WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 (UPI) -- It is not every day that a country attracts "global condemnation" for its actions as did North Korea for announcing it had conducted a nuclear test last Monday. Intelligence analysts in several countries are still trying to determine whether the large underground explosion detected in the northeast of the country was in fact nuclear, but the North Koreans certainly wanted the world to think it was.
North Korea faces severe economic problems and lives off food and energy handouts, primarily from China and South Korea. The regime of Kim Jong Il, known as the Dear Leader, worries about its hold on power and claims to fear that the United States is a threat to its security.
The test succeeded spectacularly in placing North Korea front and center on the world stage but if the goal was to focus sympathetic international attention on North Korea's concerns it was stunningly counterproductive. China, North Korea's major benefactor and protector, is understandably frustrated that their strong warnings against a test were ignored. China's foreign ministry called the test "brazen" and later declared it had "fundamentally damaged" relations between the two countries.
China's ambassador to the United Nations said China would support "punitive sanctions" by the Security Council against North Korea, while ruling out military action and adding that they should be "measured and proportionate. In the context of China-North Korea relations this is strong public language indeed and unprecedented.
It is hard to imagine that North Korea's leaders did not foresee this response and thus hard to avoid the conclusion that they did not care. In fact there is a strong case to be made that the test arose from internal political dynamics and was aimed primarily at a domestic rather than an international audience.
There has been a pendulum swing in North Korea with the military having the leading voice in driving policy since the collapse of the Six-Party talks. These brought together the two Koreas, the U.S., China, Russia, and Japan to try and resolve the issue of North Korea's nuclear program. The talks reached a high point last September when the parties signed an agreement of principles.
These seemed to provide the basis for further discussions on the details of implementation. However, it quickly became clear that the U.S. and North Korea were far apart on their respective readings of the agreement they had just signed In a separate development, the U.S. imposed financial sanctions on a Macao bank that the Treasury department said had been laundering counterfeit U.S. dollars printed by North Korea. The North Koreans cited this as a reason not to return to the talks.
They had always been reluctant participants and attended largely because of Chinese persuasion and pressure. A Korean-American source who has met several times with high level North Korean officials told UPI that the North Korean leadership had concluded that they would never get an agreement they could live with from the Bush administration and so had given up on the Six-Party process.
The same source said that North Korean military leaders had responded with harsh criticism of the country's diplomats for failing to deliver. This criticism extended to the Chinese who had persuaded North Korea to join the Six-Party talks with promises that they would benefit from the process. The North Koreans feel they have gained nothing and blame the Chinese. They were even more unhappy when China supported a U.N. Security Council resolution against North Korea after it test launched seven missiles in early July.
In reaction to these frustrations, senior military leaders, who regard themselves as the guardians of the legacy of Kim Il Sung, the founder of the North Korean state and father of Kim Jong Il, demanded a tougher approach. A "source with close ties to Pyongyang" told Reuters that military leaders had urged Kim Jong Il to bring forward the date of the test. Also the official Korea Central News Agency announced the test with the telling phrase that it had "brought happiness to the military and the people of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea."
What they hope to achieve by actions that say to the world in effect "we don't care what you think, we don't need you," is far from clear. Perhaps, some analysts believe, this is more about the situation within North Korea than it is about North Korea's international relations. The much-reduced goal of North Korea's elite today is regime survival. That is much more difficult than it used to be as the party no longer enjoys absolute control of the information reaching its citizens.
The breakdown began with the terrible famine of the mid-1990s when between one and two million people are believed to have died. To relieve some of the pressure the government allowed people to cross the border to China to try and find a living.
Government propaganda claimed that, harsh as conditions were, they were worse still in China and South Korea. When famine refugees returned from China they brought the shocking news that the Chinese were much better off than them and the South Korean TV that they saw in China portrayed an earthly paradise.
This may prove to be the crack in the dam. The government had lied in the most fundamental way and now people knew it. Discontent in the famine years even produced several little-reported mutinies in the army, a frightening development for Kim and the elite around him.
The message behind the nuclear program and the test to North Koreans is that this is a bold, unshakeable government standing up fearlessly to international threats against our country and bowing to nobody, not even the Chinese. The domestic subtext, of course, is "so don't get any ideas that this government is going to change." It is nevertheless the policy of a government in desperate straits, feeling the pressure but determined not to show it.
