Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Kim then returned to his earlier theme: “So now, in what direction are we heading? Yes, the defense industry or heavy industries are our priority. While encouraging this, what else should we do? It’s time to raise the living standards of the people. This is because tightening the belts of socialist people is—I have said already. Look at our comrades.”

  Kim continued his monologue, harking back to popular support for the socialist system at the time of the Korean War—and in the process acknowledging to Shin that the North had attacked the South, something that the South Korean would have known very well but that most North Koreans were not permitted to know. “How were the sentiments of our people when the war broke out in 1950?” he asked rhetorically. At the time, he asserted, people in both North and South had favored the Northern system and opposed what he asserted was the system below the 38th parallel: “a society for a minority of capitalists and mid-level people. Thus because they said the [socialist] system at the time was favorable at the time, what did we have? There were only a few weapons given by the Soviets. Because we knew that the system was good, we went out to secure it. Thus in South Korea there were capitalists, landlords and comprador capitalists. Thus we said, ‘Let’s go and liberate.’”

  Things had changed, though, in the intervening period, Kim acknowledged. “After doing socialism for thirty years, feeding the people cannot be done without reaching out to the Western world. We are definitely behind the Western world. So the people, this livelihood problem—this ideological problem—is very important. To overcome this, Eastern European countries are having a hard time.”

  It seems Kim still did not fully understand how the South had done so well, and would in coming years do so well, economically. He wanted to improve living standards for North Koreans, sensed that socialist methods were failing in his country and elsewhere in the communist bloc—but at the same time he rejected integration into the market economy that South Korea had joined. He still thought it possible to stick with his father’s juche approach, producing everything at home from scratch.

  The Chinese continued to work on him, though. Hu Yaobang had made a return visit to North Korea since Kim’s earlier recorded conversation with Shin and Choi. During that return visit, Kim told Shin, Hu had asked him: “Why aren’t you doing the tourism industry? The tourism industry brings in a lot of money.” Kim acknowledged the rationality of the argument, although in the same breath he expressed ambivalence about the issue: “I understand, so we will do the tourism industry now. We will start now. But it wasn’t because we didn’t want to do it—of course we didn’t want to do it—but now I’ve decided to do it.”

  Kim agonized over the opening of his country that would be necessary if he should go after tourist dollars. Speaking to Hu Yaobang, he said, he had worried aloud that North Korea was so small, with so much of its territory fortified, that it would be difficult to show off tourist sites without giving enemies a clear view of its defenses. “In your case,” he said he had told Hu, “since you have a vast continent you can do whatever you want. In our case the border and the shoreline aren’t very long, and are tightly fortified. If this is opened up to tourism, how would it be different from withdrawal of troops? If everyone comes and looks over everything, if everything is opened up—ha ha! And if Pyongyang is opened up in the end it will be the same as calling back the forces from along the border. Next it will, must be in Pyongyang. It’s the same as being disarmed. Being the same as disarmed—I propose this after we reunite. But with your [China’s] experience, like your case, we will do it. We will do it, and there is a way We will do tourism.”

  Kim had figured out, he said, that at most he could open certain east coast areas to tourism: the port city of Chongjin and parts of Kangwon province. “I said to this Hu Yaobang: ‘Now we will pursue the open door policy. We will initiate the open door policy”—but only in those limited areas. “Yes, we will do tourism.” He quoted Hu as having replied: “Let’s see you do it.” And, said Kim, “I promised him.”

  In December 1984, Kim called the couple to his office and told them that “he”—Kim Il-sung—-was “very satisfied” with their work. Having received Choi’s letters every year, the Great Leader now “would greet them on New Year’s Day, 1985. They took along their tape recorder when they went to the palace for the reception. The conversation they recorded there reveals much about the attitudes of the man who remained North Korea’s ultimate ruler, for the time being, even as he was ceding more and more authority to his son.

  Kim Il-sung and first lady Kim Song-ae engaged Shin and Choi in small talk about their movies, and then the president quickly changed the subject. He wanted to talk about a recent international proposal that North Korea and South Korea enter the United Nations at the same time. That would divide Korea “forever,” Kim Il-sung complained. “Instead, what we are proposing is to retain the systems and autonomy of North and South while uniting [in a confederation], and enter the UN as one country. That way would not perpetuate the division.”

  Then the Great Leader got in a dig at South Korea, in the process proving that he understood South Korea’s economic success and prospects no better than his son did—perhaps not even as well as his son did. “It’s impractical to ask the South Korean government to get rid of the rotten system there overnight,” Kim Il-sung told Shin and Choi. “They have a $50 billion debt. Fifty billion: think about it! Fifty billion is not a simple problem. Our debt is $1 billion. We are going to earn foreign currency and thus within a couple of years we are going to fully pay it back. Do you know what [Japanese lawmaker] Tokuma Usunomiya said to me? The Japanese give a lot of money to South Korea, but that amount is equivalent of what the South Korean government has to pay each year as interest on its loans!”

  The receiving-line conversation with Shin and Choi ended there, as a North Korean functionary offered his New Year’s greeting: “Long live the Great Leader!”

  “Thank you,” replied Kim Il-sung.

