This caste system is another legacy of his grandfather. When he was creating his ideal state, Kim Il Sung borrowed some of the feudal practices of the Chosun Dynasty, which had ruled Korea for five centuries until almost 1900. He adopted the Chosun-era system of guilt by association. It is this system that, even now, can lead to three generations of an entire family being imprisoned, sometimes for life, for one person’s wrongdoing.4
He also stole the discriminatory class system called songbun from the Chosun era, dividing North Korea into fifty-one different categories that fall into three broad classes: loyal, wavering, and hostile.
To this day, in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, the loyal are given every advantage. They are the 10 to 15 percent of the population who are considered the most politically committed to the system and have the most interest in it continuing. They get to live in Pyongyang and receive better schooling, including the possibility of attending Kim II Sung University. They are set up for plum jobs and have a head start on Workers’ Party membership. The loyal caste live in better apartments, wear better clothes, eat better and more food, and are more likely to be able to visit a doctor who actually has medicine.
At the bottom are the hostiles: the Japanese collaborators, the Christians, the skeptics. They comprise about 40 percent of the population and are generally banished to the inhospitable mountains of the north, where winters are unbearable and food is scarce even by North Korean standards.
These “undesirables” have no social mobility and no hope of advancement. Their lives revolve around a collective farm or factory—an assignment that, for the last few decades, has meant fending for themselves.
In between the loyal and the hostile is the wavering class, the ordinary people who make up about half the North Korean population. They exist in a kind of limbo. They have no chance of going to college or having a professional job, but if they’re lucky, they might secure a good assignment during their military service that will help them work their way to a slightly better standard of living.5
Someone born with bad songbun has no hope of moving up the social hierarchy. The upper levels, however, can plummet all the way to the bottom if they put a foot wrong.
Through this system, and the constant threat of being demoted down the classes, Kim Jong Un has been able to maintain power. If you’re a member of the loyal class—living in Pyongyang and able to earn some money on the side of your ministry job to send your children to university—you would think twice before openly questioning whether the leader could really drive a car at age five or criticizing the decision to spend millions on nuclear weapons instead of on hospitals and schools. There is always someone to keep an eye on you and report if you’re not sufficiently devoted to the regime. At the grassroots level, it starts with the inminban, literally “people’s group,” a kind of neighborhood watch system. Each neighborhood is broken down into groups of thirty or forty households, with a leader who is always an interfering middle-aged woman. It is her job to keep an eye on what people in her assigned households are up to. North Koreans like to say that the leader of their neighborhood group is supposed to know how many chopsticks and how many spoons each house has.6
She is responsible for registering overnight visitors—in North Korea, a person can’t stay at a friend or relative’s house without notifying the authorities—and often, together with the local police, conducts dead-of-night raids to ensure there are no forbidden guests or that residents like Man-bok or Jung-a are not watching South Korean movies. She inspects everyone’s state-issued radio to make sure they haven’t tuned it to anything other than the state station. She checks cell phones to make sure they don’t contain unauthorized music or photos from the outside world.
She also encourages neighbors to report on one another. If a family is thought to be eating white rice and meat suspiciously often, people might wonder how they’re making their money. If the blue light of a television set is flickering against the curtains late at night, long after the state television channels have stopped broadcasting, people will wonder what the occupants are watching.
If someone’s having an affair, the neighborhood leader will find out about it. This is no small matter in North Korea, which takes a dim view of women, in particular, who have premarital or extramarital sex. The couple’s transgression will be reported to their employers, and both will be put through a humiliating public criticism session.7
North Koreans live in a system where every aspect of their lives is monitored, where every infraction is recorded, where the smallest deviation from the system will result in punishment. It is ubiquitous, and it keeps many people from even raising an eyebrow at the regime.
The neighborhood leader needs to report transgressions in order to stay in good stead with the higher authorities, especially the two main security agencies.
The Ministry of People’s Security performs standard policing duties and runs labor camps for those deemed to have committed “normal” crimes like assault, theft, drug dealing, and murder. The name of these prison camps in Korean translates as “a place to make a good person through education.” Prisoners are generally sent to them for fixed terms and can hope to be released one day.
The Ministry for the Protection of the State deals with political and ideological crimes. This agency is responsible for maintaining the total blackout of all information other than state media and ensuring that everyone is strictly adhering to the propaganda.
It investigates political crimes—committed by people who question the regime or try to escape its clutches—and runs the network of unimaginably brutal prison camps for those accused of political wrong thinking and wrongdoing.
Aware that outside media has crossed his country’s borders, Kim Jong Un has given new powers to the special unit of the security services charged with enforcing the ban on illegal foreign media: Group 109. Its mission is to find media produced in foreign countries, especially that stored on cell phones and USB drives, and confiscate it. The unit looks at a device’s history particularly closely, searching for evidence of file sharing.
