4 FRIDAY
APRIL 10, 2009
N.K. provocation suggests regime in trouble
Communist state’s action is often made for internal reasons rather than external ones
Bruce Bennett
● Bruce Bennett is a senior
policy analyst at the RAND
Corporation, a U.S.-based
nonprofit research organiza-
tion.
● E-mail: Bennett@rand.org
Why are rockets more important
than children in North Korea?
Chris Williams
● Chris Williams is based at
the Centre for International
Education and Research,
University of Birmingham,
the United Kingdom, and
has also held posts at the
universities of London,
Bristol, Cambridge, Cairo
and the United Nations.
● He set up projects for street
children in Apartheid South
Africa, and has recently
evaluated projects in
Afghanistan for the
European Commission, and
Lebanon for the U.S.
Department of Labor. He
has been a magistrate, and
his books include
Leadership Accountability in
a Globalizing World (2006),
Palgrave Macmillan,
London.
● He can be reached at
chrisunula@yahoo.com
By Bruce W. Bennett
North Korea spent weeks
preparing to launch a ballistic
missile that could reach the
United States. It argued that the
launch was intended to put a
satellite into orbit. But a space
launch vehicle is a ballistic mis-
sile used for a modestly different
purpose. The missile launch was
intended to travel over Japan
and out to a range that would al-
low it to reach the United States
— a clear provocation against
Japan and the United States.
The North Korean regime’s des-
peration has led it to action that
imperils the regime as well as
regional and global peace.
This launch presents the
United States with four impor-
tant questions: Why did North
Korea do this? What have we
learned from the results? How
will the world react? And what
does this provocation suggest
about future North Korean be-
havior?
Why did Kim Jong-il carry
out this provocation?
Most of the international me-
dia focus has been on external
reasons for the North Korean ac-
tion: Setting conditions for nego-
tiation with President Obama,
pressuring the Republic of
Korea to return to a “sunshine”
policy, and forcing the world to
pay attention to North Korea.
More importantly, North
Korean leader Kim Jong-il pre-
sumably hoped that the
Taepodong-2 rocket would actu-
ally work, putting the United
States within range of North
Korean weapons and thereby
adding greater leverage to sub-
sequent North Korean coercion
of the United States. North
Korea has insisted that the
United States treat North
Korea as a nuclear “peer.” A
demonstrated ICBM capability
would move North Korea a long
way in that direction.
North Korea apparently want-
ed to split the international reac-
tion. The launch was a clear vio-
lation of U.N. Resolution 1718
that directs North Korea to “not
conduct any further nuclear test
or launch of a ballistic missile”
and “suspend all activities relat-
ed to its ballistic missile pro-
gram.” By claiming that this was
By Chris Williams
Why was the international
press silent when the U.N.
Children’s Rights Committee in
Geneva recently reported that
the discussion on North Korea
“was one of the best sessions of
the Committee, conducted in a
friendly atmosphere ... and the
interaction with the DPRK gov-
ernment was far better than
four years ago?” Are North
Korean children less important
than North Korean rockets? Did
the story not fit neatly into the
stereotypes that the journalists
use to frame their reports about
the DPRK? Or is it that stories
from North Korea can remind
us how poorly children are
treated across the whole world?
North Korea declares that
“The child is the king of the
country,” but even kings must
work it seems. One of the U.N.
Committee’s main concerns was
“the hard labor imposed on chil-
dren by the school system” from
10 years old. The North Korean
representatives explained that
formal schooling is combined
with “service for the communi-
ty,” and children sometimes
work on farms owned by their
teachers. As Clive Harber evi-
denced in his distressing book,
“Schooling as Violence,” chil-
dren are commonly abused and
exploited by teachers across the
world. Some of the worst in-
stances are the demands for
sexual favors from school girls
by male teachers in return for
good grades or presents. This oc-
curs even in countries such as
South Africa and Mozambique,
despite their revolutionary tran-
sitions.
The Committee made famil-
iar comments about malnour-
ishment and the poor health of
ANALYSIS & FEATURE
The undated image released by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s official media Korean Central News Agency on late April 8
shows a control center during the launch of an “Unha-2” rocket carrying a “Kwangmyongsong-2” satellite.
actually a satellite launch, North
Korea hoped to avoid censure un-
der this resolution, or at least win
support from sympathetic states
that wish to treat a missile as
something different depending
upon its payload. But the U.S. po-
sition is clear: a missile is still a
missile, whatever its payload.
North Korea’s claim of a satel-
lite launch also sought to legit-
imize the launch so as to avoid a
U.S. attempt to intercept a mis-
sile. In addition, North Korea
warned in strong terms that it
would carry out counterstrikes
against any intercept.
Still, the North Korean
regime has historically carried
out provocations more for inter-
nal North Korean reasons than
external reasons.
Internally, the Kim family
regime has seriously damaged
the viability of North Korea, dri-
ving the economy into failure,
starving its people, and denying
them basic human rights.
