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

by Bradley K. Martin

  Chang had a brilliant résumé by North Korean standards. Having earned multiple degrees in civil engineering, specializing in tunnel and bridge construction, she had worked for twenty-six years as an architect in the Pyongyang city planning department. Considered one of the top three female architects in the country she had participated in construction of about thirty bridges and the Juche Tower, a monument lighting the night sky with a huge flame representing the juche ideal. She had received nine awards, several of them directly from Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il. She had been photographed three times with Kim Il-sung, and on the last of those occasions Kim Jong-il also had been in the picture. She was Workers’ Party secretary for her unit.

  Q. What did you do on the Juche Tower?

  A. “I was in charge of the structure of the tower. As party secretary I led weekly meetings and designed the structure.”

  Q. Tell me about the national construction policy.

  A. “The policy can be summarized as showing the world North Korea’s pride. Construction is to give pleasure to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. This is to show the juche spirit to the world. The Juche Tower and the memorial tower commemorating the founding of the party are examples— and also the West Sea Barrage. Lots of money and manpower went into that. It was big propaganda. But in fact its practical effect was very small. They just wanted it to show the power of socialism and the party. Even in Pyongyang there are so many buildings but you can’t operate them so they remain empty: the new tall hotel, for example, the world’s widest road and so on. They shouldn’t have built the hotel. The Koryo isn’t even full yet. Also, they’re now building a dining hall for 10,000 people. Nonsense!”

  Q. Tell me about the problems you had after your eldest son defected.

  A. “My son had been studying in Russia for five years. He came to South Korea in December 1990. All of a sudden the family changed from a revolutionary family to a family of traitors. I lost my job. When they kicked us out of Pyongyang they gave us forty-eight hours’ notice to evacuate. Our household goods were to be packed in twenty-four hours and we would leave ourselves in forty-eight hours.

  “If it had been 1989, we’d have been sent to a political prison camp. But after the 1990s there were so many like us that there were no vacancies. So people started getting sent to coal mines, and to cut timber in the forests. My son who defected knew we wouldn’t be sent to a prison camp. And he thought North Korea would collapse in a year. He was wrong.”

  Q. But I’ll bet you were angry with him.

  A. “Yes, at first I felt a great bitterness. He had betrayed the nation and the Great Leader.”

  Q. I’ve heard that the Pyongyang population is shifted every two years.

  A. “Not every two years but it’s shifted frequently. After the Korean War the landlord class was kicked out, and people who had gone to South Korea during the war. A big transplantation came in 1976 when the Pan-munjom incident occurred. Also, at times of international festivals and conferences the government wants firm control so it moves questionable people out. In addition, whole groups belonging to laboratories and factories are moved because of environmental questions, to clean up the city.

  “They want people in Pyongyang who can be trusted. Whenever American reporters come, the government tells citizens to wear the best clothing they have. The authorities distribute sample questions and answers to prepare people. If someone is questioned by a reporter, he or she will be debriefed afterward on the exchange.

  “When we were banished from Pyongyang we were sent to Onsong Mine. There used to be two prison camps, Changpyong and Tongpo, in Onsong County. They moved Chanpyong camp to Tokson in South Hamgyong Province in 1988. Tongpo camp moved there in 1990 to get it farther away from the border. I was in Tongpo. Both of those are tough areas developed by political prisoners. After the camps moved, at Champyon the government sent free settlers, but those people ruined the soil. So in the case of Tongpo the government sent organized people— factory workers and union people—to control the cultivation and mining. I was sent there as a settler after they moved the camp from Tongpo. They moved the camp because they were worried about human rights organizations’ condemnations. And during high-level North-South meetings South Korean officials expressly named those camps. The other reason was that they were near the border and the authorities worried about what the prisoners might do. Those were the only two camps in border areas.

  “When I arrived at Tongpo it was in the final stage of evacuation. I met some of the remaining prisoners and heard the story from them. I didn’t start at Tongpo but at Onsong because I met someone I knew who was in charge of the mine. I could move there instead. Onsong is relatively better because it has farmland in addition to mines. Tongpo has coal mines only. I stayed at Onsong for six years and seven months, working as an architect-engineer. I was the most experienced person in the area, so I was designing bridges and rail-ways and a big storage tower for coal. I also participated in financing of rail-way construction. I didn’t participate in prison-camp architecture. Bridges were my field. But when I went to the camp in Onsong and saw the harsh reality—people lived in dugouts, no heating …

  “Our relationship with the Onsong people was good. We weren’t prisoners; we were just people expelled from Pyongyang. Our social class was unchanged. We stayed in a normal people’s area. People thought it should be the party that would take responsibility for my son’s actions, not the family. Before that my family had a very good social station. When people visited my house they could see three pictures of me with Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il and a watch signed by Kim Il-sung. We were the only family with a color TV. I worked hard. My sons behaved very well. State Security came once a year only and checked on us.

  “Mean-while, my son was trying to get us back and he finally got in touch with us. For eight months I rejected his offer to bring us to South Korea. In September 1997, though, I crossed the border with two of my sons. After I got here I realized why he wanted us to come.

