Feb 4, 2010

Prospects for a Transition in North Korea

Remarks by Carl Gershman, President, the National Endowment for Democracy at the International Donors Conference on North Korea

I want to thank Kyungnam University and its President, Park Jae-kyu, whom I saw just last Friday in Washington, for co-sponsoring this important conference devoted to strengthening international cooperation in support of human rights, development and democracy in North Korea.  

I want to pay a special thanks right at the start to John Knaus and Lynn Lee of the National Endowment for Democracy, who oversee the NED’s North Korea grants program and who have played a critical role in conceptualizing and bringing together this meeting, which is the third donors conference that we have supported.  The turnout today demonstrates the significance of this initiative.

This is actually the second time that the NED has co-sponsored a conference on North Korea with Kyungnam’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies (IFES).  The first time was in December 1998 when we jointly organized a workshop that assessed the prospects for liberalization and market reform in North Korea as a basis for developing strategies and programs to foster change there.  The small grant that we made to Kyungnam University for that conference was the NED’s first program on North Korea, a cautious opening step in what would soon become one of the most innovative and important areas of our work anywhere in the world.  

The Institute commissioned 15 papers by top specialists on North Korea, one of them a former North Korean diplomat who had defected several years earlier.  Most of the papers favored what was called at the time a “soft-landing” for the North Korean system.  Toward that end, they argued for engaging the North Korean leadership in a process of gradual reform modeled on the Chinese experience – essentially, encouraging the regime to open up the economy as the price for holding on to power.  They viewed this as the only alternative to an implosion that would be immensely destabilizing and dangerous for the entire region, and would also put an unbearable economic burden on the South.

The critics of this approach, who were in the minority, did not actually favor a “crash-landing” for North Korea, but they thought that it was unavoidable.  They argued that the North Korean leaders opposed reform because they feared that any opening would lead to the collapse of the regime.  As the North Korean defector Sung Il Hyun said, “North Korea is like a glass bottle.  You can’t make a bottle soft.  It breaks.”  He welcomed Kim Dae-Jung’s Sunshine Policy, which was then in its infancy, but he wanted to see it targeted not at the regime but at the people, whom he described as profoundly disaffected and ready to receive the message that there was an alternative to their misery.  He referred frequently to the counter-cultural impact on young people of an international youth festival that was held in Pyongyang almost a decade earlier, urging that more ways be found to “infiltrate liberalism” into the country.

Much has changed since that first conference.  For one thing, the NED grants program for North Korea has grown beyond anything that we could have imagined at the time, involving support not just for human rights advocacy and documentation (including nine annual international human rights conferences), but also for broadcasting news and information into North Korea by four independent radios; publishing a quarterly magazine that gathers information from within North Korea on culture, economics, politics, and other developments and circulates it back inside; and helping defector networks of students, intellectuals, and former military officials establish channels of communication with counterparts inside North Korea to link them for the first time to the world outside.

Moreover, whereas a decade ago North Korea was separated from the rest of the world by an impenetrable wall of silence and neglect, there are now groups in many countries working to support North Korean human rights, and later this year Canada will host the 10th in the series of annual conferences that have been sponsored by the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights under the leadership of Rev. Benjamin Yoon.   In addition, numerous reports have been published on the prison camp system and other horrendous abuses; films such as Crossing and Yodok Stories have been produced that vividly bring to light the harsh conditions in North Korea; and a U.N. monitoring process has been established, spear-headed by Special Rapporteur Vitit Muntarbhorn, the very competent Thai legal scholar and human rights advocate.  

While these developments are significant, we must acknowledge that in another sense very little has changed at all.  North Korea remains a tightly controlled totalitarian system, the most closed society in the entire world.  The North Korean Gulag is still in place, as is the apartheid-like system of hereditary political castes known as Songbun; and there are still famine-like conditions in Hwanghae province, which used to be called the country’s rice bowl.  The extremely limited reforms decriminalizing some market activities that the regime introduced in July 2002 were reversed in October 2005, when the regime banned the sale of grain on the market and tried to restart the Public Distribution System.  The assault on private markets, which the regime views as a threat to its total control of the society, was subsequently intensified when all able-bodied men, and women below the age of 40, were banned from market trading; and most recently on November 30 when the regime imposed a currency exchange intended to abolish markets entirely.  The succession process initiated by Kim Jong-Il’s stroke in August 2008 has strengthened the most hard-line elements, since no one wants to appear weak in a time of political uncertainty.  Clearly, there is no interest in Pyongyang in the China Model of authoritarian development.

