Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

by Bradley K. Martin

  Were things happening the way Collins, writing in 1996, had postulated? No outsider can know for sure about much of anything that happens in North Korea, of course. But there are always the Pyongyang-watcher’s fallback techniques of analysis based on scraps of information from all kinds of sources including defector testimony and the regime’s news media and propaganda—the sort of “tea leaf reading” that also characterized the work of kremlinologists and sinologists.

  Thus, my attempt to solve another, seemingly unrelated mystery—-why the DPRK had barred United Nations World Food Program aid monitors from thirty-nine of the North’s counties—turned out to be instructive. My findings suggested that Kim Jong-il and company so far might have avoided falling into the trap of Phase Four, as Collins defined it. In that case, the Kim family regime (let us eschew obvious comparisons to Satan and his beastly manifestations) still might have some staying power.

  The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea deserved its title as the most secretive country in the world. In the atmosphere of constant preparation for a new war that had prevailed in North Korea since the end of the first Korean War in 1953, secretiveness had always been about regime survival, first and foremost. Besides the obvious wish to prevent hostile, spying eyes from seeing the country’s strengths and weaknesses, the authorities were determined to keep ordinary North Koreans from contact with foreigners who might inform them that much of the information their rulers drummed into their heads about their own country and the outside world was blatantly false.

  So it was news when the regime’s need for international aid to respond to a full-blown food crisis forced it to ease the restrictions on foreigners’ presence and movements. More than one hundred international aid workers based themselves in North Korea. Their organizations demanded freedom of movement sufficient to assure themselves that the food reached hungry people. World Food Program monitors from abroad numbered thirty-six by 1998. They had visited 171 counties. They worked out of six offices spread around the country and drove about in their own Toyota Land Cruisers to avoid the interminable delays of the creaking public transportation system. “The DPRK two years ago barely had an international presence,” said the WFP’s Graisse. “This has been a breakthrough.” Indeed, an optimist could see in those developments a positive omen presaging a wider opening by the regime.

  Why, then, did I focus on the negative—on the thirty-nine counties that were not open to WFP monitors and whose inaccessibility had led the Rome-based organization to announce on May 18, 1998, that it was withholding 55,000 metric tons of food worth some $ 33 million? (That was 7 percent of the aid it had planned to deliver that year, the proportion based on the fact that those counties accounted for about seven percent of the total population.) My lack of optimism stemmed from having watched North Korea for more than two decades. Always eager to credit signs of opening in the isolated and rigidly controlled country I had become increasingly skeptical as I saw how little actually changed—and as I came to realize how very strong was the interest of the Kim family and other members of the top elite in resisting change, regardless of the citizenry’s needs.

  The regime continued to display a remarkable ability to thwart both external and internal forces for change. Take, for one example, the very concept of monitoring aid deliveries. In the mid-1990s, in the immediate wake of flooding that had devastated much of North Korea and precipitated the food crisis, one Westerner who was raising funds for aid insisted that he must deliver it personally. Renting trucks, he traveled through country seldom seen by Western visitors and handed over the goods directly to people identified as the end-recipients. That relief organizer prepared a lecture that he illustrated with slides showing one of his deliveries. I attended his presentation in Tokyo and saw that the supposedly needy North Koreans who were pictured lining up to receive his gifts were not gaunt and haggard, shabbily dressed people. Their faces did not appear discolored by the malnutrition-caused disease pellagra. Rather, in those slides they looked “well dressed, robust and well fed—in some cases exceptionally handsome or beautiful. I guessed that they were either local party officials or actors. Did the fund raiser who was showing those slides realize that the recipients of his handout did not look like ordinary North Koreans? If so, he did not tell his listeners on the night when I sat in on his presentation.

  Insisting on accompanying aid to the end-users was not the only technique used by visiting foreigners. Journalists no less than aid monitors and visiting U.S. congressmen asked or demanded, in the midst of their travels within the country, to see places not on their previously arranged itineraries. Visitors hoped, thus, to find the real, unvarnished truth instead of prepared scenes. Were the famine’s effects on the condition of the population worse than the authorities wanted the world to know? Was the food aid getting to the people—or, rather, was it being diverted to high officials or the military? Sudden requests for schedule changes were one of the few means for trying to check. Any visitor who did not relish being fooled was duty-bound to try that tactic, but often the effort was futile. One international aid worker told me he had learned while in North Korea that the authorities typically dispatched sound trucks to alert residents of districts that were about to be subjected to “surprise” visits by foreigners. The trucks’ loudspeakers warned that only party members were authorized to speak with the guests.

