All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio and our first guest on the show today is Jon Pfeffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.
The website is fpif.org and second only to antiwar.com.
Boy do they have a great stable of writers over there at Foreign Policy in Focus.
Welcome back to the show, Jon, how are you doing?
Pretty good, thanks for having me again on your show.
Well I'm very happy to have you here and hey I'll be the first to admit that part of the reason that antiwar.com is so great is because we link to stuff by your guys all the time.
Well I appreciate that, yeah we have some great stuff up on the site right now so I encourage folks to head over there if they're interested in the latest on foreign policy.
Absolutely and your latest here is Two Leaders, Two Deaths about Václav Havel and Kim Jong-il.
I guess first of all let's talk a little bit about the former there.
He was a poet, right, who helped overthrow the commies?
He was a playwright and he worked tirelessly to kind of create a kind of civil society in the Czech Republic or what was Czechoslovakia and he spent many years in jail, ruined his health, but he managed when the opportunity arose in the fall of 1989 to pull together what has been called the Velvet Revolution, an uprising against the Czech Communists that basically swept them out of the way and without any violence or any death.
Now what happened there?
They just marched right in and the numbers were so overwhelming the cops just put their guns down or stood out stood back or what how did it go?
Well basically I mean we have to remember that things had already been changing in eastern Europe at the time.
So we had in 1989 in June 4th of 1989 the first semi-free elections in Poland and the solidarity trade union movement had taken virtually all the seats that were available for it to take and that was an incredible inspiration for folks in the region.
I mean they saw this huge trade union movement of nearly 10 million people and a population of 40 million.
Basically overwhelmed the Polish Communist Party.
The second really important thing is Gorbachev.
Gorbachev in the Soviet Union basically said, hey you guys, he said to the communist parties in eastern Europe, you guys I'm not going to support you any longer.
You can maintain control if you can maintain control but we're not going to send in the Russian troops as we did in Czechoslovakia in 68 or Hungary in 56 and suddenly these guys were isolated.
So the solidarity took the first advantage of it and then you had you know mass demonstrations beginning in East Germany and you had mass demonstrations in Prague in Czechoslovakia as well and it was just a huge number of people.
I mean it was started by people like Václav Havel and some of his some of the key people who were in the charter 77 movement which was really a small group of people but you had this opportunity in 1989 and everybody in Czechoslovakia realized that the writing was on the wall.
They came out for a demonstration.
They were not going to be shot at and they basically overwhelmed the authorities.
Yeah you know I feel bad for people who are too young to remember this.
It took you know I guess a couple of years and I was only you know a young teenager but I was paying close attention and it really was unprecedented in the entire history of the world.
However many what tens of millions of people maybe hundreds freed in almost bloodless thing.
I mean from you know the tip of northern Europe all the way around and down into Afghanistan and to the you know east and Siberia people set free all at once in a way that you couldn't know no playwright could have come up with it and sold it to anyone.
That's right and it was unexpected in many ways.
I mean I arrived in Poland in January of 1989 and no one expected anything to be changing that year and a few weeks after I arrived in Poland the government announced that it would begin negotiations with the solidarity trade union movement.
But even then people didn't think that that was going to be a tremendous change in Poland much less in the region as a whole.
I left Poland after the elections in June I was and I traveled south and I went through Prague.
This would have been in late July early August of 1989 and it was quiet.
There was nothing going on there and I eventually left you know the region and I watched all those events take place in the fall of 1989 from the United States and it was just it was as if it came out of nowhere.
Yeah well and it really what it came down to was just economics right like they couldn't afford to put down revolutions all over Europe if they'd had to right?
Well it was it was both economics but it was also you know they didn't have the Soviet support any longer and so however however well I guess that's who I meant the Soviet system's economy was basically just done.
Yeah yeah I mean the the Soviet Union had had overextended itself could no longer afford you know its huge military and certainly couldn't afford to prop up these folks in the region.
Thank goodness we're immune to that.
Well we should have followed the lead there and and understood that you know unbelievable expenditures on the military would eventually bankrupt a country but you know China was not interested in propping up the Soviet Union back in the late 1980s and they're more interested in propping us up so I suppose that's the key difference.