But the regime’s effort to restore its total control of the society is ultimately futile.  The markets are a coping mechanism by an utterly destitute population, and trying to destroy them will only worsen the already catastrophic conditions in North Korea and widen the cleavage between the elite and the people.  A recent report by Hyeong Jung Park of the Korea Institute for National Unification emphasizes that since the currency exchange is understood by the people to be a decision imposed by the central government, it could also “lead to an historic turning point where conscious resistance against the regime becomes stronger in the mid-to-long term.”  While it is not clear when that turning point will be reached, there is no doubt that the totalitarian system in North Korea is inexorably eroding and is not the closed monolith that it used to be.  This provides the context for our efforts in the period ahead to support human rights, development and democracy in North Korea.

I think that there are three core tasks before us.  The first is to expand and diversify the kind of programs already underway, many with NED support, in the areas of human rights advocacy and documentation, broadcasting and communications, and capacity building for young defectors and others from North Korea.  Possible new initiatives include cross-border information and training projects carried out by Central European groups that have experience working in repressive environments; targeted training programs to provide North Korean travelers and business people with market skills and health care information and also to foster the capacity to think critically about how to solve every-day practical problems; and programs that help women defectors, many of whom have been the victims of sexual trafficking, develop the organizational and advocacy skills needed to assist other victims and to become a more powerful voice within the defector community.

Second, governments and non-governmental organizations that provide humanitarian and development assistance inside North Korea should try, to the extent that they can, to foster the learning of problem-solving skills as part of programs that provide medicines and medical equipment and train North Korean health workers, or that focus on increasing crop production or countering land erosion and deforestation.  If foreign NGO representatives working on assistance programs in the North were able to incorporate a rights-based approach to development projects, they could begin to nurture among North Koreans the idea that local officials should be accountable to the community and responsive to its needs.  Exchange programs in such fields as health, agriculture, finance, and foreign languages should also be built into development cooperation.  Such efforts would obviously take place under tightly controlled conditions and would be permitted only because their specific purpose is to provide useful aid and skills desired by the regime.  Still, I think Andrei Lankov is correct when he says that open engagement of this kind would expose North Koreans to the modern world and would therefore have the salutary effect of breaking down the isolation that is an integral dimension of the North Korean totalitarian system.

Finally, it is important to begin to treat the steadily growing community of North Korean defectors in South Korea, who now number about 17,000, as a critical asset and not as an economic and social burden.  These defectors serve three vital functions.  First, they offer a way to reach into North Korea, both informally by phoning and sending remittances to family members, and more formally through the defector networks already noted that enable students and others to develop channels of communication with counterparts inside.  Second, they are what is sometimes called a “bridge population,” an exile community that links their oppressed homeland with their country of residence, giving voice to the voiceless society left behind and interpreting that society to the larger world.  And third, as a population acculturated to the South but with roots in the North, the defector community is an invaluable resource that can facilitate the eventual integration of the now destitute, isolated and closed society of North Korea into a dynamic, open and united Korean peninsula.  This resource needs to be developed by investing in the education and advancement of North Koreans now living in the South, with the goal of producing what Lankov calls “the first generation of modern North Korean professionals.”

No one should underestimate the enormous cost and difficulty of managing the process of reunification.  But this is a challenge that cannot be avoided, since even though there is still the same difference of opinion that we saw at the first Kyungnam conference about whether the landing of North Korea will be soft or hard, there is little disagreement that a landing of some kind will eventually occur, though the timeframe is unknowable.  

I cannot believe that South Korea is not up to the challenge of reunification.  Let us not forget that this country, once the poorer part of a united peninsula and devastated by a civil war, has experienced a growth in per capita income of more than 200 times in less than half a century, and now occupies the presidency of the Group of Twenty economically advanced countries. This is one of the great miracles of the modern era, and if it could be accomplished here, surely the rebuilding of North Korea and its integration into a united peninsula is also possible.  

South Korea would not be alone in undertaking this monumental task.  The fact that we are gathered today to consider how the international community can promote development and democracy in North Korea is symptomatic of a gradually evolving international consensus that rescuing North Korea is in the common interest of the entire world.  There is an obvious security interest in helping North Korea become a normal country, or part of a normal country, and there is also a profound moral interest, considering the terrible suffering that has been inflicted on the people of North Korea.  So let us proceed with our work and find new ways to help the people of North Korea, and the cause of peace in this region and beyond.