와싱턴 포스트 도쿄 서울 특파원 애나 파이필드가 본 김정은, 김일성-김정일과 차이

김정은은 왜 30년간 만들어온 보검 (treasured sword)인 핵무기를 내려놓고, 경제 발전을 선택했는가?

와싱턴 포스트, 도쿄 서울 특파원 애나 파이필드 기자의 글이다. 2018년은 1994년과 2005년과는 북미 관계와 협상 태도가 다르다는 결론이다. 와싱턴 포스트나 뉴욕타임즈 역시 미국 민주당-공화당의 전통적인 외교노선을 지지하고, 트럼프가 김정은을 대하는 태도를 못마땅해왔다. 그나마 애나 파이필드 기자는 북한을 방문한 적도 있고, 도쿄와 서울 특파원을 했기 때문에, 실제 남북한의 변화, 김정은 노선의 향방에 대해 정확하게 알고 있는 편이다.

(기사 읽고 드는 생각 노트) 

1) 김정은 위원장은 북한 경제를 변화시키고자 하는 욕구가 크다, 그 반면에 향후 수십년간 장기 집권을 위한 계획도 철저하게 수립하는 중이다. 이미 북한 시민들의 50% 이상이 시장 경제 활동을 통해 생계를 꾸리고 있고,인터넷의 자유는 없지만 북한사람들이 한국 방송과 중국 미디어를 다 보고 있다. 주변 국가들 한국, 중국, 러시아, 베트남 등과 비교해 북한 주민들도 경제적인 물질적 풍요를 누리고 싶어한다. 이를 충족시키기 위해 김정은은 '한반도 비핵화'와 경제발전 집중 노선을 들고 나왔다.

2) 애나 파이필드가 묘사한 김일성, 김정일과 김정은의 차이점은 무엇인가?

"He is tactile, hugging his nuclear engineers and the South Korean president with almost equal favor" 

tactile, 그러니까 김정은이 애정이나 동감을 솔직하게 표현하는 능력이 있는 정치 지도자라고 애나 파이필드는 김정은을 묘사했다.

과연 이러한 김정은의 포옹 정치가 트럼프의 악수 정치와 서로 화학작용을 일으킬 것인가? 

.

Asia & Pacific Perspective

Reporter’s notebook: Covering North Korea, daring to hope for change.

A man watches a TV screen showing file footage of President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a news program at the Seoul Railway Station on June 11. (Ahn Young-Joon/AP)

By Anna FifieldJune 11 at 8:10 AMEmail the author

SINGAPORE —  It was February, a decade ago. I was sitting in the East Pyongyang Theater in the North Korean capital, watching an American conductor leading an American orchestra playing the North Korean national anthem. On one side of the stage, the North Korean flag. On the other, the Stars and Stripes. 

The North Koreans sat politely through the Dvorak. But they stirred with the Gershwin, which was unlike any music they’d heard before. Then a palpable flutter went through the audience when they realized the Americans were playing “Arirang,” the heart-rending traditional Korean song about loss.

It felt like history, I wrote at the time. 

As we hurtle toward another potentially pivotal moment in the 70-year-long enmity between these two countries, I’ve been thinking back to that day in 2008, which came toward the end of my first four-year stint covering North Korea. 

I was so hopeful back then. Hopeful that the ping-ping diplomacy of American violinists could lead to the kind of rapprochement that the ping-pong diplomacy of the 1970s brought with China.  

It turned out that my hope was entirely misplaced. 

Six months later, Kim Jong Il had a debilitating stroke and the regime started preparing for an unprecedented second transition of power in the world’s only communist dynasty.  

That put the regime on a course that involved more nuclear tests and the revelation of a huge uranium enrichment facility, then the coronation of the inexperienced 27-year-old Great Successor as leader at the end of 2011.

Kim Jong Un’s first six years in power were marked by a crackdown on the borders and even more brutal repression, as if that even seemed possible. And last year came a thermonuclear bomb, a salvo of increasingly advanced missiles, and a relentless barrage of threats.

But, despite everything I’ve learned in the 14 years since I began covering North Korea, despite myself, I feel hopeful again now ahead of Tuesday’s summit between President Trump and Kim.

I’m not optimistic about complete denuclearization. No way. Kim is highly unlikely to give up his nuclear program anytime soon, no matter what he agrees on Tuesday. 

The now-34-year-old dictator is consumed by a need to prove he’s the legitimate leader of a country his grandfather founded seven decades ago. He is, after all, a marshal who’s never served a day in the military and the nuclear program is, in the regime’s words, his “treasured sword.”

[North Korean defectors allow themselves to wonder: Could they really go home again? ]

Cynicism and pessimism have always served North Korea watchers well, and it remains fashionable in the Washington twitterati to hark back to the failed agreements of 1994 and 2005. Certainly, the task of denuclearization is much more difficult now than it was in 2005, before North Korea had conducted its first fizzle of a nuclear test.

But I am allowing myself to feel a little optimistic now because this moment feels different. This process is different. These leaders are different. 

