Korean Anxieties
While the attention of almost all Americans and much of the world has been focused on the presidential election campaign that ended November 4, tensions are rising alarmingly in a part of the world thousands of miles away. North Korea is up to its old tricks, threatening fire and brimstone on the South, and keeping the world guessing as to the whereabouts, and indeed the health, of its “Dear Leader” President Kim Jong-il. The combination of leadership uncertainty in North Korea, a South Korean administration notably more hard-nosed towards North Korea than its predecessors, and an imminent political change in Washington, constitute the ingredients for a possible serious rise in tensions on the Korean peninsula.
The spark for the latest crisis was the launching of tens of thousands of propaganda balloons carrying plastic-protected leaflets into North Korea by South Korean human rights activists. The leaflets not only openly criticized Kim Jong-il but also contained the names of prisoners believed to be held in North Korea’s massive and brutal gulag system of labor camps, and a family tree of Kim, who is suspected of fathering several children from different women. The North Koreans are probably more sensitive than usual to criticism of Kim, who has not been seen in public since August and who is believed to have suffered from a stroke or an aneurysm. He may in fact be hospitalized.
Before South Korea’s current president, Lee Myung-bak, took office in January of this year, previous South Korean governments had prevented the leaflet-carrying balloons from being released under a “sunshine policy” of trying to accommodate the prickly North Koreans. But notably more hawkish president Lee permitted the renewal of the human rights propaganda against the North, and his government announced that there would be an official two-day conference in Seoul highlighting North Korean human rights abuses. This brought down a few days ago a cascade of threats from Pyongyang. A Pyongyang statement growled, “The puppet authorities had better remember that the advanced pre-emptive strike of our own style will reduce everything opposed to the nation and reunification to debris, not just setting them on fire.” The statement added that this would be “a just war . . . to build an independent reunified state.” Considering that North Korea has a well-equipped, fanatically zealous army of 1.1 million, and thousands of artillery pieces within range of Seoul, South Korea’s capital, such talk carries considerable weight.
It is the uncertainty about the status of North Korea’s leadership and its political succession that makes the current tensions particularly worrisome. Though the U.S. removed North Korea from the U.S. government list of states that sponsor terrorism as part of a deal to persuade Pyongyang to reveal its nuclear holdings, the regime is still brittle, brutal, xenophobic, and dangerously unpredictable. For whomever the incoming U.S. president is, North Korea will be a security challenge of very high priority.
Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.
Columns, David Aikman, Good and Evil, Religious Liberty, War and Peace, Wed 05 Nov 2008
