WASHINGTON – While the musicians of New York Philharmonic were packing their tuxedos to return home from their much-publicized performance in North Korea last month, Hoosier Keith Luse was loading his luggage for a less-glitzy journey.
Instead of an ornate orchestra hall, Luse was heading to a nuclear weapons plant with rusting pipes, cracked concrete, radioactive material piled in plastic bags and a skeptical staff.
Since the plutonium reprocessing facility was built two decades ago, Luse said, the workers’ “lives have been dedicated to developing weapons to be used in the next war with the United States, in their minds.”
But now teams of Americans are there to oversee the dismantling of it, and Luse was on a mission to see firsthand how the project is being carried out so he could report to his boss, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind.
Dismantling the nuclear facility in Yongbyon is part of an agreement between North Korea and five other countries. The government in Pyongyang promised to abandon all its nuclear weapons and programs in exchange for financial aid, lifting trade bans and removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.
It was Luse’s fifth trip as Lugar’s eyes and ears in a country where few Westerners are free to visit. Any Americans permitted into the state-run society are assigned a “minder” who stays close by and keeps close tabs on their movements and conversations.
It’s not that official reports from the Bush administration’s diplomats aren’t accurate, said Lugar, the senior Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee and one of the country’s foremost advocates for programs that help countries dismantle their nuclear weapons programs and reassign their nuclear scientists to peaceful projects. But someone who does not have an official role in the negotiations does not have to function within the limits of that role, he said.
Luse, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, has worked for Lugar off and on for 30 years.
“They call it track two diplomacy,” said scientist Sigfried Hecker, who was with Luse on the trip. “It’s a way of keeping the dialogue and the connections going while the governments are typically at odds and not talking to each other.”
Hecker, a nuclear expert and professor at Stanford University, formerly headed the Los Alamos National Laboratory and has visited North Korea five times as an independent observer.
North Korea – one of the countries President Bush labeled as part of the “axis of evil” – has been sealed off from most of the rest of the world for more than 50 years.
“A state like North Korea is almost impossible for Americans to imagine,” said Jon Wolfsthal, a scholar with the Center for Strategic and International Studies who worked in North Korea when he was an Energy Department employee in the 1990s.
“It’s the last absolute dictatorship in the world,” he said, and is a country with widespread poverty and scant infrastructure such as paved roads and electricity.
Except for the capital, Pyongyang, “it is a largely agrarian, primitive country. Most people live like they did 10,000 years ago,” Wolfsthal said.
Even so, he said, North Koreans have enormous pride in their country and are deeply invested in a kind of single-mindedness that allows for mass dances or choral demonstrations with 100,000 people moving in precise synchronization.
“To Americans who have freedom of choice, it seems really creepy,” Wolfsthal said.
It’s that kind of society that Luse has entered five times since 2002 on trips to monitor food-aid programs or the nuclear program on behalf of Lugar.
Last autumn, North Korea agreed to disable Yongbyon and provide a list of all its nuclear activities by Dec. 31. In exchange, the other countries in the talks – the U.S., China, Japan, South Korea and Russia – promised to provide 900,000 tons of heavy fuel oil. In addition, the U.S. said it would remove some trade barriers and take North Korea off its list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Although the dismantling has begun, North Korea did not supply the list of nuclear activities (including which countries it might have provided with nuclear information or equipment) by the year-end deadline. Only part of the fuel was delivered.
North Korea says the U.S. and other countries haven’t lived up to their end of the deal; the U.S. says the same of North Korea.
Even though the official talks are stalled, Lugar said, he’s looking ahead. At some point, North Korea’s leaders will want to make sure the country is safe from the danger of nuclear material going astray, and they will be in search of jobs for the thousands of scientists and engineers who worked at nuclear weapons plants, he said.
That’s where Luse comes in.
As a non-official representative of the U.S. government, Luse can discuss how the nuclear anti-proliferation program Lugar helped create could be used in North Korea, even before all the formal negotiating is complete.
“Keith and Sig have been able to bring into the conversations Steps 3 and 4” of the nuclear dismantlement process, Lugar said of Luse and Hecker. The Bush administration’s chief negotiator “can’t really suggest that informally because he is the formal negotiator.”