  “The first I knew that he was alive was in 1993. A leaflet about my son’s marriage came from the Chinese border. It was a leaflet from South Korea that said he was studying at a university. I thought it was propaganda and figured the South Koreans would kill him after taking his photo. But when I heard he was on TV I realized it wasn’t so. We heard that my son interpreted a meeting between Gorbachev and Kim Young-sam in 1994—it was on NHK [Japan Broadcasting System]. My second son’s friend watched it, and told him about his elder brother. Then I realized if someone has ability he can be treated well in South Korea. So I calmed down.

  “Our first direct news from him came November 1, 1996. From then he wanted the family to come to South Korea. I was afraid, but considered it for eight months and finally made the decision. Blood is thicker than water. Hatred became forgiveness. Then I missed my son a lot. Finally, we had a reunion. We all live in the same house here, with his Russian wife. My daughter-in-law is my son’s professor’s only daughter. When he consulted with his professor the professor said, ‘Do what you think is right.’ Now his daughter lives in South Korea, having left her family behind.”

  The end of the second millennium saw increased foreign interest in North Korea’s human rights situation, a positive if belated development. Clearly there was more concern in Japan, Europe and North America, as well as South Korea, for oppressed North Koreans. This had much to do with news that thousands of refugees who had crossed the border into China, principally in search of food, had to hide there for fear of being captured and returned to North Korea.

  Pyongyang-watchers who were not blinded by ideological sympathy had known all along, of course, that Pyongyang gave full expression to the theory and practice of totalitarianism. As late as 1972, when Scalapino and Lee published their landmark two-volume Communism in Korea, this was said freely, in strong terms. But pointed criticisms largely went out of fashion later in the 1970s after the revisionist movement took hold among those young Korea specialists in the United States
who were influenced by leftist thinking. Well into the 1990s quite a few of them refused to credit the accounts of North Koreans who defected to the South.

  Take away the defectors’ accounts and there was almost no firsthand information available on which to base assessment of human rights abuses. Unfortunately leftist scholars were not alone in dismissing the defectors as propaganda tools of Seoul’s Korean Central Intelligence Agency. Many in foreign governments agreed.

  Around 1999, though, the credibility of the defectors in Seoul started to receive a major boost from the availability of a new crop of first-hand stories about the realities of North Korea—this time told by refugees who had crossed into China. What they were telling interviewers corroborated, in spades, the main points of what the all-but-ignored Seoul-based defectors had been saying for years.5

  The former trickle of defectors, refugees, escapees—call them what you wish—turned into a flood due to food shortages and the collapse of the North’s economy. That meant there were thousands of North Koreans testifying or ready to testify—a large proportion of them not in South Korea or under South Korean government supervision. Thus, even the most skeptical researcher might be hard-pressed to keep a straight face while citing “lack of reliable information” in dismissing wholesale the many accounts of how North Koreans had been systematically oppressed.6

  Starting in 1999 and 2000, long-isolated Pyongyang tried to improve relations with old enemies and old friends alike, an effort that seemed to offer some carryover to its human rights situation. North Korea’s quest for new relationships in Europe, in particular, aroused hopes of an accompanying increase in sensitivity to international concerns over the regime’s treatment of its subjects. Encouraging in that regard was a report, during a “dialogue” in November 1999 with the European Union, that Pyongyang had issued a large-scale amnesty to mark the September 9 founding anniversary of the Northern government.

  The South’s Yonhap news agency in a dispatch from Seoul a few days later quoted an unnamed diplomatic source as having reported the claim. But the source said the North Korean delegates, speaking with EU counterparts in Brussels, had given no details on the contents of the amnesty. Rather, they had followed up with the assertion that the regime always worked to enhance its people’s rights. To bolster that claim, they had added that the country intended to join an international covenant banning gender discrimination; that United Nations human rights standards had been translated for domestic publication; and that a national judicial committee on juvenile rights had been established.

  Sketchy as those remarks were, “It’s a big change for the North to have elaborated on its human rights situation,” said Yonhap’s diplomatic source, attributing the change to Pyongyang’s mounting concern over international criticism of its human rights record. To understand part of the reason for such concern, one had only to recall North Korea’s dismay at NATO’s Kosovo intervention, which was justified on the basis of human rights.

  In the quest for better foreign relationships, establishment of diplomatic relations with Italy was viewed as a milestone. Previously no members of the Group of Seven industrialized countries had relations with Pyongyang. Australia, the Philippines, France, Taiwan, Japan, even Britain were on the list of countries that contemplated joining in the diplomatic dance. But with all the additional diplomatic activity there were few reports of positive results in human rights terms.

  Some analysts worried that, on the contrary, having more polite government-to-government relationships might be giving the regime added leverage to do as it pleased with—and to—its own people. After all, outright enemies and long-time critics or detractors of a country don’t hesitate to condemn its human rights violations—but countries that are in the process of improving diplomatic relations think at least twice before speaking their minds in such cases.