So now you say in this article this guy Havel he really wasn't much of a leader once he got in power but his real legacy is helping to overthrow the Communist Party.
Well you know he we have to be we have to be even-handed here I mean he did preside over in some important kind of transitional periods in in Czechoslovakia and then subsequently the Czech Republic and he did so with reasonably you know with reasonable plumb.
In other words there were increased tensions between the Czech and Slovak people and the two sides managed to come up with an amicable divorce without any bloodshed and that's pretty difficult to come by in history to have a divorce of that nature.
Obviously see what happened with Yugoslavia a couple years after that.
So that was important he managed to usher the Czech Republic into the European Union and the first wave of Eastern European countries joining the European Union that was important.
Economic prosperity more or less came to the Czech Republic but what he wanted to make as his legacy was really transforming what states do and you know we're so familiar with states kind of acting in immoral or amoral ways and Václav Havel said no I mean states should act morally and as the president of the Czech Republic I will act morally I will come up with a moral foreign policy.
So some of the things he did was he invited the Dalai Lama to Prague and that pissed off the Chinese but he said look you know even though this is not economically beneficial to the Czech Republic I'm going to go ahead and do it because it's the right thing to do.
He took a look at you know how much money the Czech Republic was making on arms exports and Czechoslovakia was sending tanks and guns all over the world said this is not right this is fueling wars and conflicts all over the world we will not do this any longer.
He took a look at the European security structure he said NATO doesn't have any reason to exist any longer so let's have a European security structure that focuses on conflict prevention not on you know creating instability in future wars and those all sounded great but unfortunately he was not able to actually realize those principles in policy.
Yeah well that can be hard to make a brand new state that acts different than all the other states that came before.
Good luck.
All right well we're going to hold it right there we're going to talk about the new communist man in North Korea here in a little while right after this break Kim Jong-il has died as well and we'll be reviewing his legacy and maybe get a couple predictions on what's to come there.
Right after this with Jon Pfeffer.
All right y'all welcome back to this here thing.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jon Pfeffer.
He's the what you call it again?
Co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. fpif.org is the web address and now the big news all over TV.
Kim Jong-il is dead.
Dear leader as the people call him at least when they're in public.
I'm not sure what they say about him behind closed doors over there in North Korea but anyway he's gone and I wonder Jon I guess you know first of all give us a little bit of a taste of the life and times of the great dictator there and then you know I really want to pick your brain about where you think we're going from here now that he's out of the way.
Sure.
So Kim Jong-il is the son of Kim Il-sung the kind of George Washington if you will of North Korea the first leader and Kim Jong-il took over in 1994 on his father's death and he became only the second leader of North Korea.
He immediately basically declared a three-year mourning period and during that period North Korea basically fell apart and it was a very already heading in a downward direction economically speaking but it descended into a major food crisis famine that killed as much as 10 percent of the population.
Managed however to kind of pull North Korea out of its tailspin by the end of the 1990s and engaged in negotiations with the United States over the nuclear program with South Korea over economic engagement with China and Russia about preserving their alliances and when talks broke down with the United States and the six-party talks guided North Korea into the nuclear club and one of the few countries of the world that actually belonged to this nuclear club.
Another kind of success for Kim Jong-il was preserving the regime in general from regime change and a number of the other kind of countries in that category such as Iraq under Saddam Hussein or Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic or Libya under Muammar Gaddafi all of them suffered regime change principally at the hands of the U.S. military but Kim Jong-il managed to preserve North Korea and its structures.
There was an enormous price of course that the North Korean people have paid for that you know upwards of 150-200,000 people in labor camps, continued malnutrition, an economy that barely functions.
So that's kind of the legacy of Kim Jong-il.
I mean there are a lot of people in North Korea I'm sure who feel that you know he managed to keep the country together and there's a strong feeling of North Korean nationalism.
On the other hand he was not a particularly charismatic leader.
I doubt that he was much loved by the people of North Korea unlike his father and so my guess is there are a lot of people in that country are just kind of waiting and seeing what's going to come next.
Well now I've seen pictures of these giant developed cities and all these you know fancy 21st century freeways and everything but everything's just empty because everybody's inside.
Was it I mean I understand you know it's a communist system with a very tight control over trade and the economy but how brutal is that police state?
