Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Kim interrupted his memories to tell me that North Korean soldiers had no actual knowledge regarding the weaponry facing them, which could help explain their strong confidence of victory. Then he continued recalling the teachings that had been drilled into him in the army: “As soon as we have won the war, we will root out capitalist ideas in the South. We army men, stationed there, will teach the people about socialism, teach them to follow the leadership of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung. Whoever resists will be killed. Right now the United States is basing nuclear weapons in Okinawa and other places. But there is no need to fear them. We have better arms than the U.S., and we can win. So feel confident, soldiers, and do not fear the nuclear arms of the U.S. If a war is staged in South Korea, that will not be an invasion but a war for justice. Once we are unified, we no longer have to use our money to build up our military might. We can use all our resources for the betterment of the people’s lives. Having the South Korean farmland, with the country united under the leadership of Kim Il-sung, we can produce enough staple food not to be threatened by the Western world’s economic sanctions. As soon as we are reunified, we will all be able to ‘eat rice with beef soup, wear silk clothing and live in houses with tile roofs.’ Right now we don’t have enough food supplies and we must train strenuously. This is because our army is an army for war. As soon as the war is won we will have a better society.”

  I asked Kim whether the indoctrinations had changed in any way during his ten years in the army. “The basic objectives remained the same, although there may have been some change in structure,” he replied. “According to political events the structure might change. Right now [October 1994] I’d speculate they’re teaching with reference to the North Korea–U.S. talks— maybe something to the effect that the United States won’t give up what we want so we’ll still have to advance reunification through force. Each year the New Year’s teachings by Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il were emphasized. From 1986, there was more emphasis on getting South Korea’s farmland and eating better: ‘This ordeal is continuing because of South Korea and the United States. We have to defeat their armies and unite the North and South.’”

  Kim said he had been subjected to the lectures “right up to July 14, 1988, the day before I was mustered out. In North Korea, we have ‘Strategic Sundays,’ for study, plus three hours of ideological study daily.” He acknowledged that those sessions could become tedious. “Of course, if you hear the same thing over and over, you’ll get bored. But the punishment for drowsing during the lectures is so severe you can’t even think of allowing yourself to doze off. Punishments include from ten hours of continuous ideological studies to a whole week of them, around the clock, with no sleep. They may hit you, or make you run around the mountains.” But Kim didn’t study just out of fear, he said. “I was enthusiastic because diligence would pay off later. If you want to climb the career ladder, knowing ideology is essential. I wanted to enter a university after my enlistment, and the very first exam to screen applicants is on ideology. At the same time, I was very loyal.”

  In the end, he said, “I was not selected to take the exam. Only two out of a hundred were selected. It turned out they had to be the sons of high-ranking officials or of workers very loyal to the regime. I had some hopes but was disappointed in the end.” Although he was disappointed, he was not disillusioned. “Even if I had been dissatisfied, there was nothing I could do. My fate would not have changed. So I just accepted the outcome. If I felt some disappointment, I blamed my parents: Why wasn’t my father a high-ranking official?”

  I knew that the usual procedure for anyone ending his military hitch was to be sent to work in the mines, unless he managed to get into a university. I asked Kim how he had avoided that fate. “In principle, everybody ending his enlistment is sent to the mines,” he said. “But the regime makes sure parents have at least one child at home to look after them. My two elder brothers had already been sent to the mines, so I was allowed to go home to Sinuiju. I worked there in a company making textile-dyeing equipment. Afterward I went to Pyongyang on temporary assignment as a construction worker under the central party’s management department. I worked on the Koryo Hotel, Kim Jong-il’s gift apartments—those he awarded to people—and the 105-story hotel, until April 1992. I went back to Sinuiju then, and in August went to Siberia.”

  He explained the lure of Russia. “When I got back from the army, my father was seventy-two and my mother was in her sixties. Neither could work any longer. I had to work hard to support them. The problem was, you couldn’t get extra pay for diligence. That’s why I decided to go to Siberia. It paid twenty times what you could make in North Korea.” Getting there was “very difficult,” Kim said. “There are about 10,000 North Koreans working in Siberia. Each year a third of them rotate home, so there are some 3,000 openings. Around 9,000 sign up, which means a three-to-one competition. To be selected you have to give side gifts to officials. The family had no money. I borrowed 1,000 won —a couple of years’ wages. With that I managed to get a three-year contract.”

