Translated material
Gasoline
George Wehrfritz, B.J. Lee(Newsweek)
And the Juche ideas are ours!
And the Juche ideas are ours!
A picture from an exhibition of the achievements of South Korean capitalism. It is no coincidence that these charming Korean girls - advertising agents of the Ideapia company in Seoul are called the "capture group" - in the north, girls wear different dresses. (Photo: AP )
Park Chae-won slipped aboard a plane bound for China like a spy on a secret mission. At work, he explained that he would be absent because he needed to undergo a medical examination, and at Seoul Kimpo International Airport, in order to exclude the possibility of surveillance, he registered under a false name. So when the South Korean Minister of Culture stepped off the plane in Shanghai on March 17, he was completely alone and nothing stopped him from fulfilling his historic mission - to reach an agreement with the North Korean communists. At the Hyatt Hotel he met with Son Ho Kyung, a senior North Korean official, and over the next 22 days they prepared an agreement for a summit between the leadership of South and North Korea. When the deed was done and the upcoming meeting was solemnly announced to the whole world, the two Koreans went to a Chinese club and treated each other to cocktails of whiskey and beer, which are called “bombs”. “Son liked the cocktail,” Park joked when he returned to Seoul. “It seems like all Koreans love bombs.”
On June 13, the leaders of the two warring states sat down at the negotiating table in Pyongyang for the first time since the end of the civil war in 1953, which brought relations between the Koreas to a complete impasse. The meeting between reclusive dictator Kim Jong Il and Kim Dae Jung raises hopes that the last wall remaining from the Cold War will be torn down. South Korea's industrial giants are preparing to conquer the northern part of the peninsula. Diplomats from all over the world frequent Pyongyang - from Rome to Canberra. Foreigners living in Pyongyang note North Korea's increasing openness. “There is less suspicion, more understanding and interaction,” says David Morton, representative of the UN Development Program in North Korea.
The population of North Korea remains fanatically devoted to Kim Jong Il, with agitprop trucks driving through the streets of the capital and praising to the skies the achievements of his late father Kim Il Sung. The country lives in such isolation that few foreigners have any idea how life works here, and almost no one knows how the internal springs of its political system work. But those who watch North Korea closely believe that Kim Jong Il's desire to play statesman can only be explained by one thing: the country needs help. Today North Korea is a rogue state whose population is starving. Compared to 1990, economic indicators have decreased by half. Most enterprises are standing still, the system of government is collapsing. The only way out is to open up to the world, but this is what Pyongyang fears most. "They need cooperation with other countries," said Peter Hayes, co-director of the Nautilus Institute for Security and Development in Berkeley, California. "Otherwise they face ultimate disaster."
Pyongyang appears to be counting on receiving foreign aid - in the form of investment - without reforming its authoritarian political and economic systems. He adheres to the ideology of self-reliance - Juche. However, the almost complete collapse of the economy of entire regions forced the government to come to terms with the spontaneous development of capitalism from below - in peasant farms and in markets. The latest plans include participation in the North Korean economy by its former enemies: South Korean industrialists, American mining companies, Chinese traders, as well as financiers from such “imperialist” institutions as the World Bank. Pyongyang hopes to keep them all “behind the fence” - in special economic zones where they can be easily controlled. "This is more of a revival of the 19th-century concession economy than an opening of the market," said Nam Kung, a New Jersey-based consultant who frequently travels to North Korea.
The South Korean government predicted that the North would suffer the same fate as the GDR. However, Pyongyang, in order to force the world to reckon with itself, threatened with nuclear weapons and long-range missiles - and indeed managed to attract the attention of the whole world. In 1994, after international observers discovered that Pyongyang could produce weapons-grade plutonium from nuclear reactors, Washington agreed to build two light water reactors (which do not produce weapons-grade plutonium) in North Korea if it abandoned its nuclear program and shut down the reactors.
The main driver of the current changes is external forces seeking to penetrate North Korea. Last year, Washington, Seoul and Beijing joined forces in a delicate mission to force Pyongyang to open up to the world. Former US Defense Secretary William Perry visited Pyongyang and persuaded the North to shelve its long-range missile program. In exchange, Washington must lift trade sanctions (the United States has not yet fulfilled its part of the agreement). Japan has also resumed negotiations to establish diplomatic relations, which could result in the payment of war reparations in the amount of $5 billion.
