Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  By 1989, the campus atmosphere in the South had become reminiscent of Americans’ 1960s slogan, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” The substantial number of South Korean scholars who had learned enough overseas about communist thinking to reject it were, by the time of their return to teaching posts back home, too old and established to be considered trust-worthy advisers by the student radicals. Outright pro-communist propaganda had some enthusiastic fans. So did some left-leaning foreign scholars’ theories that condemned the roles of the American and South Korean governments while going easy on criticism of the Northern regime.

  Earlier, the South had banned books on such topics; South Koreans attracted to Marxist ideas while studying abroad were in no position to propagate them publicly after their return home. But a belated grant of democratic freedoms after 1987 had suddenly allowed Southerners to flirt with Marxism and North Korean ideology. After decades without contact with such ideas, perhaps it should not have been surprising that substantial numbers in the South were not inoculated with the skepticism needed to counter the simple if often deceptive appeal of Northern propaganda. The inherent attraction of the new and previously forbidden enhanced the attraction.

  With North Koreans themselves practicing pretty much the Stalinism that briefly appealed to leftist Americans in the Depression years of the 1930s, it was almost as if Koreans on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone had traveled back five decades in an intellectual time machine. South Korean officials were at wit’s end trying to cope. American military and diplomatic policymakers, too, were concerned. Some U.S. officials saw the most prolific and influential of the American scholars as a pied piper and went so far as to implore him to go to Seoul and help disabuse student radicals of their distorted notions. He declined.8

  A big part of the problem was that South Korean students did not know the North—still were not permitted to go there without special permission. When their government insisted that the North was a bleak place, they considered what the government had told them previously and, perhaps understandably, decided not to believe it.

  The evening I went to see The Flower Girl the guest of honor swept into the theater just before the curtain rose for the first act, receiving a standing ovation. Im Su-gyong, a beautiful South Korean university student, had defied her government by visiting Pyongyang via a third country to attend the youth festival. She was promoting a pro-unification scheme for a student march from the northern end of the peninsula, across the normally unpassable Demilitarized Zone and down to the southern tip. Her arrival in Pyongyang created pandemonium. Northerners, evidently genuinely delighted and moved by her visit, mobbed her. In the televised arrival scene, the jostled cameraman was unable to keep his camera still, resulting in a rare bit of spontaneous television.

  Im Su-gyong soon returned to the South, where she was jailed until Christmas Eve of 1992 for violating the National Security Act. That only made her a martyr to the Southern radicals’ cause—to the delight of the propaganda authorities in the North. During another visit to Pyongyang three years later, I was taken to an art studio where the main non-Kim subject of the artists turned out to be Im. There were sculptures of her and paintings galore, in a variety of poses, the most dramatic a courtroom scene from her trial in Seoul.

  Hwang Jang-yop, following his 1997 defection, told of another way the North sought to appeal to the South. Recall Baek Nam-woon, “the father of left-wing scholars,” whom Kim Jong-il purged at the end of the 1960s. Although he died in a concentration camp, Hwang reported, Baek’s remains were later moved to the Shinmiri Patriotic Martyrs’ Cemetery. Hwang said the same procedure was followed with others who were popular among South Korean nationalists. “Anyone with some value in maintaining the sympathy of outsiders is buried here, even if he had died at the hands of the North Korean rulers.”9

  The image of ideological purity that Pyongyang projected appealed to the South Korean radicals’ tendency to see issues in black and white. The propaganda mills of Pyongyang never failed to point out that the South still suffered the ignominy of having foreign troops on its soil, “controlling” its armed forces, buying its women, golfing on its prime real estate and disseminating crass American culture over one of the most desirable of the scarce television channels. (The fact that those troops were there to deter another invasion by the North like the one in 1950 was never mentioned—Northern propaganda still claimed it was the South that had invaded.)10

  Pyongyang’s call for immediate reunification—its means for completing the revolution—had a simple appeal compared with the more complex and cautious South Korean policy. Pyongyang presented early reunification as a spiritual as well as a practical imperative for achieving Korea’s destiny as a major nation, free of contaminating foreign influence and able to stand alone, whole, atop the North’s considerable mineral resources—including coal, iron ore, gold and uranium—combined with the South’s arable land and its technological and business prowess. “If our country is reunified it will be rich in food,” Haksan Cooperative Farm’s director told me.

  In one sequence in the mammoth opening ceremony of the youth festival scores of doves or pigeons representing peace were released inside the stadium. Immediately, there was a multiple-gun salute—twenty-one guns, I suppose, but I did not count—during which the booming noise and the smoke of the explosions drove the already frightened birds into panic so that they veered all over the stadium in apparent efforts to escape. (Shu Chung-shin, the dancer once rejected as a candidate for the okwa on account of her family background, told me when I met her in South Korea several years later that she had been on the field performing during the dove scene.) That incident could have symbolized the ambiguity of North Korea’s reunification policy: On the one hand, Pyongyang continued to insist publicly that it had no interest in unifying the peninsula by force. On the other hand, its enormous military was poised to attack south-ward on short notice.

