NewYorkTimes

2012Saturday, April 14, 2012

North Korea is the last Stalinist state on earth, and in 2006 it became the latest country to join the nuclear club. Over the past two decades, it has swung between confrontation and inch-by-inch conciliation with its neighbors and the United States, in an oscillation that seems to be driven both by its hard-to-fathom internal political strains and by an apparent belief in brinksmanship as the most effective form of diplomacy.

The uncertainty surrounding the actions of Pyongyang, the North’s capital, deepened with the announcement by state media on Dec. 19, 2011, that its ailing ruler, Kim Jong-il, had died of a heart attack on a train on Dec. 17.

Kim Jong-un, the youngest and previously least-known son of Kim Jong-il, was declared to be the next leader of North Korea.

Over nearly two weeks of national mourning following the announcement of his father’s death, an elaborate series of ceremonies introduced Kim Jong-un as the new dynastic leader, culminating in a mass rally on Dec. 29 at which tens of thousands of North Koreans rallied to pledge their allegiance.

North Korea has said the “great successor,” as Mr. Kim has been called, will faithfully follow his father’s songun, or “military-first,” policy, which has raised tensions with Washington and Seoul.

A Failed Satellite Launch Draws Global Condemnation

In late February 2012, North Korea agreed to suspend nuclear weapons tests and uranium enrichment and to allow international inspectors to verify and monitor activities at its main reactor, as part of a deal that included an American pledge to ship food aid to the isolated, impoverished nation. The agreement came after two days of talks with American officials in Beijing.

North Korea also agreed on a moratorium on launches of long-range missiles, which have in the past raised military tensions in South Korea and Japan, and to resume the so-called six party talks with the United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia.

North Korea has agreed in the past to halt its nuclear program, only to back out and demand more concessions. Still, both South Korea and Japan welcomed the deal as an important first step, though they cautioned that they would wait to see whether North Korea would faithfully implement it.

Indeed, the agreement was compromised in mid-April, when North Korea launched a satellite, a belligerent act that the United States called a cover for developing an intercontinental ballistic missile that one day might be able to carry a nuclear warhead.

But the much-publicized launch failed, when the rocket carrying the satellite exploded in midair about one minute after liftoff. The rocket and satellite — which cost the impoverished country an estimated $450 million to build, according to South Korean government estimates — splintered into many pieces and plunged into the Yellow Sea.

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The failed launching drew swift international condemnation, including the suspension by the United States of food aid, and raised concerns that the North might speed ahead with what satellite photographs suggest are preparations for a nuclear test — the country’s third.

For weeks, Washington had told Pyongyang to cancel the launch or the United States would suspend the promised food aid shipment. The United States and its allies also warned that they would take the country to the United Nations Security Council for a censure and probably further tighten sanctions already imposed on North Korea for its previous missile tests.

For a New Leader, a Humiliating Setback

For Kim Jong-un, his government’s failure to put a satellite into orbit was a $1 billion humiliation.

Mr. Kim wanted to mark his ascension to top political power — timed with the country’s biggest holiday in decades, the 100th birthday of his grandfather and North Korean founder, Kim Il-sung — with fireworks, real and symbolic. And the launching of its Kwangmyongsong, or “Bright Shining Star,” satellite was the marquee event.

Despite the embarrassing setback, Mr. Kim was installed hours after as the new head of the national defense commission, his country’s highest state agency, during a parliamentary meeting in Pyongyang. That was the last among the top military, party and state posts that have been transferred to him from his father, Kim Jong-il.

In a socialist country steeped in the traditions of a Confucian dynasty, it is of paramount import for the young Mr. Kim to embellish his rise to power with events that show his loyalty to his forefathers while demonstrating his own abilities to lead, analysts said.

The government, more famous for shutting off its country from the outside world, had intensified the pre-launch publicity. It trumpeted the satellite program as a key achievement of Mr. Kim, claiming that he had personally directed a previous satellite launching in 2009. It also invited foreign journalists to visit the launch site and command and control center.

The result was more than a loss of face. North Korea lost 240,000 tons of food aid, estimated to be worth $200 million, that Washington had promised in February but then said it was canceling because of the announced rocket launch.

South Korea did not lose the opportunity to jab at the North’s hurt pride.

“It is very regrettable that North Korea is spending enormous resources on developing nuclear and missile capabilities while ignoring the urgent welfare issue of the North Korean people such as chronic food shortages,” said its foreign minister, Kim Sung-hwan.

