ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 25, 1996 TAG: 9602280012
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: ELAINE SCIOLINO THE NEW YORK TIMES
Just two years ago, the Clinton administration's biggest fear about North Korea was its determination to develop nuclear weapons - a determination that could have led to war with the South. That worry was allayed after North Korea promised not to pursue atomic weaponry, in exchange for help with more benign nuclear power plants.
But now, the United States has a different worry - that North Korea is in so much trouble economically that it could fall apart. Rather than eliminate a threat, a sudden collapse could touch off internal chaos, a flood of refugees and - if things got truly desperate - war with the South.
South Korea, even more than the United States, is eager to avoid a sudden collapse of the North Korean regime. It is not just the threat of another war. South Korea's leaders are just as concerned that the North could fall the way East Germany did and, despite their stated commitment to reunification, they are extremely reluctant to make any real moves in that direction as long as the North remains an economic basket case.
In recent months, a wealth of anecdotal evidence - severe food and energy shortages, an increase in defectors, a dramatic scaling back of annual military ground exercises - suggests a country in economic crisis and a leadership struggling to cope with it.
One difficulty the United States faces in figuring out what to do in response is that North Korea is the black hole of Asia - an isolated, rigid, Stalinist regime whose policies, capabilities and intentions are nearly impossible for the outside world to divine.
Another is that for years, U.S. intelligence agencies have focused hard on North Korea's 1.2 million man army and its nuclear weapons program. The satellites and other secret intelligence gathering told America a lot about where the tanks were pointing and whether their engines were running, but little about whether peasants had enough to eat or whether the leadership was secure.
So it is hard to know just what to make of the anecdotal reports now emerging, and even harder to know how to react to them.
``For a long time there was little attention paid to such things,'' said Toby Gati, the State Department's most senior intelligence official.
``If it was not an indication of war, there was no way to put it into the charts. The main focus of our analysis was and continues to be whether and under what conditions the North would invade the South. This is still crucial because of our troops. But a country is more than a tank, and now we have to have more than a one-dimensional look.''
The task of analyzing the country's economy has become more crucial following floods last summer that wiped out entire villages and a large percentage of the country's food stocks and new harvest.
This aggravated an economic crisis created after the Soviet Union collapsed and North Korea lost its patron and after China decided a year ago to stop selling the North grain on credit.
When the North Korean regime, whose guiding principle is self-reliance, turned to the outside world for help, the United States concluded that the economic problems were severe enough to warrant $2 million in food aid.
Because North Korea remains subject to a 46-year-old economic embargo , the pledge of emergency aid was a diplomatic overture as much as it was a humanitarian response - designed to show that the United States had no interest in seeing North Korea fall apart.
Last November, the secretive North even allowed the United Nations' World Food Program to open an office in the capital, Pyongyang; its presence has provided rare snapshots of everyday life.
Earlier this month, for example, Trevor Page, the program's director, visited Hwanghae, a prosperous town by North Korean standards and the fifth-largest in the country, where, according to his report, conditions were ``appalling.''
Children from one to 16 years of age met in unheated classrooms where temperatures were about 5 degrees below zero. Most of the children were coughing and sneezing. School feeding rations had been cut in half.
There were no cars on the streets, only a steady stream of oxcarts and bicycles - a sign of a fuel shortage. Groups of peasants were furtively selling firewood, clothing, cigarettes, matches and ballpoint pens on an illegal black market, which, according to an internal World Food Program report, ``the government is now tolerating because the public rationing system has broken down for lack of food.''
In another report after a World Food Program visit to North Pyongan province last month, people interviewed said they were eating only two meals a day and stretching rice by turning it into porridge. The agency also has reported that the police are not arresting peasants who come into Pyongyang from the countryside with nothing to do but wander around in search of food.
``Is there famine in the Biblical sense?'' asked Page in a telephone interview from Pyongyang. ``Clearly not. But the North Korean winter is hard and long and people are cold and the people are hungry and desperately short of food.''
Another sign of discontent is that more North Koreans are fleeing overland into China and defecting to the South. Although U.S. intelligence analysts look with skepticism on the stories told by defectors in staged news conferences in South Korea, the sheer number of the reports, particularly from soldiers who have defected, means they are now taken more seriously. Some defectors, for example, claim that hungry soldiers are deserting, robbing peasants, and being treated in hospitals for malnutrition.
Most interesting to the Pentagon is the fact that although North Korea's annual Air Force exercises are at about the same level as last year, its ground exercises are dramatically smaller. That, military analysts say, could mean that the Army does not have enough fuel to exercise.
Still, there is no agreement inside or outside the administration about the extent to which shortages have affected morale or military readiness, whether the country is going to collapse or whether a collapse would prompt the North to invade the South.
``When you combine the failure of the economic system, the absence of political legitimacy and the lack of international backing, common sense tells you this is a country falling apart from within,'' said Stanley Roth, until recently the chief Asian analyst at the National Security Council. ``But it's almost impossible to project when you have such little data.''
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