A promise by North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to improve the state’s broken economy is forcing him to ask for massive aid and may even bring him back to nuclear talks that Pyongyang once declared dead.
The North, which last month sent an envoy to the US on a charm offensive, gave its clearest signal yet yesterday that it was ready to return to the six-way talks.
Plenty of obstacles remain to reviving the discussions, not least the fact that Washington wants Pyongyang to recommit to giving up its nuclear activities before negotiations.
“It is still too early to tell if the North is desperate enough to make the strategic decision about a change in its nuclear arms program,” a diplomatic source in Seoul said.
But Kim, it appears, has backed himself into a corner after having pledged to turn North Korea into a “strong and prosperous nation” by 2012 to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of his father and the state’s founder, Kim Il-sung.
Meeting that promise and Kim’s need to pay off cadres to win their support for a generational change in Asia’s only communist dynasty help explain why he abruptly stopped raising tensions with the international community after numerous missile launches this year and a nuclear test in May.
“This puts pressure on the regime to get as much aid as it can, as fast as it can,” said B.R. Myers, an expert on the North’s state ideology at Dongseo University in South Korea. “To say that it will be a strong and prosperous country and to say that will be achieved by 2012, and to raise expectations, is actually a very risky thing.”
The year 2012 may also be the year when Kim Jong-il, 67, announces to his countrymen that he is handing over power to the youngest of his three sons.
Unlike other times when the North’s leaders were able to claim victory by touting fictitious economic achievements or blaming US imperialists for its woes, the North will have to show its citizens real change by 2012 because it has raised expectations so high, analysts said.
“Very high and vast are the targets we have to hit,” the North’s KCNA news agency itself declared a few months ago.
And very bare are its coffers. North Korea’s tiny economy, estimated at US$17 billion, or just 2 percent the size of South Korea, has been buffeted on several fronts.
First, a new government in Seoul cut off aid to North Korea early last year. It said the aid, roughly equivalent to 5 percent of North Korea’s economy, would only flow again if Pyongyang took concrete steps on nuclear disarmament.
Most recently, tough UN sanctions in the wake of the nuclear test in May have cut Pyongyang’s lucrative arms sales while the country is also suffering a poor harvest.
The North could get more from South Korea, which once supplied US$1 billion in annual aid, than by trying to revive assistance worth a quarter of that value that was suspended when Pyongyang left the six-way nuclear talks a year ago.
But by returning to the nuclear talks, the North would please Beijing. It could also head off any US plans to further crack down on its international finances.
In recent months Pyongyang has sought direct talks with the US even as Washington has refused to relent in enforcing the sanctions. Pyongyang has also reached out to the government of South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, which angered Pyongyang by cutting off unconditional handouts last year.
“The North is shackled and can feel it. Its conciliatory moves and the attempt to improve things with the United States are all part of trying to unlock the shackles,” said Kim Yong-hyun, an expert on the North at Dongguk University in Seoul.
Kim has also moved to firm up relations with China, his main supplier of the aid.
Some experts think the upper limit in any new talks would see the North give up Yongbyon nuclear plant, thus putting it out of the plutonium-producing business, and perhaps handing over a portion of its stockpile of fissile material, estimated to be enough for six to eight bombs. That would still leave the North’s nascent uranium enrichment program, another way to make a nuclear bomb and one that is harder to track because it can be carried out underground.
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