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

by Bradley K. Martin

  Eventually, I would drive to the border with a full truckload of dried fish and trade. The company head and the rest often participated. I was not fooling anyone in the company.

  “For three years I made strenuous efforts to show my loyalty and enter the party. But when I tried to sign up, the official in charge said: ‘Look at your background. How dare you apply to join the party?’ After that I lost all faith in the regime. In 1993, the announcement came that war was about to erupt, so anyone under thirty should volunteer and prepare to fight. I didn’t want to go to war. At graduation time, the army had represented my hope to erase my bad background and have a decent career. But I had come to realize that no matter how hard I worked, my background never would be erased. I “would always be mistreated and discriminated against.

  “I had problems with State Security people, but bribed them to send me to Sunchon City to work as driver hauling export goods, a better job than the one I had. Bribery started in big way in the early 1980s and became very prevalent in 1988, especially in 1989 with the youth festival. In 1988, because of the coming festival many foreign countries donated goods. People started realizing the value of foreign goods and realized that you have to have money to buy them in the black market. So officials and others developed a greed for foreign exchange.

  “In the past, ifgirls prostituted themselves and used the proceeds to buy fancy clothes, the authorities might inquire into where the money had come from. These days no one even asks any more. So many girls sell themselves to foreigners. Even in the Sunchon area, in the train stations, women approach and ask ‘Do you want to buy a squid?’ People in the know understand this to be the code. In the past the code would be ‘flower basket.’ Even in Pyongyang, if they find a foreigner with a North Korean woman, State Security will follow them, then approach her and demand the money. The women usually turn over the money. The customers are not only foreigners. A North Korean man with five won can get that service. Some ofthe women have approached me. In the past people scorned them, but now people are understanding, as long as they earn money. Usually in North Korea, all villagers know where the prostitutes are.

  “I worked in Sunchon from May to October, 1993, then crossed the Tu-men River to China on October 1, 1993. On January 28, 1996, I came to South Korea. All I want to do is get a South Korean driver’s license and drive a big container truck. At first, I thought of becoming a tractor designer, but they’ve got enough of those.”

  North Korea with its one-man rule and brain-washed society always had appeared to scholars as a country in which the real story was that of the leader. But the basis of that assumption started to shift during the 1990s. A nanny state that had provided everything was unable now to provide much of anything. North Koreans found they had nothing left but ideology, which they could neither eat nor wear. Required for their survival to become traders and individual strivers, many had found a certain freedom. Although under the circumstances it would have been surprising if many of Kim Jong-il’s subjects welcomed that development, it seemed to me likely to have some profound— perhaps ultimately positive—consequences for North Koreans’ future.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Though Alive, Worse Than Gutter Dogs

  In March 1999, North Korean diplomats and other agents kidnapped twenty-year-old Hong Won-myong, along with his diplomat father and his mother, who were attempting to defect, from a Bangkok apartment. The parents escaped in the confusion of an automobile wreck, but young Hong was in another car that was not involved in the wreck. His captors held him as a hostage while, with a degree of chutzpah that none but North Koreans could muster, they used him as a bargaining chip as they demanded that the Thai government turn the parents over to them and absolve Pyongyang and its gang of thugs of blame for the kidnap. Not buying that audacious pitch, the Thais threatened to break off diplomatic relations if the North Koreans refused to give up hostage Hong. Pyongyang considered Bangkok its most useful Southeast Asian diplomatic and trading outpost, so young Hong was released.

  Amazingly, after his release, Hong held a press conference at which he announced he wanted to go home to North Korea, with or without his parents. “I love and respect my father very much,” he said—adding, with emotion in his voice: “But if my father refuses to return I will ask to cut parental ties and return home alone.”

  No doubt re-wards awaited him. His countrymen would make a big fuss over him upon his arrival back in Pyongyang. They would parade him around as an example of the type of selfless patriot that the country’s educational system for decades had sought—-with remarkable success up to a point—to produce. I could visualize thousands of chanting, flower-waving schoolchildren lining the route of young Hong’s motorcade from Pyongyang’s airport into the capital, “where he would be hustled onto state television (the only television there was in North Korea) to repeat in Korean his performance in Thai at the press conference.

  There were various versions of why the parents were unwilling to go home to Pyongyang. North Korea alleged that the father, as number three in the embassy had embezzled $83 million that the country was preparing to pay for Thai rice imports. There was no way the regime would have entrusted him with that much money I thought. But financial irregularities of some degree had become a way of life for North Korean officials, in the environment of extreme uncertainty and rapid moral decline in which their country found itself. It would not have surprised me to learn that a defecting diplomat had dipped his hand into the cookie jar.

  What the father told the son, the latter said, was that he wanted to live in a country that would offer the younger Hong more comfort than North Korea. “But for what should I go to live in a foreign country?” the son asked at the press conference. “Should I live comfortably like a selfish person, or should I return to join more than 20 million people in my homeland to bring prosperity and development to it?” And there was more: “I don’t think my country is poor, but it is very rich, because everybody works for the single aim of bringing progress to the country.”

