The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [205]
Whatever else his legacy might be, Kim Il Sung left his son an economy that was on the rocks. January 1995 marked the beginning of the sixth consecutive year of negative economic growth, as estimated by outside experts. Since 1990, the first year of decline, the North Korean GNP had contracted by about one-fourth, according to these estimates. Nonetheless, we saw little privation in our one-week visit that was limited to the capital city, whose specially chosen population obtains the best of whatever is available. Surprisingly, I noticed more cars, trucks, and buses on the streets, suggesting that the energy crisis had diminished since my previous visit in 1991.
The country's economic troubles were doubtless among the reasons that North Korea in early 1995 appeared eager to confirm and advance its new relationship with the United States. The importance of the U.S. relationship was explicit in the statements of officials whom we saw, including Foreign Minister Kim Yong Nam and the more freewheeling Kim Yong Sun, who after further ups and downs had become Workers Party secretary for North-South affairs. Our visit coincided with that of a team of experts from U.S. government agencies working with the nuclear authorities to arrange safe and continuously inspected storage of the fuel rods that had been unloaded from the now-dormant 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon. The visit also coincided with the arrival of two ships at the port of Sonbong carrying 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil, the first of the U.S.-supplied energy to be delivered under the Agreed Framework in compensation for the shutdown of the North Korean nuclear program. Later I saw the brief cable from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington to U.S. Commands in the Pacific notifying them that "the Secretary of Defense has directed the [merchant ships] Da Quing and Lark Lake to deliver 50,000 metric tons of heavy fuel oil to the DPRK." It was hard to believe that less than a year earlier, the United States and North Korea had been on the brink of war and that the Joint Chiefs had been contemplating very different orders about the DPRK to its Pacific commands.
On January 20, the day before we left Pyongyang, the State Department announced the easing of several economic sanctions against North Korea, as anticipated in the Agreed Framework. However, these were less than the administration had previously planned because of opposition to concessions on the part of the Republicans who were now in control of Congress. For the same reason, the first fuel oil shipments were paid for out of Pentagon contingency funds, which did not require new authorization from Capitol Hill. The Agreed Framework, while working as planned in North Korea, was on thin ice politically in the United States.
The central issue presented to us in nearly every meeting in Pyongyang was the desire to negotiate a U.S.-DPRK "peace insuring system" at the DMZ to replace the 1953 armistice agreement, which North Korea insisted was obsolete. The demand for a U.S.-DPRK peace treaty was more than twenty years old, but it had been given new impetus starting in April 1994, when North Korea reacted to the U.S. military buildup in technical violation of the armistice. Weeks later, the North withdrew its delegates from the Military Armistice Commission, forced the withdrawal of the Polish participants from the long-standing Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission at the DMZ, and launched a successful diplomatic drive to persuade China to withdraw from the Military Armistice Commission. A senior DPRK foreign ministry official, Kim Byong Hong, told us ominously that if the