Since 1992, the Nunn-Lugar program has helped countries put their nuclear, chemical and biological weapons stockpiles in safer places or eliminate them. In addition, it has helped provide jobs for the scientists who worked on those programs so they are not tempted to go to work for rogue governments or terrorists who want to develop weapons of mass destruction.
In his conversations with the North Koreans he has met with, Luse has introduced the idea of bringing the NunnLugar program to Pyongyang.
“Unless they are able to guarantee a satisfactory economic transition for a large group of individuals, the North Korean government is posed with a domestic political challenge – unhappy workers,” Luse said. “These workers represent some of the best minds in the country. They have been working on a program that, to North Korea, represents the cornerstone of its international image, its power.”
So when he visits North Korea, he looks for opportunities to bring up the Nunn-Lugar program.
Over the years he’s been meeting with North Koreans – sometimes the same people – Luse has seen a slight opening in the highly controlled society.
One of North Korea’s top nuclear scientists was allowed to have a lengthy conversation with Hecker and Luse in February, for instance. Government officials allowed the U.S. visitors to take photos for the first time.
But that doesn’t mean the U.S. and North Korea trust each other, Wolfsthal said.
“There’s a total trust deficit. So anything we do to build confidence in North Korea is useful,” he said, and Luse’s travels help with that.
The Bush administration’s approach to North Korea was once quite consistent with its overall foreign policy. There was name calling, a preference for regime change and an emphasis on military solutions. Unsurprisingly, the relationship between the United States and North Korea, like so many other tense stand-offs, deteriorated over the last seven years. The U.S. accused the third member of the “axis of evil” of money-laundering, missile sales and a secret program for the production of nuclear material. For its part, North Korea responded tit for tat at the rhetorical level. In October 2006, it upped the ante by exploding a nuclear device. If the United States were not tied up in other military conflicts ― and eyeing Iran ― a war in Northeast Asia might have been higher on the administration’s to-do list.
But all of that appeared to change in 2007. Chastened by military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, anxious about the vulnerability of the Republican party on foreign policy issues in 2008 and accused of having allowed North Korea to “go nuclear” on its watch, the Bush administration reversed its hard-line policy. Washington agreed to negotiate seriously with Pyongyang, provide it with incentives on the road to denuclearization rather than only at the end of the process and even to meet face-to-face when necessary.
The results of this turnabout were dramatic. The February 13, 2007 agreement in the six party talks ― among the United States, the two Koreas, Japan, China and Russia ― not only illuminated a path toward a denuclearized Korean peninsula. It also outlined steps toward normalization of political relations with Pyongyang, a replacement of the Korean War armistice with a peace treaty and the building of a regional peace structure for Northeast Asia.
Many conservatives were aghast that the Bush administration, after six years of ABC (Anything But Clinton), was essentially exhuming the Clinton administration’s engagement policies toward North Korea. From their perspective, the six party talks were supposed to be a holding pattern until the regime in Pyongyang finally collapsed through a combination of outside pressure and internal weakness. When the talks instead produced a breakthrough agreement, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton denied any achievement and declared, “I think the six party talks failed.” He then recycled his earlier position: “I think the only solution is the enhanced isolation of North Korea, ultimately bringing the regime down and peacefully reuniting the peninsula.”
In 2008, progress toward implementing last year’s February 13 agreement slowed. While North Korea has begun shutting down its Yongbyon plutonium facilities and readmitted inspectors, and the United States has sent about 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil and 5,000 tons of steel products for its power plants, disagreements remain. North Korea missed the first deadline for delivering a complete declaration of its nuclear program, and a second one looms at the end of February. Meanwhile, the United States has yet to remove the country from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Even if these hurdles are cleared, several more remain. It is not yet clear whether North Korea will entirely give up its nuclear deterrent or whether the United States will remove all economic sanctions and extend diplomatic recognition.
The fragile détente between North Korea and the United States might succumb to its internal challenges. Additionally, a faction of hardliners in North Korea may be troubled by the prospect of giving up their nuclear deterrent, opening up the economy to outside influences and relinquishing control over foreign and military policy to Pyongyang’s version of engagement advocates. It is difficult, however, to pierce the veil of ignorance to understand the state of play within North Korea and which side holds the upper hand. Should it so desire, North Korea is fully capable of undermining the détente all by itself. Meanwhile, in the countries that face North Korea, hard-line opponents don’t want to leave it to chance or the prospect that North Korean hawks will prevail.
