NORTH KOREA’S unsettling manoeuvres in the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) recall a similar performance in another East Asian tension spot. Then it was Beijing, trying to ratchet up the pressure on President Lee Teng-hui in the Taiwanese elections. Now it is Pyongyang, seeking to destabilise President Kim Young-sam ahead of Thursday’s National Assembly elections.
The Chinese leadership, poorly placed now to urge caution on the North Koreans, may have additional reason to regret their forceful tactics which only brought out more votes for Lee. Pyongyang’s performance may have a similar effect in mobilising conservative support for Kim’s ruling party. But there is another more disturbing comparison. China’s posturing in the Taiwan Straits seemed in part to reflect army pressure upon the Communist Party leadership to act more forcefully. North Korea’s action hints more strongly at tension between the army and the party and must add an extra element of unease.
The crisis began with a statement issued on March 29 by the North Korean armed forces vice-minister Marshal Kim Kwang-chin suggesting that the 1953 armistice had become obsolete. Pyongyang regularly complains of South Korea’s alleged warlike preparations whenever Seoul conducts military exercises. But Pyongyang has made a point of observing the restrictions placed on the joint security area at Panmunjom. And it has never gone quite so far as to suggest that the two Koreas are actually “on the eve of war”.
Marshal Kim’s statement contains a still more remarkable feature: it refers to South Korean suggestions that damage caused by last year’s floods could cause “someone to collapse” and it complains that Seoul has “dared to vilify our supreme leadership”.
North Korean readers will have no trouble in reading between the lines: they are being informed of speculation in the south that the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il is in political trouble and that the succession to his father the late Kim Il-sung is not completely secure.
Even to hint at such an idea must be regarded, according to the narrow rules of North Korean discourse, as an amazing admission. These suggestions from the south are supposed to be a “provocation” against the north, but if so who is being provoked? The real crisis may be less in the DMZ than in the workers’ paradise of Pyongyang.