Kim Jong-un Declared ‘Supreme Leader’

On April 11, the Workers’ Party declared Kim Jong-un to be “supreme leader” and awarded him the title of first secretary during a party conference, the country’s first major political gathering in one-and-a-half years. The inevitable elevation of Mr. Kim to the top defense commission post will complete his rise to the pinnacle of party, military and state leadership, at a speed that analysts in the region said reflected the insecurity of the young leader’s status as much as it did the secretive leadership’s need to have a solid power center in place immediately.

The Worker’s Party conference gives the young leader — or the senior power elite surrounding him — an opportunity to shuffle party and military leaderships, gradually retiring old stalwarts from his father Kim Jong-il’s days as leader and elevating younger loyalists.

Such a generation change has been unfolding since Mr. Kim was officially designated as his father’s successor in the last party meeting, held in September 2010. More signs of the shift came on April 10, when the Korean Central News Agency revealed that Vice Marshal Kim Jong-gak, a key military political officer widely believed to be Mr. Kim’s promoter among the military elite, was made People’s Armed Forces Minister, a title equivalent to defense minister.

Two other senior officials said to have been hand-picked by Mr. Kim’s father to help engineer the transfer of power to his son — Choe Ryong-hae and Hyon Chol-hae — were promoted to vice marshal ahead of the party meeting, the news agency said. The rise of Mr. Choe was particularly significant, according to analysts. At 61, he is relatively young among the top North Korean hierarchy, which has been filled with people in their 80s and 70s.

Mr. Choe’s rise also showed that the dynastic transfer of power in Pyongyang was not just for the Kim family but was often for the rest of the elite class as well — a factor that analysts often cite to help explain the cohesion of the Kim rule. Mr. Choe’s father fought alongside Kim Il-sung when he was leading a group of Korean guerrillas during the Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945. The families of many of those guerrillas remained key members of the top ruling class.

Kim Jong-il never achieved the revered status of his father. The party decided to leave the previous top post — general secretary — vacant, designating Kim Jong-il “eternal general secretary.” Similarly, when Kim Il-sung died in 1994, he was upheld as “eternal president” of the country.

The move illustrated the long shadows of his forefathers under which the young leader, Kim Jong-un, must operate.

A Calculated Propaganda Message

When Kim Jong-il died, the younger Mr. Kim was such an unknown that the world did not even know what he looked like until his ailing father began grooming him as a successor in 2010. But the biggest enigma may be whether he will be able to hold onto power in this last bastion of hard-line Communism, much less prevent its impoverished economy from collapsing.

Kim Jong-un is believed to be in his late 20s and his youth and relative inexperience could make him vulnerable to power struggles. News of his father’s death was kept secret for roughly two days, perhaps a sign that the leadership was struggling to position itself for what many believed could be a perilous transition.

For South Korean and American intelligence services to have failed to pick up any clues about Kim Jong-il’s death attests to the secretive nature of North Korea, a country not only at odds with most of the world but also sealed off from it in a way that defies spies or satellites.

As the United States and its allies negotiate a leadership transition in North Korea, the closed nature of the country greatly complicates their calculations. With little information about Kim Jong-un, and even less insight into the palace intrigue in Pyongyang, much of their response has necessarily been guesswork.

The Question of the Military’s Allegiance

When Kim Jong-un was unveiled as his father’s heir in 2010, he was given two powerful military titles: four-star general and vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. With his father’s death, the support of the military is crucial if Kim Jong-un is to consolidate power.

To that end, on Dec. 21 North Korean television showed senior military leaders saluting the young Mr. Kim as he received mourners at the Kumsusan mausoleum, where his father lay inside a glass case for public viewing.

Three days later, state-run media showed footage of the top military brass flanking Kim Jong-un as they paid their respects to Mr. Kim’s father and vowed their allegiance to his chosen successor. Among the officials there was Jang Song-taek, 65, Mr. Kim’s uncle and a vice chairman of the powerful National Defense Commission, whose role as the young successor’s caretaker has been magnified during the transition. Mr. Jang, 65, wore a general’s insignia.

On Dec. 28, the day of Kim Jong-il’s funeral, Kim Jong-un walked alongside the hearse through snow-covered downtown Pyongyang, leading a procession that provided early glimpses of those serving as guardians of the young untested leader. Mr. Kim’s two elder brothers, Kim Jong-nam and Kim Jong-chol, were nowhere to be seen.

Most prominent among those leading the funeral alongside and behind Mr. Kim were Mr. Jang and and Ri Yong-ho, head of the North Korean military’s general staff.