  Sometimes, a last-minute request elicited more or less full disclosure, but usually not without a struggle. “Of course we have to indicate in advance we wish to visit this or that,” Graisse of the World Food Program said in Tokyo, “but there can be small deviations from the plans.” He had just returned from a visit to the city of Sinuiju, across the Yalu River from China. His original itinerary there had emphasized kindergartens and nurseries, since the WFP’s aid program focused primarily on feeding children. But his organization was planning a new program of assistance to hospitals, so Graisse after his arrival in the city asked to see a pediatric hospital. He got his wish, but after he arrived at the hospital he ran into trouble when he asked to see the kitchen. That request caused “visible pain on the face of the hospital administrator.” A long discussion ensued before the administrator permitted his visitor to open pots and see what was inside, which was not much: a bit of rice brought by the family of one patient and some “very clear” soup made of weeds, spinach and sea-weed.

  But let’s return to the part of the WFP’s batting average that especially intrigued me: those thirty-nine counties to which it had failed to gain access. Aside from the Hitchcockian spy-chase associations of the number (The 39 Steps), what was so special about those counties? How were they different from the 171 counties to which the monitors did have access? With foreigners permitted to go to the other counties, why were thirty-nine still closed tight? Here was a mystery. And anyone who disliked trying to solve mysteries would have no business spending his or her days watching so secretive a country as the DPRK.

  Pyongyang itself vaguely cited reasons of security for barring foreigners from those areas. But in a country-where the regime’s security-was the be-all and end-all, that explanation hardly narrowed down the practical possibilities. The authorities did mention sensitive military installations, and I phoned a Western diplomat in Seoul to ask him if those might explain the exclusion. “I can’t comment on that at all,” he said. “You’re asking me to discuss USFK [United States Forces Korea] targeting information on an open line for publication.”

  North Korea did have plenty of military installations, all of them more or less sensitive. The fact that food monitors were permitted to travel to certain food-distribution centers certainly did not mean they were welcome on military bases within the same county jurisdictions. Presumably the authorities could, if they wished, give access to food-distribution centers in some or all of the thirty-nine still-closed counties while forbidding the monitors to travel near military installations.

  Pondering the whys of keeping thirty-nine counties closed to outsiders, I no
ted that some of them were in areas where—as former political prisoners and prison guards had told me—the regime had maintained concentration camps for political offenders. And in the same harsh and remote northern mountains were communities largely comprising families that had been banished from Pyongyang and other desirable parts of the country on account of “bad family background.” In the 1990s additional families had been tarred with the designation because relatives had defected to South Korea.

  I wondered: Were some of the thirty-nine counties off limits precisely because the regime did not want outsiders to see what was happening to the members of the “hostile” and “wavering” classes who lived there? A-worst-case scenario occurred to me. I knew that prisoners already had been half-starved as a matter of policy. Their official daily grain ration even in times of relative plenty had been as little as 300 grams per person, versus the 700 grams rationed to a normal working adult.6 Now the food shortage had become so severe that grain rations failed to appear for months on end. Even citizens classified as loyal were reduced to receiving as little as an average of 100 grams a day or less. So what was happening to those North Koreans who were politically out of favor? Were the prisoners in their camps and the banished families in their mountain communities being treated even worse than before? Specifically had the regime systematically abandoned them to starvation?

  There were some ghastly communist precedents. Stalin used famine “to achieve mastery” over the Ukraine, as the North Korea demographic expert Nicholas Eberstadt has written. “Soviet troops were actually emplaced at border points to prevent travelers from smuggling food into the desperate region.” Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, once it had taken power country-wide, says Eberstadt, “selectively inflicted” hunger on a group that the communists called “the new people”—Cambodians who had not been with the movement from its guerrilla days.7

  Could the Pyongyang regime be so brutally cynical as to have devised a genocidal policy of ensuring that all or most of the people classified as disloyal would die quickly from hunger—-while the survivors of the famine would include the people whose loyalty was considered essential for regime survival, especially the military and the police? Had Pyongyang calculated that the regime would thus emerge from the period of famine stronger than before, because almost all the survivors would be loyalists? It was a horrifying thought. Knowing something of the ruthlessness of the regime, and with the example of Hitler and the Holocaust so fresh in the West’s collective memory, I could not dismiss the theory out of hand. I arranged a round of intensive interviews, in Seoul, of Koreans and non-Koreans who had knowledge of the North. I showed all the people I interviewed a map of North Korea, downloaded from the Internet. The counties that had been visited by WFP monitors were shaded in green. I asked them to venture explanations of why the areas in white were still closed.

  ***

  Officials who were familiar with Pyongyang’s military deployment shared my doubt that military installations were the sole sticking point regarding the closed counties, most of which are in the mountainous northern part of the country. “I don’t think they’re hiding another nuclear site up there,” said one official.

  “Obviously they have the bulk of their forces echeloned right at the Demilitarized Zone,” another official offered. But only eight of the thirty-nine counties bordered the DMZ. And in the far north “they don’t have very much stuff.” Sensitive military installations in the excluded mountain counties “would surprise me.” As for missile launching sites, “It’s my personal understanding that even the Nodong is on a missile launcher, and the Scuds are on mobile launchers. They don’t want a fixed site because they know we can go after it.” The North Koreans would not have excluded a county “just because there’s a launcher,” he continued. “A county is, like, really big. It’s not like a launcher is so dominating that, like bam! you run into it.”

