Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  So was it the case that the people did not connect Kim’s rule to their problems? “They don’t blame Kim Il-sung, but they do blame Kim Jong-il,” Ko said. “The moment Kim Jong-il came into power the problems started, they think. All North Koreans believe Kim Il-sung is a war hero who brought about the independence of Korea. They worship him. Even though I betrayed North Korea, I still revere Kim Il-sung, think very highly of him. Probably all the defectors here think that way It’s such a closed society.”

  Ko had found, he said, that “people in South Korea are not alert enough. I know that Kim Jong-il is brutal enough to start a war. Most people in North Korea believe the reason North and South cannot reunify is that the U.S. military is stationed here. And if the U.S. moves out, they think, reunification is only a matter of time. But removing U.S. troops won’t bring about reunification. Kim Il-sung knows that if free markets and other foreign influences come in, his regime will collapse. I support economic sanctions. But for economic sanctions to work China would have to give up its socialist ideal.

  Without that change we can’t have change in North Korea, because the regime has the support of the Chinese.”

  I told Ko about Washington’s plans for Radio Free Asia broadcasts in Korean and asked if he thought those could help open the society. “That’s an exciting idea!” he said. “A lot of people listen to the radio so it has a high chance of disrupting the regime. It would be effective. Most North Koreans don’t know what’s happening in North Korea. When I was living there I was waiting for someone to tell me what I should do. No one ever did. On those broadcasts, defectors should talk and persuade their friends in North Korea—let them know we’re alive. Maybe that would inspire them. Put it in terms they can understand. Instead of having someone say that South Korea is experiencing an economic boom, get defectors on the radio to give examples of-what can be bought down here.” As a percentage of the respective average incomes, “the price of a Hyundai Sonata II here, for example, is equivalent to the price of a suit in North Korea.”

  I asked him about the leaflets the South Koreans dropped by balloon. “I’ve read them myself,” he replied, “although you’re forbidden to read them. If word gets out they have been dropped, State Security sends lots of people out to watch. If anyone is seen picking up one of the leaflets to read it, someone will tattle and the person reading it will go to prison.”

  Another North Korean who told me about the growing criticism of Kim Jong-il in the 1980s was Kim Nam-joon, who defected to the South in August 1989 while serving as a People’s Army second lieutenant. “The food shortage got worse in the early 1980s,” Kim Nam-joon told me.8 “Most people tied that to the appearance of Kim Jong-il on the political stage. Kim Jong-il is a very unlucky man. He graduated from Kim Il-sung University in 1964. Until the late 1970s he worked quietly in the party. In the 1980s he started appearing in public. People connected all the failures to him. In 1984, when there was flooding in South Korea, North Korea offered aid to the South. Each month at a military hospital in my area a two-and-a-half-ton truck had come, filled with supplies. After we started aiding South Korea, the truck would show up with only two kilograms or so of supplies per month. For workers, the grain ration had been 700 grams a day. The authorities would subract 20 grams to store in case of-war. Then they started taking another 20 grams out for aid to South Korea.” Military men got a larger ration—800 grams was the standard—but still, when that was cut, “I could feel it,” Kim said.

  Kim Nam-joon told me that in 1989, “fifteen more grams were cut from the grain ration to pay for the youth festival, so we were down to 645 grams a day.” I asked about what Asians refer to as “side dishes,” a catchall term for the rest of their diet besides grain. He laughed bitterly. “If it was the season for Chinese cabbage, that’s what we’d have. Maybe just salted. Or if it was radishes—salted. To try to make us think we were getting a variety of dishes, they would cut the vegetable in different shapes: a bowl in which it was cut into cubes, another in which it was sliced—the same vegetable. Soup was just the water that had been used for washing rice, with a little salt added.”

