Korea, North

IN 1997, ONE YEAR away from the 50th anniversary of formal assumption of power of the communist regime in North Korea, the economic crisis in the extremely reclusive nation became so acute that accounts of mass starvation there became international news. Normally disdaining international assistance, which it regarded as “interference” in North Korean affairs and as an unwholesome admission of national weakness, the North Korean regime announced that it would now accept international food aid. More than anything else, this signaled that the nation was indeed in the midst of a great crisis.

The Soviet Union installed Kim Il Sung as the leader of North Korea shortly after its forces occupied the northern half of the peninsula as Japanese resistance was collapsing in August 1945. Within two years of the formal establishment of a North Korean state in 1948, Kim Il Sung launched an invasion of South Korea. Armed with Soviet weapons and reinforced by Korean divisions that had been battle-tested in the Chinese civil war, Kim Il Sung's forces succeeded in driving South Korean forces and their American advisers into a small pocket in the southeast corner of the country.

Only Douglas MacArthur's daring landing at Inchon prevented a North Korean victory. Indeed, after cutting off and annihilating most of the North Korean forces in the south, the American and United Nations forces drove northward against diminishing opposition to the North Korean border with China. Only the introduction of hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops into the conflict prevented the elimination of North Korea as a separate state. When the armistice was finally arranged, the border between North and South Korea remained largely where it had been at the beginning of the conflict, though millions of Koreans on each side of the border had perished.

After the close of active hostilities, North Korea was largely in ruins and its population had become widely dispersed. Kim Il Sung took advantage of this grim opportunity to remake his state from top to bottom.

Cities were rebuilt as extensive monuments to the authority of the state and of Kim Il Sung himself. All suspect groups, including practicing Buddhists and Christians, were sent to forced labor camps. The membership of the Communist Party was also purged, with 450,000 of the 600,000 party members being punished for all sorts of violations of party rules.

Even among those in Kim Il Sung's inner circle, many found themselves stripped of influence, sentenced to the forced labor camps, or facing execution. Seeking to make North Korea impervious to outside influences, Kim Il Sung sealed the borders of his country, promoted agricultural and industrial self-sufficiency, and created a million-man military to intimidate both South Korea and his own people. With the help of Soviet investments and subsidies, North Korea was able to maintain the illusion that its collectivized farms were efficiently [Page 616]meeting its food needs and that its state-con-trolled heavy industries were producing enough foreign-exchange monies to maintain their technological viability. The central doctrine of Juche, or self-reliance, appealed in an extreme and, ultimately, absolutely paranoid way to the long-standing Korean concern about foreign domination, even as North Korea became increasingly dependent on Soviet and, to a lesser extent, Chinese economic and political support.

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