  It was around that time that the balance tilted in the relationship between the president and his heir-designate. Mainly involved with matters of ideology and propaganda previously, Kim Jong-il from the mid-1980s is reported to have taken day-to-day charge of the party, the military, the administration— even international affairs. “By 1985, Kim Jong-il had in reality taken complete control of most of the areas in politics,” according to Hwang Jang-yop, “and he got his men to spread the word that he was top leader in North Korea.”19

  The extent of his new responsibilities and the amount of-work involved seem to have required him to face up to the need that he change his behavior. “From 1985, Kim Jong-il’s lifestyle changed totally,” elite defector Kang Myong-do told JoongAng Ilbo in Seoul. “His life of no constraints ended and the number of Happy Corps members declined. There was a lot of work to do from 1985. Each day he had thousands of reports to take care of and had to work until 1 or 2 A.M. sometimes. He adopted a routine. On Monday he would take care of the party propaganda department’s work; Tuesday the Korean People’s Army; Wednesday the president’s office and party finances; Thursday government officials; Friday the Central People’s Committee. Weekends, he would rest.”20

  If there was any hope for the country short of a major regime change, then, it was that Kim Jong-il would turn out to be a reformer. Pyongyang offered tantalizing clues that he might. Here is what an unofficial spokesman for the regime wrote about Kim’s modernizing ways in the Hong Kong–based magazine Far Eastern Economic Review: “An enemy of regimentation, Kim Jong-il views it as contradictory to the concept of man as a free, independent and creative being. He advocates modern lifestyles while preserving traditional values. He even encourages people to date more openly, in a traditional manner. Since he first appeared with a modern hairdo, such things have been in vogue among North Korea’s young people. City and rural barbers and beauty parlors cater to customers with dozens of different hairstyles. People are encouraged to wear a variety of fashionable and colorful costume
s, both traditional and modern.”21

  Beyond such superficial matters, there were some changes in economic policies, including a 1984 law intended to encourage foreign investment in joint ventures in North Korea. But positive change in substantive matters came slowly through the 1980s and into the 1990s. Part of the reason has to be that, as we have seen in this chapter, Kim Jong-il was not completely clear in his own mind about the direction in which he should take the country.

  In fairness, we should note that he still did not have full power. While Kim Jong-il was running things on a day-to-day basis from 1985, one former elite official told me nearly a decade later, the younger Kim inevitably encountered some conflicts with his father, who was still the president and the Great Leader. “Kim Jong-il will be the successor, but Kim Il-sung is not handing over power all at once. Kim Jong-il may want it faster. Since Kim Jong-il is younger he’s more open-minded regarding foreign affairs than Kim Il-sung. Even if he wants to change the policy, though, he has to go through Kim Il-sung.”22 The former official’s point is well taken. Still, even if Kim Il-sung had died in 1985 and left the whole family business to Kim Jong-il, we may doubt based on what we know of him that the younger man would have moved immediately to change the system in a major way.

  NINETEEN

  A Story to Tell to the Nations

  In 1989, during a brief thaw in the otherwise mostly unremitting enmity between Pyongyang and Washington, the first delegation of North Korean “scholars” visited the East Coast of the United States. At a dinner party in their honor in a friend’s New York apartment, I was introduced to the North Korean delegates including their leader, Professor Kim Jong-su. Something about him, perhaps the oval yet strong-jawed face, or the sardonic look of his downward-turned mouth, looked familiar. Kim and I looked at each other for a while, and it was he who spoke first to ask: “Haven’t we met before?” Indeed we had, I replied—but I had been with The Baltimore Sun at that time, in 1979. Now, ten years later, I was working for Newsweek. I decided not to mention that I had known him the first time not as Professor Kim, deputy director of a scholarly think tank called the Institute for International Studies, but as Bai Song-chul, the orphan who had been brought up by Kim Il-sung to become a diplomat working for the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.

  It was an extraordinarily pleasant evening. The North Korean guests and a group of Korean-American scholars joined together to sing Korean songs around the piano after supper and talked of their hopes for reunification. Everyone was in shirtsleeves and relaxed. At one point Kim Jong-su asked sociably if I had been back to North Korea.

  That was just the question I had been waiting for. Kim Yong-nam, the foreign affairs secretary, had told me during our interview in 1979 that I ought to revisit North Korea in the future, as I had “made many friends” in his country. “Later on we’ll have much opportunity to meet again,” he had assured me. But then the North had rolled up the welcome mat. Over the following decade I had written and cabled Kim Yong-nam and others in Pyongyang asking permission to revisit the country but each request had been ignored. The World Festival of Youth and Students was scheduled to open in Pyongyang just a few days after this New York dinner party and I had applied to cover it, but the prospects did not look good.

  When I explained all that to Kim Jong-su, he unhesitatingly offered to intercede on my behalf, assuring me that I would be admitted. He was as good as his word and soon I was back in Pyongyang, ensconced once again in the Potonggang Hotel.