Is this the kind of thing where guys in black come and get people in the middle of the night on a regular basis for anybody dare say a peep?
Basically you know it's a there's a system in North Korea that dates back many many hundreds of years in both the Korean and Chinese system of punishing families for the acts of individuals.
So if an individual says something it could be an inadvertent comment about the leadership.
It could be something as seemingly innocuous as folding a picture of the leader Kim Jong-il or Kim Il-sung because you're not supposed to alter a picture in any way.
Someone could be trundled off to a labor camp and their whole family would be punished as well.
So this is a pretty brutal system but it's also a system in which people have pushed at the limits of what's possible.
So they engage in private market activity some of which is more or less legal some of which is illegal.
Many people now have cell phones so upwards of a million people in North Korea out of the population of approximately 25 million have cell phones.
So it's the elite for the most part people who are engaged in economic deals with China and other countries.
So you have a growing kind of middle class elite in North Korea but you still have vast tracts of poverty and underdevelopment.
All right now I just wanted to we don't have time to discuss this I don't think but I wanted to mention to the audience that if they will google your name John Pfeffer and mine or just go to antiwar.com/radio start looking through the archives there we've spoken in detail in the past at length about how it was that North Korea came into nuclear weapons as you just mentioned how Bush pushed North Korea to nukes as Gordon Prather put it in his last article for antiwar.com before he retired and I highly recommend people take a listen to that because there are lessons in it for Iran and other situations around the world as well but I want to ask you now if you can and I'm sure by the way you've written about that as well am I right I forget now but yeah absolutely yeah yeah so fpif.org you can find John Pfeffer's writings on that topic as well.
All right now so what about Kim Jong-il's son I already forgot his name I saw a picture on tv but it looked like it was shot from really far away or something like that is does he have the backing of the military is there any rumor of how ruthless he is or isn't or anything like that well he's only about 29 years old so you know his only reputation is at the moment is for studying in Switzerland enjoying basketball like Eric Clapton so yes it really developed a reputation for ruthless.
Eric Clapton that doesn't bode well.
There are rumors of course that he was responsible for the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island South Korean island that is in a disputed maritime area but there really is no evidence of that.
He like his father has no military experience but because of the nature of the North Korean system you don't get anywhere politically without military backing.
Kim Jong-un also has military backing he himself has been declared a general even though as I said he has no experience.
It's difficult to know what direction he's going to go in obviously he has some experience in the west on the other hand he's operating in a system that is like a straitjacket it's extremely difficult to move one way or another and complicating the issue is that it's a Confucian society in which young people are supposed to show deference to their elders and while it's true that Kim Il-sung actually took over as quite a young man he killed off anybody who might challenge him.
Kim Jong-un is not going to have quite that opportunity so it's likely that Kim Jong-il's brother-in-law Jung Sung-taek will possibly be the power behind the throne it's likely that the military will pull the strings at least in the short term so at least for the next period of time we're probably not going to see any dramatic changes in North Korea.
On the other hand you know if the United States and other countries offer some attractive opportunities to sit down and talk about the nuclear program to consider a rehab of North Korean infrastructure to open up a path for to join the international community in one way or another that could push Kim Jong-un and his backers within the North Korean elite in a direction more favorable to reform.
Now late last week the State Department was claiming progress in talks with the North Koreans saying they're going to ship some food aid and the North Koreans are going to do what in response now?
Well yeah I mean the North Korea basically has requested food aid has done so for the last couple years basically and the United States is just getting around to considering some humanitarian relief there has been there have been some there was a small shipment that went out in September that was a kind of humanitarian shipment.
In response you know North Korea is you know willing to sit down has said that it's willing to sit down to nuclear negotiation and that's the key thing that the United States is interested in it wants to get more information about in particular uranium enrichment activities of North Korea.
Well they even floated freezing it for now right?
Yep and also have moratorium on missile launches so there's some positive signs coming out of North Korea if we're willing to take them up on it.
Yeah well I don't know if that's too much to hope for but I'm gonna hope anyway thanks very much for your time John as always.
Thanks for having me on the show.
Everybody that's John Pfeffer co-director of foreign policy in focus at the institute for policy studies fpif.org and his newest piece today is two leaders two deaths.