  Actually, Kim Nam-joon told me, blaming Kim Jong-il in that case was unfair since the shortages of the 1980s could be traced directly back to the early 1970s “when Kim Il-sung made his declaration about national farming. It was nonsense. He did it because there wasn’t enough coal, so people had to go to the mountains and cut trees for firewood. So the mountains are bare. Kim Il-sung said since there are no trees on the mountains we’ll use them for farmland. OK, you guys, cut the trees—-we’ll farm there. ‘Reclaim more land’ was the motto, but you can’t fight nature. After a couple of years the mountains started eroding from the rain, and the runoff clogged the rivers. The water supply couldn’t get to other farm areas.”9

  That struck me as a rather sophisticated analysis of agricultural policy for an army junior officer to have recited, so I asked Kim Nam-joon if people really had talked in such terms about the Great Leader’s policy failures. “They’re so simple-minded they don’t complain,” he replied. “They only see what’s in front of them.” What he had told me was “something I figured out after coming to Seoul. I only speculated about it while I was in North Korea. But I had a calculator in 1987 or ’88. I once calculated something. All the people were hungry, but the media said that each year North Korea was harvesting 8.8 million tons of grain. I calculated, even assuming there were around 30 million people in North Korea”—the actual population was only something over half that—“and applied the standard grain rations to see how much grain that would be. I came up with a figure of 4.5 million tons. So I wondered where the other 4.3 million tons had gone. I realized it was another lie.”

  The thought of the regime having lied to him set Kim Nam-joon off on a bitter tirade. “Kim Il-sung is such a liar, such a hypocrite, such an imitator,” he raged. It was Kim Nam-joon who told me of the slogan theft mentioned in chapter 13. “At people’s homes there’s a slogan, ‘Fish cannot live out of-water. The people cannot live without the People’s Army.—Kim Il-sung.’ When I came to South Korea I learned that Mao Zedong was actually the one who said that. Kim is such a copycat. He’s so stupid. In the early ’70s he said, ‘Find land.’ In the ’80s he said, ‘Find water,’ after all the rivers had been clogged from mountain erosion. He said that for farming we would have to find underground water supplies. Of course, there’s not enough water underground. All this brought about the decline of North Korean agriculture.”

  Kim Nam-joon recalled that he had been a typically faithful believer through high school. His parents were ethnic Koreans who had lived in the Russian Far East, near Khabarovsk, where his father served in the Soviet Navy. In 1959, three years before Nam-joon’s birth, the father retired and the family moved to Chongjin, a major port on the east coast of North Korea.

  “The family moved because my father had been member of the Communist Party in Korea before moving to the Soviet Union in 1945, after liberation,” Kim Nam-joon told me. “Father was sixty had his pension and wanted to come home. He figured he would get special privileges thanks to his political history. Chongjin was a place where a lot of returnees were sent to resettle—especially those from Japan. The government told them to go there. Mother opposed returning. In the event, their life in North Korea was so deprived they wished they could go back to the Soviet Union. Growing up, I heard them complaining all the time. When they lived in the Soviet Union, they had radios, bicycles—all the luxuries. Many people who came to Chongjin from the Soviet Union were married to Russian women. They were allowed to return to the Soviet Union if they wished. But my parents were both Koreans so they weren’t allowed to leave once they had returned to Korea.”

  Despite his parents’ complaints, Kim said, he had not felt any contradiction between reality and what he was taught in the North Korean schools. That was “because my father was a totally committed communist. Of course my mother was not used to the lifestyle in North Korea, but I di
dn’t really feel a conflict until I graduated from high school. I thought everyone in the world lived the way I did. The general mentality in North Korea is, if they tell you it’s red, you say it’s red even if it’s really blue.

