A nation of approximately 23.1 million people (as of 2006), North Korea occupies the northern portion (46,490 square miles) of the Korean peninsula that extends, in its entirety, some 685 miles southward from the Asian mainland. It is bordered on the north by eastern China; on the south by South Korea (whose own southern border is with the East China Sea); on the west by the Yellow Sea and the Korea Bay; and on the east by the Sea of Japan. The country's population is one of the world's most ethnically and linguistically homogenous; the only minorities of note are small numbers of Chinese and Japanese. The capital city, Pyongyang, is home to more than 3.2 million people.
North Korea's communist economy has been stagnant for decades; nearly all its manufactured goods are produced by publicly owned industry. Fully one-fourth of the nation's Gross Domestic Product is allocated to military development.
Officially an atheist state, North Korea severely restricts the practice of religion within its borders - particularly Protestantism, which it views as closely tied to the hated United States. It is estimated that in all of North Korea, there live only 13,000 Christians (4,000 Catholics and 9,000 Protestants), and they are known to suffer extreme persecution.
The ancient history of Korea began in the Neolithic Age, when Turkic-Manchurian-Mongol peoples migrated into the peninsula from China. The first agriculturally based settlements in the region were established around 6000 B.C.
Korea became a vassal state of China in the 17th century and was thereafter entirely cut off from contact with the outside world. When Japanese and Western traders arrived in the 19th century, Korean rulers tried to resist foreign trade and seal their country's borders, earning Korea its nickname of the "Hermit Kingdom." But in 1876 Japan forced the first of numerous trade agreements on Korea, and eventually annexed the latter in 1910. Korean nationalists, however, never accepted Japanese rule and demanded independence.
After Japan's defeat in World War II, the Korean peninsula was partitioned into two occupation zones, divided at the 38th parallel. The Soviet Union controlled the north, and the United States controlled the south. In 1948, separate regimes were formally established in the northern and southern regions. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), otherwise known as North Korea, came into existence on May 1, 1948, with Kim Il Sung as its President.
On June 25, 1950, North Korea launched a surprise invasion of the South in an effort to extend Communism's dominion over the entire peninsula. The United Nations Security Council condemned the attack and demanded an immediate withdrawal of Northern troops; U.S. President Harry Truman sent American air and naval units to enforce the UN mandate. He was supported in this move by a UN multinational command. China entered the conflict in October 1950 to support North Korea, and after three years of bloody combat marked by shifting fortunes on both sides, the war stabilized near the 38th parallel and ended with an armistice that was signed on July 27, 1953. It is estimated that more than 2.5 million people -- including also civilians and military soldiers from UN Nations and China -- died in the conflict. (North Korean deaths numbered approximately 1.13 million, of which about 600,000 were soldiers. South Korean deaths totaled more than a million, 85 percent of them civilians. And 33,686 Americans were killed in combat as well.)
After the Korean War, Kim Il-Sung, who ruled as a totalitarian dictator, introduced the personal philosophy of Juche, a code of diplomatic and economic "self-reliance" closely related to Stalinism, as a check against excessive Soviet or Communist Chinese influence on his nation. Kim's rule was marked by extreme brutality and repression. According to the Center for the Advancement of North Korean Human Rights, during his reign at least 400,000 political prisoners were tortured or starved to death in gulags Kim began to establish in 1972. Most of the inmates were taken into custody for somehow having offended either Kim or his son Kim Jong Il (who would succeed him as President in 1994). The prisoners' offenses may have been as trivial as tearing up a newspaper photo of one of the Kims, uttering a negative comment about the Communist Party, or listening to a foreign radio broadcast. Once incarcerated, captives were generally never seen or heard from again outside the camps. Moreover, Kim's policy demanded that three generations of every prisoner's family should be wiped out in order to "cleanse" his socialist haven. Thus if a man was pronounced guilty of one of the aforementioned transgressions, his parents and children were sent to the labor camp along with him - for the sole purpose of slow, tortured extermination.
Kim Il Sung ruled North Korea for 46 years, until his death on July 8, 1994. At that time, his aforementioned son, Kim Jong Il, assumed leadership of the country and continued to rule in his father's brutal tradition. He was unable, however, to duplicate his father's status as a figure so solemnly revered by an adoring nation. The elder Kim, by means of political omnipotence and complete control of all media, had created a cult of personality wherein he was viewed as a divine, paternal figure who came to be widely known as the "Great Leader," a title whose majesty would be assigned to him even after his death, theoretically in perpetuity. North Korea's 1998 Constitution officially declared Kim Il Sung the "Eternal President of the Republic," and the post of President was officially abolished on grounds that no one would ever again be worthy of sharing the title of so extraordinary an individual. Today his son Kim Jong Il holds several official titles, the most important being General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea (the party to which 80 percent of all government officials belong), Chairman of the National Defense Commission, and Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army. In the manner of his father, he has developed a formidable personality cult of his own, and North Koreans commonly refer to him as their "Dear Leader."
Shortly after Kim Jong Il came to power, he was faced with a calamity resulting from his father's decades of economic mismanagement and resource misallocation. A devastating famine struck North Korea in 1998 and 1999, claiming an estimated 2 to 3 million lives and forcing the country to rely heavily on international aid to feed its population while continuing to funnel all available funds into the maintenance of its million-man army.
Systematic human rights abuses throughout North Korea are rampant and well documented. It is estimated that there are some 200,000 political prisoners in the country today; there have been innumerable reports of torture, slave labor, and forced abortions and infanticides in the prison camps.
In October 2002 North Korea admitted, when confronted with incontrovertible U.S. intelligence, that it had violated a 1994 pledge to freeze its nuclear weapons production program, and had in fact been illegally developing the program for several years. In late December 2002, the government in Pyongyang expelled UN weapons inspectors from the country and declared that it would never again abide by the terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, from which it officially withdrew in January 2003. Since that time, North Korea has vacillated between affirming and denying that it already possessed a nuclear arsenal of some kind. In June 2006, North Korea announced that it would soon test-launch a long-range ballistic missile capable of reaching the American mainland.
This section of DiscoverTheNetworks examines North Korea in depth - most notably its internal politics, its suspected ties to terrorism, its relations with other countries, and its development of nuclear weapons.