  Besides its reunification policy, North Korea’s emphasis on economic equality exerted enough pull on some South Korean radicals to overcome the clear fact that South Korea had advanced much farther and faster economically through capitalism. Internally, the North Korean regime’s ideological and economic needs conflicted badly, in the long run tending to box it in. Still, Pyongyang’s leaders could hope to use the appeal of Kim’s ideas to young South Koreans to revolutionize the South and “win the race despite Seoul’s advantages.11

  Of course, North Korean propaganda concerning the South was pitched not only to South Koreans but also at least equally to Northerners, and it was intriguing to see how the Northerners reacted. “I am young, so I want to know about the South Korean students’ struggle against the U.S. imperialists and the South Korean puppet clique,” my guide Pak said to me one night when I took him and our driver to supper. I explained that the demonstrations had tapered off to some extent following the movement’s success in forcing a free presidential election in 1987. A bit later, Pak said: “As you know, the United States provoked the Korean War in 1950.” No, I said, it was well established that the North had planned the invasion of the South. Pak laughed and told me that what I had said was just too ridiculous to credit. He did apologize a few minutes later for using the term imperialist— obviously not the thing to call one’s guest. But it was clear that he and his fellow Northerners had been given a hugely distorted view of South Korea as a uniformly horrible place in need of salvation by the Great Leader, a land where the fruits of capitalist economic development had accrued to the wealthy few. Among North Koreans who were permitted to speak with foreign visitors, even those sophisticated enough to know that the South had the higher average living standard insisted that the North’s system was better because the wealth was shared more evenly.12

  (Equality in the North was not quite what the regime and faithful subjects portrayed it as being. It had little to do with the lives of top officials and their families. One illustration could be found on any street or road. Scarce passenger cars were use
d mainly to carry big shots, while the masses walked, or rode in the backs of trucks or on buses. The passenger car drivers almost without fail propelled their vehicles at high speed. They clearly operated on the presumption that they were entitled to the right of-way against pedestrians. Drivers approached intersections without slowing down, scattering pedestrians, who would fall back to avoid being run over. Drivers apparently felt that the importance of their high-ranking passengers justified their arrogant behavior. At the entrance to the tomb of the founder of the Koguryo Dynasty, Kim Jong-su pointed out to me an ancient inscription: “Men great or small must dismount before entering here.” I asked whether that applied to the Great Leader. Kim Jong-su’s face assumed a pained look and he replied, “Don’t make such comparisons.”)

  South Korea did have a few thousand radical disciples of Kim Il-sung, problem enough for the authorities in Seoul. But to hear it from North Korean propaganda one would have thought almost the entire Southern population was ready to worship Kim. Since there was virtually no information available to the contrary, people in the North seemed to believe all this. As was often reported abroad, radios available to ordinary citizens really were fixed so that they could receive only government broadcasts. The newspapers purveyed strictly the party line. “According to the newspaper almost all South Koreans respect the Great Leader and want reunification,” said my guide, who added that he believed everything he read in the North Korean press.

  Of course, the real elite had sources of information much better than the regular North Korean media. Very high-ranking cadre who needed to keep up with the outside world could listen to foreign broadcasts, including South Korean programming and the U.S. government’s Voice of America. A slight but studied relaxation of U.S. antagonism toward the Pyongyang regime had permitted the delegation of North Koreans led by Kim Jong-su to visit Washington shortly before the youth festival. Much as sightseers in Hollywood want to see the studios and the homes of the stars, the North Koreans were keen to visit the offices of the Voice of America—-where they expressed puzzlement when told of a U.S. law that prohibited broadcasting VOA programming-within U.S. borders.13

  High officials’ superior sources of information about how North Korea compared with other countries did not produce any hint of humility in their conversation and pronouncements. Rather, one of Pyongyang’s chief objects in permitting some Western journalists to visit for the youth festival was to issue a warning to the United States against continuing what amounted to a policy of letting North Korea stew in its own juices.

  Strategists in the United States and South Korea had developed a theory, over the preceding few years, that the balance of power in the Korean peninsula was about to shift. According to that theory, South Korea’s economic growth rate was so much higher than the North’s that it would be a matter of only a few years before the South’s military expenditures—-while representing a much smaller percentage of gross national product—-would match and exceed those of Pyongyang. When that happened, the theory went, South Korea would be able to field enough of a defensive force of its own to provide a credible deterrent against North Korean attack, without the help of U.S. troops. (Unspoken was the obvious corollary that if the South should develop aggressive intentions toward the North, Seoul would have the force advantage to contemplate carrying them out.) According to the theory, North Korea was desperate to do something to keep the balance from shifting decisively against it. Adding to North Korean frustration were the flight from communist orthodoxy of Pyongyang’s allies, their flirtations with South Korea and pressures on Pyongyang from within to reform its own lagging economy.

