Japan without warning in August 1998, shock did
not entail surprise.
The first
intelligence reports of a large missile being
moved to the Musudan-ri site had come in mid-May.
Although much of North Korea's war effort,
including missile manufacture, is concealed
underground, launching a long-range missile
requires a gantry, which cannot be hidden from spy
satellites.
In mid-June, rumors that the
Taepodong had been fueled - a process hazardous to
reverse - intensified regional and global
concerns. Many governments and others spoke out,
with unusual unanimity. Even China, rarely so
explicit, warned against a test. But with
counter-reports that the satellite pictures were
ambiguous, late June brought speculation that this
was a rerun not of 1998, but 1999. (Then, too, a
Taepodong was trundled onto its gantry and stayed
there for weeks.
That led the US
administration to start talks on missiles, during
which Kim Jong-il declared a moratorium on further
long-range tests. The talks nearly led to an
agreement, essentially to buy out the program,
which North Korea has long said was for sale.
President Bill Clinton was ready to go to
Pyongyang to sign this, but his term ran out. The
incoming Bush administration elected to
discontinue these negotiations.
Once the
phoney war was over and the missiles were actually
fired, they rapidly exposed familiar fault lines
between North Korea's five main interlocutors. The
fact that Kim Jong-il went ahead, despite explicit
pleas not to from both Seoul and Beijing, was a
slap in the face for supporters of engagement and
put Roh Moo-hyun in an awkward position.
Yet Roh's own perverse reaction hardly
helped. When a newly and unusually assertive Japan
made much of the initial reactive diplomatic
running, drafting a hardline resolution to the UN
Security Council (), some comments from Seoul
seemed more concerned to criticize Tokyo for
making a fuss than to condemn Pyongyang's
provocation.
Wrong calls? In
devising its own policy response, which after all
it had had several weeks to prepare, South Korea
again looked off-balance. The challenge was clear,
and admittedly not easy: to show firm disapproval,
but also not let this destroy the many and varied
links achieved by almost a decade of the Sunshine
Policy. Patience in Seoul had already been wearing
thin, especially over the North's last-minute
cancellation of long-delayed railway test runs in
May.
With Roh's approval ratings plunging,
and having explicitly warned that a missile launch
would put aid in jeopardy, the South had to do
something. Yet some of the specific policy calls
made in Seoul since the missiles looked
questionable. South Korea's first, immediate
riposte was to rebuff a North suggestion, made two
days before the missile launch, for a military
liaison meeting on July 7.
This is a forum
that the South is usually keen to promote, but
presumably it felt that at this juncture this
would send the wrong signal. That logic is not
obvious: such a meeting could have been used as a
rare and timely chance to read the riot act
directly to the Korean People's Army.
Conversely, were one to cancel anything,
the obvious candidate would have been regular
inter-Korean ministerial talks, the 19th since the
June 2000 Pyongyang summit, due to be held in
Busan, South Korea's second city and main port, on
July 11-14. After all, North Korea had postponed
the last meeting by a month (from March to April)
to protest regular US-South Korea war games. In
the event, Busan went ahead, to no purpose. The
North's delegation refused to talk missiles, and
left a day early when the South would not discuss
food aid.
The South's more general stance
was also peculiar. On July 6, right after the
missile tests, Unification Minister Lee Jong-seok
said humanitarian aid to the North would be
suspended indefinitely. But business cooperation,
like the Gaesong industrial zone and Mt Kumgang
tourism, would continue, ostensibly because this
was a private rather than state initiative.
This again is questionable, on both
counts. Normal international practice is to exempt
food aid from any punitive measures; while the
Gaesong and Kumgang ventures, though nominally led
by Hyundai, are in fact key tools of official
policy that depend on state subvention.
Moreover, the profits from these two
border special zones go straight to the state and
elites, so suspending these could have hit Kim's
pocket. (The Dear Leader called at Kumgangsan in
September en route to one of his regular frontline
military trips, but did not visit any of Hyundai's
facilities while there; nor did the official news
agency deign to mention, much less thank, the
South for financing and developing this resort.)