The critics of engagement policy are therefore marshalling arguments to strangle the hopeful developments of 2007 in their cradle. Some critics, like Bolton, continue to hold onto the old Bush strategy of isolation and regime change because, they argue, North Korea cannot be trusted to abide by any agreement. Other critics focus on North Korea’s nuclear program itself, both its internal characteristics and purported external cooperation with countries such as Syria. A third set of criticisms focuses on the February 13 agreement itself and identifies flaws, ambiguities and blind spots, particularly around the question of verification. Another group focuses instead on North Korea’s human rights record and the failures of China and Russia to pressure their putative ally on this and other issues. Finally, conservative critics in Japan and South Korea are attempting to undermine détente from the sidelines.
The negotiators trying to implement the agreements reached in the six party talks face a host of internal and external challenges. The hard-line criticisms can be addressed. But it’s not certain whether engagement supporters in Washington or in Pyongyang have sufficient political capital to push the process forward in 2008.
The Nuclear Challenge
North Korea’s nuclear program has long been a mystery. It’s never been clear how much fissionable material the country has produced. Although the country froze its plutonium facilities as part of the 1994 Agreed Framework, it is unclear how much time and resources it devoted to pursuing a second path to a bomb, namely highly enriched uranium (HEU). Even the October 2006 nuclear test remains a puzzle. Some experts have declared it a failure, while others speculate that North Korea succeeded with a low-yield experiment.
For a small and relatively weak country, mystery can be critical for survival, and North Korea has been reluctant to disarm itself of such a weapon. In the current conflict over declaration of the full extent of its nuclear program, North Korea claims that it already provided full information in November, prior to the December 31 deadline. But the United States is not satisfied with the amount of plutonium that North Korea has declared or with the government’s contention that it never set up a HEU program.
These points are negotiable. The amount of plutonium that North Korea reportedly declared ― 30 kilograms ― is at the low end of U.S. estimates, so this is well within negotiable range. Getting agreement on the amount of reprocessed plutonium in North Korea’s possession involves some massaging of the numbers, which is what happened in 1994 as well. The HEU program, meanwhile, is more a matter of saving face than dismantling a viable program. The Bush administration wants to demonstrate that its 2002 accusations, which derailed the 1994 Agreed Framework, had some merit. North Korea, however, wants to demonstrate that it did not violate the spirit of that agreement. Both sides have moved closer to agreement. The U.S. government has already admitted that its initial estimates were exaggerated. And experts suggest that evidence of uranium residue in aluminum tubes that North Korea provided to investigators, which would suggest actual enrichment, is the result of contamination from Pakistani material. Christopher Hill has all but admitted that North Korea did not use these tubes for uranium enrichment.
Syria Connection
What might not be negotiable, however, is the Syria connection, which hardliners have seized on to prove that North Korea remains an incorrigible rogue.
In early September, the U.S. media reported on Israeli military strikes against Syria that destroyed what might have been a nuclear facility. Some reports suggested that the facility had been built with North Korean assistance and that North Korean engineers had even died in the bombing. If the media reports were correct, North Korea had crossed the critical red line established by the Bush administration (Pyongyang had earlier crossed the red line when it tested a nuclear weapon). And yet, the Bush administration simply allowed the State Department to go about its business. With hardliners like Bolton and the State Department’s senior arms control and security official Robert Joseph no longer on the inside, the State Department has had more maneuvering room to pursue engagement.
But congressional opponents of engagement certainly raised a fuss about the purported Syria connection. “We regret that the administration has ignored numerous letters from Congress asking that all members be briefed on the Israeli airstrike,” wrote Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) in The Wall Street Journal. “Failing to disclose the details of this incident to the legislative branch, preventing due diligence and oversight ― but talking to the press about it ― is not the way to win support for complex and difficult diplomatic efforts to combat proliferation by rogue nations.” The congressional representatives cautioned the administration not to move forward on any agreements with North Korea until this matter was cleared up.
The Syria connection remains sufficiently mysterious that engagement opponents may be able to exploit it at any point when it seems that détente is moving forward. As Bolton has put it, “The idea of North Korea for years engaged in cloning Yongbyon in Syria (or anywhere else ― Burma, for instance) should be a fire bell in the night.”
