North Korea

Country in East Asia, bounded northeast by Russia, north and northwest by China, east by the Sea of Japan, south by South Korea, and west by the Yellow Sea.

Government

Under the 1972 constitution, which replaced the 1948 Soviet-type constitution, the leading political figure is the president, who is head of the armed forces and executive head of government. The president is appointed for four-year terms by the 687-member supreme people's assembly, which is directly elected by universal suffrage. The assembly meets for brief sessions once or twice a year, its regular legislative business being carried out by a smaller permanent standing committee (presidium). The president works with and presides over a powerful policy-making and supervisory central people's committee (which is responsible to the assembly for its activities) and an administrative and executive cabinet (administration council). In practice, though, the control of the ruling party - the Korean Workers' Party - and military support are of more importance than the formalities of the constitution.

History
For the history of Korea as a whole up to the end of the Korean War in 1953, see Korea: history to 1637 and Korea: history 1637-1953.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea was formed from the zone north of the 38th parallel of latitude, occupied by Soviet troops after Japan's surrender in 1945. The USSR installed in power an ‘Executive Committee of the Korean People’, staffed by Soviet-trained Korean communists, before North Korea was declared a People's Republic in September 1948 under the leadership of the Workers' Party of Korea (KWP), with Kim Il Sung as president. The remaining Soviet forces withdrew in 1949.

The Korean War

After two years of skirmishes around the 38th parallel that divided it from the non-communist Republic of Korea in the south, the North Koreans launched a large-scale attack on south in June 1950, in an attempt to reunify the country. This began the three-year Korean War (see also Korea: history 1637-1953), which, after intervention by US-led United Nations forces (on the side of the South) and by China (on the side of the North), ended in stalemate. The 38th parallel was re-established as the border between North and South by the armistice agreement of July 1953, and a UN-patrolled demilitarized buffer zone was created. North Korea was devastated by the war, and lost 294,000 troops, but remains committed to reunification.

Continuing tensions with the South

In August 1971 North Korea proposed political discussions with the South, and the Red Cross Societies of the two halves of the country began talks on humanitarian problems arising from the division of Korea and involving the division of millions of families. Despite the establishment in 1972 of a North-South coordinating committee to promote peaceful unification, relations with the South remained tense and hostile. Border incidents were frequent, and in October 1983 four South Korean cabinet ministers were assassinated in Rangoon, Burma (now Myanmar), in a bombing incident organized by two North Korean army officers.

Political developments to the late 1980s

North Korea remains one of the most secluded countries of the world. It presented a monolithic façade of unity, under the guidance of Kim Il Sung (the ‘ Great Leader’) until his death in 1994. Behind the façade, Kim and his ‘kapsan’ faction eliminated the South Korean communists, whose misreading of the situation in the South was said to have lost North Korea the war, and the ‘Yan'an’ communists, who were accused of being behind a plot to overthrow Kim in 1958.

In December 1972 the Supreme People's Assembly adopted a new constitution for North Korea, which stressed that Marxism-Leninism must be adapted to the realities of the Korean situation. This adaptation of the theoretical terminology of Marxism-Leninism, orientated to an extreme nationalism and committed to the pursuit of economic and cultural self-sufficiency, became known as the juche ideology identified with Kim Il Sung's cult. Juche provided a rationale for xenophobia, the command economy, and mass surveillance.

In foreign affairs, North Korea adopted a neutral stance in the Sino-Soviet dispute, signing a friendship and mutual assistance treaty with China in 1961 while at the same time receiving economic and military aid from the USSR. North Korea remained largely immune from the pluralist or market-socialist wave of reform that swept other communist nations from 1987.

In the late 1970s and the 1980s North Korean politics became dominated by the succession question. Kim Il Sung had sought to establish his son, Kim Jong Il (the ‘Dear Leader’), as sole heir designate. His designation as successor was announced in 1977, and his portrait was placed on public display across the country. In January 1992 Kim Jong Il replaced his father as supreme commander of the armed forces. Elements within the Workers' Party and armed forces appeared, however, to oppose Kim's succession aims.

Economic development

The years after 1948 saw economic development in a planned socialist manner. The Japanese colonial legacy had favoured the northern part of the Korean peninsula which, at the time of its division from the south, had more industrial infrastructure and a richer mineral resource endowment. Factories were nationalized and agriculture collectivized in the 1950s, and priority in investment programmes was given to heavy industry and rural mechanization. North Korea claimed to have recovered from the worst effects of the Korean War by the early 1960s, having received industrial aid from the USSR and other Soviet-bloc countries in eastern Europe.