  “In 1983, though, I entered the Kankon Military Academy and became more internationalized. The academy is a two-year military college in Pyongyang where they train officers. I entered after three years in the military. When you enter the military academy you are supposed to start to get a feel for the foreign world. To be able to teach our subordinates to deal with reality, future officers had to be in contact with reality. We needed to see foreign newspapers. It wasn’t that open, really—-we could only have a taste. But they did let us have a glimpse of the real world. North Korea teaches that capitalism is on the brink of collapse, but from all my reading at the academy, I realized capitalism has a better future than socialism. Take the case of Hungary, which was starting to prosper in those days. At first I thought the Hungarians were rich because of socialist ideas and the communist system. Then I realized that they had grown prosperous thanks to capitalist ideas. The most important thing that influenced me was the knowledge I got of South Korea. I had thought of South Korea as corrupt and poorly governed. But at the military academy they had a catalog of South Korean weaponry I realized they had high-tech weapons, and far more military vehicles than North Korea. Before entering the academy, I thought all South Koreans were poor. I believed that their housing was like refugee camps. But at the academy they taught a course on the Republic of Korea, telling us about lifestyles and so on. I started to think maybe the people in South Korea were not as miserable as I had thought.

  “At the academy, although I was beginning to get a little suspicious of the regime I still didn’t have so many real doubts. And I didn’t talk with people at the academy about my suspicions. It was after I graduated, got my commission and was stationed at the Demilitarized Zone that I began to really face facts. We had binoculars and could compare the reality across the DMZ with what we had been told. Near the DMZ there’s a South Korean town. I realized it had beautiful houses. I saw lots of helicopters and other vehicles. I figured it would take a prosperous country to maintain it.

  “A big impetus to my defection came in July 1987 when I saw South Korean television broadcasts. I was head of the border guard unit, which gave me a lot of authority despite my low rank. I had access to the camp commander’s room. There was a Japanese television in there with the channels blocked. Accidentally one day I saw that the back was open and I moved a switch. I got to see the U.S. Armed Forces Korea Net-work (AFKN), which was totally surprising. I got up my courage further and changed channels to KBS, where the Midnight Debate was on. Sometimes I watched it after that. Even the highest-quality television sold in North Korea is the dial-type. They move the dial to channel nine and solder it in place. But from the back you can still turn the channels. I liked to watch the Midnight Debate. A weekly 40-kilometer [25-mile] hike was from 10 P.M. Friday to 6 A.M. Saturday so everyone was out of the camp at the time when I turned that program on each week. I didn’t really know what they were talking about. I was just looking at the people. South Korea was supposed to be poor and ugly but they were lavishly dressed and had some fat on them. All the students in the studio audience were wearing watches—that would be almost a miracle if it were North Korea.

  “I just watched once a week for four weeks before I got caught. I was afraid I would be sent to prison then. But in order to be part of this border guard brigade you had to have a good family background. Even Premier Yon Hyon-muk’s son was in the border guards. I had paek [connections] so I was only demoted and sent to a front-line infantry brigade. That was in August of 1987. For two years I had so much conflict in my mind. Should I commit suicide? Defect? There was no prospect of promotion for someone who had been demoted and sent to the infantry. If I had children later on, they would be deemed to have a bad family background because of me.”

  In 1988, Kim Nam-joon felt the impact of a momentous announcement by South Korean President Roh Tae-woo. On July 7 of that year, emulating West Germany’s Ostpolitik, or outreach to East Germany, Roh issued his own six-point Nordpolitik proposal for an improved North-South relationship, including economic and personnel exchanges. “A balloon dropped a copy of Saenal [New Day],” Kim told me. “One of the articles dealt with the July declaration of Roh Tae-woo. After reading that, I decided I had to go to South Korea. For twenty-five years I had been hearing Kim Il-sung’s New Year’s proclamations. Every time I heard them, I thought, ‘That’s a pack of lies, but I guess that’s what leaders have to say’ But when I saw Roh’s July 7 proclamation I analyzed it for forty minutes, underlined parts of it and decided, ‘This is true.’ Even regarding the North-South issue, Roh showed real intent. Kim Il-sung would always say, ‘We have to reunify peacefully’ You didn’t really see much eagerness in it. But in Roh’s proclamation I saw the yearning.

  “Two other guys read it, too. Kim Kwang-choon defected with me and the other man was supposed to, but he couldn’t get out. I suppose he must have been caught. Most other people who have defected did so on the spur of the moment, but I deliberated for a whole year. After I had planned it for eight months, the other two came into the picture four months before the actual defection. I hear the brigade I was in was dispersed. Maybe the people close to me are in big trouble.”

