The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [208]
"It is not a document of surrender but a product of diplomatic negotiations," said ROK foreign minister Gong, in defending the outcome of the Kuala Lumpur talks. The North Korean Foreign Ministry issued a statement claiming victory in the talks and declaring that "what KEDO does is the internal matter of the United States and we do not feel it necessary to interfere and do not care a bit." With the agreement in Kuala Lumpur, the nuclear crisis, while not over, seemed decisively on its way to resolution.
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NORTH KOREA IN CRISIS
1 ith the waning of the nuclear struggle, North Korea only briefly left the list of pressing concerns of the major powers. Within months it was back, but this time with an abrupt shift in the angle of vision brought on by the regime's inability to feed its people and its unprecedented appeal for outside help. After dealing with the DPRK almost exclusively as a strong and nightmarish threat to peace, policy makers in Washington and other world capitals began to focus on a failing state whose very weakness was a menace, albeit of a different kind. The question being urgently discussed among the experts was, "Is this the beginning of the end for North Korea?" And if so, how would its neighbors and the world deal with a potential economic collapse, the flight of massive numbers of refugees across land and sea boundaries, and/or civil war that might spread across tense borders?
General John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed the view of many when he said, "We are now in a period where most who watch the area would say it's either going to implode or explode-we're just not quite sure when that is going to happen." Secretary of Defense William Perry, who had been perhaps the most influential policy maker in the nuclear crisis, popularized the metaphor of North Korea as a disabled airliner rapidly losing altitude, as well as the metaphor of seeking a "soft landing," meaning a gradual unification or accommodation with the South, rather than a destructive crash.
The altered optic with which the great powers viewed the northern half of the Korean peninsula was evidence of how much the world had changed in the quarter-century since 1972, when the two Koreas had begun to interact peacefully with each other. South Korea had decisively won the economic race, with enormous consequences in the diplomatic and military fields. Although the North retained a formidable armed force, it was no longer a serious competitor to the South in any other field of endeavor, and the disparity of its resources was swiftly eroding its military competitiveness. Following the death of its Great Leader, it was forced to center its attention and energies on sheer survival and little else-and in so doing to ask the assistance of the outside world. Prideful North Korea sought to deal with this reversal of fortunes with a minimum of humiliation, but it was not easy.
The realization that North Korea was in deep trouble began with an act of nature. On the sticky midsummer day of July 26, 1995, the skies over the country darkened. Rains began to pound the earth, rains that were heavy, steady, and unrelenting and that soon turned into a deluge of biblical proportions. The DPRK Bureau of HydroMeteorological Service recorded 23 inches of rain in ten days; in some towns and villages, according to the United Nations, as much as 18 inches of rain fell in a single day, bringing floods that were considered the worst in a century.
As a self-proclaimed "socialist paradise," North Korea traditionally had said little or nothing about domestic disasters. This time, as the rains ended in mid-August, it broke its silence and described the tragedy in expansive terms, even exaggerating the admittedly severe impact of the flooding. In late August, for the first time in its history, the bastion of self-reliance openly appealed to the world for help, asking the United Nations for nearly $500 million in flood relief as well as fuel and medical assistance.