No Exit: North Korea, Nuclear Weapons and International Security (Adelphi Book 418) by Pollack Jonathan D

Author:Pollack, Jonathan D. [Pollack, Jonathan D.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)
Published: 2014-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

The road to the Agreed Framework

The breakdown in negotiations between Seoul and Pyongyang and between North Korea and the IAEA generated mounting concern in the Clinton administration. Kim Il-sung was also weighing his responses to increased US political and military pressure. As long as Kim was alert and alive, his authority was presumably unchallenged, though he was in declining health. According to highly informed Russian sources, during a meeting with a visiting Bulgarian delegation in the summer of 1986, Kim suffered a massive heart attack. His life saved by the intervention of Soviet cardiologists flown to the DPRK at his son’s urgent request.[34] Prompted by awareness of his increasing frailty, Kim Il-sung relinquished most leadership responsibilities to Kim Jong-il. But Kim Jong-il was involved primarily with various construction projects and with propaganda and cinematic activities. There was only minimal evidence of the younger Kim’s direct involvement in external affairs, and his domestic portfolio focused primarily on issues of immediate personal interest, rather than on North Korea’s increasingly dire economic circumstances.

Kim Il-sung seemed far more attentive than Kim Jong-il to the DPRK’s looming internal crisis. According to a detailed account prepared by a former correspondent in Pyongyang, in late 1991 Kang Song-san, prime minister between 1984 and 1986 and then serving as governor of North Hamgyong Province, informed Kim Il-sung about the province’s increasingly dire conditions as the agricultural crisis took hold. In response, Kim declared in his New Year’s Day speech that 1992 would be ‘the year of agriculture’.[35] Kang (reappointed to the prime minister’s post in December 1992) reported at a Party Plenum the following year on the failure of the Seven Year Economic Plan (1987–93). As a consequence, the plenum announced a two to three year economic ‘adjustment period’.[36] Weeks later in his New Year’s Day address, Kim Il-sung announced priority would be given to agriculture, light industry and foreign trade, all supposedly geared to enhancing people’s livelihoods, although these pronouncements did little to stave off the famine that materialised fully in the mid-1990s.[37]

Kim was also pursuing new avenues for economic assistance. On 28 September 1990, the KWP and senior representatives of the Liberal Democratic Party and the Japan Socialist Party signed a joint declaration, with the signatories agreeing that ‘Japan should fully and officially apologise and compensate … the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for the enormous misfortunes and miseries imposed on the Korean people for 36 years and the losses inflicted upon the Korean people in the ensuing 45 years after the war.’[38] An equally implausible benefactor was Moon Sun-myung, head of the Unification Church who had fled the North many decades earlier and was a fierce opponent of the regime. Moon travelled to North Korea as a state guest in December 1991 and met with Kim Il-sung, and subsequently invested in various projects, including a major hotel and an automotive joint venture.

Kim Il-sung also strengthened the power and role of the North Korean military. He realised that the political loyalty of the military and the

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