The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [222]
NORTH KOREA'S STEEP DECLINE
By the winter of 1996, most observers who were following the situation in North Korea had watched the progressive sinking of the economy for many months and had become inured to the adverse trends. Portents of disaster and predictions of impending collapse had become commonplace, yet the North's ability to absorb external and internal reverses had been demonstrated time after time as it accepted the loss of its allies, the death of its founding leader, and the increasingly steep decline in its standard of living. Thus, it seemed possible to assume, in the face of all logic, that the country could continue indefinitely on its downward slope without experiencing a crisis.
Reports from travelers to North Korea, however, suggested this could hardly be the case. In fact, a principal debate among American government analysts was whether the DPRK economy was collapsing or had already collapsed. Deteriorating or flooded coal mines and reduced petroleum imports produced insufficient energy for industry, so many factories had closed or were operating at only a fraction of their previous output. Fuel was so scarce in some provincial cities that only oxcarts and bicycles could be seen on the streets. Many office buildings and dwellings, even in the much-favored capital, were unheated during large portions of a very cold winter. Electrical blackouts were commonplace. Even the state television station was off the air for long periods of time due to lack of power. Many trains, some of them coalfired and others powered by electricity, were idle. An American intelligence official, who in the past had been sanguine about North Korea's prospects, compared its plight to that of a terminally ill patient, whose physical systems were weakening one after another, with each expiring organ reducing the performance of the others.
A drop in fertilizer production had diminished agricultural yields in the autumn 1996 harvest, adding to the serious shortages caused by flooding. In many cases crops that had been harvested could not be moved to where they were needed due to lack of transport, and more was lost to rain and rats. The meager public distribution of food in the countryside, which averaged three hundred grams per day earlier in the year, was cut back to half or less, barely enough to sustain life, or had stopped completely. To survive, North Koreans were consuming oak leaves, grasses, roots, tree bark, and other nonstandard foods, many with little nutritive value, and buying or bartering food, clothing, and fuel at markets that had sprung up in many towns in violation of government policy. In some areas, dormant factories were being dismantled and turned into scrap metal, which was then bartered across the Chinese border for the cheapest food available.
Although the authorities had no choice but to accept these transgressions and local officials appear to have abetted or even sponsored them, the remarkable thing was that the authority and cohesion of the regime seemed undiminished, so far as the outside world could see. Song Young Dae, the former ROK vice-minister of national unifica tion and longtime negotiator with the North, described the DPRK scene in late 1996 as "stability within instability," with Kim Jong Il at the top of a crisis-management system controlled by the military. Among the greatest unknown factors was how the trauma of the North Korean economy and society would affect the country's political and military systems.
In these dire circumstances Kim Jong II paid a visit to Kim Il Sung University on December 7, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of his alma mater, the nation's foremost institution of higher education. The transcript of his lengthy and rambling remarks, evidently delivered in confidence to several Workers Party secretaries who accompanied him, was brought out of North Korea by Hwang Jang Yop, who was not present but who was privy to such materials in his post as a party secretary.