By contrast, despite concerns over diversion, at
least some rice feeds North Korea's hungry.
Nature strikes again Concretely,
when the missiles flew, South Korea had just
finished shipping 350,000 tons of fertilizer, but
amid already cooling relations had not yet agreed
to the North's request for the usual 500,000 tons
of rice. As of early October that remains the
case, but Seoul's wider refusal of food aid
predictably soon crumpled after nature inflicted
what seems its annual misery on North Korea.
In mid-July, Typhoon Ewiniar caused
flooding that left at least 154 dead and 127
missing, according to the UN. Good Friends, a
South Korean Buddhist non-governmental
organization (NGO)that assists North refugees,
alleged a disaster of biblical proportions, as
Time puts it: with 54,700 dead (many due to
landslides); 2.5 million - over 10% of the
population - rendered homeless, and wide
destruction of crops in major rice-growing areas.
Even if those figures exaggerate, this is
a harsh blow to a country already barely and
minimally coping as regards food, yet which this
year has spurned aid, expelling foreign NGOs and
forcing the UN World Food Program to curtail
operations that once fed up to 6 million North
Koreans.
Facing pressure at home from
public opinion to help their northern brethren,
Seoul first on August 11 allocated $10.5 million
to support local NGOs that had already stepped
into the breach. Then on August 20, Seoul
announced much larger-scale official support, to
be channeled via the Red Cross: some 100,000 tons
of rice and the same weight of cement, along with
iron rods, excavators, and trucks, plus blankets
and medical kits.
All this is worth over
$200 million; it would cost less than half that if
foreign rice were bought, but, as the South Korean
Unification Ministry frankly admitted, because of
a local rice surplus, South Korea would send its
own rice, at five times the price. As in the US,
food aid is in practice inseparable from the
political economy of farm support.
In an
immediate reaction to October's nuclear shock,
Seoul suspended even this emergency aid.
Politically it will now be very difficult to
resume this in the foreseeable future.
Washington tightens the noose The
financial squeeze which the US has pursued since
last autumn appears to be both biting and
spreading, with Vietnam its latest focus.
According to the Financial Times, a visit by
Stuart Levey, who as under secretary for terrorism
and financial intelligence is overseeing this
drive, led to the closing of several North Korean
accounts there.
A leaked Japanese joint
intelligence report, cited by Bloomberg, claims
that since US pressure forced the Macau-based
Banco Delta Asia to freeze all North Korean
accounts a year ago,the country had established
new links with 23 banks in 10 countries -
including Mongolia and Russia, said to be among
the few nations left where North Korea can still
bank.
Levey's itinerary also took in
Japan, Singapore and South Korea. While Seoul had
earlier expressed dismay that this pressure has
stalled the six-party talks, this time the South
Korean Foreign Ministry echoed Washington's stern
note, saying it had serious concerns about North
Korea's illicit activities, including
counterfeiting, and urging Pyongyang to take steps
to quell such worries in order to become a member
of the international society.
Even so,
Levey's line that the US continued to encourage
financial institutions to carefully assess the
risk of holding any North Korea-related accounts
makes this a very blunt instrument: hitting
legitimate trade and joint ventures as much as,
indeed maybe more than, the dodgy stuff - which
will always find ways of going underground.
China chafes Although not confirmed
by Beijing, China is also said to have joined the
financial crackdown, with the state-owned Bank of
China (BoC) freezing or closing North Korean
accounts. Reports from northeastern China claim
that border trade has been curtailed, and that
some North Koreans working without permits in
China - as distinct from refugees - have been
deported.
In July, three refugees who had
taken sanctuary in the US consulate in Shenyang
were allowed to fly direct to the US, most
unusual. Yet while China must protect itself
financially, and may vent irritation with Kim in
small ways, there is no sign of any large-scale
sanctions or squeeze. At a time when North Korea's
capital needs and partial opening are creating
great opportunities for Chinese firms, and thereby
also building leverage for Beijing in Pyongyang,
it would be self-defeating if China were to
overreact to the missile launch. Its nuclear test
may be a different matter.
