North Korea’s Restraint May Signal Policy Shift - NYTimes.com

Image via WikipediaNorth Korea’s Restraint May Signal Policy Shift - NYTimes.com

By MARTIN FACKLER and MARK McDONALD

SEOUL, South Korea — A day after North Korea backed off threats of violent retaliation for South Korean artillery drills, analysts and policy makers in Seoul said Tuesday that the North’s unexpected restraint might signal, at least for now, that the North Koreans were shifting away from recent military provocations.

North Korea had vowed retaliation if South Korea went ahead with its planned live-fire drills on Yeonpyeong Island, where a North Korean artillery barrage last month killed two South Korean soldiers and two civilians. But when the South defied those threats and held a 94-minute drill on Monday, the North’s official news agency reversed itself by saying it was “not worth reacting” to the exercises.

Political analysts could only speculate about the sudden change in tone by North Korea, one of the world’s most closed and secretive societies. They said that a visit to North Korea by an unofficial American envoy, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, that came at the same time might have helped. Indeed, the North seemed to offer Mr. Richardson an olive branch with its willingness to allow United Nations inspectors back in to monitor its nuclear program.

“I do commend the South Korean government for their restraint, for their legitimacy in pursuing this military drill,” Mr. Richardson told reporters in Beijing on Tuesday. “And I commend the North Korean leadership for not retaliating.”

Most political analysts in Seoul said it was most likely that the North had decided to bide its time while waiting to see whether its attack last month would press South Korea and the United States into talks, and possibly even concessions. They said this was a recurring pattern in the North’s unique brand of brinkmanship: making a provocation in hopes of forcing the other side to negotiate.

Despite North Korea’s propaganda of proud independence, Korea watchers noted that the country was desperate to obtain food aid from the South, especially with the hard winter months ahead, and possibly even win security guarantees from Washington as the North’s ailing leader, Kim Jong-il, tries to engineer the succession of his untested third son, Kim Jong-un.

“North Korea was thinking very strategically,” said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. “I think they are trying to create the mood for dialogue.”

South Korea had defiantly pushed forward with the drills, despite warnings that they might cause an escalation and calls by China and Russia to cancel them. By refusing to bite at what appeared to be a military challenge by the South, the North was perhaps hoping to cast itself as the more reasonable of the Koreas, particularly in the eyes of its traditional backers in Beijing and Moscow, some analysts said.

The North’s restraint may be tested again this week. The South Korean Army and Air Force plan a military drill on the mainland near the border between the two countries on Thursday, The Associated Press reported. The training, while routine, will involve a larger than normal number of troops and weapons, The A.P. reported.

Some analysts have suggested the North might be trying to repair its image among the South Korean public, which reacted with outrage to the civilian deaths on Yeonpyeong. Some analysts said the North played a sometimes sophisticated game of wooing public opinion in the South, aimed at winning support for economic aid and other engagement policies.

“The world should properly know who is the true champion of peace and who is the real provocateur of a war,” the North’s news agency said Monday.

Still, it is unclear how much success the North’s strategy will have, particularly in bringing its opponents back to negotiations. The United States has refused to engage in bilateral talks with the North, insisting that all dialogue take place within the six-nation process that also includes China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. But the United States, Japan and South Korea have also rejected recent calls by the other three nations for an emergency restart of the talks without signs that the North is willing to dismantle its nuclear program, something it appears unwilling to do.

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said: “When and if the North Koreans are ever serious about living up to their obligations, then we can think about restarting six-party talks.

“But the belligerent actions that the North Koreans have demonstrated over the past many weeks I don’t think provide anybody the confidence that they’re even remotely ready to resume in a responsible way those talks.”

If the North feels that South Korea and the United States are still giving it the cold shoulder, then it could strike again. Analysts said the strike was almost certain to be unpredictable and unconventional.

That was true of last month’s shelling, which South Korean officials said surprised them because they had not expected an attack on civilian areas. “Their provocations are beyond our imaginations,” said Gen. Han Min-koo, chairman of South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Analysts say these provocations reflect the increasing desperation of the Communist North, which needs the resumption of aid shipments from the wealthier, capitalist South to prop up its impoverished state-run economy.