  Here is another switch: The young man claimed that it was he who, for a time, had not wanted his embassy captors to turn him over to the Thai authorities. He finally agreed when he saw that it would be an opportunity to be with his parents for long enough to persuade them to go home, reunite with his elder brother and other relatives and friends, admit their mistakes and be accepted back into the bosom ofthe country. He did not think his father had been the traitor he was accused ofbeing, young Hong said—but the elder Hong might have made some mistakes. “I believe that ifanyone admits a mistake and asks for forgiveness, my country will give him another chance,” he said. And he himself-would “work wholeheartedly” to make up for any mistakes his father might have made.

  It was obvious that, during his two weeks in an undisclosed place of captivity, the youngster had received some great coaching from the A-team Pyongyang sent in to help him see the light. Even though he had been living outside North Korea for years, he managed to get the party line down pat in his press conference performance. No doubt he would do just as well in public appearances back in Pyongyang.

  He probably would not be arrested immediately. Kim Jong-il had issued in 1993 a new policy—“Do not make internal enemies”—encouraging leniency toward defectors’ family members who were willing as Hong put it to “cut family ties.” But after he had served the regime’s propaganda machine sufficiently, he would be of no further use. The people in charge would not make him a diplomat, like his dad, and take advantage of his qualifications as a foreign-educated linguist, because they could never banish the suspicion he might some day try to defect and join his parents. That cosmopolitan background of his would count against him, not for him. After all, the North Koreans most inclined to complain about the regime were the cosmopolitan elements. Think in particular of the ethnic Koreans born in Japan or China who immigrated with high patriotic spirit to help “build the homeland” but, having in their minds those inevitable points of comparison, found
they did not much like what they found.

  Judging from what I had learned about the North Korean system by talking with many of his former countrymen who had managed to escape abroad, I thought young Hong after the inevitable waning of his propaganda value most likely would be found wanting in the loyalty department. He might be exiled to one of the poorest, most barren and mountainous parts of his country. If he were lucky, his lot there might be to try to eke out a living, as a farmer or miner, in one of the communities of people cast out of normal communities because their loyalty to the ruler was suspect—not on account of any crimes they had committed but due to problems of “family background.” Some were people whose families had been abroad and who had been overheard comparing North Korea unfavorably with other countries.

  If he were really unlucky, despite the new policy young Hong might— like an estimated two hundred thousand of his countrymen1 —be sent to a prison camp. If his parents returned with him he might accompany them or not depending on whether the regime decided to just get it over with and gag the parents with stones—or bring the son forward in an arena, before a crowd screaming for justice, to accuse them of crimes—and then shoot them as he looked on.2 The alternative would be to let the Hongs rot in one of the camps housing political criminals who had seriously offended the regime and the accompanying families of some of those criminals. Forget about the quaint notion that high-ranking would-be defectors could simply admit their mistakes and be forgiven.

  Shin Myung-chul, a former State Security telecommunications staff member whose story features in chapter 22, told me the sad tale of a fellow defector named Yoo he met after arriving in South Korea. That man had defected to South Korea in 1987 while he was an officer on the DMZ, Shin said. “In March 1988, I witnessed the family of Mr. Yoo being sent to Aoji in North Hamgyong province. It’s one of the three main prisons where they send families of defectors. The procedure for sending them off takes three days. The first day a wire comes from district State Security to village State Security to watch the family. There are various communications back and forth. On the day for sending them away, the State Security officials arrive in a truck around 2 A.M., with no warning, and take the whole family quietly. It’s all over in forty minutes.

  “After I came to South Korea, Mr. Yoo kept visiting me. Finally, after the tenth visit, I told him what had happened to his family. He had expected it, but he was devastated all the same. They usually take the wife, children, parents and siblings of the defector—all the direct relations, except in the case of a sister who’s married off; her husband can be reprimanded or have his job taken away. I believe it’s to help the regime retain power. It shows people the consequences of defection so people will feel responsibility. It takes forty minutes because the law says people who are resettled are entitled to take about 500 won worth of property-with them. Anything over that the government takes.

  “There are two categories of people. One group would be sent to a provincial State Security evaluation department when they’re removed from their homes. They get evaluated for about a year: Are they spies for South Korea? Do they oppose Kim? But in cases like Yoo’s relatives they have no hope of ever returning from the camps.”

  Did young Hong know the bleak reality that most likely would await him if he should go back home? Maybe not. Maybe all he remembered of North Korea, from the time before his family had last moved abroad, was life among the elite of Pyongyang: enough to eat, in those days at least; schools where you grew up learning to worship the Kims, father and son, and to believe more or less wholeheartedly in the sort of sentiments the just-released hostage gave voice to so stirringly at his press conference. It would not be unusual for such a privileged young man to know little of the darkest side of his country—until his turn came to experience it.