From 1961 there was clearly some disagreement with these allies, and the 1961-67 economic plan was not fulfilled until 1970. North Korea put this failure down to the need for increased military preparedness, and 1968-69 saw a new peak in commando attacks on the South. From 1971 North Korea began to seek financial and technical assistance from Japan and Western countries. North Korean economic growth, however, lagged behind that of its richer and more populous southern neighbour despite its stronger position in the early 1950s.

Efforts to end isolation

Anxious to end its international isolation because of mounting economic shortages, North Korea sought external alliances from 1990. In September 1990 Prime Minister Yon Hyong Muk made an unprecedented three-day official visit to South Korea, the highest level official contact since 1948. In November-December 1990, after four decades of bitter hostility, North Korea had its first formal contact (in Beijing, China) with the Japanese government.

The collapse of communism in the USSR deprived North Korea of considerable military and economic aid, and China failed to fill the breach. China was becoming increasingly market-oriented and sought to strengthen its links with South Korea with a view to encourage trade and inward investment. North Korea was therefore forced to further review its isolationist strategy and began to seek foreign inward investment, especially from Japan. North Korea was admitted to the United Nations, simultaneously with South Korea, in September 1991, and in December 1991 a non-aggression pact was signed with South Korea, which included the restoration of cross-border communication links, the reunion of divided families, and the free movement of people, commerce, and ideas. This, however, remained very much a dead document.

In January 1992, following a further agreement with South Korea signed in December 1991 banning the production and deployment of nuclear weapons, North Korea also signed the Nuclear Safeguards Agreement, allowing for international inspection of its nuclear facilities. In December 1992 Yon Hyong Muk was replaced as prime minister by Kang Song San, who had served as premier 1984-86.

Tensions with the outside world

In March 1993 North Korea threatened to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, prompting fears that it was secretly developing nuclear weapons. To head this off an agreement was reached whereby North Korea would receive two ‘safe’ reactors of the type to generate power without having the potential to develop weapons, which would be built and largely paid for by the South, supported by Japan and the USA. (These were eventually received in 1995.) Although North Korea later retracted its threat to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, amid evidence that North Korean military forces were massing near the country's southern border, US President Bill Clinton announced in November 1993 that an attack on South Korea would be considered a direct attack on the USA itself. He also declared that North Korea should be prohibited from building a nuclear weapon.

Kim Il Sung died in July 1994 and was replaced as national leader by his son, Kim Jong Il. However, Kim Jong Il did not officially take up the post of general secretary of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea until October 1997, after a three-year period of mourning for his father.

In January 1995 the USA eased a 44-year-old trade embargo after North Korea agreed to halt its nuclear development programme in return for US financial aid.

Political and social developments in 1996-97

In February 1997 deep fissures in the solidity of the North Korean regime were revealed by the defection of Hwang Jang Yop, one of the top 25 leaders of the KWP. In the same month 66-year-old Kang Song San, a supporter of ‘open-door’ Chinese-style economic reforms, was replaced as prime minister by his more cautious deputy, 73-year-old Hong Song Nam. Also in February, the North Korean government officially confirmed that it had only half the food it needed to feed its people in the coming year. In April 1997 Kim Jong Il appointed 122 new generals in a bid to shore up his power. That summer two successive years of floods were succeeded by widespread drought and the inundation of a coastal region by a disastrous tidal wave.

The apparent priorities of the regime were revealed by the announcement in July 1997 that, following the end of the three year period of mourning for the death of Kim Il Sung, a new calendar was to be adopted, with 1912, the year of his birth, as its baseline. In August, following criticism of its human-rights record, North Korea withdrew from the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which it had signed in 1981, thereby becoming the first state to renege formally on its commitment. In October Kim Jong Il finally took up office as secretary general of the KWP.

Famine

Since 1990 North Korea's economy has contracted by 4% per annum. Facing severe famine, with food supplies expected to expire in August 1996 (two months before the next harvest), North Korea made a request to the USA in May for an urgent shipment of 3,000 tonnes of rice. Food aid was provided by the UN.