South Korean aid has trickled nearly to a halt under President Lee Myung-bak, who came to power three years ago with the demand that the North reciprocate by ending its nuclear weapons program. North Korea angrily refused and began a series of provocations that included the sinking in March of a South Korean warship that killed 46 sailors (for which the North has denied responsibility), last month’s shelling of Yeonpyeong and the recent revelation of an expanded uranium-enrichment program at its Yongbyon complex.

Some analysts said the North also sought a peace treaty with the United States that would recognize the government’s right to exist. Neither the United States nor the Koreas signed a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War, which came to a halt with a cease-fire.

“North Korea has specific reasons for negotiations, and Kim Jong-il is seeking the end of hostilities with the United States, recognition of his government and the survival of his regime,” said Chung Dong-young, an opposition South Korean lawmaker. Some political analysts said it might also be tough for Mr. Lee’s government to make concessions to the North after the president faced such withering public criticism for what has been seen here as weak responses to the shelling of Yeonpyeong and the sinking of the South Korean warship, the Cheonan.

“The Cheonan and Yeonpyeong Island changed public opinion,” said Song Dae-sung, president of the Sejong Institute, a private research group. “The people want a harder line toward North Korea.”

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WikiLeaks Archive — A North Korea Guessing Game - NYTimes.com

WikiLeaks Archive — A North Korea Guessing Game - NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON — With North Korea reeling from economic and succession crises, American and South Korean officials early this year secretly began gaming out what would happen if the North, led by one of the world’s most brutal family dynasties, collapsed.

Over an official lunch in late February, a top South Korean official confidently told the American ambassador, Kathleen Stephens, that the fall would come “two to three years” after the death of Kim Jong-il, the country’s ailing leader, Ms. Stephens later cabled Washington. A new, younger generation of Chinese leaders “would be comfortable with a reunited Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the United States in a benign alliance,” the diplomat, Chun Yung-woo, predicted.

But if Seoul was destined to control the entire Korean Peninsula for the first time since the end of World War II, China — the powerful ally that keeps the North alive with food and fuel — would have to be placated. So South Korea was already planning to assure Chinese companies that they would have ample commercial opportunities in the mineral-rich northern part of the peninsula.

As for the United States, the cable said, “China would clearly ‘not welcome’ any U.S. military presence north of the DMZ,” the heavily mined demarcation line that now divides the two Koreas.

This trove of cables ends in February, just before North Korea began a series of military actions that has thrown some of Asia’s most prosperous countries into crisis. A month after the lunch, the North is believed to have launched a torpedo attack on the Cheonan, a South Korean warship, that killed 46 sailors.

Three weeks ago it revealed the existence of a uranium enrichment plant, potentially giving it a new pathway to make nuclear bomb material. And last week it shelled a South Korean island, killing two civilians and two marines and injuring many more.

None of that was predicted in the dozens of State Department cables about North Korea obtained by the organization WikiLeaks, and in fact even China, the North’s closest ally, has often been startlingly wrong, the cables show. But the documents help explain why some South Korean and American officials suspect that the military outbursts may be the last snarls of a dying dictatorship.

They also show that talk of the North’s collapse may be rooted more in hope than in any real strategy: similar predictions were made in 1994 when the country’s founder, Kim Il-sung, suddenly died, leaving his son to run the most isolated country in Asia. And a Chinese expert warned, according to an American diplomat, that Washington was deceiving itself once again if it believed that “North Korea would implode after Kim Jong-il’s death.”

The cables about North Korea — some emanating from Seoul, some from Beijing, many based on interviews with government officials, and others with scholars, defectors and other experts — are long on educated guesses and short on facts, illustrating why their subject is known as the Black Hole of Asia. Because they are State Department documents, not intelligence reports, they do not include the most secret American assessments, or the American military’s plans in case North Korea disintegrates or lashes out.

They contain loose talk and confident predictions of the end of the family dynasty that has ruled North Korea for 65 years. Those discussions were fueled by a rash of previously undisclosed defections of ranking North Korean diplomats, who secretly sought refuge in the South.

