Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Dong told me that he had kept his ideological purity until he left North Korea to study abroad. “Our political and economic system was based on dictatorship by Kim Il-sung—one-man rule,” he said. “When I was in North Korea, I thought Kim Il-sung was God. I did everything by his command. I had no doubts about the regime until I went to Poland in 1985. Then, for five years, I heard a lot of news of the West—the United States, Germany, England. I thought, ‘Which system or country is better politically or economically?’ And I saw the life of the Polish people. In my mind, I saw that life in the West and in East European socialist countries, as well, was better than life in North Korea.

  “I watched the Seoul Olympics on television—all the games. On the television monitor I saw Seoul and other cities. Before seeing the 1988 Olympics, I had been taught that South Korea was very poor. Many, many people were dying there, fighting against dictatorship, I was told. But I saw something different during the ’88 Olympics. Of course I was interested in the games, but I was mostly interested in the street scenes that were televised, how the people were dressed. I realized I had been thinking wrong. I’d always been taught that South Korea was a poverty-stricken colony of the United States with no freedom, but when I watched boxing and saw that the South Korean beat the American, I thought, ‘Maybe it’s not the way I’ve been told.’ Up until then I had thought that the colony could not go against the imperialists. Seeing that the South Koreans upheld their flag and competed in the games as South Korea, I was astonished that they could beat the United States.”

  After the Seoul Olympics, “people in many Eastern European countries including Poland were eager to find out about South Korea,” Dong said. “There were a lot of special reports in the news—magazines, television, and so on—about how South Korea could develop into such an industrialized nation, and about how much power South Korea had to have to be able to host the Olympics. This was the channel I used to get knowledge of South Korea. I think it’s a tragedy we had to get information that way When I was in Pyongyang we could not learn such things.”

  Dong noted that radio, for example, “is a product of capitalism.” In North Korea, “people can’t have access to normal radios, because that would allow them to hear broadcasts from all over the world. It’s hard to buy radios except the one-channel radios. The central government sends people to inspect radios every three or four months, so just having a radio can put people under fear and apprehension.”

  I asked Dong-what he thought of the plans then being discussed for U.S. radio broadcasts to North Korea of news about North Korea in the Korean language, via Radio Free Asia. “It’s a very good idea but not very practical,” was his opinion. “Not enough North Koreans have access to radios to receive the transmissions—maybe just one percent, the high officials, a few people with power like those in State Security. The broadcasts won’t be known nationwide. But the people with power to change things could listen and think. I myself got a lot of help from Radio Free Europe and BBC broadcasts.”

  It was not only what he heard on the radio and the televised revelations about South Korea that rocked Dong’s worldview. “The changes in Poland— especially Solidarity—influenced me a lot,” he said. “I had lots of Polish friends in Solidarity. They kept telling me, ‘If your brain is properly oiled, you won’t go back to North Korea.’ I was shocked when a South Korean embassy was set up in Hungary, but I felt encouraged, because with a North Korean passport I couldn’t go to a Western or neutral country but I could go to Hungary.”

  Soon, another factor arose that made Dong feel he had only a narrow window of opportunity if he wished to escape. When the embassy was established in Hungary, all the North Korean students there were sent to Poland to keep them from having contact with the Southerners. “When I heard of a plan for a South Korean embassy in Poland, I figured the North Korean students in Poland “would be removed, too.” With nowhere else to go in Europe, “I would be sent back to North Korea. That’s what triggered my defection. I went by plane to Hungary and found the South Korean embassy in Budapest. They sent me to the South Korean embassy in Vienna.” That was in May of 1989, six months before the South Korean embassy in Poland opened. “When I defected,” Dong told me, “the main thing that troubled me was that my family would be punished. But I feel I’m a very egocentric man, to be able to defect. I guesss I was egotistical enough to overcome that concern.”

