Good News in Korea, North and South, so Can Bad Be Far Behind?

NEW YORK —  In Korea, sometimes even the good news can be scary. The latest example came two weeks ago, when a reluctant North Korea defused a simmering crisis and put international negotiations back on track by apologizing for an incident last fall, when a heavily armed North Korean submarine ran aground in the South.

That apology was, make no mistake about it, good news--and one of the most important foreign-policy victories of the Clinton administration to date. Hard-liners in North Korea, worried about growing ties between North Korea and the United States, apparently sent the submarine south in an effort to derail progress toward peace. Firm but patient U.S. diplomacy ultimately got the North Koreans to issue their apology and, better still, to agree to attend a meeting to learn more about what Washington hopes can be a framework for peace talks between North and South Korea.

All this is good news--but look a little deeper and the outlook is not quite so sunny. North Korea didn’t apologize because it was sorry; it apologized because it is starving--and starvation in North Korea could destabilize the Korean peninsula and East Asia as a whole.

Without subsidized Soviet oil and other foreign aid from communist states, North Korea’s economy has been slowly unraveling since 1990. Food shortages, already a problem, escalated into famine after devastating floods in the summer of 1995 spread close to three feet of water on crops almost ready for harvest. By the summer of 1996, food shortages were so acute that rations in much of the country dropped below 500 calories per day.

This year, things look worse. More floods last summer, combined with the collapse of most of North Korea’s industry, leave the country facing a massive food shortage that can’t be averted without foreign aid. Now North Korea’s Dear Leader Kim Jong Il (son of recently deceased Great Leader Kim Il Sung) has little choice but to continue to look for help in his economic troubles to Japan, South Korea and the United States.

Pyongyang’s apology assures that the U.S. will continue to help North Korea replace its current nuclear reactor with a safer model, whose spent fuel cannot be used to build nuclear weapons. Military officials will dig up North Korean hillsides in search of the bodies of MIAs from the 1950-53 Korean War.

And, while neither Japan, the United States nor South Korea wants the dear leader to stay in power, nobody wants the Pyongyang regime to collapse into chaos. Reluctantly, the international community will send at least some food to feed North Korea’s starving millions.

Whether the foreign aid will be enough to stabilize the country remains to be seen. The economic crisis runs so deep, and the North Korean regime has made so many mistakes, that, in the long run, it is difficult to see how the country can avoid some kind of catastrophic collapse.

If and when that happens, it will be South Korea’s responsibility to pick up the pieces. That is easier said than done. Recent events in South Korea show that, despite its economic miracle over the last 20 years, the country still has a long way to go. After the New Korea Party passed restrictive laws against labor unions and tightened its already draconian security laws in a secret session of the National Assembly, the country has exploded in its most serious unrest in years. Auto, steel, financial-service and transportation workers have gone on strike to protest the new laws. The government responded by outlawing unions; corporations joined in by threatening to sue labor unions for damages in these “illegal” strikes.

What is going on is a struggle for the future of South Korea. Can this Asian tiger economy “mature” into something like the high-wage industrial democracies of North America and Western Europe? Or will wage increases for Korean workers make the country uncompetitive? Will Korea’s still-emerging democracy look like Japan’s corrupt system of one-party rule; or will Korea develop along the Western model, where parties compete openly and on equal terms?

The questions aren’t easy to answer. South Korean workers want the same rights that their counterparts enjoy in most other advanced industrial economies. Opposition politicians want a level playing field, and they don’t want a corrupt alliance of the New Korea Party with the country’s tightly knit industrial and financial establishment. These seem like reasonable demands.

On the other hand, South Korea does face new challenges from lower-wage producers in Asia and elsewhere. If economic powerhouses like France and Germany have been unable to cope with international competition, how can South Korea manage?

Meanwhile, lurking in the background are the security forces who ruled the country under a series of dictators from the Korean War until very recently. Two of the country’s former rulers were convicted last fall of crimes related to the 1980 massacres in the southern city of Kwangju, when troops ran amok and killed hundreds of protesters. Deeply implicated in the crimes of past dictators, deeply suspicious of both North Korea and the former colonial power Japan, the Korean military may yet be heard from before the current crisis is resolved.

While South Korea isn’t about to fall apart, it is clearly a society at loggerheads with itself and it is unlikely that a country this deeply divided will be able to respond constructively and quickly should North Korea begin to disintegrate. North Korea is in far worse shape than East Germany ever was, and South Korea is neither as rich nor as stable as West Germany.

For the United States, none of the choices on the Korean peninsula are particularly appealing. We are probably stuck with trying to keep North Korea from either collapsing or launching a suicide attack against the South.

That means food aid, and it means more painful diplomacy in the search for peace. At the same time, we have to be quietly supportive of those in South Korea who want to build social peace based on compromise--and assure Seoul behind the scenes that when Korean unification comes, we will be there to help.

So far, the Clinton administration’s accomplishments in Korea have been nothing short of remarkable. In the teeth of opposition from hard liners in the U.S. and in both Koreas, Washington has reduced the risk of nuclear arms in the North; prodded both sides toward peace, and helped encourage North Korea’s first painful steps on the long road of economic reform. Managing change on the Korean peninsula will be one of Madeleine K. Albright’s toughest assignments as she settles into her new job as secretary of state. Let’s wish her luck--with 37,000 troops in South Korea, the U.S. has a big stake in her success.*