But they were also influenced by a remarkable period of turmoil inside North Korea, including an economic crisis set off by the government’s failed effort to revalue its currency and sketchy intelligence suggesting that the North Korean military might not abide the rise of Mr. Kim’s inexperienced young son, Kim Jong-un, who was recently made a four-star general despite having no military experience.

The cables reveal that in private, the Chinese, long seen as North Korea’s last protectors against the West, occasionally provide the Obama administration with colorful assessments of the state of play in North Korea. Chinese officials themselves sometimes even laugh about the frustrations of dealing with North Korean paranoia.

When James B. Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state, sat down in September 2009 with one of China’s most powerful officials, Dai Bingguo, state councilor for foreign affairs, Mr. Dai joked that in a recent visit to North Korea he “did not dare” to be too candid with the ailing and mercurial North Korean leader. But the Chinese official reported that although Kim Jong-il had apparently suffered a stroke and had obviously lost weight, he still had a “sharp mind” and retained his reputation among Chinese officials as “quite a good drinker.” (Mr. Kim apparently assured Mr. Dai during a two-hour conversation in Pyongyang, the capital, that his infirmities had not forced him to give up alcohol.)

But reliable intelligence about Mr. Kim’s drinking habits, it turns out, does not extend to his nuclear program, about which even the Chinese seem to be in the dark.

On May 13, 2009, as American satellites showed unusual activity at North Korea’s nuclear test site, officials in Beijing said they were “unsure” that North Korean “threats of another nuclear test were serious.” As it turns out, the North Koreans detonated a test bomb just days later.

Soon after, Chinese officials predicted that negotiations intended to pressure the North to disarm would be “shelved for a few months.” They have never resumed.

The cables also show that almost as soon as the Obama administration came to office, it started raising alarms that the North was buying up components to enrich uranium, opening a second route for it to build nuclear weapons. (Until now, the North’s arsenal has been based on its production of plutonium, but its production capacity has been halted.)

In June 2009, at a lunch in Beijing shortly after the North Korean nuclear test, two senior Chinese Foreign Ministry officials reported that China’s experts believed “the enrichment was only in its initial phases.” In fact, based on what the North Koreans revealed this month, an industrial-scale enrichment plant was already under construction. It was apparently missed by both American and Chinese intelligence services.

The cables make it clear that the South Koreans believe that internal tensions in the North have reached a boiling point. In January of this year, South Korea’s foreign minister, who later resigned, reported to a visiting American official that the South Koreans saw an “increasingly chaotic” situation in the North.

In confidence, he told the American official, Robert R. King, the administration’s special envoy for North Korean human rights issues, that a number of “high-ranking North Korean officials working overseas” had recently defected to the South. Those defections were being kept secret, presumably to give American and South Korean intelligence agencies time to harvest the defectors’ knowledge.

But the cables also reveal that the South Koreans see their strategic interests in direct conflict with China’s, creating potentially huge diplomatic tensions over the future of the Korean Peninsula.

The South Koreans complain bitterly that China is content with the status quo of a nuclear North Korea, because they fear that a collapse would unleash a flood of North Korean refugees over the Chinese border and lead to the loss of a “buffer zone” between China and the American forces in South Korea.

At one point, Ambassador Stephens reported to Washington, a senior South Korean official told her that “unless China pushed North Korea to the ‘brink of collapse,’ ” the North would refuse to take meaningful steps to give up its nuclear program.

Mr. Chun, now the South Korean national security adviser, complained to Ambassador Stephens during their lunch that China had little commitment to the multination talks intended to force North Korea to dismantle its nuclear arsenal. The Chinese, he said, had chosen Wu Dawei to represent Beijing at the talks. According to the cable, Mr. Chun called Mr. Wu the country’s “ ‘most incompetent official,’ an arrogant, Marx-spouting former Red Guard who ‘knows nothing about North Korea, nothing about non-proliferation.’ ”

But the cables show that when it comes to the critical issue of succession, even the Chinese know little of the man who would be North Korea’s next ruler: Kim Jong-un.