  I asked Dong how North Korean youngsters managed to learn anything substantive in school, what with all the gang fighting, labor, ideology instruction and so on. Had he felt he was far behind his Polish fellow students? “I thought I was way up there, because I entered in Poland as a university freshman,” he replied. “All my classmates had only graduated from high school, but I already had three years of university education. So I was ahead of them. In general, though, I think North Korea lags in all fields with the possible exceptions of math, basic science—physics and chemistry—and English and Russian.”

  Before entering the prestigious Korea University in Seoul, Dong told me, he had taken an entrance examination and failed Korean. (That is not as surprising as it may sound. After all the decades of separation, the versions of Korean used in the North and South had many differences in vocabulary. As for the writing systems, although North Korea had long before halted the use of Chinese characters, South Koreans continued to use them in tandem with what had become the sole Northern writing system, the indigenous Korean hangul alphabet.) Nevertheless, Dong said, “I had very high scores in physics, chemistry and math. I’m a senior now. When I graduate, I’ll enter Daewoo Corporation and specialize in East European trade. I speak Polish.”

  I asked Dong if he still worshipped Kim Il-sung, years after his defection. He hesitated. “It’s hard to answer,” he said. “When I think of Kim Il-sung, he did very cruel and wrong things. Still, when you contemplate it, the degree of his wrongdoing lessens. Since coming to South Korea I’ve come to realize that much of his history is fabricated, but still I’m moved by Kim Ilsung’s leadership.” Kim Il-sung, Dong noted, formerly had worn “people’s clothes”— inmin-pok. (-what Americans call Mao suits although the Chinese actually call them Sun Yat-sen suits, for the 1911 founder of the Chinese republic, who wore the garb before either Mao or the North Koreans did)— with a Lenin cap. “Now he wears Western-style suits. That symbolizes that his health is good and he has the intent of cooperating with the West. The former, the health symbolism, is for his people; the latter is for the outside world.”

  By the time I spoke with Dong, the United States and North Korea were embroiled in the first dispute over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program. Dong read into that an interesting observation about the regime’s staying power. “I don’t believe North Korea is going to collapse suddenly” he said. “To be able to have this conflict with the United States means Kim Il-sung has something to rely on: the support of the people.” I asked if this was real rather than feigned or imaginary support. “I believe he has the people’s support,” Dong said. “Here’s proof. Now they’re having two meals a day they’re overworked, but still there’s no uprising. That proves he has the people’s support. People now understand that North Korea is not the most powerful nation. But they still believe it is among the most developed nations in the world. For me, when I left for Poland, I thought, ‘North Korea is the best nation.’ When I visited North Korea before the 1988 Olympics I met people who realized North Korea was not the best nation, but they thought it was certainly among the higher-ranking ones.”

  Dong noted that “Kim Il-sung is old” and said that “people realize he’ll die soon. Until Kim Il-sung’s death the regime will stay put. After his death, Kim Jong-il will succeed him. People don’t trust Kim Jong-il as much as Kim Il-sung, so they will be a bit troubled. But there’s still backing, and the regime won’t collapse all that suddenly. From then on there will be a lot of change in North Korea—change like in China, maintaining the socialist system but adapting the free-market system. B
ut the problem is, there will be turmoil caused by people who want revenge for all the hardship they’ve gone through. I believe Kim Jong-il doesn’t have the kind of leadership ability Kim Il-sung has. So the people who have been oppressed will rise up and take revenge.”

  I asked Dong what he thought South Korea and the United States should be doing. “I would like to see the U.S. put more pressure on North Korea,” he said. “Sanctions, demanding to inspect the human rights situation. Mean-while South Korea should play the good cop and say to the U.S., ‘Don’t press them so hard.’ Thus there could be a good channel for North-South talks. But the U.S. still would have to maintain the pressure. Even if there are North-South talks, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations and the United States should be able to step up the pressure if the talks don’t go well. But I do believe that to achieve normal ties between North and South will be very difficult. It would be easier to normalize relations between the U.S. and North Korea or between Japan and North Korea.”