Under a
darkening sky, one possible ray of hope was the
likelihood of South Korea's Foreign Minister Ban
Ki-moon succeeding Kofi Annan as the UN's next
secretary general. Even before his formal
appointment, Ban pledged to make North Korea a
priority and to seek an early visit to Pyongyang,
pointing out that Annan had not done so in a
decade.
Yet his being Korean is not
necessarily an asset, given the North's lingering
suspicions of the South, even while it grabs
Sunshine's gifts, and especially if ties now
worsen. In any case, the North is cross with the
UN over the Security Council's unanimous
condemnation on July 15 of its missile tests; it
called the resolution (1695)"brigandish", and will
be even angrier with the further nuclear
condemnation that has followed. Nor has it
forgotten, or forgiven, that in the 1950-53 Korean
War the UN was the enemy. (On Tuesday, North
Korea's Foreign Ministry issuing a statement
saying that the UN Security Council's latest
resolution "cannot be construed otherwise than a
declaration of a war".)
Refugee raid in
Bangkok Elsewhere, refugees from North
Korea returned to the headlines in August. A
police raid in Bangkok on August 22 arrested no
fewer than 175, all staying in a two-story house;
their numbers, unsurprisingly, drew attention.
Eighty percent were women, as is ever more the
trend. Such fugitives must still make a long trek
across a hostile China to find sanctuary in a
third country, often aided by South Korean
missionaries.
Despite this raid, Thailand
is friendlier than other destinations like Vietnam
and Laos, which as fellow communist states have
hitherto been more heedful of their ties with the
North. Sixteen of those arrested already had
papers from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR), and with two others were swiftly flown to
Seoul. It was expected that the rest would follow,
after a short spell in jail, while the UNHCR and
the South Korea government processed them.
The numbers are growing, with 400 North
Koreans turning up in Thailand alone so far this
year. Some 1,054 reached the South in the first
seven months of 2006: 59% more than in the same
period last year, whose total was down from 2004.
These are still tiny figures compared to the
former East Germany, or most other global refugee
flows. All governments, in Beijing and Seoul no
less than Pyongyang, are fearful lest this trickle
should swell into a mighty flood.
North
Korea suspended most contacts with the South for
almost a year after 468 defectors were flown out
of Ho Chi Minh City to Seoul (at Vietnamese
insistence) in July 2004, even though Seoul did
its best to keep this airlift low-key. This time,
post-missiles and nukes, the South may prove less
deferential to the North's sensitivities.
Rim Tong-ok, North Korea's point man on
the South, died on August 20 aged 70. As director
of the United Front Department (UFD) of the ruling
Workers Party of Korea (WPK), and vice chairman of
the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of
the Fatherland (CPRF), Rim oversaw ties with South
Korea, his field since the early 1970s.
As
such he was well known in Seoul, where the
government sent condolences to Pyongyang, angering
some. "Seoul Condoles N Korea on Death of
Spymaster" was the headline in the right wing
daily Chosun Ilbo. This was the South's second
such gesture, the first being on the death last
year of the North's ex-premier, Yon Hyong-muk. One
imagines there will be no more for the time being.
Speculation began at once in Seoul on who
would succeed Rim. Most money is on one of the
UFD's two vice directors: Ri Jong-hyok, an urbane
ex-diplomat, and Choe Sung-chol, a rising star.
Also in the frame is CPRF vice chairman An
Kyong-ho, notorious for warning that if the
South's opposition Grand National Party came to
power, as it may well do in 2008, Korea would be
enveloped in the flames of war.