Food shortages mounted through 1997, resulting in another $15 million in emergency food aid from the United States, bringing the total of US food aid to $33 million since late 1995. Food aid also continued to come in from South Korea and China. In South Korea, the newly elected government of Kim Dae Jung, despite facing its own major internal economic crisis, pledged itself to encourage cross-border investment and to alter the law to permit private citizens to send cash to relatives in the North.

Demands for international monitoring of food aid distribution were, however, strongly resisted by the North. Attempts by the South to link food donations to the effective implementation of the 1991 agreement on cross-border cooperation were likewise rejected. In January 1998 the UN World Food Programme responded to the worsening famine in North Korea by launching its largest-ever food aid operation, to provide 650,000 tonnes of food to 7 million people, almost a third of the population of North Korea. The US government pledged 200,000 of food aid. At face-to-face North-South talks in Beijing, the North demanded 500,000 tons of fertilizer. When the South attempted to make such aid conditional on discussions about family reunions, the North refused to accept any such linkage and walked away from the negotiating table in April 1998, promising only to return at some unspecified future date. It was reported in August 1998 by a US congressional team that famine had killed, on average, 500,000 North Koreans, or more than 5% of the population, in each of the last three years.

In July 1998 legislature elections were held for the first time since 1990. In September 1998, on the republic's 50th anniversary, the Supreme People's Assembly (legislature) met for the first time in four years and it was announced that Kim Il Sung, the country's deceased former ruler, had been made ‘president for perpetuity’. Kim Jong Il was re-appointed chairman of the Central Defence Committee, the country's highest post. The constitution was also amended to allow farmers greater freedom in the sale of produce and the retention of income.

Nuclear weapons

In August 1998 satellite spy pictures suggested that North Korea might, in a secret underground site of Kumchangri, be infringing the freeze on its nuclear weapons programme agreed in return for American, Japanese, and South Korean help in constructing new power plants. In the same month, North Korea test fired, unannounced, a ballistic missile over Japanese territory. Japan stopped food aid and commercial flights to North Korea in protest, not resuming them until December 1999. In December 1998 relations with the USA deteriorated further when the USA demanded access to the Kumchangri site.

Changing foreign relations

North Korea sent its warships into southern territorial waters in June 1999, saying that the navy was protecting fishing boats, and denied that it was seeking an excuse to start an armed conflict with the South.

In its most conciliatory gesture towards North Korea in nearly 50 years, the USA announced in September 1999 an easing of sanctions, including the lifting of bans on non-military trade, banking, and transport links between the two countries. In return, according to the White House, the North Korean government agreed not to test a new long-range missile capable of reaching US territory in Hawaii and Alaska, as long as the two countries maintained progress towards normal relations.

In April 2000, North and South Korea announced the arrangement of the first summit meeting between them. Building up to the event, North Korea forged diplomatic relations with Japan, the USA, and Italy, who responded to a call made by North Korea for international assistance, as natural disasters and economic crisis had severely affected the country since 1995, causing widespread starvation. North Korea also took part in the annual meeting of foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in July 2000, marking a further step out of diplomatic isolation.

At the summit meeting between North and South Korea in June 2000, Kim Dae Jung was welcomed by Kim Jong Il. The two leaders came to some agreement, including a plan for South Korea to speed up economic investment in North Korea, and a plan to open rail links between the two countries. In August, 100 elderly people from either side of the border were reunited with their families from whom they had been separated for 50 years. Another step was taken in September when the defence chiefs of North and South Korea met for the first time in over 50 years. Jo Myong Rok, a senior North Korean military officer, also met US President Clinton in the USA in October 2000, in an attempt to improve relations with the West. In October, Britain opened diplomatic relations with North Korea, and the US secretary of state held talks with Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang. However, the incoming administration of US president George W Bush suspended talks from 2001.

Kim Jong Il met Russian president Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on 4 August 2001. President Putin pledged economic assistance to help modernize the North Korean economy, and Kim Jong Il promised no new missile tests until at least 2003.

In June 2002, in the worst clash between North and South Korea in three years, naval vessels fired on each other in disputed coastal waters in the Yellow Sea. Four South Korean sailors were killed and 19 injured, while around 30 North Korean casualties were reported. It also jeopardized plans for dialogue between the North and the USA, which has about 37,000 troops based in South Korea.

North Korea (redirected from Korea (Democratic Republic of))