  Chung Seong-san, a soldier until his January 1995 defection, gave me a “yes, but …” answer to the question of whether the communist new man (or woman) really existed in North Korea. Chung told me he had contracted polio as a child and suffered from “stiff” legs. A man of very casual demeanor and dress, wearing a white-on-white windbreaker, light plaid slacks and loafers, Chung exhibited no obvious physical symptoms other than swollen knuckles. (Those were not uncommon among North Korean army veterans, trained in knuckle-smashing martial arts.) Evidently Chung’s had been a mild case of polio or the diagnosis was faulty.

  At one point in our conversation Chung said to me: “I’ve met a lot of North Korea specialists. Theoretically they know more about North Korea than I do, but they don’t know the North Korean heart.” Chung’s heart story was a complicated one, sometimes self-contradictory it turned out. “I was bald until I was eleven or twelve,” he told me. “I got special treatment because of my illness, due to the benevolence of the party.”

  Hearing Chung say that, I remembered that neither I nor other visitors had seen handicapped people in Pyongyang. Lee Woong-pyong, the MIG19 pilot who escaped with his plane to the South, had told me that, in Pyongyang, “before the 1970s you could find many beggars and people disabled by the war. After that they were exiled to rural areas in the provinces. The reason the authorities gave was that Pyongyang is a cultured city, with lots of foreign visitors and there should be no distractions from the scenery.” Ahn Choong-hak, a former soldier and logging camp worker who became a Kia automobile salesman when he reached the South, told me, “In the early 1980s they rounded up all the midgets in North Korea and placed them in M.aemu-ri. Relatives started complaining, so around 1989 or 1990 they released them.”

  I told Chung I was surprised by his remarks; I had understood that the regime treated handicapped people shabbily. “There’s different treatment for each group, but basically North Korean society is for the handicapped,” he replied. “They have a specific policy regarding handicapped people. The best treated are those who become disabled while in the army—amputees and people who lose their sight, for example. Kim Shi-kwon, who became paralyzed in the Korean War, is the symbol of the disabled. He gets the most from the regime. There’s always a car waiting to take him anywhere; doctors come to check him.”

  When I spoke with Chung he had been in South Korea for under half a year since his defection—he was still in the custody of the intelligence service pending his qualification for citizenship—but already he felt prepared to make a comparison. “The South Koreans don’t have the kind of compassion the North Koreans have,” he asserted. “In North Korea a friend lost a leg when a grenade exploded. He was helpless for the time being, but a very attractive woman factory worker volunteered to live with him. This is the result of training in selflessness.”

  In each North Korean province, Chung said, “there are two special schools for the disabled. They call them ‘schools for the blind’—even if the problem is cerebral palsy. They have all the basics for dealing with problems such as sight and hearing impairment: braille, sign language and so on. There are special factories for the handicapped to work in. The North Korean regime says that, as long as you have that revolutionary spirit burning inside you, you get this special treatment.”

  Recent history however, had been unkind to the disabled along with everyone else. “It’s true that discrepancies are developing in the socialist countries,” Chung said. “They don’t have the resources for the normal people, so how can they provide properly for the disabled?” North Korea’s special schools, he said, “don’t have the resources for improvement.” Still, “even though North Koreans may not have the doctors and the medicine, they’re trying.”

  Up to this point, Chung had been positive in his recollections. But he abruptly changed his tone when I asked him to estimate what percentage of the people had internalized the officially encouraged attitude of loving and helping the other person—had become examples of North Korea’s “new man,” similar to the ideal Christian. “Although the system provides special privileges for the disabled, you can’t fool human nature,” he replied. “People are not all that kind to the disabled. In the 1960s, Pang Hwa-su, an elementary pupil, got third degree burns all over his body. Doctors really did peel off their own skin to graft onto him. Now he’s a well-grown man. But the doctors today are like vampires. They’re not for the people. The case where the woman volunteered to live with the amputee—that hardly ever happens. In North Korea there are about twenty-five severely paralyzed people a year. For each of them, the regime selects a woman and forces a marriage. Basically the women go through that kind of ordeal because they get re-warded by the government and because the summons is like the word of God. They get color televisions, money, and so on, if they agree, but if they refuse they’ll be sent to prison camp.”

