“In June of 1992 I started work for O Joong-hup University as chief of general affairs, in North Hamgyong Province. It’s a teacher-training university. One day in January 1995, when I went to work, there was a Nodong Shinmun on my desk. One article told of students demonstrating in South Korea against imports of rice and beef from abroad. There were about thirty other employees in the office. People come to work at 7:30 A.M. and spend the first thirty minutes hearing lectures on the greatness of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. After I saw the article I said, ‘Those sons of bitches are too well fed and they’re protesting about imported beef!? I wish they’d bring it up here and let us eat it!’ After that, my colleagues started thinking South Korea must be doing much better than we were. I was jailed for ten days, accused of inciting pro-South Korean thinking. Besides my remark, there were other, personal transgressions. I used to wager with friends, with cigarettes and alcohol. That’s prohibited.
“I was released, after those ten days, because I’d been a military career man and they said I didn’t really know civilian society well. Others would have gotten much longer sentences. I returned to my job, but in December 1995 the North Hamgyong provincial office ordered me to move to the Kilju Ilshin coal-mining area as a ‘revolutionary laborer.’ They told me that this is what they do—they send people to work with coal miners. They spend two to three years repenting, reforming their thoughts, and then return to their old jobs.’ But in reality no one ever returns to his job.”
Q. What actual work did you do at the mines?
A. “I never went. I was only dispatched there. Once that happens, politically and otherwise you are finished in society. When I was given the assignment I went and argued at the provincial office: ‘I’ve dedicated my life to Kim Jong-il, spent twenty-four years in the military, didn’t do anything wrong. I refuse to go.’ I knew I’d be watched all the time. I didn’t want to live like a dog. Suddenly I wasn’t part of the society any more. I had always thought Kim Jong-il’s policies were for the people. I was extremely disappointed. I wanted to live like a human being so I decided to leave. It took three months or so of back and forth but finally they told me I had to go to the mines. I refused, but they said, ‘If you refuse, we’ll give you a worse assignment.’ I said, ‘Go ahead and do it, then. I didn’t do anything wrong.’ This all went on for about three months.”
Q. Is North Korea in any way a society of laws?
A. “People in North Korea do have certain rights. You can buy time because of the layers of bureaucracy. Sometimes you have time to write to Kim Jong-il and argue with the authorities.”
Q. Did you write to Kim Jong-il?
A. “To the Central Party, twice: once in August 1995, the second time in January 1996. I said that citizens’ rights were part of the constitution. ‘This is not what I was taught. How could they be doing this?’ Writing made me seem more of a troublemaker.”
Q. The top-down structure of the regime, with very little horizontal communication—is that a-weakness of the system?
A. “I see it that way. Once the command comes down from the top, that’s it.”
Q. Your order came all the way from the top?
A. “Every province and other subdivision has a top authority who usually belongs to the central party. My decision came down from the provincial party. I got no answer to my letters to the central party. If the central party wrote to the provincial party, I never saw it.”
I told Yoo the story of the woman who said she had been framed, Lee Soon-ok. She quoted central party people as telling her they had determined that her accusations against influential people in her office and community who had gotten her punished were true—but nevertheless she mustn’t rock the boat.
“Yes, that happens a lot,” Yoo said. “Everybody knows of a case like that: Many people are involved, and if the authorities wield the axe it will bring them all down. So they ignore cases like that. North Korea does have an organized system and they do check things out.”
Q. Did they tell you, too, that you shouldn’t rock the boat?
A. “Because I was in my hometown, Chongjin, I knew the provincial officials. Throughout the argument process they were saying, ‘Let’s see if we can try to give you a post in Chongjin as a laborer.’ That gave me a little more time to plan my escape. I finally crossed the border on March 4, 1996.”