Mr. Ri, a relatively unknown figure during most of Kim Jong-il’s rule, rose to prominence in 2010 as the late leader began grooming his son as heir. He is considered an important backer of Kim Jong-un in the Korean People’s Army.

In a closed-door briefing at parliament in Seoul, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service noted that Mr. Jang might expand his influence into the military to ensure a smooth transition, according to lawmakers who attended the briefing.

The spy agency also noted a sense of vulnerability in the North Koreans’ hurry to thrust the son into the spotlight. Long before his father died in 1994, Kim Jong-il had already seized power, including the leadership of the military. Unlike his son, Kim Jong-un, he was in no hurry to assume his father’s top titles like “great leader.”

No Official Condolences from Seoul or Washington

A day after Mr. Kim’s death was announced, officials in Seoul and Washington issued coordinated statements. They were careful to direct their “sympathy” or “prayers” to the “North Korean people,” not to the government, in contrast to Beijing and Moscow, which sent official condolences to the authorities in Pyongyang, the capital.

In response, North Korea urged South Korea on to “show proper respect” over the death of Kim Jong-il, calling the South’s decision to express sympathy for the North Korean people but not to send a government delegation to Mr. Kim’s funeral “an unbearable insult and mockery of our dignity.”

South Korean officials said that while they were careful to avoid any hints of approval for Mr. Kim’s legacy, they wanted to relay hopes for a more productive relationship with the North.

From South Korea, a Private Delegation

Though South Korea sent no official mourners, a private delegation of prominent South Koreans traveled to North Korea and met with Kim Jong-un. The meeting with the private delegation, which included Lee Hee-ho, the widow of former President Kim Dae-jung, and the chairwoman of Hyundai Asan, Hyun Jeong-eun, which had business ties with North Korea, appeared to be cordial.

The Seoul government said that Ms. Lee and Ms. Hyun were reciprocating for the North Korean delegations that visited Seoul to express condolences over the deaths of President Kim and of Chung Mong-hun, the former Hyundai chairman.

No Shift in Stance Toward the South

When Ms. Lee met with the delegation in Pyongyang, Kim Yong-nam, president of the North Korean Parliament, called for the implementation of the inter-Korean summit agreements, which would have brought massive South Korean investments had the South Korean leader, Lee Myung-bak, not scuttled them.

Kim Jong-il held summit meetings with President Kim in 2000 and with his successor, Roh Moo-hyun, in 2007. Both meetings produced promises of large South Korean investments. Both South Korean leaders believed that boosting economic exchanges would ease military tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula and reduce the cost of an eventual reunification of Korea.

But that approach was reversed when President Lee, a conservative, came to power in early 2008. He demanded that the North first abandon its nuclear weapons program. North Korea has since denounced Mr. Lee as a “national traitor” and demanded that the summit agreements be reinstated. Its recent military provocations against the South were seen as efforts to win concessions.

Pyongyang’s demand concerning the summit agreements provided an early sign that Kim Jong-un was not shifting the North’s basic stance on South Korea.

Indeed, on Dec. 30, the National Defense Commission, North Korea’s highest decision-making body, announced that there would be no change in its policy toward South Korea under its new leader, Kim Jong-un. The statement struck a characteristically hostile posture with a threat to punish President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea for “unforgivable sins.” It marked the country’s first official pronouncement to the outside world since the regime upheld Mr. Kim as its supreme leader on Dec. 29.

By returning swiftly to typical bellicose form after two weeks of mourning, North Korea appeared to demonstrate a confidence that the transition of power in Pyongyang was going smoothly. But the strident rhetoric was also a sign that the government, as it often has, was using perceived tensions with the outside world to rally its military and people behind the new leader.

The Legacy of Kim Jong-Il

Called the “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong-il had been the hereditary and eccentric ruler of North Korea, which was founded by his father, Kim Il-sung, from the time his father died in 1994. The two Kims have been the only leaders their country has known.

In January 2012, almost a month after Kim Jong-il’s death, North Korea’s official news agency announced that his embalmed body would be placed on permanent display in the Kumsusan Memorial Palace in Pyongyang, where his father’s embalmed body has been on public display since his death nearly two decades ago.

Under Kim Jong-il, North Korea became a nuclear power. It also became the world’s most isolated state, one in which unknown numbers starved during recurrent famines, while money flowed to the country’s military programs.

