North Korea's Bizarre Communist State

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

How do you solve a problem like North Korea? As numerous attempts by, among others, China, Japan, Russia, and the United States, have demonstrated, it’s not easy.

Though they are both ethnically and linguistically homogenous, since the division of the peninsula in 1945, the two Koreas have diverged economically, politically and even culturally – whereas almost one-third of South Koreans are now Christians, the north remains resolutely anti-religious. 

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), as the Communist north calls itself, has long used the development of nuclear capability as a form of extortion, promising to curtail its program in return for aid from other countries. But it always eventually reneges on its promises, as it has done again.

The goal of convincing the DPRK to abandon its nuclear program depends on the tortuous negotiations involving the United States, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and North Korea that began in 2003 after the DPRK had withdrawn from the Non-Proliferation Treaty on Nuclear Weapons and announced it would no longer abide by a 1992 agreement to keep the peninsula free from nuclear weapons. 

In 2007 it closed a nuclear reactor in exchange for aid agreed in the six-party talks, and Washington removed the DPRK from its terrorism blacklist after it promised to shut down the Yongbyon nuclear site. But in 2010 it emerged that it had secretly built a new facility for enriching uranium there. 

The 33-year-old leader of the DPRK, Kim Jong-un, grandson of the state’s founder, has been flexing his military muscles since taking power in 2011.

On Jan. 6, Pyongyang tested a nuclear bomb and on Feb. 7, it launched a rocket thought to be part of a ballistic missile program, despite threat of severe sanctions from United States, maintaining that the launch was part of a peaceful effort to put satellite into orbit.

In recent weeks, North Korea has fired a slew of short and medium-range ballistic missiles and artillery shells into the sea. South Korea has determined that the North is capable of mounting a nuclear warhead on its medium-range Rodong ballistic missile, which could reach all of the South and most of Japan.

The North has now threatened a nuclear strike against Washington in retaliation for new United Nations sanctions passed to punish the country. It recently released a video titled “Last Chance” that depicts a nuclear strike on Washington, along with a warning to “American imperialists” not to provoke the North.

Domestically, the regime’s insistence on juche, self-reliance based on political independence, economic self-sufficiency and independence in defence, and its songun chongch’i, or army-centred politics, has condemned the population to frequent famine and terrible poverty. About one million people starved to death in the 1990s. 

But it has also enabled this perplexing country to develop nuclear weapons and to manufacture long-range missiles. South Korea has determined that North Korea is capable of mounting a nuclear warhead on its medium-range Rodong ballistic missile, which could reach all of the South and most of Japan, a senior government official said on Tuesday.