  Seeing all that, American and South Korean policymakers figured they could deal effectively with the North Korean threat simply by leaving the U.S. troops in place as a deterrent, taking modest steps to ease tensions and allowing time to pass. Thus, neither Washington nor Seoul seemed to feel any great urgency to push vigorously for negotiated solutions to the standoff in the peninsula. That disturbed North Korean officials. Although they showed no real interest in genuinely negotiating with Seoul, nonetheless they still obviously hoped to play up to the United States sufficiently to get the U.S. troops removed from the South. True, American and North Korean mid-ranking diplomats had begun to meet periodically in Beijing. But this was really little more than another aspect of Washington’s measured, very slight approach to relaxing tensions. Pyongyang—in search of diplomatic, military and economic concessions—-wanted higher-level, more frequent contacts to get the talks off dead center. Kim Jong-su complained to me that the Beijing talks were proceeding like a very slow-moving bicycle—in danger of falling down for lack of momentum.

  Kim Jong-su let me know that his government had not issued its invitations to American journalists lightly. “You have to understand that it’s difficult to invite Americans here,” he said. “Our people are very sensitive about the United States. In America you are maybe not so sensitive about Korea.” What seemed to have overcome Pyongyang’s reservations about inviting us was an urgent need to convey a message to Americans and others in the Western alliance. The message: North Korea was a powerful country, a country to be reckoned “with, not only militarily but as a revolutionary society of impressive economic and social achievements, a beacon to the poor and to those oppressed by inequity in South Korea and the Third World.

  Although it was tempting to imagine that North Korean leaders had started to believe their own propaganda, there was much more than that to their demand for respect. They meant to leave us with the impression of a country we should take seriously, if for no other reason than the enormous amount of trouble it could cause. Washington must not assume that the continued presence of U.S. troops in the South, coupled with an American policy of benign neglect of other issues, would solve the Korean problem. Americans should not make the mistake of assuming it was only a matter of time before North Korea would collapse or otherwise decisively lose the race with South Korea. More to the point, we had better realize that Pyongyang simply-would not permit itself to lose without doing something drastic.

  There did seem to be some basis for questioning the U.S. policy of deterrence-plus-malign neglect. North Korea still had gold and other mineral resources to barter abroad. Militarily reports had started to appear that Pyongyang might be trying to develop nuclear weapons. Already it was known that the North had the capability to launch another surprise attack with conventional weapons. Add the factors of Pyongyang’s ideological penetration of the South and uncertainty about what would happen after Kim Jong-il’s succession, and the picture of what was yet to come looked a bit less reassuring. Those troubling facts were reason enough to intensify the search for new policy approaches. Arms-control experts, including John W Lewis of the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford, were indeed talking with North and South Korean counterparts about confidence-building measures that could lead to a reduction of the danger of war on the peninsula.

  On balance, though, it would have been hard to justify an immediate and drastic shift from the basic watch-and-wait policy—especially a shift to any of the alternatives Pyongyang was pitching. Kim Il-sung had proposed a “confederation” in which the Northern and Southern systems supposedly could thrive separately, with no need for American troops to guard the peace. The catch was that there would be a common army and a common foreign policy—under whose control? The South Koreans understandably were not interested in taking a chance that the North would gain control of the army and impose its system on the South, completing Kim’s revolution. North Korea’s proposal for a nuclear-free zone in the peninsula seemed more worthy of discussion, but an agreement clearly-would be worthless unless the North opened itself to permit verification.

  New ideas would have been welcome, but no one seemed to have any. The regime was loath to open the country in any way that could admit outside influences, which might challenge its control of the people. So for Pyongyang’s adversaries there remained a good argum
ent in favor of waiting for internal strains to intensify further—mean-while ensuring that the North’s rulers would always have a way out, would not feel cornered.

  Still, I left pondering the thought that North Koreans, after all, were Koreans—possessed of the toughness and determination that had made their fellow Koreans extraordinarily successful, not only in the South but as immigrants in the United States and other countries. Waiting for them to fall on their faces could be a long wait.

  North Korean officials were unhappy with my coverage of that visit for Newsweek. As a Chongryon official told me later, the main complaint was that the articles had dwelled on Kim Il-sung’s personality cult. Pyongyang vehemently insisted that the popular worship of Kim Il-sung was purely voluntary and from the heart and should not be described in the same terms as a state-imposed Stalinist personality cult. During my visit, an official had told me pointedly that the bottom-line minimum was that Westerners who wanted any sort of relationship with Pyongyang at all must stop making fun of its leaders. “Some parts of the body are more sensitive than others,” the official told me, advising me not to hit him “in the eyes.” In the monolithic society that North Korea boasted of having become, as I knew “well enough, talk of the regime’s “eyes”—or “brains”—-was intended as a direct reference to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.

  Presumably as a result of the official unhappiness with my articles, Kim Jong-su after that visit treated me distantly ignoring my letters. Eventually I heard that he had gone to Peru as a diplomat. Some time later he reappeared in New York with ambassadorial rankas deputy chief of the North Korean mission to the United Nations. Still, despite calls and letters from me, he showed no interest in resuming our acquaintanceship.