Q. Was your whole family supposed to go to the coal district?
A. “Of course.”
Q. Did you bring them out?
A. “Yes. My mother, my six-year-old son, two daughters and my wife all went to China with me. Mother died while we were in hiding there. We lived around the Beijing train station about a month. I thought once we got to Beijing we could go to South Korea through the embassy. But I found that was impossible. My wife and I argued a lot during that time. She was resentful that my prediction hadn’t worked out. It was pretty bad. I think the North Korean embassy people found out we were there and started following us. My wife said she was going to keep trying to come to South Korea through the embassy. But I took the children and left. I don’t know if she’s still there or back in North Korea.
“When we were in China I started listening to KBS. That’s when I learned that the route to South Korea was to go to Guangzhou, then Hong Kong, and thence to South Korea. I didn’t have money and needed to earn some to do that. Some Chinese-Korean people helped me. With their help I got on a ship January 22, 1997, with the children. We landed on a deserted island and got help from the South Korean Marine Police. From there we took a helicopter to Inchon.”
Q. Tell me about hunger and starvation in Chongjin.
A. “People were dying of starvation. I saw them. I heard my friend’s father was sick. I visited him and the doctors told me he was just malnourished. He was skin and bones. They said if he ate he’d get better. But there wasn’t any way to feed him. He died three days later. I didn’t see people dying on the streets, though.”
Q. What about conditions in the coal mines?
A. “I don’t know much about it. I don’t think their rations were better than others.”
Q. What about the estimates of two to three million dead?
A. “That’s probably very true. By the time I left in 1996 we were getting only two days’ worth of food per month. People who didn’t have money or anything to sell could only starve.”
Q. Who were they?
A. “Laborers, people without power. Usually the officials and party members have food.”
Q. How about prisoners?
A. “Usually prisoners are treated like dogs. When I was jailed for ten days I got a corn ball with three beans in it, this big [shows six finger joints] three times a day with a small bowl of salt soup, just enough to sustain life. I lost eight kilograms during the ten days. I didn’t eat the first four days, the food was so disgusting.”
Stories like Yoo’s made more plausible the claim of First Lieutenant Lim Young-sun (chapter 31) that the regime’s increasingly careful and deliberate system of investigation and punishment had enabled him to have months of warning that he was likely to be arrested for distributing anti-regime leaflets and must make plans to defect. In April 1993, Lim wrote in his second book, “I went to check the Onchon underground run-way construction site, and the political committee member instructed me to stay overnight. The next day some officers arriving from my corps informed me that the security guard had gone through my things. I realized that I was in for it. But, fortunately for me, they couldn’t find definitive evidence of my guilt, so they just increased surveillance of me.
“Why did State Security waste all that time trying to find incriminating evidence, when past practice had been to arrest and execute anyone considered even slightly suspect? In the past, many innocent people had been killed that way—because once a person was taken to a secret place it didn’t matter whether he or she was guilty or not; even an innocent person would have seen the inner workings of State Security by then and would have to be executed to
preserve security. But from the mid-1980s, to end such abuses, concrete evidence was required for an arrest.
“Why did the investigation take so long? This was because of structural problems among security organizations. The head of North Korea’s authority system is State Security. Under it there are provincial and city security authorities. The People’s Armed Forces security is [formally] under the direction of State Security but the PAF maintains its own security department and trains its workers at its own security school. For State Security to investigate or arrest an army member it needs the cooperation of the military security authorities. They usually don’t work well together. In my case, State Security requested cooperation from the PAF Security Department but the PAF authorities didn’t cooperate. That left it to civilians in State Security to investigate me with no help. Military security authorities hoped State Security would give up due to lack of evidence so they could then solve the case, arrest and charge me and keep all the credit for themselves.”