  A third official looked at the map and wondered if missile manufacturing might account for some—but not all—of the excluded territory. He noted that North Korea’s “two invasion corridors, Chorwon and Munsan, are both in the middle area on the Z”—slang for the Demilitarized Zone. “The Ongjin Peninsula is on the west. Presumably they have significant defenses there, too. Where they build the Nodong missiles may be somewhere in the west— I heard that. They wouldn’t put that too close to the Z.”

  “Kanggye is a defense industry center,” said another official. “But that doesn’t justify making the whole province off-limits.” He was not certain about his assertion, though. Later in our conversation he remarked that he did think it possible that county officials might block access to their entire territory just to protect a single sensitive installation. “County administration can’t be broken up,” he said. “It makes sense to keep the whole county off limits if there’s something you don’t want people to see. Everywhere within that county there’s one political boss—the party boss, who also sits on the economic committee and controls the whole jurisdiction. North Koreans never break up jurisdictions [in such a way that in] this part of the county you can, that part you can’t. It would lead to conflict between policy and lifelong training, [-which] starts with ideology training in kindergarten.”

  That same official mentioned the presence of coal mines, full of disappointed former soldiers who had hoped for better assignments when their hitches expired, as an explanation that might apply to some of the counties. Due to the shortage of electrical power, water could not be pumped from the bottoms of the mines. Fuel shortages and other transportation problems made it difficult to move coal from the mines. Thus many miners (who in many cases remained reserve soldiers, with some access to arms) were effectively out of-work. “I don’t see a military reason in the middle area” of the map, that official said, noting that mountainous Kangwon Province had seen very little combat during the Korean War. However, the North Koreans “consider the coal-mining areas highly sensitive,” he said. “There are lots of coal mines in the top right of the middle white area.” (In 1999 a Beijing correspondent of Seoul’s Chosun Ilbo quoted “people who frequently visit North Korea” as reporting a riot in North Hamgyong’s Onsong mining district.)8

  Several officials mentioned concentration camps as a possible explanation of why those counties were closed. “There’s been some speculation that they might also include prison camps,” one said. “I do think that part of the reason they do it is not just for military installations but for various criminal camps they have up there,” said another.9

  But one official sought to shoot down that theory arguing that the public distribution centers for rationed foodstuffs in a given county would not likely be situated very near any prison camp.

  One promising category of answers could be summed up by an official’s pithy remark: “I suspect that what’s really stopping the WFP from going there is probably that conditions really suck there.” He began tapping on his computer keyboard and soon had called up from the Internet a map from the U.S. Agency for International Development, showing distribution of supplies.10 The distances between ration distribution centers were great in the white regions of the WFP map, he noted. He suspected the roads were bad, as well.

  Another official, looking at the map, said similarly: “They don’t have the resources to assist the [aid workers] to get to these areas. Almost all are incredibly high mountains. Their infrastructure in these areas is no better than Rwanda or the Central African Republic—miserable.” He thought this factor might combine with the presence of prison camps. Yanggang Province “is so isolated, so hard to get to, and there are many camps up there. And the camps are very large.”

  One official spoke of the map’s white regions this way: “We’ve heard the government has just written them off as far as getting food to people. They’re completely on their own. No doubt in large part these are mountain areas with bad infrastructure.”

  I heard several variations of the write-off theory. One of them imputed thorough cynicism to North Korean leaders. In
that case an official said: “I suspect these are places that the North Koreans have written off and decided to let them starve.” He added that he found the estimate of up to three million dead to be credible. He noted a certain Korean cultural trait: officials tend to be fiercely protective of their home regions, sharply antagonistic to rival regions. I had seen that trait at its most deadly in South Korea’s 1980 massacre of more than two hundred citizens of the south-western city of Kwangju by paratroopers, sent from a rival region in the southeast to put down pro-democracy demonstrations. In the Korean political culture, “regions without important native sons get nothing,” the official observed. (In this case, though, as we saw in chapter 29, Kim Il-sung himself reportedly had taken pity on North Hamgyong Province although it was not his home province.) The official had heard that the North Korean People’s Army, just as the South’s army had done, “raises regional units but assigns them to other regions so they won’t hesitate to shoot.”

  The North Korean economy, that same official asserted, “never worked. It was subsidized. When big neighbors bugged out, the North Koreans were on the margin. They were unable to respond to natural disaster. They had to prioritize. The military is always first. Whenever you prioritize something, you have to deprioritize something else. The concept that they’ve written people off is right. It’s inevitable they’re going to write people off. They can’t afford to feed those who are not critical to the survival of the regime, such as coal miners. If you’re in a factory or cooperative that’s [even less] necessary to support the regime—a doll factory, an ice cream or widget factory—you were deprioritized long ago. You close down a factory, it becomes a ghost town. The ration center moves. If you’re not part of the group, you get scre-wed and have to go down the road. There is definitely a fringe population that is being intentionally sacrificed. They don’t really have much choice.”