Or Kim
Jong-il may pick one of his own cronies, as is
increasingly his wont; some analysts attribute his
missile test gaffe - and a fortiori, the
nuclear test - to the Dear Leader being surrounded
by yes-men, who echo rather than question his
judgment. Also cited is Kim's brother-in-law, Jang
Song-thaek, purged in 2003 but reinstated earlier
this year. But he is said to have been injured in
a car crash in September. None of this may happen
quickly: Rim only got the job two years after the
death of his predecessor, former KWP international
secretary Kim Yong-sun.
A new
approach? Though all water under the bridge
now, for the record a desultory search for a way
out of the present impasse continued. The usual
talking-up of prospects, such as an unspecified
new common and broad approach, said to have been
agreed when President George W Bush and Roh met
(very briefly) in Washington on September 14, may
just be whistling to keep spirits up.
Although the US and South Korean
presidents manage to paper over the cracks, their
respective preferences for stick and carrot were
well known. Yet something might have been afoot.
Roh, loose-tongued as ever, said on September 28
that the new approach was put to North Korea
before he discussed it with Bush. A day later,
China's top delegate to the six-party talks, Wu
Dawei, said in Seoul that Beijing supported it.
What no one would spell out is what this
magic formula consists of. That is not necessarily
a bad sign. A certain public vagueness may mean
the nitty gritty is being argued behind the
scenes, a better bet than publicly parading
specific non-negotiable incompatible demands, as
has too often occurred in the past. Just possibly,
all parties realize they have collectively dug
themselves into a hole that benefits no one, and
are ready to compromise. But how?
Further
straws in the wind include hints by the US
ambassador in Seoul, Alexander Vershbow, hitherto
seen as a hardliner, that bilateral US-North Korea
talks might be possible (albeit within the
six-party format). Vershbow also said that his
predecessor, Christopher Hill, well liked in his
brief sojourn in Seoul before he was promoted to
assistant secretary of state to head the US
delegation to the six-party talks, could be
willing to visit Pyongyang.
Post-missiles
but pre-nuke, South Korea remained reluctant to
paint the North into a corner completely, yet
could hardly fail to react. Thus, on September 21,
Unification Minister Lee Jong-seok said Seoul was
suspending applications from local businesses to
set up in the Gaesong Industrial Zone, just across
the demilitarized zone inside North Korea.
Yet he insisted that the general
development of the Gaesong complex was continuing,
and that the applications process would resume
when market conditions were most appropriate.
Market conditions hardly seem the point.
While only 15 South Korean firms are operating in
the zone so far, interest had hitherto been keen,
but the fear was that the missile tests would
scare off applicants. Moreover, the Bush
administration dislikes Gaesong, and is firmly
resisting Seoul's vigorous efforts to have its
products included in the bilateral free trade
agreement which the two nations are currently
seeking to negotiate, which, in any case, is a
long shot politically, given strong public
opposition in South Korea.
In view of its
timing, a week after Roh met Bush, this suspension
looks like a gesture to please Washington.
October's nuclear test now puts the whole project
at risk, especially if the outcome is UN-mandated
economic sanctions.
A Chinese
satellite? All analysis of North Korea, as
anywhere, needs to contemplate the longer-term as
well as immediacies. The cover story in the
October issue of the Atlantic Monthly was a long
article by Robert Kaplan, provocatively titled
"When North Korea Falls". If rather one-sidedly
reflecting the view of US Forces in Korea, this
performed a service in thinking the unthinkable on
several fronts.
Most striking was his
suggestion that China's infrastructure investments
are already laying the groundwork for a Tibet-like
buffer state in much of North Korea, to be ruled
indirectly through Beijing's Korean cronies once
the Kim family regime unravels. Kaplan suggests
that the US and even South Korea might go along
with this, if only because the alternative of
either of them trying to run a post-Kim North
Korea (vide Iraq) threatens to be riskier and
costlier than letting China carry the can.
A royal niece takes her life in
Paris Mid-September brought a rare and tragic
fresh glimpse of North Korea's royal family, with
reports that Kim's niece had killed herself in
Paris in August. Jang Keumsong, 29, was the sole
birth child of Kim's brother-in-law and confidant
Jang Song-thaek, a first vice director in the
ruling WPK, and the Dear Leader's only sister, Kim
Kyong-hui, herself director of the WPK's light
industry department.