Kim Jong-il was considered an eccentric playboy who invariably appeared in platform shoes and a khaki jumpsuit. In 2008, Mr. Kim disappeared from sight for several months, and it was later revealed that he had suffered a stroke. After that, he became increasingly reclusive and began taking actions to transfer power to his son, Kim Jong-un, who in September 2010 was appointed a four-star general in the People’s Army. In February 2011, he named his son vice chairman of the National Defense Commission, the country’s most powerful body led by his father.

A Series of Provocative Actions

In 2010, the North undertook a series of provocative actions, including the apparent sinking of a South Korean naval vessel and the shelling of a South Korean island outpost. Observers tied the incidents to Mr. Kim’s desire to establish Kim Jong-un’s credibility with the military.

Years of on-and-off talks that have been marked by recriminations and broken promises have left officials in Seoul unsure whether North Korea is willing to give up its nuclear weapons programs in return for economic and diplomatic rewards, or whether it has simply been using the talks to win economic aid. But the United States and its allies have been unable to find an effective alternative to dialogue, except for applying sanctions and appealing to China.

In October 2011 the United States decided to resume long-suspended talks with North Korea in Geneva and appointed a full-time envoy with a background in nuclear issues, as North Korean media reported that Kim Jong-il had made rare comments of encouragement on the talks. After the talks, officials on both sides agreed that they had narrowed their differences but parted without fixing a date for further bilateral or multilateral talks.

International Confrontations

After setting off its first atomic device in 2006, the secretive, heavily militarized and desperately poor country slowly moved away from confrontation — and then slowly moved back toward it. In 2009 it successfully conducted its second nuclear test, again defying international warnings. Another international crisis was sparked by the sinking in March 2010 of a South Korean warship, the Cheonan, by a North Korean torpedo

American intelligence officials said they were increasingly convinced that Kim Jong-il had ordered the sinking of the ship to help secure the succession of Kim Jong-un. Relations between North and South deteriorated to their worst point in many years, as South Korea‘s president, Lee Myung-bak, recast North Korea as its “principal enemy” — a designation dropped during inter-Korean detente in 2004 — and the North retaliated by severing its few remaining ties with the South. The Obama administration announced that it would impose further economic sanctions against North Korea.

In November 2010, in the most serious clash in decades, North and South Korea exchanged artillery fire after an estimated 175 shells fired from the North struck a South Korean island near the countries’ disputed maritime border. The North asserted that the South had fired first.

Self-Imposed Isolation and Poverty

North Korea took steps in the 1990s toward warmer relations with South Korea, before questions about its nuclear ambitions plunged it back into isolation. But more broadly, North Korea has taken a consistent anti-Washington line since its creation in 1948, denouncing both the United States and South Korea as its puppet. Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, the North has not attacked its neighbor, but to this day keeps large concentrations of troops and artillery focused on Seoul, and has regularly engaged in provocations like kidnappings, submarine incursions and missile tests over the Sea of Japan.

Internally, North Korea’s problems continue to mount. A ham-handed currency revaluation in 2009, aimed at reasserting central control over the economy, was reported to have badly backfired, producing unrest and disaffection with the government. At the same time, the spread of cellphones and DVD players has broken the North’s self-imposed isolation, giving many of its citizens a sense for the first time of how poor and backward their country has become.

Signs of hardship are evident even in the capital, Pyongyang. Commuters cram into decrepit electric buses, and pedestrians bow under huge bundles stuffed with goods for trade in private markets, which have eclipsed the ill-supplied state stores. Power shortages occur frequently. The pyramid-shaped, 105-story Ryugyong Hotel remains a shell nearly 25 years after construction began. Outside the city, other abandoned construction projects scar roads.

Away from the capital, North Korea is a land of shuttered factories and skimpy harvests. Residents, especially in northern provinces, report that child beggars haunt street markets, families scavenge hillsides for sprouts and mushrooms and workers at state enterprises receive nominal salaries, at best.

Although malnutrition has improved in the past decade, one in three North Korean children is stunted, and nearly one in five is underweight, according to the World Food Program. With paltry harvests, inflation of food prices is a chronic problem. Food shortages have also been caused by years of economic mismanagement and underinvestment, and have been made worse in 2011 by poor weather and a reduction of food imports from China and South Korea.

In October 2011, Valerie Amos, the United Nations’ humanitarian chief, said that North Koreans, especially children, urgently need outside aid to fight “terrible levels of malnutrition.”