One American involved with private relief efforts took note of the somewhat less harsh face the justice system had begun to present. “North Koreans break the rules on internal passports for the starving,” he said. The authorities had been permitting unprecedented freedom of movement so that desperate people could search for food. “They’re not shooting people for cutting trees on the hills or farming on slopes even though it causes erosion and means deforestation that will deprive the military of hiding places.” Meanwhile, he said, “enlisted men are almost starving.”12
There had been a policy since Kim Il-sung’s day to “root out three generations” of the families of disloyal subjects, and the prisons continued to be used for that purpose. (See the testimony of Ahn Myong-chol in chapter 34.) However, as other researchers also have found,13 apparently that did not translate into a special starvation regime for prisoners once the famine began in earnest. While more and more inmates died as a result of malnutrition, the political prison camps continued to be run more as slave-labor and slow-death camps than as instant-death camps. It may seem a small distinction, but it shows that in this regard at least Kim Jong-il was no Hitler.
Choi Myung-nam defected in 1995. I asked him what he thought had happened to the family he left behind. “I believe they would have been resettled to a rural area in the mountains, maybe in South Pyongan Province,” Choi said. “From 1993, families of defectors are not sent to prison camps but just resettled in the mountains. From 1993, unless a person actually commits a crime he’s not sent to prison camp. It’s just a policy of Kim Jong-il’s.”
That sort of leniency, as opposed to the crackdown that Robert Collins would have predicted if the regime were entering his fourth phase, suppression, in the process of collapse, suggested to me that the regime might be around for a while.
In fact, although of course he had not used those terms, reversing the local independence of Phase Three and avoiding Phase Four had been main thrusts of Kim Jong-il’s December 1996 speech. As for local independence, his argument was: “If the party lets the people solve the food problem themselves, then only the farmers and merchants will prosper, giving rise to egotism and collapsing the social order of a classless society. The party will then lose its popular base and “will experience meltdown as in Poland and Czechoslovakia.” Kim clearly feared that party officials were opting for suppression. Instead, he insisted, they must persuade the people that “this is the time of the march of hardship” and thus permit the regime to “control the situation without resorting to using law enforcement bodies.”14 One can see in his handling of the situation hints that in the aftermath of his father’s death he had become an effective national leader in his own right, correctly analyzing the reasons for communism’s collapse elsewhere and taking steps to avoid that outcome in North Korea.
It turned out that Kim Jong-il in 1998, only shortly before I started inquiring into the mystery of the thirty-nine counties, met with Japanese-Korean representatives of Chongryon and spoke to them enthusiastically about what he saw as the need for more attention to legality in North Korea. “Our people have incorrect understanding of how our laws should work,” Kim complained. “In a socialist country, party organs, government officials and social groups are keen on political indoctrination but little attention is paid to the laws of the land.” It appears that although some of the examples of leniency during the famine would prove to have been merely temporary expedients, Kim contemplated changes of a more permanent nature that could make the system less arbitrary15
The immediate impetus for Kim’s new stance apparently had been an incident at Hwanghae Steel Mill that forced him to confront the extent to which corruption had taken hold since the 1980s. “I will tell you what really happened at the Hwanghae Steel Mill,” he said to his visitors from Japan. “We spent three years mourning the death of our Leader Kim Il-sung and coinci-dentally were hit with natural disasters. We found ourselves in a dire situation and could not provide enough electric power to the Hwanghae Steel Mill. The mill had to stop operation. Some bad elements of our society in cahoots with the mill management began to dismantle the mill and sell its machines as scrap metal to Chinese merchants.
“By the time we got wind of what was going on, more than half of the mill had been stripped away. For nearly a year, the thieves took over the mill and stole the people’s property at will. They bought off party leaders and security officers and, consequently, no one had informed us about their thievery. Everybody was on the take at the mill and we had to send in an army to retake the mill. The army surrounded the mill and arrested the thieves. The army recovered the people’s property from the thieves. Some of our trading people were involved in this massive fleecing of the mill.”
