Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0267/02671.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 36KB | 576 lines

$Unique_ID{COW02671}
$Pretitle{281}
$Title{North Korea
Chapter 5A.   National Security}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Stephan B. Wickman}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{security
party
public
korean
political
system
north
court
state
control}
$Date{1981}
$Log{Korean People's Army*0267101.scf
Figure 27.*0267102.scf
}
Country:     North Korea
Book:        North Korea, A Country Study
Author:      Stephan B. Wickman
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1981

Chapter 5A.   National Security

[See Korean People's Army: Soldiers symbolizing the Korean People's Army]

     In early 1981 the Korean peninsula was one of the most heavily armed and
fortified regions of the world, as it had been since the outbreak of the
Korean War in 1950. Three major powers-China, the Soviet Union, and the United
States-maintained defense treaties with their respective allies on the
peninsula, lending global implications to any potential conflict in the area.

     In North Korea a large military establishment and a pervasive system of
civil control have been made essential elements of society, doctrinally
legitimized by the specter of American "imperialism" and the leadership's
desire to promote continued class struggle and make revolutionary gains. The
system functioned under the guidance of the Korean Workers Party whose organs
paralleled and monitored those of the government and the military from the
highest to the grass-roots level. There was no independently verifiable
evidence of internal subversion of the government or the ruling party; both
seemed to have the acceptance of a majority of the people. An efficient system
of police and domestic surveillance was capable of detecting and discouraging
those who might feel otherwise.

     The combined manpower of all regular armed forces units-collectively
known as the Korean People's Army-was estimated by the International Institute
for Strategic Studies in London in 1980 to be 678,000 troops under arms. About
90 percent of this force consisted of the three major ground force
commands-the army, mechanized force, and artillery force. Another estimated 2
million men and women served in active reserve or paramilitary forces.

     The society was highly militarized, and military strategies and
expenditures were significant factors in political and economic
decisionmaking. The commitment made in the early 1960s to a massive defense
program and greater national self-sufficiency in arms and equipment resulted
in a major diversion of resources from economic development to military
purposes and substantial sacrifice in the standard of living. Nearly 4 percent
of the population belonged to the Korean People's Army, another 2 percent was
in the military reserves, and an additional 11 percent belonged to the
Worker-and-Peasant Red Guard, an organization originally conceived as a
territorial militia for local defense but which increasingly assumed the
characteristics of an auxiliary military force. Thus many North Koreans were
directly involved in some form of military activity through either regular or
auxiliary units.

     The military establishment was in many ways a privileged class. Military
men have always held prominent places within the elite of both the Party and
government.

     The functions of internal security and maintenance of law and order were
centered in the Ministry of Public Security, which possessed extraordinarily
broad powers over the lives of citizens and the movements of persons within
the country. The ministry's police apparatus (both conventional and secret),
along with courts and procurators, constituted parts of a system under
centralized party control. The party leadership saw them as vital to the
functioning of a communist society and the attainment of its transforming
mission. Party control over these organs and coordination of policy and major
operational matters were exercised through the Justice and Security
Commission.

     North Korea's legal and criminal justice systems were formed during the
period of Soviet occupation after World War II and closely followed Soviet
models. The legal and criminal procedure codes were taken almost literally
from the central Soviet codes of the time. North Korea has not followed the
Soviet Union, however, in liberalizing certain features of the codes in the
post-Stalin years.

     The legal system reflected a strong authoritarian heritage and emphasized
the interests of the state over those of the individual. Criminal law and
procedure stressed sanctions and public trial as means of crushing deviance
and educating the public in the modes of conduct desired by the state. Special
unpublicized provisions of law and criminal procedures were applied to those
classified as political offenders. From preliminary investigation through
trial, sentencing, and penal incarceration, the political offender was handled
through a separate criminal procedure under secret police jurisdiction in
which the defendant had little if any recourse to due process.

     In a major speech following the Sixth Party Congress of the Korean
Workers Party, a key internal security leader reasserted the importance of the
public security organs in confronting counterrevolutionary forces, noting at
the same time that the socialist system had established deep roots in a land
that was being made into an "impregnable fortress." The nation's stock of 600
combat aircraft, 2,600 tanks, 400 fast-attack and amphibious craft, and
thousands of howitzers, mortars, rocket launchers, artillery weapons, and
missiles lent credibility to the claim. In the early 1980s North Korea,
producing many of its own weapons and consistently maintaining a high level of
defense expenditure, found itself locked into an escalating arms race with its
neighbor, South Korea.

     In 1981, as in recent years, key elements of North Korea's forces and
arms were deployed along the Demilitarized Zone. Some analysts viewed this as
an indication that the North Korean leadership had considered offensive
actions against the South Korean capital, Seoul (see fig. 27). The North
Koreans, however, claimed that the threat of war arose from the possibility of
a South Korean invasion of their own territory, rather than from a North
Korean attack on the South, or an effort to subvert South Korea from within.
Over the past decade, the proximity of massive enemy forces has served to
heighten the sense of threat and fear of attack or "preemption in defense."

[See Figure 27.: Demilitarized Zone Area]

Internal Security

Society and Public Order

     Confucian tradition emphasizes the importance of education and
indoctrination over the use of force in the maintenance of public order.
Confucius argued in the Analects that controlling people through the use of
laws and penalties would only lead to their attempting to stay out of jail
without developing what he called "a sense of shame." In contemporary North
Korean society Confucianism as a political theory has been repudiated, but
persuasion and exhortation are still preferred to coercion as methods of
controlling the populace. Education has been greatly stressed, particularly
political education, as a means of raising the people's revolutionary
consciousness and ensuring their cooperation and compliance. For the
maintenance of internal security, total control of the educational and
cultural media is seen by authorities as equally important as massive
investments in the mechanisms of coercive police power (see Education; Social
Education, ch. 2).

     Nevertheless a large public security and police apparatus existed to take
over where education and indoctrination failed. In a December 1980 speech
commemorating the thirty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the agency,
Minister of Public Security Yi Chin-su described it as a "mighty weapon of the
proletarian dictatorship of our Party." "Its existence is justified," he said,
"because historical experience shows that no class can put progressive reforms
into effect wi