But the notion that any country would be interested in a clone of Yongbyon is far fetched. After all, North Korea’s facility is itself based on a rather old English model ― the Calder Hall design ― and Syria could just as easily have skipped North Korea and gone back to the original. If Syria were building a nuclear plant, which is still not verified. Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that a former senior U.S. intelligence official with access to the current intelligence says "we don't have any proof of a reactor ― no signals intelligence, no human intelligence, no satellite intelligence."
Bolton slips in a sly suggestion that North Korea is cloning Yongbyon elsewhere. In briefings with its Asian allies in early 2005, the United States similarly accused North Korea of providing Libya with uranium hexafluoride. It turned out that the U.S. government had misled its allies, however. North Korea had provided the material to Pakistan, which already has a nuclear program, a business transaction that the United States had known about for years.
As such, there still remains no evidence that North Korea is engaged in nuclear proliferation, whether in Syria or elsewhere. North Korea is certainly short of cash, and nuclear know-how and materials are valuable commodities. But no one knows the true marketability of North Korea’s program, and certainly it would pale in comparison to what North Korea could earn from giving up its nuclear program wholesale.
Trust, Then Verify?
If North Korea provides a declaration of its nuclear programs that U.S. negotiators can live with, and the United States then proceeds to remove the country from the state sponsors of terrorism list, the process moves on to the next level. At that point, North Korea is supposed to submit to a more intrusive inspection regime and begin to give over all of its nuclear material.
Opponents of engagement are readying their arguments, and they largely focus on the question of verification. The Heritage Foundation’s Bruce Klingner, for instance, compares the verification protocols from the Cold War with what is being proposed in the Six Party Talks and finds them wanting.
“To verify the extent of North Korean plutonium production, inspectors must be allowed to conduct short-notice challenge inspections of suspect sites as well as to take samples of fissile material,” he writes. “North Korea's refusal in 1992–1993 to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to access two suspect nuclear sites precipitated the first nuclear crisis. The agency has never gained access to the sites.”
During the lead-up to the first nuclear crisis in the early 1990s, North Korea allowed an initial inspection by Hans Blix of the International Atomic Energy Agency and produced a 150-page document detailing its uranium mining sites and nuclear power plants. “It turned out that the North Korean list closely matched Western estimates of the scope of its nuclear program,” writes Michael Mazarr in his book, North Korea and the Bomb. True, North Korea refused to allow the IAEA to visit the two suspect sites, claiming that they were conventional military facilities. But the real problem was that after allowing six IAEA inspections and providing the detailed list of its programs, North Korea got nothing out of the deal: “no economic aid or investment, no broader political contacts with Washington or Seoul or Tokyo, not even the ability to verify that U.S. nuclear weapons had been withdrawn from the South,” Mazarr concludes.
The current demand that North Korea submit to an intrusive inspection regime as a precondition for moving forward with engagement recapitulates this earlier conflict. Before it throws open its highly secretive sites, North Korea wants some sign that its longstanding enemies ― the United States, Japan, and South Korea ― have changed their adversarial policies. South Korea has largely done so. But the United States has only sent over some heavy fuel and rescued a few North Korean sailors who were attacked in the Red Sea by pirates. Japan remains obsessed with the abduction issue, showing no sign of changing tack.
The verification procedures that the Agreed Framework established are still applicable to the dismantlement of the Yongbyon facility. They worked during the 1990s, and there is no reason to doubt that they will work again. Expanding verification to short-notice inspections of all suspect sites throughout the country can only be achieved through give-and-take negotiations and the building of trust, not through fiat.
Human Rights
If negotiators manage to settle all the outstanding disputes over the nuclear issue, other stumbling blocks loom. Perhaps the most vexing is the issue of human rights. The debate over human rights in North Korea as it intersects with policy discussions over engagement inevitably focuses on the prudence of linking human rights concerns with political issues such as nuclear negotiations and normalization of relations. Central to this debate is not whether there are human rights violations in North Korea. No doubt North Koreans endure major human rights violations. As economic migrants or political refugees who have crossed into China, North Koreans face dire living conditions. They are in danger of being discovered not only by the authorities but also by anyone wanting a reward for turning in undocumented immigrants. For those remaining in North Korea, the list of human rights concerns is long, ranging from the full spectrum of civil and political rights to social and economic rights.