From the outside, people tend to look at North Korea as a monolith, stuck in a time warp somewhere between Victorian times and Stalin’s heyday. People tend to look at the leaders called Kim as if they were printed in triplicate.

But the North Korea of 2018 is not the North Korea of 1998, when a famine was rampaging through the country, killing maybe 2 million people.  

It is not even the North Korea of 2008, when the regime went into stabilization overdrive. That North Korea was a country where poverty and malnutrition were relatively equally shared, in good socialist style. A country where people might have had an inkling that the outside world was a better place, but many couldn’t say for sure.

In fundamental ways, North Korea is beginning to change. 

For all the communist central planning, North Korea is essentially capitalist now. More than half of North Koreans earn their living in the market economy, and the vast majority of the remainder have some involvement in private enterprise. 

“No one expects the government to provide things anymore,” one escapee from North Korea, who was a university student when Kim Jong Un took over, told me last year. “Everyone has to find their own way to survive.” 

It is no longer the cliched “Hermit Kingdom” either. Yes, the regime does its best to cut off all information from the outside world and there is still no Internet, but almost every single one of the scores of escapees I’ve met has watched melodramatic South Korean soap operas or Chinese action movies. They know that they do not live in a paradise, as the regime has long told them.

[With smiles and a handshake, Trump and Kim could mask gulf on nuclear arms ]

And those who say that Kim is just taking a leaf from his father’s playbook are overlooking demonstrable differences in their style.

Kim Jong Il was an introverted, reluctant leader who seemed to hate having to leave his palaces, stacked with DVDs and cognac. In 17 years in power, he spoke in public only once, and even then briefly. He went to China and Russia grudgingly to keep his patrons happy.

In stark contrast, Kim Jong Un is a charismatic leader who has delivered numerous public addresses and seems to relish being out and about, whether it’s at a missile launch or at the opening of a factory producing Hello Kitty-style backpacks. He is tactile, hugging his nuclear engineers and the South Korean president with almost equal fervor.

Kim exudes confidence and has shown himself to be entirely unconcerned with global norms and their consequences. 

His army of cyberwarriors attacks banks and hospitals and movie production companies. He had his uncle and his half brother killed. He sent a young American man, who’d gone to North Korean in perfect health, home in a coma to die. 

Clearly, he is capable of great brutality. But he is also clearly thinking very rationally about what he needs to do if he’s going to stay in power. Killing your uncle and brother makes perfect ruthless sense if you’re a totalitarian dictator who needs to eliminate potential rivals. 

That’s what he’s doing now. He’s thinking in decades, not in years.

If he lives as long as his father, Kim could have another 37 years on this planet, although clearly diabetes or heart disease are a risk.

He knows if he is to retain control of this anachronistic throwback of a country, it’s not enough to take care of the 1 percent who keep him in power. He also needs to devote some energy to the 99 percent, the people he told would never have to tighten their belts again.

 Those people need to feel like their lives are improving too, and while Kim had muddled through until now, it’s impossible to achieve the kind of growth he wants while sanctions are being applied with maximum pressure.

[For Kim Jong Un, meeting Trump is about cementing power at home ]

 As North Korea’s state media illustrated in full Technicolor on Monday, he is committed to having a successful summit. 

North Korea’s most authoritative anchor appeared on Korean Central Television, which is to Kim as Fox News is to Trump, on Monday morning to announce that the North Korean leader had departed for a “historic meeting” with “American president Donald J. Trump.” This was a very rare neutral mention of the U.S. leader who’s more frequently called a “dotard” or “senile” in the state propaganda.

The Rodong Sinmun newspaper, the mouthpiece of the Workers’ Party, carried an editorial explaining that “even if a country had a hostile relationship with us in the past, our attitude is that if that country respects our autonomy … we will seek to normalize relations through dialogue.”

Played right, this could be an opportunity for the outside world to alleviate the plight of the 25 million North Koreans who are trapped in Kim Jong Un’s prison state, the people who are subject to his threats on a daily basis.

Hoping for regime collapse or pushing for regime change has not worked. This is an opportunity to use diplomatic engagement with North Korea to benefit both the outside world and those on the inside, says Sokeel Park of Liberty in North Korea, a group that helps people who have escaped from North Korea.

Accelerating the opening and normalization of North Korea as a country could help make life more open and more normal for North Koreans who live without basic rights like speaking and traveling and loving freely. 

This will be difficult. Kim Jong Un may be game for some economic change, but he will certainly resist political changes that could weaken his grip on the state. 

Still, in so many ways, this millennial is ready to do things differently. Trump has also shown a willingness to do things differently.

This is not 1994. This is not 2005. This is 2018.

Read more:

South Korea’s Moon says reaching accord with the North could take years

After blowing up the G-7, Trump seeks peace with North Korea

Trump meets with Singapore leader as U.S. races to finalize summit details

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

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Anna Fifield is The Washington Post’s bureau chief in Tokyo, focusing on Japan and the Koreas. She previously reported for the Financial Times from Washington, D.C., Seoul, Sydney, London and from across the Middle East.

  Follow @annafifield

 

(June 11, 2018 Singapore)