Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH: Change? What change?



	January 15, 2000	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH: Change? What change?
By Bradley Martin

The January 8 installment of this column quoted an optimistic writer for South Korea's Yonhap news agency as suggesting that Great Leader Kim Jong-il in the year 2000 might start to show himself as ''the North Korean version of Park Chung-hee''. Park was the dictator who laid the foundations for South Korea's largely successful market economy. The Yonhap writer quoted a similarly optimistic South Korean official who observed that ''North Korea seems to have awakened to market principles, seeing that it emphasized material interests in economics in its new year's message.''

Who else thinks drastic change is afoot in Pyongyang? Not Donald Gregg, the astute former US ambassador to South Korea who in recent years has headed the New York-based Korea Society.

In Seoul on Wednesday Gregg gave an interview to the ubiquitous Yonhap in which he said North Korea has a strong resistance to change. To illustrate how strong, Gregg said he had been negotiating for years to lead a delegation of US business people on a visit to the North. Pyongyang's reply? ''They say, 'You want to bring American businessmen and you think we are going to change. We are not going to change. We are always going to stay the same.' That's what they say.''

To test those North Koreans' assertion and see if it might be an exaggeration, let's take a look at some recent media stories. Start with a Radio Pyongyang editorial, picked up on January 12 in a JoongAng Ilbo dispatch entitled ''N. Korea jeers at capitalists' unemployment''. ''The unemployment difficulties that have plagued most capitalist nations of the world clearly demonstrate the basic structural flaws of the capitalist system,'' and are getting worse on account of corporate mergers and downsizing that lead to massive layoffs, the Pyongyang regime's broadcasting outlet said.

So they don't want to change to the extent of embracing capitalism. Then how about just making some minor changes in the way the command economy has been operating for decades, or even just recognizing that the Stalinist system might not be perfect? Well, the North Korean party newspaper Nodong Shinmun did complain of an electricity shortage this season. The thing is, noted JoongAng Ilbo in reporting the complaint in its January 7 issue, there is ALWAYS an electricity shortage at this time of year when rivers have slowed and there's not as much water over the hydroelectric dams. What's Pyongyang doing about it? Same as always: ''encouraging coal production''.

At least, though, the regime must have learned something about agricultural policy and moved to make serious changes after the long years of famine that have ravaged the country? If so, someone neglected to mention it to the propaganda operatives who recently put Pak Ok-hui, a cooperative farm chairman in Chagang province, on the cover of a magazine. Her achievement: she ''has obtained three crops a year, which can be noted as a miracle in the history of farming in the mountainous areas of our country''. Triple cropping in the mountains may be the absolute last thing the country needs. Kim Il-sung's policy of planting steep hillsides led to erosion and flooding that in turn has been a major cause of the famine.

Then there was Yonhap, again, quoting ''expectations'' by unnamed observers that Kim Jong-il would appear on radio and television to read the annual new year's message - as his father, Kim Il-sung, used to do before his death in 1994. Of course the junior Kim did no such thing. He's still reclusive and still hates making formal speeches, just as in 1983 when, at a banquet in Beijing, he responded to a toast by nudging an underling and having him stand to reply. So Kim Jong-il stayed out of sight and the new year's statement appeared as a joint editorial in three major newspapers.

We could go on and on. People may be starving but slightly more than half the national budget went to military expenditure last year, according to South Korean official estimates. Anybody surprised? Certainly not Don Gregg, who asserted in the Yonhap interview that the regime is genuinely afraid of a US military strike and has expressed its concern to former US defense secretary William Perry, who's now President Clinton's point man on North Korea policy. ''They talked about this to Perry,'' said Gregg. ''They said, 'We are not going to be another Iraq or another Kosovo.' They think that's what we have in mind for them.''

(Special to Asia Times Online)

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