But most of all, Kim Dae-jung strives for rapprochement. Despite the consequences of the Asian financial crisis, he stubbornly insists on expanding contacts with the North. His announced “policy of optimism” (in English translation it sounds like sunshine policy) is aimed at expanding inter-Korean trade, investment, cultural and sports exchanges - in his opinion, this will introduce freedom and democracy to Koreans from the North. Initially, according to one expert familiar with the North Korean situation, "Pyongyang was offended because in these relations it was assigned - however, quite reasonably - the role of a poor relative." But nevertheless, as soon as large South Korean corporations, the so-called chaebols, began to “ask to visit” (of course, with gifts - with money, and once they even brought cows with them), Pyongyang opened its doors to them. More than 200 thousand southerners have already visited North Korea, most of them as part of groups sent by the Hyundai Corporation on a sea cruise to Mount Kumgangsan. Hyundai paid a billion dollars for the right to develop this tourist destination. And inter-Korean trade turnover amounted to $340 million last year, which is one and a half times more than in 1998.
South Korean schoolchildren enthusiastically look at a poster depicting North Korean leader Kim Jong Il (left portrait in the photo). Next to him is South Korean President Kim Dae-jung. (Photo: AP )
There is reason to believe that Pyongyang's agreement to sit down at the negotiating table with the South is explained by something more than greed. This may be a response to the political statement made by Kim Dae-jung during his state visit to Germany in March this year. Kim then highly praised the efforts of West Germany, which during the Cold War managed to develop forms of coexistence with the GDR, and offered Pyongyang assistance at the government level to overcome the economic crisis in the North. In recent years, North Korea has sent its specialists to the West to study market economics.
South Korean corporations look to the North, inspired by patriotism - and the dream of cheap labor. After the summit was announced, the Federation of Korean Industries called for bilateral economic cooperation and promised to send a “landing party” to North Korea to study the investment climate.
Hundreds of small firms have already rushed north of the parallel. On April 1, the Seoul state tobacco monopoly released the first “all-Korean” Unity cigarettes. They are produced in Pyongyang from a mixture of tobacco varieties grown in South and North Korea. Manufacturers see the new cigarettes as a promising product, although they still have to cut shipping costs, retrain low-skilled North Korean workers and adjust to periodic power outages in Pyongyang. “These cigarettes will help unite Korea,” says the author of the project, Lee Chol So. “For us, this is more important than profit.”
American investors also became interested. As Newsweek learned, while American sanctions have not yet been lifted, a group of Americans began to develop a project related to the mining industry. Pyongyang agreed to give the group control of the promising Hamyang gold, copper, zinc and magnesite deposit on the east coast of North Korea.
International aid organizations are most distrustful of North Korea's ability to reform. After all, they know what it’s like here, for example, to trace the fate of their own humanitarian cargo. The intransigent position of the authorities forced such organizations as Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, and Care (Cooperative Society for American Relief Everywhere) to leave North Korea. However, there has been some progress here too. One UN organization has succeeded in implementing a microcredit system in which families can take out small loans to raise pigs, chickens, goats and rabbits. Another has introduced a crop distribution coordination scheme that allows communes to escape the dictates of Pyongyang's planning authorities. The Nautilus Institute of California provided energy to a village affected by the tsunami in 1997 - it built wind turbines that can power a hospital, a kindergarten and 60 farms of local peasants who grow rice.
Another symbol of the future is construction on the east coast of North Korea. Here, the International Organization for Promotion of Energy Development of the Korean Peninsula is implementing a project worth 4.6 billion dollars - building a nuclear power plant. This is the result of a political agreement under which Pyongyang abandoned the development of its nuclear program. The main character here is the South Korean monopoly engaged in nuclear energy, with top managers from Japan and the USA in leadership positions. Hundreds of southerners, who were once brought up in the spirit of fighting the “northern devils,” are working at the construction site along with local workers. Fearing an “ideological infection,” Pyongyang initially banned its workers from all contacts with the southerners. The builders had to communicate with each other through the Americans. But now they are in contact through the mediation of Korean foremen, and they even celebrated holidays together. When government representatives of North Korea and construction managers gather and discuss something, during smoke breaks southerners and northerners chat amicably and sing karaoke together.
Of course, social and economic contacts will not quickly destroy the North Korean Stalinist system. Pyongyang could still slam the door in Kim Dae-jung's face. However, there is much evidence that the country may be undergoing historic changes. In the late seventies, China also tried to gradually “open the door,” but capitalism literally poured into the country. Today in North Korea it is equally difficult to channel the forces generated by the economic crisis: starving refugees, black market speculators, smugglers, and now enthusiastic entrepreneurs from the South have been added to them. “The government will never admit that this is capitalism and will talk about “its own style of socialism,” says Kim Myung Chol, who heads the Korean American Center in Tokyo, which sympathizes with the northerners. “The main question is what socialism is.” The world will soon see whether Kim Jong Il has the answer to this question.
(Printed with abbreviations)
Meeting after half a century. South Korea's First Lady Lee Hee Ho (left) and her schoolteacher Kim Ji Han, who left Seoul for Pyongyang in 1945. (Photo: AP )