People caught with such illicit content are liable to be detained and questioned. Some are able to bribe their way out of trouble with money or even cigarettes, plus the confiscation of the device in question. In fact, many North Koreans think that officials deliberately look for foreign media on citizens’ phones or during late-night raids on homes as a way to make some money on the side of the low-paying state jobs.
When he had the North Korean Criminal Code revised in 2012, the year after he took power, Kim Jong Un had a special section added to address foreign media. This is considered tantamount to subversion and is much harder, or, rather, much more expensive, to wriggle out of. People caught running industrial information smuggling operations are at risk of being referred for prosecution, where conviction is guaranteed, and sent to a labor camp for their crimes.8
Not that the other components included after Kim Jong Un took power were any less draconian. Drawing up a plan for the economy in a haphazard manner and not properly selecting winning athletes for important competitions are listed as political offenses. Any gathering not authorized by Workers’ Party and state authorities is banned, as is criticizing or expressing dissatisfaction with the state, even privately. Anyone who takes part in a riot or demonstration “with anti-state purposes” faces a life sentence of “reform through labor” or the death penalty. Anti-state “propaganda and agitation” carries the threat of death.9
Even with this enhanced effort to guard against “ideological corruption,” the regime has not wholly prevented people from getting snatches of the outside the world.
Man-bok, the science student, watched war movies, gangster movies, and R-rated movies. He listened to the news. He grew more and more disaffected. “The regime tried to brainwash us,” he said, “but we in the younger generation know the truth.”
To mention the criminal code is to suggest there’s an orthodox rule of law in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea
. There is not. Sometimes the authorities will bother themselves with a quasi-judicial process but certainly nothing that the outside world would recognize as a fair trial. There’s no defense attorney, no jury of one’s peers.
Often, the authorities don’t even bother going through these limited motions. Some people who are thrown into the most brutal political prison camps don’t know why. There are four such camps, each covering hundreds of square miles of rugged terrain in the northern reaches of the country. They are surrounded by high barbed-wire perimeter fences, as well as pit traps and minefields, and reinforced with watchtowers manned by armed guards with automatic rifles.
Once in these penal labor colonies, prisoners are held incommunicado and are considered to be outside the protection of the law because they are deemed to be counter-revolutionaries not worthy of legal protection.10
The prisons operated by the secret police are by far the most brutal, with inhumane conditions that large numbers of prisoners do not survive.
Once imprisoned, people are starved. Food is so scarce that inmates hunt for frogs or rats to eat. It’s the only protein they’ll get. They search for edible weeds, anything to supplement the “soup” they’re given, the chief ingredients of which are water and salt.
Still, they must perform arduous work and often dangerous manual labor, sometimes for as long as eighteen hours a day. They dig mines by hand using only picks and shovels. They log trees with axes and handsaws. Farmwork is done with only the most basic tools. Women make wigs and false eyelashes or sew garments, all of which are sent to China and onward to the outside world. Prisoners who do not meet their production quotas can expect to have their food rations cut further and to be beaten.11
Severe beatings and torture are commonplace, including pigeon torture, whereby prisoners’ hands are tied behind their back, and they’re hung from a wall, forcing out their chest. They’re made to stay that way for hours, often until they pass out or vomit blood.
Plane torture and motorbike torture are also customary; prisoners are forced to hold out their arms either to the side or in front for hours on end. They usually collapse before being allowed to let their arms fall to their sides.
Worse still are the sweatboxes. Prisoners are locked into wooden boxes so small that a person can’t fully stand up or lie down. Instead, they are forced to kneel in a crouched position, their buttocks pressed into their heels. This cuts off the circulation and leaves their rear ends solid black with bruising. If left long enough in there, the person will die.12 The guards are trained to be merciless, and if they show even the most trivial form of kindness, they are liable to be punished themselves.
Rape and violent sexual assault are also part of the punishment cycle. Women who wind up in prison after being repatriated from China have reported being forced to have abortions—often induced through beatings—or having their newborn baby killed in front of them. Some have even reported being forced to kill their babies or be killed themselves.
This is especially likely when the baby is considered to be “impure”—to have a Chinese father.13
The United Nations’ special commission of inquiry into North Korea’s human rights abuses found that these violations were not “mere excesses of the state” but “essential components” of its totalitarian system.
“The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world,” the commission concluded in a landmark 2014 report. It recommended the Kim Jong Un be referred to the International Criminal Court to face charges of crimes against humanity.
The testimony presented to the commission came from numerous prisoners who had endured the prison camps and lived to tell the story. All of them were incarcerated in the camps during the Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il eras and later managed to escape from North Korea and describe how they had been treated.