As recently as February 2009, the American Consulate in Shanghai — a significant collection point for intelligence about North Korea — sent cables reporting that the Chinese who knew North Korea best disbelieved the rumors that Kim Jong-un was being groomed to run the country. Several Chinese scholars with good contacts in the North said they thought it was likely that “a group of high-level military officials” would take over, and that “at least for the moment none of KJI’s three sons is likely to be tapped to succeed him.” The oldest son was dismissed as “too much of a playboy,” the middle son as “more interested in video games” than governing. Kim Jong-un, they said, was too young and inexperienced.

But within months, a senior Chinese diplomat, Wu Jianghao, was telling his American counterparts that Kim Jong-il was using nuclear tests and missile launching as part of an effort to put his third son in place to succeed him, despite his youth.

“Wu opined that the rapid pace of provocative actions in North Korea was due to Kim Jong-il’s declining health and might be part of a gambit under which Kim Jong-il would escalate tensions with the United States so that his successor, presumably Kim Jong-un, could then step in and ease those tensions,” the embassy reported back to Washington in June 2009.

But carrying out plans for an easy ascension may be more difficult than expected, some are quoted as saying. In February of this year the American Consulate in Shenyang reported rumors that Kim Jong-un “had a hand” in the decision to revalue the North’s currency, which wiped out the scarce savings of most North Koreans and created such an outcry that one official was executed for his role in the sudden financial shift. The cables also describe secondhand reports of palace intrigue in the North, with other members of the Kim family preparing to serve as regents to Kim Jong-un — or to unseat him after Kim Jong-il’s death.

Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York.

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Korean War Games Continue Despite Rising Tensions : NPR

Korean War Games Continue Despite Rising Tensions : NPR

The United States and South Korea prepared for war games Sunday as South Koreans demanded vengeance over a deadly North Korean artillery bombardment that has raised fears of more clashes between the bitter rivals.

The North, meanwhile, worked to justify one of the worst attacks on South Korean territory since the 1950-53 Korean War. Four South Koreans, including two civilians, died after the North rained artillery on the small Yellow Sea island of Yeonpyeong, which is home to both fishing communities and military bases.

North Korea said civilians were used as a "human shield" around artillery positions and lashed out at what it called a "propaganda campaign" against Pyongyang.

It claimed the United States orchestrated last Tuesday's clash so that it could stage joint naval exercises in the Yellow Sea with the South that include a U.S. nuclear powered supercarrier — enraging the North and making neighboring China uneasy.

China sent a senior official, State Councilor Dai Bingguo, to Seoul on Saturday for talks with Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported. Dai, accompanied by chief Chinese nuclear negotiator Wu Dawei, discussed Tuesday's attack and international talks on ending North Korea's nuclear programs, it said.

The North Korean attack on an area with a civilian population marked a new level of hostility along the rivals' disputed sea border. Only eight months ago, according to the findings of a South Korean-led international investigation, a North Korean torpedo sank a South Korean warship in waters farther west, killing 46 sailors.

The aggression could be linked to the North's attempt to strengthen its government as it pursues a delicate transfer of power from leader Kim Jong Il to a young, unproven son. It also may reflect Pyongyang's frustration that it has been unable to force a resumption of stalled international talks on receiving aid in return for nuclear disarmament.

The attack laid bare weaknesses 60 years after the Korean War in South Korea's defenses against the North, which does not recognize the border drawn by the U.N. at the close of the conflict and which considers waters around Yeonpyeong as its territory.

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News from The China Post Korean crisis serves as warning of our own risk

News from The China Post

Korean crisis serves as warning of our own risk

Saturday, November 27, 2010

The China Post news staff

As the American nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington headed for Korean waters yesterday, a day after North Korea fired artillery shells at a South Korean island, killing two South Korean marines and two civilians, and wounding 15 others, the tensions on the Korean Peninsula have become the focus of the world governments and the media.

Although Pyongyang claimed that the two Koreas are at the "brink of war," the general opinion is that the shelling was not a precursor to war but an act of provocation either to boost the status of North Korean's heir apparent, the 25-year-old Kim Jong-un, or to force the U.S. back to the negotiating table.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak was credited by both international press and domestic opinion for the calm and restraint he showed in the handling of the crisis. Although known as a hardliner on the North Korea issue, Lee's first directive after the shelling was to stop the situation from escalating.