The heart of the matter is: how should these rights be protected and by whom? The answer largely revolves around the issue of regime change. Some, like Bolton, argue that North Korean human rights can best be protected if the regime is toppled. Others, like the German doctor Norbert Vollertsen, go so far as to encourage large refugee outflows to foster the collapse of the regime.
Human rights organization Amnesty International, however, has been leery of linking human rights to such political agendas throughout its long history of human rights activism precisely because such political agendas take the focus away from human rights and play into geopolitical power struggles. In the short term, they provoke harsher measures that adversely affect the most vulnerable. In the North Korean case, this was seen in the crackdowns by Chinese authorities after dramatic coordinated bids for asylum in the scaling of embassy compound walls by North Korean refugees between 2002 and 2004. The Chinese authorities predictably increased roundups, repatriations and border patrols in order to discourage similar high-profile acts. Raising the visibility of the issue might advance certain political agendas, but such strategies negatively affect the large majority of those in dire conditions, fostering distrust rather than cooperation. By contrast, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Beijing, criticisms notwithstanding, has been attempting to work behind the scenes with Chinese officials to deal with the issue. It has not insisted on refugee status for North Koreans in China, a matter sensitive to China not only because of its own internal dissidents but also because of its relationship with Pyongyang. Rather, it has sought to provide protections to specific North Koreans, arranging, for instance, for their transit to third countries. Likewise, humanitarian organizations directly aiding the North Koreans in China attest to the fact that their activities are tolerated as long as they are carried out quietly. Finally, proponents of regime change seem oblivious to the even greater potential threat to human rights in the chaotic aftermath of regime collapse, including war on the Korean peninsula. In short, most human rights and humanitarian organizations believe that neither human rights nor humanitarian aid should be used as a political tool.
A negative example of what happens when human rights are linked to political agendas is the North Korea Human Rights Act of 2004. This legislation authorizes $24 million for each of the fiscal years between 2005 and 2008 for assistance to North Korean refugees, promoting human rights, democracy, and freedom of information inside North Korea. In addition, the bill mandated the appointment of a special envoy for human rights in North Korea, a position subsequently filled by lawyer Jay Lefkowitz.
On the surface, it seems that the legislation stands up for human rights by alleviating a major humanitarian crisis. However, it has another objective. During a speech given to the Heritage Foundation on April 19, 2007, Lefkowitz emphasized the need for increasing flows of information into and out of North Korea by smuggling in radios so that North Koreans might listen to programs like the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. “While all of these are crimes in North Korea, and getting caught could subject the offender to extreme forms of punishment, the long-term trend has been a steady increase in the porosity of the country,” he casually stated. “In the struggle for human rights in North Korea, we not only can help try to save the lives of the North Korean people, most immediately, but we can also try to help make the region and the world safer by helping to bring about a similar transformation [as in the Soviet Union]. In this way, human rights can be a means to a greater end.” Lefkowitz leaves little room for doubt that this “greater end” is the collapse of the North Korean regime.
More recently, on January 17, Lefkowitz seemed to consign the six party talks to premature death in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He declared that North Korea, despite four years of nuclear disarmament talks, will likely still have its nuclear weapons when the next U.S. president takes office in 2009. He accused Pyongyang of not being “serious about disarming in a timely manner,” pronouncing that “North Korea has not kept its word.” Revealing the longstanding split within the administration on how to deal with North Korea, his statement was hurriedly taken off the State Department’s website, and its author quickly put in line by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “[Lefkowitz] doesn’t know what’s going on in the six party talks, and he certainly has no say on what American policy will be in the six party talks,” she said sternly. “I know where the president stands, and I know where I stand, and those are the people who speak for American policy.”
Lefkowitz deliberately overstepped his bounds to undermine the nuclear talks by linking them to human rights. “Security issues and human rights issues are linked inextricably,” he has said. “They both derive from the nature of the regime, and any long-term effort by the international community to alleviate security concerns in northeast Asia will have to seek to modify the nature of the [North Korean] regime.” Although his job is to press for human rights, Lefkowitz views his role through the prism of national security and regime change. His apparent misunderstanding of his own job presents one of the strongest cases against linking human rights with political agendas.
