Foreword to North Korea on the Brink, Gareth Evans

Foreword by Gareth Evans, President, International Crisis Group, to North Korea on the Brink: Struggle for Survival, by Glyn Ford with Soyoung Kwon, published December 2007, by Pluto Press. 

North Korea remains one of the most stubborn problems for the international community. Over the past 60 years it has defied regular predictions of its imminent collapse, survived the end of the Soviet Union, endured the death of its all-powerful leader Kim Il Sung and gained a outsized place among global concerns because of its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Even as its last few communist allies opened their economies and prospered, it has remained resolutely closed off to the world, a dark and little understood nation at the heart of North East Asia. Its problems go back to its origins at the end of World War II when the Korean peninsula was split by Stalin and Truman. The legacies of that war persist in the region; a dead weight of history has blocked progress towards real peace and security.

Isolation has prompted decades of speculation about North Korea's government, its intentions and the lives of its people. This has often taken on the most lurid tones: as an unknown quantity, it has always been possible for analysts to project their darkest fears onto the country. For decades, North and South Korea traded insults, lied about each other and stirred up the worst fears in their people. North Korea remains one of the most cut off nations in the world. Only a handful of flights leave its airspace each month, it trades only a tiny amount compared with it neighbours, and few of its people ever travel abroad. But since 1995, an increasing number of people have gained access to North Korea, visiting as officials, diplomats, aid workers and tourists. Even when closely chaperoned, as all visitors are, it is possible to see for oneself what Glyn Ford describes as the "normal, abnormal and absurd" in daily life.

There can be no doubt that North Koreans live some of the most grimly controlled lives anywhere and that their government has one of the most troubling histories of human rights abuses in the past half century, including its failure to tackle a famine that may have cost more than a million lives. It has remained on a permanent war footing since the Korean War almost wiped out the country in the 1950s. A mindset of conflict and paranoia has been stoked by the hostility of the United States and the division of the Korean peninsula. Even when agreements have been reached, such as the 1994 Agreed Framework that froze the countries nuclear program, both sides have tended to act in bad faith with the North constantly pressing more demands and the United States delaying implementation in the hope that the regime in Pyongyang will collapse.

Collapse is unlikely and wishful thinking is not a good basis for policy. The North Korean regime is obsessed by its survival and maintains a security apparatus to ensure it. It has played a deft diplomatic game to divide its opponents and keep them off balance. Pyongyang has been skilled at dragging out the Six Party Talks in Beijing, only making small concessions when it suited them. But negotiations have succeeded in getting international inspectors back into Pyongyang's nuclear facilities and have cooled the temperature on the Korean peninsula. What is needed now is a sustained effort to bring North Korea into the fold. This will require a lengthy and complex series of discussions and considerable patience, a commodity that is often lacking.

Each new administration in Washington DC has reviewed its policies on the Korean peninsula; when President George W Bush did this in 2001, he blithely discarded the progress that had been made in the last weeks of the Clinton administration. That has proved to be a terrible error, as was the inclusion of Pyongyang in the "Axis of Evil". The invasion of Iraq only stoked North Korea's fear of regime change and made it that much more difficult to deal with the issues of proliferation. Now there is a new opportunity to talk to North Korea. It is a chance that should not be missed.

This makes Glyn Ford's work on North Korea even more critical. As a prominent and effective Member of the European Parliament, he has been a pioneer in developing relations between the European Union and North Korea. He first visited Pyongyang in October 1997 when North Korean diplomats approached him for help in responding to the famine that was destroying the country. His work with the European Commission led to one of the EU's largest humanitarian responses ever with some 340 million euros channelled through the United Nations World Food Program and NGOs operating in North Korea. This aid also started a political dialogue with Pyongyang which was encouraged by the South Korean government of Kim Dae-Jung when he launched his "Sunshine Policy" of openness to the North.

That dialogue has been interrupted by the failures of the Agreed Framework and North Korea's nuclear test in 2006 but it may now be resuscitated if the Six Party Talks make more progress. Ford makes a compelling case for a greater European role on the Korean peninsula. Up to now it has mostly been a "payer, not a player", footing the bill for energy shipments but having little say in the deals made among the regional powers. Now that the EU includes many nations who have been through the often painful transition from centralized to market economies, it has considerable expertise in managing these changes. Germany brings both experience of long-term engagement with its Ostpolitik as well as knowledge of the huge challenges of reunification of divergent states. Europe puts human rights at the heart of its values: a full but critical engagement with North Korea on these issues could start the process of change that is so desperately needed.

As Ford notes, engagement is a long-term strategy, but it is one that has worked elsewhere in the past. There are no other realistic options on the Korean peninsula but to hope that North Korea can be drawn out and brought into the wider world. This is a view that is now held across the political spectrum in South Korea, the country with the most to lose if war were to break out again. Ending Pyongyang’s isolation may reduce the security threat it presents and improve the lives of its 20 million people. It is a process that could take decades but it will start when more policymakers follow Ford’s example and no longer regard the country as a closed book. It may be difficult to understand North Korea with its opaque history and its politics. But understanding it, in the way this timely book so well helps us to do, is the first step towards ending a conflict that has gone on for far too long.