Neither the regime nor the state
has failed yet, and both might
continue to survive in some
children, but as yet we have no
press reports of North Korean
children having limbs and geni-
tals cut off to make muti (medi-
cine) as in South Africa. Gender
concerns were also raised, but
North Koreans do not engage in
abuses such as female genital
mutilation as do North Africans.
And children of the Democratic
Republic of Korea do not face
the threat of being starved or
killed because they are thought
to be witches, as in the
Democratic Republic of Congo.
If North Korean parents do
not pay the school fees, “good
conduct campaigns” demand
that children provide raw mate-
rials such as steel, rubber, and
rabbit skin. This is reminiscent
of church schools in Ireland in
the last century, when children
were expected to bring peat or
coal for the school fire, for heat-
ing and cooking. The claim that
children work on state-run opi-
um farms to earn foreign cur-
rency raises the strange irony
that children in the world’s most
ardently secular socialist state
might be engaged in the same
form of labor as those in Islamic
Afghanistan. The Committee’s
concern about street children
similarly reflects circumstances
in Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Turkey and Egypt.
But is child labor in the con-
text of a school worse than the
plight of millions of children
worldwide, who work in unregu-
lated sweatshops, the tourist in-
dustry, or the sex and drugs
trade? In Lebanon, children
work on tobacco farms or carry
scrap metal across the Syrian
border, but the problem is not
simply that children work. This
can often be educational and
help poor families to survive.
The question is whether the la-
form for many years to come.
Still, even small external
pressures have escalated North
Korea’s internal economic and
related problems and forced the
regime to take some kind of ac-
tion.
Other governments have
learned to compromise with the
outside world when they have
faced such troubles. With North
Korea, there is no such option. If
a North Korean leader were to
compromise under external
pressure, he would appear weak
and ripe for overthrow. He is
therefore forced into provoca-
tions that make him appear em-
powered. He can then drive at
an international agreement
that he can describe as a favor-
able result of North Korean co-
ercion and empowerment, even
if it involves a little compromise.
This is what happened in 2006.
U.S. economic sanctions impeded
North Korean use of the interna-
tional banking system, potential-
ly imperiling the regime. That
July, North Korea used ballistic
missile launches to demonstrate
bor is harmful or exploitative.
Long days spent picking olives
on the family farm may, as the
Lebanese girls claim, be “boring
and dusty,” but just a few min-
utes working with battery acid
in a garage could destroy a
child’s eyes instantly. The North
Korean system at least provides
the possibility for proper regula-
tion. The important questions
are, does regulation happen and
is it effective? Among those who
have proposed that schooling
should include productive labor,
was Ghandi.
The military training of chil-
dren from the age of 14, through
the Red Youth Guard, was also
questioned. This is also reminis-
cent of Victorian Britain, where
institution for orphans such as
the Thomas Coram Foundling
Hospital in London claimed
with pride how they were train-
ing all their boys to go and fight
in the British army. The girls
were trained to be domestic ser-
vants, where they often suffered
sexual abuse from their mas-
ters, and the resultant babies
provided the next generation of
inmates at the hospital.
It is again ironic to find so-
cialist DPRK bracketed with
Islamic countries such as Iran,
in the child soldiers debate. But
we need to know exactly what
military training means. It
seems unlikely that 14 year-old
North Korean children are en-
gaged in any active fighting, as
they were on both sides of the
Iran-Iraq war. There are no re-
ports of girls with mental dis-
abilities being used as suicide
bombers, as last year in Iraq.
And if we want to see 14-year-
old schoolboys wearing military
uniforms and undergoing mili-
tary drill, we need look no fur-
ther than the elite cadet corps in
Xinhua-Yonhap News
its power and threats, recogniz-
ing that in the short term the in-
ternational reaction could be in-
creased sanctions.
When the North Korean
launches failed to relieve the
sanction pressure, the country
then tested a nuclear weapon in
October — a clear threat escala-
tion. The international commu-
nity increased sanctions further
after this test. But within a few
months, an agreement was
reached in the six-party talks
that resolved many of the finan-
cial sanctions, provided North
Korea with considerable aid,
and cost North Korea very little.
The North Korean leaders had
not only arrested the regime’s
downward spiral; they had re-
versed it to some extent and
demonstrated their power.
The North Korean return to
provocations now suggests that
the regime again faces serious
internal threats. The outside
world may only be seeing a part
of those problems.
The famine of 2008 was not as
serious as the 1990s famine.
In this photo released by the World Food Program, North Korean children sleep during a lunch break
at a creche in Hyangsan, in North Korea in October 2006. Millions of needy North Koreans face “real
hardship” due to cuts in food aid from China and South Korea and the North’s decision to accept less
World Food Program assistance.
the private schools of Britain
and America.
Reports about DPRK in-
evitably mention the intern-
ment camps. “Concentration
camps” were first devised by
Britain, during the Boer War in
1900, and held young children.