There is no doubt that Kim Jong Un has taken full advantage of the repressive system set up by his grandfather and perpetuated by his father. Satellite images show that the extensive network of prison camps, located both on the outskirts of cities and in huge compounds in the mountains, continues in his era.
Those images also show new or expanded prison camps, including one near the political-prisoner Camp 14, in the center of the country. Inside a 5.6-square-mile enclosed area with clearly visible security perimeters are guard barracks and checkpoints. The reeducation camp, Prison No. 4 on the outskirts of Pyongyang, has a clearly visible limestone quarry just outside the penitentiary walls and a conveyor belt to transport the limestone rocks into the camp for prisoners to crush.14
But the outside world has heard very little of what conditions are like inside these reeducation camps and concentration camps in the Kim Jong Un era.
During my years covering North Korea under the third-generation leader, I searched for people who had been inside the prisons after 2011. Even after talking to activists who help North Korean escapees, including former prisoners, and experts on North Korea’s prisons, I couldn’t find a single person who’d emerged from the camps after Kim Jong Un rose to power. No one I asked even knew of such a person.
Maybe the inmates have remained inside the prison camps. Maybe they haven’t been able to escape the prison of North Korea. We just don’t know. But we are sure that this penal system endures.
When the International Bar Association asked three renowned human rights judges to hold a hearing on North Korea’s prison camps in 2017, one of them said they were just as bad as—and perhaps even worse than—the Nazi concentration camps of the Holocaust. He should know. Thomas Buergenthal was held in Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen as a child, as well as the ghetto of Kielce, Poland. He went on to serve on the International Court of Justice.
“I believe that the conditions in the [North] Korean prison camps are as terrible, or even worse, than those I saw and experienced in my youth in these Nazi camps and in my long professional career in the human rights field,” he said after hearing from former North Korean prisoners and guards.15
Like the UN commission, these jurists concluded that Kim Jong Un should be tried for crimes against humanity because of the way his regime uses political prisons to control the population.
Many people wonder why North Korea hasn’t collapsed, like the Soviet Union, or changed, like China.
There are several reasons.
It’s partly because life is in fact getting better for many North Koreans, thanks to their ability to earn their livings through the markets. A person who ate meat twice a year might now be able to eat it twice a month. A farmer who can sell his crops can bribe his daughter’s way to the front row of the classroom. Money has enabled some small freedoms, which may feel like outsized changes in repressive North Korea. One of the most often overlooked factors is the fact that the Kim family has created a strong national identity and given people some reasons to be proud, sometimes based on misinformation but sometimes not. Even after escaping, North Koreans have told me they are proud of their plucky defiance of international bullies and especially of their nuclear prowess.
But the biggest reason is fear.
The punishments are so harsh that North Koreans who object to the system would rather escape than try to argue for change from the inside.
“Even if you know things, you are not supposed to say them,” Mrs. Kwon told me. “If you speak up, you don’t know what kind of punishment you might face. So instead of trying to do something to change the system, it’s better just to leave.”
Yet only those with a very strong will to escape actually try to leave, she said. Even if they make it out, they know there’s a likelihood that their family members will be punished.
And so it continues.
CHAPTER 8
GOODBYE, UNCLE
“Despicable human scum Jang, who was worse than a dog, perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery in betrayal of such profound trust and warmest paternal love shown by the party and the leader for him.”
—KCNA, December 13, 2013
THE MOST DANGEROUS TIME FOR A NOVICE AUTOCRAT IS THE first two years in power. It’s then that he has to figure out who’s loyal and who’s expendable. It’s during those first two years that someone else who wanted the job is most likely to make a play for it. This is especially the case when the leader inherits his supporters from his predecessor.
So when Kim Jong Un took over, he followed the model used by his father and grandfather and set about making sure the handful of elites who could keep him in power were rich and happy—and getting richer and happier.
Like his patriarchs, he has managed to survive as a dictator by controlling an entire nation through a relatively tiny group of people. It was another rule espoused by Machiavelli: don’t worry about the general population; just be sure to enrich a small, elite group.
He is what academics call a “small coalition leader,” someone who keeps his regime stable through the support of relatively few well-rewarded people while letting the rest of the population languish.
Within the small coalition category, Kim Jong Un belongs to a subset that Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a political scientist who has studied successful tyrants, calls the “greedy kleptocrats.” Other members of this subset include Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
They want to live well, so they steal a lot of money from state coffers, and they make sure that the people who keep them in power also live well. As for those privileged elites, they know that they’re much more likely to retain their positions when power passes from king to prince than when it passes to someone outside the family. So they have an interest in the son succeeding.
Kim Jong Un’s first order of business was to determine who would stay in his small coalition of elites.
Even a novice knows that getting rid of potential rivals or critics at the beginning is crucial. Mao Zedong did it in China, Kim Jong Il did it when he took over, and Kim Jong Un followed in this tradition.
The Great Successor Page 14