"The question for South Korea is how much more serious can these attacks get before the risk of doing nothing and showing there's no cost is worse than the risk of prompting an overreaction by North Korea," an analyst from the Beijing-based risk consultancy Control Risks was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying. "My own view is we're still not at that level."

Overreaction by South and North Korea could result in catastrophe. With Seoul only 33 miles from the demarcation line and with North Korean missiles' capable of reaching any point in the South, an all-out war, or even escalated clashes, could cause devastation in one of Asia's key economies.

Taiwan also has a stake in the situation. While cross-strait relations have improved in the past two years after President Ma Ying-jeou took office, mainland China and Taiwan are still far from agreeing to denounce the use of force to settle the "One China" issue. In many simulated military scenarios, strategists regard the Korean conflict and the involvement of U.S. forces in East Asia as a possible trigger of cross-strait military escalation.

The government took the laudable steps of emphasizing its continual alert on the situation while posing a calm stance by not raising advisory levels for trips to South Korea. However, while there are reasons to hope for the best, Taiwan should also be ready if things take an unexpected turn.

As tension at the Korean Peninsula builds, Taiwan should prepare its plans to show the people and investors that the government is ready and that cross-strait relations remain stable in order to protect the nation and its still recovering economy.

First of all, Taiwan should show that while remaining vigilant of the Korean situation, there will be no sudden unexpected escalation of military action on Taiwan's part. Restraint and dialogue are key at a time when the region is virtually held hostage by what Matthew Lee (李世明), director-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Department of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, characterized as the "manic depressive" North Korea.

On the other hand, Taiwan should also actively establish the channel of dialogue with mainland China. The government could begin by continuing cross-strait interactions on all levels. At the same time it should also be explicit in its status as part of the global community by joining the international call for China to condemn North Korea's actions.

The key to such plans lies not only in handling the current situation but also in establishing a paradigm of cross-strait communication to cope with future extraordinary situations. Cross-strait ties are all the more important at difficult, or strange, times.

Last but not least, the government and the opposition should come to an understanding, even if it is unwritten, that the nation should have a united voice on the Korean conflict, that domestic political grandstanding in Taiwan would not be another unexpected factor in an already tricky situation.

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U.S. Sees North Korea as Rattling Sabers for an Heir - NYTimes.com

Image via WikipediaU.S. Sees North Korea as Rattling Sabers for an Heir - NYTimes.com

By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — In the 16 years since he assumed his father’s role as North Korea’s sole leader, Kim Jong-il has been denounced by the United States as a vicious dictator who starves his people, runs gulags, sets off nuclear tests and orders attacks on South Korean ships.

But now the Obama administration is concerned that what comes next could be worse.

What is coming, they fear, is Mr. Kim’s third son, Kim Jong-un, who is thought to have been the moving force behind a new wave of aggressive actions by the North and appears to be in line to succeed his father.

On Thursday night, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates — who took an intense interest in North Korea during his many years as an intelligence officer and then the director of the C.I.A. — offered an on-the-record glimpse of the administration’s internal analysis, saying that the North’s provocative actions were indications that the dictator’s son “has to earn his stripes with the North Korean military.”

He voiced suspicions that it was the succession struggle — in which Kim Jong-il is helping to build the credentials of his son, who is either 27 or 28 — that could explain the attack on a South Korean frigate, the Cheonan, that killed 46 South Korean sailors in March. “My worry is that that’s behind a provocation like the sinking of the Cheonan,” Mr. Gates said during an appearance in San Francisco.

In a question-and-answer series after his speech, the defense secretary, echoing statements by American military leaders, said that until the North Korean succession was settled, the Cheonan sinking could turn out to be the first of several such attacks. Last week a South Korean fishing boat was seized in disputed waters, and the North Koreans, apparently reacting to recently completed military exercises conducted by the United States and the South Koreans, raked the area with gunfire. The action was mostly symbolic; there were no other forces nearby.

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