  More likely, I thought, he did have some idea—but was really the nice, sincere kid his Bangkok college friends said he was. In which case it should not have been too hard for the team that worked on him for the two weeks of his captivity to use, as leverage, reminders of his remaining relatives and friends in North Korea—and hints of-what would happen to them in case he should defect.

  That kind of pressure could make it a tough call for anyone, but if he had asked me (I was in Bangkok at the time) I would have sat him down to go over the interviews that follow, several of them with members of families that had suffered together. Then I would have given him some unambiguous advice: “Don’t go back to Pyongyang. Stick with your parents. If the three of you get to the United States or Canada or South Korea, especially if your dad has even a few grand, not to speak of the $83 million he is accused of having ripped off from the regime, you will find that for a price a rescue expedition can be dispatched into North Korea via the China border to bribe authorities and bring out a whole family of internal exiles, even prisoners. Don’t go back, kid.”

  Hong, at twenty, was young but that would not win him special treatment. Ahn Hyuk was even younger, eighteen, when the junior table tennis champion was imprisoned. At age eleven, in 1979, Ahn entered and won a tournament for elementary school pupils. Thenceforth, he was groomed at a training center in Nampo to become national champion. (A woman star named Pak Yong-sun had won two world championships—although she didn’t make it into the finals for the 1979 tournament that I attended. It was Pak’s winnings that had been used to build the Nampo training center.)

  Q. How did a table tennis champion end up in a concentration camp?

  Ahn Hyuk. “I went to a ski resort used by sons and daughters of high officials. Skiing down Mount Paektu one day in February of 1986, a group of us came close to the Yalu River. Some ethnic Koreans living on the Chinese side started talking to us. They said, ‘You talk about Kim Il-sung’s paradise. You ought to come to China and see how we live.’ Six of us walked across the frozen river, just out of curiosity, and stayed in China for three months. Then we returned to North Korea. I was sent to the camp as the youngest political prisoner there.”

  Q. Why did you return?

  A. “Because of our families. They would be worried. I had $200 when I went skiiing. I used that to go around China for a month or so. We returned to the Yalu River to find the ice melting. It was still too cold to swim across, so we waited until May That’s when my destiny was overturned.

  “I had no idea what would happen. I was the only son, pampered, the son of a high official who had access to a lot of foreign currency for his work. I thought my father had enough power to fix it. The other guys when they got back went to their parents, who told them, ‘Don’t ever mention that you’ve crossed the Yalu.’ But I first went to see my relatives, not my parents, and my relatives said, You’re dead meat.’ I realized I’d done something wrong, and I was scared. So without seeing my parents I went on my own to State Security. I thought if I went and confessed it would be all right. I told the authorities I was the only one who crossed, so the others didn’t get caught. North Korean society works on criticism. I thought if I went to State Security they would criticize me and forgive me. But after my confession State Security sent me to its secret prison at Malamdong in the Yongsong area of Pyongyang. My Kim Il-sung portrait-badge was taken away, and I felt like the lowest thing on earth.

  “At the prison I was kept in a dungeon for about twenty months. The cell was 2 meters by 180 centimeters. From 6 A.M. to 11 P.M. I had to sit very straight, with my fists extended in front of me. I wasn’t allowed to utter a word without permission. I was supposed to raise my right fist when I needed to pee, raise my open right hand for a bowel movement. Raising the left fist meant, ‘I have something to ask you,’ and raising the open left hand meant ‘I’m very sick.’ We only got to leave the dungeon to see the sun once a month.

  “I was the youngest, so I ended up doing a lot of the cleaning. My fellow prisoners included Yang Sung-hyon, former ambassador to Libya, and Kwon Song-chol, former vice foreign minister, along with a student returned from Guangzhou in China and one of the chauffeurs who drove t
he Volvos and Mercedes Benzes around. Yang hadn’t done his job right, somehow. Kwon had been with Kim Jong-min when Kim defected from Russia, but hadn’t defected himself. He was being punished for not stopping Kim Jong-min’s defection. The chauffeur had merely noticed that Western passengers carried a lot of foreign currency and remarked, ‘Wow, the West must be really developed.’ That’s all he said.

  “The only food in the dungeon was cooked corn in a bowl. No side dishes. You can hardly get rice outside, so how could we get it in prison? They cut the handle off the spoon to help prevent suicide. They give you the bowl but you can’t eat right away. You have to say, ‘I’m ready to eat now.’ All six in your row of cells have to say that before the warder says, ‘OK, you may eat.’

  “When I went out to get my monthly sunshine I had to strip first. I thought, ‘I can’t go on living this way. I must commit suicide.’ On my way out I would look for a nail, or even a toothpaste cap to put under my tongue. But there was no way. I did swallow a nail, trying to kill myself with internal bleeding. I cut the inside of my mouth with the nail, then swallowed it. I sat for about ten minutes and fainted. I was sent to the hospital. They treated me there and I lived.”

  Q. Did they ever explain why you were being punished?

  A. “They said I had acted against the people. Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il are the most dignified leaders of the world, and by going to China I had injured their dignity.”

  Q. How did you get out?