  I asked if there had been some turning point when popular altruism started to decline. “It’s hard to say,” Chung repled. “Maybe it was after 1985, possibly because of the food shortages. The second major cause may be repression, but they probably don’t even realize that. I realized it while I was working there, visiting the schools for the blind to do research.”

  Chung was born in 1969 in Pyongyang, the capital. His father was a warehouse clerk. His mother stayed home to keep house. He told me he had gone to Chanhyun Elementary School and Songbuk Junior and Senior Middle School. That set me off on a line of questioning about the top schools in Pyongyang. The real elite, he told me, attended Mangyongdae Revolutionary School and Namsan Junior-Senior Middle School. “Namsan Junior was called, in 1948, Pyongyang First Elementary Junior School. After the Korean War they called it Namsan Junior and it was specifically for offspring of Korean War heroes and very high party officials.” Over the decades, Chung said, the regime—unhappy-with the qualifications of the class of 1958 at Kim Il-sung University—had tried various strategems for expanding the pool of Namsan applicants in order to bring in brighter youngsters. The children of somewhat less exalted officials were admitted if they were relatively gifted intellectually. “In 1984, they changed the selection system. Before 1984, 100 percent of those accepted were high officials’ kids, but after 1985 two out of five were not from that background but were geniuses—although they still had to have proper class backgrounds. After 1985, the competition was about 300 to one, and you could enter from any part of the country.”

  I asked about the difference between Namsan Junior-Senior and Man-gyongdae Revolutionary School. “Mangyongdae was an orphanage for children of Korean War martyrs, and it also accepted children of especially loyal members of the regime—spies working in South Korea for example,” Chung said. “There are special cases where high army officers send their kids or grandchildren to get them trained for the army. You couldn’t term this a normal, average school. More members are sent to the army and become the central members of the army.”

  After his own graduation in 1986 from the lesser SongbukSenior,
Chung himself went into army. “I was a writer in the army, writing propaganda for the regime,” he told me. “North Korea has ten army corps. I was in the Second Corps, Ninth Division. At the same time I was taking a correspondence course in film production from Pyongyang Research Movie College and was a member of the national Writers’ Coalition. In the Ninth Division I was in the mobile propaganda unit. I did my studying while I was with my military unit and occasionally visited the college for an exam. My work was to go around boosting the morale of my fellow soldiers. We put on stage shows, comedies, song and dance performances. I was both producing and writing. From 1988 until I defected I worked as a producer. At the beginning I had a goal in mind, which motivated me. The goal was to workdiligently, enter the party and attend university.”

  So, I asked, had he been opportunistically trying to get ahead without particularly believing in the propaganda? “Yes,” he replied. I asked when he had stopped believing. “I can’t give you a turning point,” he said. “It was gradual change while I was growing up. Since I know a lot about the regime, I started to know the discrepancies. That’s when my heart changed. In Jilin Province, China, in 1938, Kim Il-sung formed a ‘soviet’ and made a speech: ‘My ultimate goal is for the people to to eat rice with meat soup, live under a tile roof and-wear silk clothes.’ Over the decades he has done none of it. One incident comes to mind: My elder brother’s marriage ceremony in 1990. It’s a tradition that you put rice cakes and chestnuts on the table. The ‘rice cakes’ at his wedding were made of radish and the ‘chestnuts’ of dirt.”

  A more specific turning point for him, Chung said, came in 1991— “after I heard South Korean radio programs. South Korea sent propaganda balloons. I got a radio from a balloon and started listening to South Korean broadcasts—M.BC, CBS [the Christian Broadcasting System], KBS. When I acquired the radio I was suffering from self-contradictions. I had to write North Korean propaganda saying that all the people were living well and had plenty to eat. I felt the discrepancies. I listened to KBS programs specifically targeted to North Koreans. At first I didn’t believe them but later I acknowledged some of what they said. Even to this moment I don’t believe all of it.”