  John Pomfret of The Washington Post in a February 19, 2000, article reported that the situation of North Korean refugees in China had worsened precisely because of Pyongyang’s improved relations with other countries. The article quoted a United Nations official who lamented the “total silence” with which the international community greeted the forced repatriation of seven North Koreans who had fled to China and thence to Russia. “In most parts of the world the Americans would be outraged,” the UN official continued. But the article quoted aid officials as saying foreign (read American?) officials’ gratitude for progress on weapons issues had made them less eager to put pressure on North Korea regarding refugee issues.

  Pyongyang had further plans to use diplomacy in ways that could bode ill for starving or otherwise unsatisfied, or dissatisfied, citizens of North Korea who might wish to vote with their feet. Those plans involved the country most interested in improved relations, South Korea, whose President Kim Dae-jung was pursuing a “sunshine policy” to try to lure the North into a peaceful relationship. South Korean press reports quoted a unification policy official in Seoul as saying on February 17, 2000, that North Korea had offered Seoul some secret reunions of families divided by the Demilitarized Zone—a hot-button issue in South Korea. In exchange, though, Seoul would have to agree to help Pyongyang deter the defection of North Koreans with relatives in the South. That category had accounted for a large percentage of successful defections, since the Southern family members were often willing to pay for agents to undertake rescue efforts.

  Face the fact that dealing with human rights issues in the North would be a slow process, the South’s President Kim advised early in 2000. “Interest by the international community in North Korea’s human rights conditions may have effect to some extent,” he told an international conference on engagement policy toward the North. “But it would be difficult to produce great results under any circumstances.” Kim added that “solving poverty is most important in terms of North Korean human rights. Dialogue with the West and wider investment must take place before one can expect improvement.” While perhaps a pragmatic and realistic assessment, that would have been a bitter pill for anyone in or out of North Korea who was hoping for a flowering of human rights as a result of all the current diplomatic activity.

  But there was some encouraging evidence that Pyongyang’s change of policy amounted to more than just such cosmetic touches as moving political prison camps from border areas to more remote, less easily observed sites. In October 2002, former political prison camp inmate Kang Chul-hwan, in his capacity as a Chosun Ilbo reporter, was able to report:

  “It has recently been learned that the notorious public executions carried out across North Korea in the latter half of the 1990s are all but gone since 2000, and that the family life of political prisoners has eased significantly ‘Under Kim Jong-il’s order issued to the State Security Agency and border guards early in 2000, “Don’t fire shots in the Republic,” no public executions have been carried out in the North, particularly in the border area,’ said a North Korean who has fled to China and who had served with the border guard. … The reported suspension of open [as opposed to secret] executions is reportedly ascribed to censure by the world community. Pyongyang is also said to have suspended punishing the families of political criminals, unless involved in grave offenses.”7

  Such changes, if real, might have been too late to help Hong Won-myung, the twenty-year-old ex-hostage in Thailand, if he had returned to North Korea in accordance with his shock announcement to the press. But a Thai newspaper reported after his press conference appearance that the real reason Hong had expressed the wish to return home was that he wanted to protect his remaining family members there from retaliation by the Pyongyang regime; in fact he had decided to defect with his parents to the United States.

  His captors each day had made him telephone his brother in North Korea, who had told him he should follow the North Korean officials’ instructions or the brother and the brother’s wife would come to serious harm, perhaps be killed, according to the account in the vernacular daily Naew Na. The paper attributed to unnamed Thai intelligence sour
ces its version of what young Hong recounted privately after having been reunited with his parents. His captors fed him his lines for the press conference, telling him they wanted to make sure North Korea’s image would not be hurt further, the article said.

  Naew Na’s sources quoted Hong as saying his captors had tranquilized him and kept him in his underwear after the kidnapping. Using a carrot-and-stick approach, besides arranging the daily calls to his frightened brother they had promised him an elite career if he would do as he was told and return to Pyongyang. Hong would be made a diplomat and dispatched to Bangkok in two years as a third secretary in the North Korean embassy there, they assured him. The captors also offered to return cash amounting to some $100,000 plus 200,000 Thai baht that they had seized when they broke into the family’s apartment, according to the Naew Na account.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Sun of the Twenty-First Century

  Stern-faced soldiers stood every few hundred meters along a road that skirted freshly plowed and flooded rice paddies, the dark brown ooze ready for planting. A few goats grazed. Oxen pulled plows; one pulled a “honey wagon” full of night soil—human excrement, traditionally used as fertilizer. People carried loads of fire-wood or straw on their backs, going to and from the single-family houses and small apartment buildings that dotted the countryside. Long winter underwear hung out to dry.

  This was the North Korea that a tourist like me could see from one of the tour buses that pulled up every day at the base of Mount Kumgang, home of the 100-meter Nine Dragons waterfall. The buses parked in a vast lot surrounded by souvenir stands and snack shops. After hiking up a steep, river-hugging trail, the drill was to admire ancient Buddhist inscriptions and contemporary communist slogans that had been chiseled into the rock faces. When we had taken in enough of the scenery, we could spend our hard currency bathing in therapeutic hot spring water or watching circus performers from Pyongyang perform in a covered stadium.