Vietnamese child refugees were
held in fenced camps by the
British in Hong Kong, until the
handover to China in 1997. The
United States ran similar
camps to control Native
Americans in the 1830s. During
World War I British soldiers as
young as 14 could face the firing
squad if they refused to follow
orders. When we read that,
“Although prohibited by law,
torture was extensively prac-
ticed and abhorrent prison con-
ditions resulted in a myriad of
abuses and deprivations,” does
our mind now go first to DPRK,
or to Guantanamo Bay and Abu
Ghraib?
The plight of children raised
or born in prison, because par-
ents are convicted criminals, is
a concern which is also not
unique to North Korea. We read
Still, many North Koreans
starved to death and some mili-
tary units suffered from inade-
quate food. The food shortage
was exacerbated by the lack of
food aid from the Republic of
Korea, and the 2008 harvest
suffered from the lack of fertiliz-
er from the ROK.
In an effort to deal with food
and other economic shortages,
the North Korean regime began
several years ago to allow local
markets to develop. But the
markets brought many of the
“evils” of capitalism, undermin-
ing regime control.
Regime attempts to largely
close these markets have led to
various challenges to the
regime. North Korean citizens
who have managed to survive
because of the markets have in-
sisted on them staying open,
and corrupt elites who have
found the markets a source of
wealth have been lax in enforc-
ing the new rules. The restric-
tions have now been relaxed,
probably reflecting pressure by
the corrupt elite.
that, “Pregnant women are
handcuffed, shackled around
the belly, and placed in leg irons
... They are typically shackled to
the hospital bed when they give
birth.” A girl “gave birth alone in
her cell shortly after midnight,”
with no medical help. One tells
that she was expected to breast
feed with male guards in the
room, and complains that he
was “looking around the screen
while I was trying to deliver the
afterbirth.” But these reports
were not from North Korea.
They were from America, and
Britain where some women
MPs even supported this prac-
tice of shackling. Across the
world, there is a genuine dilem-
ma about prison births, and
whether or not it is better for
the children of prisoners to re-
main in prisons with parents.
Apparently, “The experts
were mostly concerned with the
definition of child, which in the
Convention is defined as 18
years, and 17 in Korean law.”
This is complicated because, in
Korean tradition, a child is one
year old at birth and is consid-
Note also that the North
Korean markets are heavily tied
to the black market and other
corrupt activities, reflecting
growing rebellion that now
seems to characterize North
Korea. Other forms include the
attempts of refugees to escape
North Korea, the rise of theft for
survival, the influx of informa-
tion from outside North Korea,
and some reported assassina-
tion attempts on North Korean
leaders. In short, the North
Korean regime must perceive a
loss of control that is increasing-
ly serious.
These and other conditions in
the North make the regime ap-
pear weak, unable to control the
challenges North Korea faces.
The regime apparently hoped
that a successful satellite
launch with a missile able to
reach the United States would
make the regime appear very
empowered internally.
What do the results of the
launch suggest?
The launch succeeded in part
but not completely. North Korea
has a partially successful space
program and has mastered
parts of intercontinental ballis-
tic missile technology, posing a
direct threat to U.S. territory.
North Korea may be able to
mount a nuclear warhead on
such missiles.
Potentially, North Korea can
now fire a nuclear weapon at
major U.S. cities. This is a seri-
ous change in threats to U.S. se-
curity. While North Korea would
be deterred from doing so in
peacetime, in a conflict the
regime may conclude that a nu-
clear weapon demonstration
against the United States would
coerce the United States into
abandoning its “nuclear umbrel-
la” support for the ROK and
Japan. North Korea might feel
that the United States would be
reluctant to retaliate with nu-
clear weapons if it knew that
North Korea could escalate to
using nuclear weapons against
U.S. cities. This would be a very
high risk for North Korea, but it
may perceive that any war with
its neighbors and the United
States would be a war for regime
survival, justifying such risks.
Because one missile partially
Continued on Page 15
AP-Yonhap News
ered to be one year older at the
start of the New Year. Age re-
lates to concern that children
between 14 and 17, convicted of
murder, may face the death
penalty when they become 18.
This was denied, but we do not
have to search hard to find ar-
guments about executing mi-
nors. In 1990 a survey in
America found that of 50 states,
37 permitted the death penalty
for minors, only 18 had a lower
age limit (18 or 16), and that
nine had no limit which techni-
cally meant that a child crimi-
nal of any age could be executed.
The discussion was resurrected
again in 2004, also in relation to
offenders with mental disabili-
ties, and a similar debate hap-
pened two years later, in Iran.
The North Korean represen-
tatives stated that most child of-
fenders are under “house ar-
rest,” which reminded me of a
period as a British magistrate
when curfews, and later elec-
tronic tags, were a useful sanc-
tion against young tearaways.
There seemed less clarity about
Continued on Page 15