Photograph by: LIU JIN, AFP/Getty Images

Jonathan Manthorpe: Collapse of North Korea more dangerous than Kim’s threats

By Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun columnistApril 1, 2013

Former North Korean Premier Pak Pong-ju (centre-left), shown during a visit to Shanghai in 2005, was removed from power in 2007 due to hard-line resistance to his economic reforms. On Monday, North Korea announced he has be reinstated and appointed to the Workers’ Party Politburo.

Photograph by: LIU JIN, AFP/Getty Images

The big danger in the Far East is not that North Korea will attack its neighbours, but that the regime will collapse and intervention by other players will provoke unpredictable and highly volatile results.

It has received little attention in the West, but there are signs that Kim Jong-un and his mentors are continuing policies started by his father, Kim Jong-il who died in December 2011, to liberalize the regime.

For authoritarian regimes like Pyongyang, this is always a dangerous transition, and events can easily spiral out of control.

But chaos in North Korea would invite intervention by South Korea, where there are strong yearnings for reunification of the two countries divided at the end of the Second World War.

Equally concerned about a flame-out by the Kim regime would be China, the only significant supporter of the Pyongyang government. Beijing sees a separate North Korea as an important buffer against United States military influence in the region.

Beijing would be reluctant to intervene directly in North Korea because of the imperialist message it would send to China’s other neighbours such as Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines with which it has territorial disputes.

But there are clearly scenarios in the fallout from a collapse in North Korea that could quickly see a combustible confrontation between China and the U.S., backed by its Asian allies.

Recent threats by the Pyongyang regime to attack South Korea and the U.S. are too outlandish to be credible. They are undoubtedly aimed at North Korea’s domestic audience and intended to brand leader Kim Jong-un as a decisive, tough and ruthless leader like his father and grandfather before him.

Kim’s propaganda machine portrayed new United Nations sanctions against Pyongyang — a response to its Feb. 12 underground test of a nuclear weapon — and joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises as acts of aggression against North Korea.

Therefore, said Pyongyang, North Korea is justified in making pre-emptive strikes against South Korea and the U.S.

But UN sanctions were to be expected. It is what has happened every time North Korea has defied international condemnation of its weapons programs, including two previous nuclear weapons tests and the launching of unarmed long-range missiles.

The war games between U.S. and South Korean forces are an annual event, and while Pyongyang always protests, there is no reason for the North to consider these any more threatening than past exercises.

And the threat to attack the U.S. is too outlandish to be believable.

Like all authoritarian regimes, the driving force behind all that happens in Pyongyang is the preservation of the regime.

Kim and his courtiers know full well that if they push too hard they will be removed either by the U.S. and its allies or by China.

On Sunday, even as the Central Committee of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea proclaimed that its possession of nuclear weapons will not be negotiated away and are now an essential part of “the nation’s life,” it also took another step in the reform process.

The Central Committee, whose decisions are seldom reported as openly as these were, set out “a new strategic line” with an emphasis on economic development.

In the last few years, Pyongyang has toyed with following China’s model for trade and investment. But it has been politically near impossible for the leaders to abandon the ruinous policy of “juche” — economic self-reliance — developed by the regime’s founder, Kim Il-sung.

An indication that the economic reform policy may be real is that former North Korean Premier Pak Pong-ju was promoted to full membership in the Politburo.

Pak led the 2002 Economic Management Improvement Measures, the first efforts at reform. But he met severe resistance from hard-line “juche” purists, his reforms were shelved, and he was removed from power.

But an increasingly important part of the North Korean economy and a model for its future development is the Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC).

The KIC is a joint venture between North and South Korea where, every day, South Korean managers commute to supervise 50,000 Northern workers in 123 enterprises owned by the South.

And again, contrary to the usual view from the West, there has been some liberalization of the police state in North Korea in recent years.

One significant development is that, for the first time, business people and others trusted by the ruling party have been given passports and allowed to work abroad, mostly in China.

But among some of these North Koreans interviewed by non-Korean analysts, there is a common theme.

They are uniformly contemptuous of the Kim regime, which they see as totally self-serving and uninterested in providing for North Korea’s people.

If these are the views of people trusted by the ruling Workers’ Party, then the ground under the Kim regime cannot be considered stable.

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