  In the decade since my previous visit to North Korea, rival South Korea’s gross national product had expanded to nearly $5,000 per capita while economic performance in the North had continued to lag. Persistent reports reaching the outside world had told of serious food shortages in the North, although the regime did not acknowledge them. Indeed, it had not talked much about such occurrences since the hard times of 1946, the year after liberation, when Kim Il-sung had told his countrymen: “Everything is short with us—foodstuff, personnel, materials and so on. But this is no reason for us to be idle.” In 1989 it was not yet clear to outsiders that what had been intended as a propaganda gesture to South Korea had instead confirmed the North on a collision course with famine. Kang Myong-do reported in 1995 that North Korean organizations responsible for destabilizing and spying on the South had come up with the idea of publicly offering massive rice aid in 1984 when the Southerners were hit with floods. The assumption was that Seoul as usual would reject the offer. To the Pyongyang leadership’s horror, the Southerners accepted. In Pyongyang, “Kim Jung-lin, the person in charge, was exiled,” Kang reported. “He dug privies for six months.”1

  Now Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il seemed determined to banish any problems by intensifying the same old approaches. Communist leaders in China, Hungary and elsewhere were experimenting with individual incentives and free markets. The Pyongyang leadership mean-while dreamed up ever more costly and elaborate schemes to burnish prestige with grandiose monuments and extravagant festivities, hoping to persuade its subjects that their sacrifices were worth-while. But the evident confusion and panic within the Northern leadership increased as old allies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union cast off communism—and with it, their special relationships with Pyongyang.

  One by one, countries that had favored North Korea or tried to maintain equal relationships with the two Koreas were wooing the South and all but ignoring the North. For those countries, North Korea no longer had much to offer. South Korea on the other hand was a model of capitalist development, a potential source of trade, investment, technology, advice and aid. The trend could be glimpsed from the time Hungary and South Korea set up trade offices in each other’s capitals starting in late 1987. Other East European countries followed Budapest’s lead, and diplomatic recognition followed trade.

  From early in the decade the Northern leaders had responded to the signs Pyongyang was losing the contest with Seoul by resorting to terror. There was the 1983 Rangoon bombing, in which North Korean agents assassinated South Korean cabinet members. In 1987, Pyongyang agents bombed a Korean Airlines civilian passenger jet, killing all 115 people aboard. The attack was an effort to spoil Seoul’s plans to host the Olympics. The two agents swallowed poison when they were caught, but one survived. Under South Korean questioning she said she had been told by her superior in Pyongyang that her orders came directly from Kim Jong-il. (Former party secretary Hwang Jang-yop has blamed Kim Jong-il for the incident, without giving details.)2 Maddeningly for Pyongyang, the South went on to increase its lead over the North not only economically but also politically. In 1987, student-led demonstrations forced President Chun Doo-hwan to agree to free elections. Permitting the South’s people to choose their leaders tended to neutralize Pyongyang’s chief remaining talking point.

  Among South Korea’s successes, none galled the North’s leaders more than the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which celebrated and spotlighted the South’s newfound international status. Pyongyang first tried to muscle in on Seoul’s act, demanding that it be allowed to co-host the Olympics. The South agreed to discuss the matter, but negotiations collapsed. Then came the bombing of the Korean Airlines plane. Finally, North Korea’s leaders decided to use their turn to host the World Festival of Youth and Students—a sports-and-ideology bash well known in the socialist world but virtually unheard of in the United States—as a showcase of their own. (The psychology of that decision was typically Korean. In the South, for example, a recurring problem for economic planners was that if one top chaebol—big business combine— went into, say, the automobile business, then the others felt they must do exactly the same. Their prestige depended on it, in the Korean way of thinking.) Having kept Western journalists at a distance in response to the largely unfavorable coverage at the time of the 1979 table tennis tournament, Pyongyang officials decided once more to admit a press contingent.

  Like so much else that the leadership had tried, the scheme to stage the festival as a means of enhancing Nor
th Korea’s international prestige backfired badly. Through an accident of timing, the Pyongyang festival opened right after the Tienanmen Square massacre in China. Not only journalists but also delegates from European countries with relatively moderate socialist movements focused on obvious similarities between the human rights situations in China and North Korea. Those of us who attended the festival’s opening ceremony, in a brand-new stadium, witnessed an astonishing demonstration that may have been the first in decades to oppose the regime. As Scandinavian and Italian delegates marched around the stadium, they briefly held up signs questioning human rights policies in North Korea and in China. Danes in the audience who brandished a sign just as Kim Il-sung began speaking found themselves in a scuffle with male North Koreans—students who acted spontaneously not police, Kim Jong-su assured me later. (“We are a hot people,” he explained, using the incident as an illustration that the people were not automatons as some foreigners thought.)

  Alerted in advance, North Korean officials clearly were concerned about the foreign criticism. A day or two before the opening ceremony a group of foreign correspondents asked a taxi driver to drive to the Italian delegation’s headquarters, where a party was scheduled. We expected to get news there of the coming protest. The driver indeed took us for a ride—out into the countryside. For an hour, he pretended to be lost. Eventually he returned us to our hotel. It may be that he had exceeded his brief; one of our handlers apologized and said it had been a mistake. Before the evening was completely gone, we were duly ferried to the Italians’ party.