Huge army is backbone of North Korean communist rule
Thu Apr 25, 6:47
AM ET
By Paul Eckert
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea (news
- web
sites)'s army, which marked its 70th anniversary on Thursday, has seen
no major battlefield action since the Korean War, but remains the
principal guarantor of communist rule in the impoverished state of 22
million people.
The Korean People's Army (KPA), the
world's fifth largest army, is so dominant that foreign commentators have
described North Korea as an army with a country -- rather than a country
with an army.
The official Korea Central News Agency said the North's political
system was based "on the principle of attaching priority to the army and
pushing forward the cause of socialism as a whole, with the army as the
pillar and in reliance upon it".
Like much about North Korea, the KPA's origins are a mix of myth and
history embellished to instil reverence for late state founder Kim Il-sung
and his son, current leader Kim Jong-il.
The KPA was formally founded on February 8, 1948 -- seven months before
the founding of the North Korean state -- and for 30 years, February 8 was
celebrated as army day.
But in 1978, North Korea suddenly announced that its army was founded
on April 25, 1932, when official histories say the 20-year-old Kim Il-sung
formed a partisan group in Manchuria, China, according to U.S.-based
biographer Suh Dae-sook.
SAVED BY CHINA
The Soviet-armed KPA first grabbed international attention on June 25,
1950, when it attacked South Korea (news
- web
sites) with a withering pre-dawn mortar and artillery barrage,
followed by an invasion by 10 divisions that easily overwhelmed the
South's smaller army.
The attack invited a massive intervention by U.S.-led multinational
force fighting under the flag of the United Nations (news
- web
sites). U.N. forces aiding South Korea rolled back the KPA to Korea's
border with China, almost wiping them out until Beijing intervened on
North Korea's side in October 1950.
Chinese troops by the millions pushed U.N. forces back to a line
roughly similar to the 38th parallel that separated North and South Korea
before the war and which forms the border today.
Today, the KPA, with nearly 1.2 million troops on active duty, is the
world's fifth largest army, behind those of China, the United States,
Russia and India.
By percentage of troops to population, North Korea is the world's most
militarised society, with about one in 20 people in uniform, augmented by
a reserve force estimated at 4.7 million.
WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
U.S. military commanders estimated that at least two-thirds of the KPA
troops and weapons are forward deployed, close to the Demilitarised Zone
(DMZ) which separates North and South Korea and within easy range of the
South's capital, Seoul.
The United States maintains 37,000 troops in South Korea to augment
Seoul's 600,000-strong military.
North Korea's military has big stockpiles of chemical and biological
weapons and an ambitious domestic ballistic missile programme which has
produced hundreds of medium-rage missiles for its arsenal and for sale
abroad, according to the book "Armed Forces of North Korea", by Joseph
Bermudez Jr.
Pyongyang's efforts to produce nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles
capable of reaching Japan and parts of the United States brought it into
conflict with Washington in the 1990s.
A 1994 U.S.-North Korea agreement that froze the North's suspected
nuclear programme and Pyongyang's 1999 moratorium on missile testing will
be at the top of the U.S. diplomatic agenda with the North once the two
sides resume long-frozen talks.
President George W. Bush (news
- web
sites) last year sought to add conventional forces to the agenda, but
Pyongyang has refused to discuss what it considers the crucial guarantor
of its government's existence.
Donald Gregg, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea who visited North
Korea this month and met KPA leaders, said Kim Jong-il's relationship with
the army "is absolutely central to his support".
"If we immediately ask them to give away their security blanket we
aren't going to get very far," Gregg said.
This month, Kim Jong-il promoted 54 senior army commanders to mark his
father's birth anniversary and bolster his government.
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