Last year I was reading a textbook on North Korean history, issued by a group of South Korean scholars. This was a good read, not so much because it provided new data, but because it was a wonderful testimony to the biases now so fashionable in Korean academia.
Just one example of such: the textbook dedicates many pages to the 1946 land reform in the North, and favorably contrasts its radicalism with the sluggishness of similar measures in South Korea. Basically, it's true: the South Korean government of 1948-1950 included too many landlords to be enthusiastic about land redistribution.
But there was something in the story that made me smile (sarcastically, I admit). The textbook authors fail to mention that from the very start the land reform program in North Korea was planned by the Soviet military authorities, and Kim Il-sung simply signed the documents, which had been prepared for him by the Russian officers.
This fact is well-known, since Russian papers on the land reform issue were declassified and published in South Korea almost a decade ago. But these facts do not accord with the authors' preconceptions and hence are not mentioned. A good example of manipulation, of course, but a fairly typical one. The ``progressive'' (that is, left-wing) academics, who increasingly dominate the South Korean intellectual world, want to play down the Soviet impact on the North.
Why? Because this serves their own political agenda. The modern South Korean Left was formed during the struggle against the right-wing military regimes of the 1960s and 1970s, and came to perceive them as an embodiment of evil (actually, as far as dictatorships go, the South Korean strongmen were mild, and exceptionally efficient with respect to economic management ― but do not tell this to a young Korean ``progressive!''). Thus, the Left wants to demonstrate the illegitimacy of their old enemy, insisting that the South Korean state was, from its inception, not authentically national. It was compromised by its widespread employment of former pro-Japanese collaborators and perhaps by a too close cooperation with the U.S. military administration. But to emphasize this idea even further, the leftists need a good example, and they tend to believe that the North Korean state was the complete opposite of the allegedly corrupt and dependent Seoul government. Facts, which show that for all practical purposes the North Korean state was a Soviet puppet, do not fit into such picture and hence should not be mentioned.
But even a cursory look through the available documents clearly indicates: in 1945-1950, the North Korean regime operated under the complete control of the Soviet supervisors. Who drafted the above-mentioned land reform law? The Soviet advisers. Who edited and, after some deliberation, confirmed the North Korean Constitution? Stalin himself. Who arrested all the major opponents of the emerging Communist regime? The Soviet military police. Where were they sent to do their time? To prison camps in Siberia, of course!
The available papers leave no doubt that even the relatively mundane actions of the North Korean government needed approval from Moscow. The Soviet Politburo, the supreme council of the state, approved the agenda of the North Korean rubber-stamping parliament and even ``gave permission'' to stage a parade in 1948. The much-trumpeted conference of the politicians from the North and South in the spring of 1948 was another Soviet idea, even if the leftist historians now love to depict it as yet another expression of Pyongyang's will to negotiate based on its alleged national feelings. The most important speeches to be delivered by the North Korean leaders had to be pre-read and approved in the Soviet Embassy.
My favorite story in this regard happened in December 1946, when the first elections for the North were being prepared. On Dec. 16, the Soviet Colonel-General Terentii Shtykov discussed the composition of the North Korean proto-parliament with two other Soviet generals. The generals (no Koreans were present) decided that the Assembly would consist of 231 members. They did not forget to distribute the places among the various parties, decided how many women would become members, and the social composition of the legislature. If we have a look at the actual composition of the Assembly, we can see that these instructions were followed with only minor deviations.
If all these do not give us a right to describe the North as a ``puppet regime'' ― well, I do not know what would. But such facts do not coincide with the agenda of many young historians who have a strong allergy to the anti-Communist propaganda of the past (even if this propaganda was much closer to the truth than they are ready to admit). Hence, such uncomfortable facts are downplayed.
But I cannot help but wonder: what will happen when the North Korean regime collapses and the scale of its brutality becomes all too obvious? What will these people say? I suspect that many of them will change their mind and start blaming the regime's exceptional cruelty on the malevolent foreign influences, on those same scheming Russians whose involvement is now denied or barely mentioned.
But where is the truth? Somewhere in-between, I suspect. While initially created as a product of Stalinist social engineering, the North Korean regime still enjoyed remarkable support from below. This support influenced the trajectory of the regime, too: since for better or worse North Korean Stalinism acquired some very specific and very national features.