Said to be tall and
beautiful (and not to have told her friends she
was North Korean), Jang was studying in Paris,
evidently in some style; her body was found in her
villa by her maid and chauffeur. She had taken an
overdose of sleeping pills. Press speculation -
none of this has been announced or confirmed,
needless to say - is that she had been ordered to
return to Pyongyang, where she had a suitor whom
her parents rejected because of his bad
ideological background.
In North Korea's
contorted demonology, that means some of his
family members may have been landlords,
Christians, victims of successive purges, living
in South Korea, returnees from Japan, or a long
litany of similar supposed sins.
If true,
this is ironic in that North KoreaĦ's founding
leader Kim Il-sung opposed Jang Song-thaek's
marriage to his daughter on similar grounds. Jang
was exiled for a while to the east coast city of
Wonsan, before the Great Leader relented and
permitted them to wed in 1972. (Rumor has it that
they are now separated, and that Kim Kyong-hui has
a drinking problem.)
This also echoed a
parallel recent tragedy for South Korea's
quasi-royalty. Last November, Lee Yoon-hyung, 26,
youngest daughter of Lee Kun-hee, chairman of the
Samsung group, Korea's biggest conglomerate, and
the country's richest man, hanged herself in New
York where she was studying. Here again the cause
was said to be parental opposition to the man she
loved: Shin Soo-bin, who found her body. Public
sympathy was strained by Samsung's initial clumsy
attempts to hush up the suicide and claim she had
died in a car accident.
While Jang
Keum-song's death has no known direct political
overtones, in Pyongyang the personal is political.
Her father, long the Dear Leader's right hand man,
fell from grace in 2003 and was not seen for two
years before re-emerging early this year in what
appeared a slightly lower rank, soon belied by his
following his brother-in-law in making a
high-level but low-profile visit to China in
March.
One alleged reason for Jang
Song-taek's purge was his pushing his adopted son
Kim Jang-hyun, in fact a natural son of Kim
Il-sung with one of his nurses, as a potential
successor to Kim Jong-il. In North Korea's
neo-patriarchy, princesses seem to have no claim,
even though the Dear Leader's daughter Kim
Sol-song is reportedly an able economist who
accompanies her father on some of his workplace
visits.
North Korea's obsessive
secretiveness is indefensible in more than one
sense; it is no match for spy satellites. No
longer restricted to the professional intelligence
community, detailed views of everything from Kim
Jong-il's palaces to his prison camps, not to
mention missile batteries and nuclear sites, are
now available - free, at present - to anyone with
broadband Internet access, courtesy of Google
Earth.
Writing on August 29, Sonni Efron
of the Los Angeles Times commented that this was
far more revealing than anything she was ever
allowed to see as a visiting reporter. Already
viewers are debating landmarks of interest. One
has identified no fewer than 332 mainly military
sites, including artillery along the demilitarized
zone and the vast network of air defenses ringing
Pyongyang.
Efron also noted a stark visual
contrast: Click on down into South Korea and the
barren, deforested mountaintops give way to lush
forests, the dusty valleys to emerald rice fields,
the surface-to-air missiles to factories, houses
and cars. Kim may rule in secret and hide nuclear
secrets underground, but the shameful nature of
his regime is on global display.
Other
than the regime's endlessly risible
self-presentation, humor on North Korea tends to
be in short supply. Last month was lightened by
two exceptions. On September 25, Seoul dailies
headlined a claim by Kang Sok-ju, North Korea's
senior vice foreign minister and long-time chief
nuclear negotiator, that Pyongyang had at least
five nuclear weapons.
