The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [211]
Before the American contribution was announced, North Korean officials had been disheartened by the tepid response to the initial UN appeal for humanitarian aid. Washington's announcement, however, opened the way for additional contributions from governments and private groups. On March 29, after hesitation in Pyongyang due to conservatives who were disdainful of the appeals and who predicted they would produce little help, the DPRK ambassador in Geneva informed UN agencies of North Korea's "urgent need" for additional food and requested a second UN appeal on its behalf.
In this context, it was hard to understand that only a week later, North Korea announced it would no longer accept the duties and limitations of the Korean War armistice and sent 130 soldiers armed with AK-47 automatic rifles, light machine guns, and antitank recoilless rifles into the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom, in deliberate violation of the armistice. Under the agreement that had been generally observed for four decades, each side was limited to thirty enlisted men and five officers armed only with pistols. After two hours, the troops withdrew, but twice as many returned the next night in a further demonstration. After a third night of armistice violations, amid intense international nervousness and widespread condemnation, the demonstrations subsided.
Well before the DMZ incursions, intelligence analysts in Washington and Seoul had been closely watching the growing clout of the KPA in Pyongyang. Since succeeding his father in July 1994, most of Kim Jong Il's public appearances had been visits to military units, in his capacity as supreme commander of the armed forces. Moreover, since Kim Il Sung's death, high-ranking military officers had been elevated in the hierarchy of North Korean officialdom. A large-scale military parade was staged for the (fiftieth) anniversary of the founding of the Workers Party, an event that had previously been of a nonmilitary character; the newly appointed defense minister, Choe Kwang, made the keynote address. At the same time, however, Kim Jong Il seemed to have held the military in check on key policy issues involving the United States, overruling military objections in negotiating the Agreed Framework to halt the nuclear activities at Yongbyon and again in releasing American helicopter pilot Bobby Hall.
Equally curious were two unpublicized developments late in 1995. In the early fall, the Korean People's Army Sixth Corps, in the northeastern part of the country, was disbanded, its leadership purged, and its units submerged into others, under circumstances suggesting disarray in the ranks. Moreover, in early December the KPA suddenly halted its annual winter military maneuvers two months before their normal conclusion and embarked on new ideological education instead. This appeared to reflect a scarcity of resources even for top-priority military missions as well as problems of indoctrination and discipline.
During my trip to Pyongyang in early 1995, North Korean officials had spoken repeatedly of their long-standing dissatisfaction with the Korean War armistice and of their proposal to replace it with a U.S. DPRK "peace insuring system." Our delegation had been warned, as had others, that "unilateral steps" would be taken if there were no movement toward negotiations on the issue-and there had been no movement.
The greatest mystery in April 1995 was not what the KPA forces had done in the DMZ-clearly a demonstration that was intended to call attention to their demands-but how Pyongyang's leaders had calculated or tolerated the strange timing. Coming just as the DPRK government was appealing to the world anew for urgently needed food, the military actions made it more difficult to obtain. In another anomaly of timing, the incursions came less than a week before a new set of nationwide elections in South Korea, this time for seats in the National Assembly. The ruling party, which had been expected to do poorly because