Was Kim extolling the rule of law because he wanted to crack down on the leniency that rank-and-file officials had exercised in the face of the population’s difficulties? Perhaps the facts of the mill incident as he recited them could permit the interpretation that local officials had been trying heroically to raise cash with which to feed the population of unemployed mill employees. Suggesting a different interpretation, however, is the fact that people connected with the mill incident were by no means the only ones made to answer for corruption around that time. There were high-level targets, some very close to Kim himself. South Korean intelligence chief Lee Jong-chan told his country’s National Assembly in July 1998 that seven members of the Kim Il-sung League of Socialist Working Youth had been executed in the fall of 1997 while the league’s chief Choe Yong-hae, had been dismissed for corruption. That’s the same “Jerkoff” Choe who, as we saw in chapter 11, hung out with Kim when they were youngsters. Chang Song-taek, Kim Jong-il’s brother-in-law and the man rumored to be his closest friend and advisor, had been sent off to atone for corruption by going through a “revolutionary education” course and had already returned to Kim’s good graces, the Southern spy boss reported.16
In his talk with Chongryon representatives Kim spoke with evident respect about the legal systems of capitalist countries. In North Korea, he complained, “party cadres and security officers operate outside the law without exception.” In capitalist nations, on the other hand, “people abide by the law from cradle to grave,” he said. “All persons must obey the law and the law is enforced universally.” That praise was in contrast to his father’s dismissal of legal impartiality as nonsense.17 To be sure, Kim Jong-il’s interest was thoroughly mixed with caution, as he then emphasized. “Revisionists,” he said, using the term applied to anti-Stalinist communist reformers such as Khrushchev, “weaken socialist systems by overemphasizing laws and ignoring political indoctrination. Gorbachev brought down the Soviet Union using this tactic. Today, the Chinese leaders are on the same path.”
But he quickly resumed praising Western systems: “As you comrades know so well, having lived in a capitalist nation for so long, people in a capitalist society must obey the law no matter where they live. Chongryon, too, must obey the Japanese laws, otherwise the Japanese
police will crack down.” A North Korean ship calling frequently at the Japanese port of Ni-igata was under official Japanese scrutiny at the time, in view of evidence it was being used for smuggling prohibited items, among other infractions. “I hear that our cruiseship Mangyong 92 has to cater to Japanese businessmen and bribe the police with large sums of money in order to get anything loaded,” Kim told his visitors. “In our country, a few hundred dollars are enough to bribe some security officers. This shows in a way how bad our judicial system is in comparison to that of a capitalist nation.”
Kim observed, “In a capitalist nation even the prime minister and the president are prosecuted if they break the law. We must study how to strengthen our legal system. Japanese police fear the prosecutors. Whom do the prosecutors fear? Do they fear the police? You said that the police will go after any prosecutor who breaks the law. Few prosecutors have been arrested in Japan. The main reason is the strict process of selecting prosecutors. Law graduates take tough exams to become lawyers, judges or prosecutors. Only the best get to become prosecutors or judges.”
Thus, Kim said, “cops and prosecutors are miles apart in qualifications. [But] in our nation, any college graduate can become a prosecutor, if the college so wishes. Because of this, prosecutors in our nation carry no special authority. In a capitalist nation, prosecutors are sworn to uphold the law and defend the nation. Kakuei Tanaka, a former Japanese prime minister, was arrested by a prosecutor.”
Kim wanted a system in North Korea in which “law graduates must pass a special exam in order to become prosecutors, and only the best qualified people should become prosecutors. Currently, prosecutors are appointed just like other jobs and they stay chummy with their former classmates. It is tough for prosecutors to wield any authority in this kind of system.”
In the same conversation, Kim talked about food and agriculture policy. North Korea’s agriculture minister, So Kwan-hui, had been executed in September 1997, accused of intentionally ruining the country’s agriculture as a spy in the service of the United States. At the same time the regime had dug up the remains of Kim M.an-kum, So’s predecessor and mentor, from the Patriots’ Cemetery and subjected them to ritual execution by a firing squad—a modern update of the feudal custom of exhuming and decapitating the corpse of a posthumously disgraced official. The two officials’ fate had then been held out to officials, the military and the public as examples of what would befall any other “traitors.”18
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty Page 84