Their source was an
article on the nautilus.org website, a key forum
of debate on North Korea, by Robert Carlin, a
former chief of the Northeast Asia section in the
US State Department. Carlin's title, "Wabbit in
Free Fall", plus sundry other clues, made it
abundantly clear that what purported to be a
speech by Kang was in fact a spoof; indeed, a
clever and poignant lament for those on both sides
who spent years building bridges between
Washington and Pyongyang, only to see all their
efforts ruined by hardline colleagues.
(It
follows a similar exercise by Erich Weingartner of
the Canadian clipping service CanKor, imagining
how a senior North Korean aid official might
strive to make sense of the famine and the ups and
downs of his government's dealings with an outside
world that it barely understands.)
Six
hours passed before the South Korean media
twigged, issuing red-faced retractions and
apologies. Soul-searching and self-criticism
followed, for not only literal-mindedness but
sheer laziness and haste in simply reproducing the
story without checking it out first. Wordplay as a
weapon
North Koreans themselves have
precious little to laugh about. While communism
elsewhere - especially in Eastern Europe -
generated a rich vein of wry humor, North Koreans
are often deemed too cowed or brainwashed to do
likewise. Yet a recent issue (number 38) of North
Korea Today, a well-informed newsletter from the
South Korean Buddhist NGO Good Friends, reports
some ironic punning on who really does what in
North Korea.
Wordplay has the Democratic
Women's Union (DWU) as running the Socialist
Working Youth League (SWYL) standing, and the
ruling Workers Party of Korea (WPK) sitting. That
is, the party just sits around, young male
officials of the SWYL stand and out bark orders,
and the women do all the work. Good Friends adds
that it is no exaggeration to say that the North
Korean economy is run by women. It is good to know
they have the last laugh.
From Sunshine
to sunset Though early days yet, in the
immediate aftermath of October's nuclear test it
is hard to see this as anything other than marking
the end of an era in inter-Korean relations. It is
sunset for Sunshine. That does not mean engagement
will cease altogether, or if suspended that it
will not resume in some form and continue even if
the Grand National Party forms the next
government.
But it will be different now,
and rightly so. Both from a policy and political
viewpoint, it must surely now be acknowledged that
the sound of one hand giving was the wrong way to
go and cannot continue. Even if a loss-leader
approach was arguably necessary initially to build
confidence, it is now discredited. Future
North-South dialogue must be less one-sided and
asymmetrical, insisting rather on conditionality
and reciprocity.
October's nuclear test
shows the North's cold-eyed contempt for the
South's self-deluding efforts and generosity. With
elections approaching - presidential in December
2007, then legislative in April 2008 - there will
be no votes now in South Korea for being nice to a
nuclear North.
A new stage was in any case
on the cards from early 2008, if the conservative
opposition Grand National Party (GNP) wins back
the presidency. Currently the GNP is far ahead in
opinion polls, and the election looks theirs to
lose. But they did exactly that last time, in
2002, and 14 months is a long time in South
Korea's ever-swirling political scene.
The
nuclear shock has just given the GNP a massive
electoral boost, which seems perverse in the
extreme: Pyongyang media routinely excoriate the
GNP as traitors and US flunkeys. Just conceivably,
after the present shock has died down (albeit
leaving both the local and global situations
permanently changed for the worse), fresh twists
may prove possible.
Not only is there
little practical choice for others save to glumly
accept the North Korea's nuclear fait accompli,
but, clutching at straws, it is just possible that
this new status may give Kim Jong-il fresh
confidence in his impregnability, such that he
might dare to take more risks in negotiating on
other fronts.
Yet how could others respond
without seeming to reward him for what China
rightly and sharply termed "brazen" behavior. This
will trouble all North Korea's interlocutors.
Hopefully henceforth they will prove less divided
on how to deal with this uniquely obdurate regime,
which has now taken its longstanding and fateful
doctrine of jawi - self-reliance in
defense, independent of friend and foe alike - to
its grim logical conclusion.
Aidan
Foster-Carter is honorary senior research
fellow in sociology and modern Korea, Leeds
University, England, and a freelance writer and
commentator on Korean affairs.