In November 2011, South Korea authorized the World Health Organization to resume the distribution of medical aid for malnourished North Korean children. The decision “was based upon our belief that purely humanitarian support for the young and vulnerable in North Korea should continue,” a senior South Korean Unification Ministry official told reporters.

In 2009, South Korea donated $13 million for a W.H.O. program to send medicine and medical supplies to the North. But it asked the United Nations agency to suspend the distribution of the money after the March 2010 sinking of its warship, the Cheonan. On Nov. 8, the Unification Ministry accepted the W.H.O.’s request to distribute the remaining South Korean money, totaling about $7 million, the official said.

Seeds of Foreign Enterprise

Ever so slowly, North Korea is opening to foreign investment. A focus of its strategy is developing previously created “free trade and economic zones” on the borders that have languished.

An example can be found in the remote northern port towns of Rajin and Sonbong. About 30 miles from China, the combined towns, called Rason, are central to the new push. Since designating Rason a special zone in 1991, North Korean officials have tried on occasion to attract investment there, with poor results. Some foreign analysts and businesspeople remain skeptical, saying the country’s investment climate is still too unstable, but others argue that North Korea could be establishing here the kind of laboratory that the Chinese Communist Party set up in the fishing village of Shenzhen in 1980 to help move China forward.

On the surface, Rason is an unlikely site for a boomtown. It is a three-hour drive on a rutted dirt road from the Chinese border. In the surrounding countryside, green with cornfields and pine trees, men ride horses and ox carts while women dry cuttlefish on rooftops. The area, home to 200,000, suffers from blackouts. In the town center, bicyclists navigate dirt tracks. There are few cars, stores or restaurants.

But Rason’s port remains ice-free, a rarity in Northeast Asia, and officials there see shipping as a pillar of economic growth, along with seafood processing and tourism. They say they also want foreign-run assembly plants and high-technology factories. As inducements, they say they would offer tax breaks, full foreign control and minimum monthly wages set at $80 per worker, lower than in China.

The central question is whether the ideologies of the current regime will allow for long-term reforms to spur economic growth.

Nuclear Program

The United States came close to military action against North Korea in 1994, as President Clinton weighed the idea of air strikes against its nuclear sites. Instead, in a last-minute deal, North Korea agreed to shelve its nuclear program. In 2002, President Bush included Pyongyang in the "axis of evil,” and American officials charged later that year that North Korea had violated the earlier agreement. Pyongyang declared the agreement void and expelled international nuclear inspectors.

North Korea agreed in September 2005 to abandon its nuclear programs in exchange for economic assistance and diplomatic incentives from other parties to the six-party talks, which include China, Japan, Russia and South Korea, in addition to North Korea and the United States.

But the agreement collapsed in a dispute over how thoroughly North Korea should reveal its nuclear activities and subject its nuclear facilities to outside inspections. North Korea’s continuing nuclear activities, its testing of missiles and the lethal shelling of the South Korean island — as well as the sinking of the South Korean naval vessel — all added to the chill in relations.

In November 2010, the North revealed a vast facility built secretly and rapidly to enrich uranium. The Obama administration concluded that the North’s plant to enrich nuclear fuel uses technology that is “significantly more advanced” than what Iran has struggled over two decades to assemble.

In January 2011, former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned that North Korea was within five years of being able to strike the continental United States with an intercontinental ballistic missile, and said that, combined with its expanding nuclear program, the country “is becoming a direct threat to the United States.”

In late August 2011, Kim Jong-il went to Russia, where he met with President Dmitri A. Medvedev. During their meeting, Mr. Kim agreed to consider a moratorium on nuclear weapons tests and production, and said he wanted to return to the stalled talks on the nation’s nuclear program.

In January 2012, North Korea said that it was open to further negotiations over a deal to halt its uranium enrichment program, an agreement that seemed within reach before the death of Kim Jong-il in December 2011.

In late February, North Korea agreed to suspend nuclear weapons tests and uranium enrichment and to allow international inspectors to verify and monitor activities at its main reactor, as part of a deal that included an American pledge to ship food aid to the impoverished nation. The agreement came after two days of talks with American officials in Beijing.

North Korea also agreed on a moratorium on launches of long-range missiles, and to resume the six party talks. Both South Korea and Japan welcomed the deal as an important first step, though they cautioned that they would wait to see whether North Korea would faithfully implement it.

Indeed, the agreement was imperiled only two weeks later, when North Korea announced that it planned to launch a satellite into orbit in April, testing a technology that the United States and the United Nations Security Council have condemned as a cover for developing and testing long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles.