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

North Korea has a centralized authoritarian political regime, dominated by the elite within the ruling party and with a cult of personality around the leader, Kim Jong Il. Under the 1998 constitution, the leading political figure is Kim, the Chairman of the National Defence Commission, who commands and directs the armed forces and heads the government. There is a single-chamber legislature, the 687-member supreme people's assembly, which is directly elected by universal suffrage, usually every five years. The assembly holds two meetings a year, each lasting a few days, and its regular legislative business is carried out by a smaller permanent standing committee (presidium). The post of state president was abolished on the death in 1994 of Kim Il Sung, who was designated the country's ‘Eternal President’ in 1998. Though viewed as one of the world's last remaining communist states, North Korea describes itself as a state based on the principles of Juche (self-reliance) rather than Marxism–Leninism. It is dominated by the ruling party, the Korean Workers' Party, which, with two smaller parties (the North Korea Social Democratic Party and the Chondoist Chongu Party) participates in the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland, which nominates all candidates for elections. The military also plays a key role, along with tight state control over the media and the repression of dissenting opinions, including religious practices.

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

Driven 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. This prompted fears that North Korea was secretly developing nuclear weapons. North Korea retracted this threat after agreement was reached whereby North Korea received, in 1995, two ‘safe’ reactors of the type to generate power without having the potential to develop weapons, to be built and paid for by South Korea, with the support of Japan and the USA.

Later in 1993, there were further tensions when the North Korean army massed near its southern border. In November 1993 US President Bill Clinton reacted by announcing 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.

Succession of Kim Jong Il

In July 1994 Kim Il Sung died. He was replaced as national leader by his son, Kim Jong Il. There followed a three-year period of mourning, before Kim Jong Il officially took up the post of general secretary of the ruling KWP, in October 1997. A new constitution was adopted in 1998, under which the post of state president was abolished and the late Kim Il Sung was declared ‘Eternal President’. Also, a new calendar was adopted, with 1912, the year of Jim Il Sung's birth, as its baseline.

Kim Jong Il ruled as chair of the National Defence Commission, heading the armed forces, and continued with his father's self-reliance programme. In February 1997 Kang Song San, a supporter of ‘open-door’ Chinese-style economic reforms, was replaced as prime minister by his more cautious deputy, Hong Song Nam. In April 1997 Kim Jong Il appointed 122 new generals to shore up his power. In August 1997, after 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, to become the first state to renege formally on its commitment. In July 1998 legislature elections were held for the first time since 1990.

The country faced a worsening economic environment as, deprived of aid from the USSR and without the means to buy capital equipment needed by its factories, production contracted and living standards fell. The 1998 constitution allowed farmers greater freedom in the sale of produce and the retention of income. But Kim refused to sanction more extensive market-oriented reforms, including the breaking up of collective farms. Meanwhile, Kim pursued an isolationist and anti-Western foreign policy and the country's relations with the USA became even more strained when the right-wing George W Bush became US president in 2001.

Economic decline and famine

North Korea's economy contracted by 4% per annum in the 1990s, and a series of floods and droughts led to a serious famine 1996–99 which claimed between 600,000 and 900,000 lives. As well as suffering poor harvests, North Korea, which spends a quarter of its GDP on the armed forces, lacked the resources to import the capital goods needed to modernize its industrial plants. Increasingly, the country needed to turn to the international community, particularly the USA, the European Union (EU), the United Nations (UN), South Korea, and Japan, for food aid, receiving as much as $300 million in 2001. And there was increased illegal emigration by tens of thousands to China.

In January 1995 the USA eased its 44-year-old trade embargo and provided financial aid after North Korea agreed to halt its nuclear development programme. In May 1996, North Korea made a request to the UN for urgent shipments of tonnes of rice and in February 1997, the North Korean government said it had only half the food it needed to feed its people in the coming year. In response, in January 1998 the UN World Food Programme launched its largest-ever food aid operation, to provide 650,000 tonnes of food to 7 million people, or a third of the population of North Korea, while the USA pledged 200,000 tonnes of food aid.

North Korea resisted demands for international monitoring of food aid distribution. It also rejected attempts by South Korea, whose president from 1998, Kim Dae Jung, sought engagement with the North, to link food donations to effective implementation of its 1991 agreement on cross-border cooperation and to discussions about family reunions.

In July 2002 North Korea devalued its currency and allowed food prices to rise, in an effort to encourage production. It also trialled a new ‘family-unit farming system’ in some areas and set up a special administrative zone in Sinuiju, near China, where there was freer trade to generate some foreign currency. But North Korea's steps towards a market economy were very limited and not comparable with those seen in China.

In 2008, food prices rose sharply in North Korea, leading to fears of a serious new famine. After late summer floods hit harvests in 2006 and 2007, the World Food Programme, in April 2008, called for urgent help from the international community.

Foreign relations under Kim Jong Il

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 US, 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, and did not resume them until December 1999. Relations with the USA deteriorated in December 1998 when North Korea rejected the USA's demand for access to the Kumchangri site.

In 1999–2000 there was an improvement in North Korea's foreign relations. In September 1999 the USA's Clinton administration lifted bans on non-military trade, banking, and transport links between the two countries, apparently because North Korea had agreed not to test long-range missiles capable of reaching US territory in Alaska and Hawaii. Diplomatic relations were established with Italy, Japan, and the UK in 2000, and in July 2000 North Korea also took part in the annual meeting of foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

In June 2000 North Korea and South Korea held their first ever heads of state summit meeting. South Korea agreed to accelerate economic investment in North Korea and announced that it planned to open rail links between the two countries. In August 2000, 100 elderly people from either side of the border were reunited with their families from whom they had been separated for 50 years. And in September 2000 the defence chiefs of North and South Korea met for the first time in over 50 years.

But in January 2001 the right-wing Republican, George W Bush, became US president and immediatly suspended talks with North Korea. He later described North Korea as one of the world's renegade states that was part of an ‘axis of evil’, and relations with the USA became increasingly difficult.

In February 2005 North Korea declared that it had nuclear weapons. Russia considered this to be an exaggeration and a bargaining ploy, as it did not believe that North Korea had the technology needed to build a nuclear weapon. In July 2006 North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile that could potentially reach the west coast of the USA, but the missile failed shortly after launch. In October 2006 North Korea announced that it had successfully detonated a nuclear device underground, and South Korea's seismic monitoring centre had evidence of a substantial tremor.

In February 2007 North Korea signed an agreement with South Korea, the USA, Russian, China, and Japan in which it agreed to shut down its Yongbyon nuclear reactor in exchange for economic and energy assistance.

North Korea (redirected from Korea (North))