  Ko Young-hwan was one of the North Koreans who had to go abroad before starting to realize what was really happening at home. Born in 1953, the year the Korean War ended, Ko studied for seven years in a foreign languages institute before enrolling in Pyongyang’s Foreign Languages University. After graduation, he joined the Foreign Ministry. He was stationed as a diplomat in Geneva for one year, in Zaire twice for a total of five years, then in the Congo. He was first secretary in the North Korean embassy in the Congo when he defected in 1991. After that, South Korea put him to work as a researcher at the Institute for North Korean Studies in Seoul. Skinny with gold-rimmed glasses, when I interviewed him in 1993 he presented the sort of studious appearance that made me feel certain he would adjust well to life in the South Korean capital.10

  “Most North Korean citizens believe that when Kim Il-sung was in full power the economy was better,” Ko told me. “They believe the economy has gone down since the late 1970s when Kim Jong-il started appearing on the political scene.” But Ko, like Kim Nam-joon, felt that the declines of that period resulted from the policies of the father, rather than those of the son. “This is the buzz in North Korea: ‘When Kim Il-sung was in power, everything was perfect, but now that Kim Jong-il is taking over it can be very bad.’ The truth is, in the 1950s and ’60s the economy thrived because support from communist countries—the Soviet Union, China and Eastern European countries— made possible a stable economy. But in the late 1960s the country started using half its gross national product for the military. That’s why the life of the people worsened. The change almost coincided with the time Kim Jong-il came into power. Thus Kim Il-sung’s faults are blamed on Kim Jong-il.”

  I asked Ko about the origins of his decision to defect. “Three events really shook me up regarding communist ideology,” he told me. “First, I heard Gorbachev’s speech on perestroika in 1987. I wanted to know more. Second was the reunification of East and West Germany. Third was the political turmoil in Albania. The Gorbachev speech was the first time I doubted the socialist ideal, but earlier, while I was in Zaire from 1981 to 1983, I experienced my first concerns and doubts about the education I had received in North Korea. I heard about South Korea from other people and learned that what I had been taught was not true. That’s when my ideas began to be shaken. After 1987 I believed socialism could not succeed in North Korea.”

  We talked about my observations regarding fanaticism as a quality that had seemed to be at its peak when I first visited Pyongyang in 1979. Ko agreed, saying things were changing. “The younger generations of the late 1970s and today are totally different,”
he said. “I was one of the fanatics until 1987. Up until about 1985, most people were that way But toward the end of the ’80s people started having doubts about the socialist ideal, and about whether we could really beat South Korea in war. The difference is that the new younger generation are doubters, not fanatics. That earlier younger generation of the late ’70s—those people have now become family men, mainly interested in stability.” Ko said people tended to develop doubts between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-nine.

  The challenge for people who harbored doubts was to keep their lips zipped. Regarding Kim Jong-il, “the only thing they can talk about is the fact he is the son of Kim Il-sung,” Ko said. “They don’t dare discuss whom he married, who his half-brother is, the fact that he’s short—any of these could send them to prison. There is twice as much repression as when Kim Il-sung was in power. After the late ’70s it got so bad that if you went to a store, asked for toothpaste, were told there wasn’t any and complained, asking, ‘What kind of a store is this?’ you could be sent to prison as a political dissident. While I was in university there were about 1,000 students. Each year about ten students disappeared for such transgressions—even for saying there was bad blood between Kim Jong-il and Kim Pyong-il,” his younger stepbrother.

  I asked Ko how, if people could not talk freely, he had learned how people viewed Kim Jong-il. “Inside North Korea you can’t hear that kind of complaint,” the ex-diplomat told me. “But when people visit an overseas embassy and have a drink, they say things like ‘Kim Jong-il should maybe spend more time on the scientific and technical side’—something very indirect, so that if there were any repercussions they could hope to get away with it. Another indirect conversation you could hear among high officials relates to China’s reforms. They would say, ‘China is doing very well nowadays.’ They don’t directly say that North Korea should be like China.”