  There was more indoctrination before his departure, but this time he quickly had an opportunity to see that what he was being taught wasn’t true. “I had to undergo an intense ideological training session. They taught us that Russians were having a hard time since they’d given up socialism, so we shouldn’t associate with Russians in Siberia. When I got there, I secretly visited stores and discovered that the situation was not at all as I had been told.

  Russians worked very diligently and got paid accordingly for their work. I also came into contact with some Chinese merchants who had visited South Korea. I learned from them about the real situation in the South. I also associated with some immigrants from Korea, and listened to South Korean radio. So I started to become affected. What really made me decide I’d been lied to was when I visited department stores in the larger cities, which had lots of South Korean goods on sale.”

  I had understood Kim’s job to have been logging, but he corrected me on that. “Among the Koreans sent to Siberia,” he said, “a few are sent to mines instead of doing logging, to earn Russian currency that can be used to pay for trucking the timber and so on. I was one of those, and I realized I “was getting only 10 percent of-what my Russian co-workers got. The other 90 percent was going to the [Korean Workers’] party. I got upset at that and argued about it, getting into trouble. At dawn on the day I would have been arrested for insubordination, I escaped to Vladivostok. Two Chinese-Korean immigrants there helped me, and when I heard of a ship in port that was bound for Pusan, I stowed away aboard it. I got to South Korea December 30, 1993. Now I work for a pharmaceutical company, in the personnel department.”

  I asked Kim to permit me a personal question about his tattoo. “Some friends and I got tattooed when we went into the army,” he replied. “This says, ‘Martial Spirit.’” I wondered if he had talked to any former soldiers, mustered out more recently than he, and learned whether their indoctrination had been like his own. “Yes, I knew some in Siberia. They were told: ‘No one here is going to end his hitch before a war comes.’ They call the soldiers ‘reunification soldiers.’” Would they fight? “They don’t have any fear. They’ll just run down to South Korea once war erupts.” Could the North win? “With what I know now, they don’t have a chance of-winning. I don’t believe they could take Seoul—although Seoul certainly would be affected by a-war.”

  I met Chae Myung-hak the same day I spoke with Kim Kil-song in October 1994. Chae had arrived in Seoul the previous February. He sported an early Beatles sort of bowl haircut with heavy bangs down to his eyebrows. From there down his face featured high cheekbones and a strong jaw.

  Chae was born in 1960, in Kuson, a city in North Pyongan Province, he told me. His father had been a policeman. Leaving the force in 1963 after eleven years, the father had then become a communal farmer. Chae’s mother was also a farmer. Chae heard from them that “before my father became a farmer, we lived a comparatively wealthy life.�
�� His own memories of material conditions dated to the late 1960s, “when we didn’t have basic necessities like shoes and clothing, and couldn’t find them in stores. But from the time I was seventeen I have no perception of how the society worked because I was in the army. We were allowed to write letters, but officers would read them first, and when we received letters they only gave us the parts that were cleared. Besides, we had our hands completely full with strenuous mountain training for war. There was no time to think of the rest of society.”

  Chae did not know at the time he enlisted that he would be assigned to the special forces—an elite posting. “For special forces, they pick about 10 percent of recruits, choosing on the basis of good family background and healthy bodies,” he told me. “They trained us to attack certain sites in South Korea, including Kimpo Airport and certain Honest John, Hawk and Patriot missile sites. We specialized in nuclear missile sites. We had spies in South Korea who took pictures of the sites and mapped them. We had exact mockups of the installations we were to attack. We were trained so thoroughly we could even attack blindfolded.” Pending war, only higher-ups knew the actual locations of the targeted sites in South Korea, he said. Mean-while the men prepared to deal with the first obstacle, the heavily mined Demilitarized Zone. “We were trained to cross the DMZ. For training we had the same set-up, fences, mines and all, and we had to practice getting through.”

  I wondered if his trainers had predicted how a new war would begin. “Since my childhood I had been taught that the Korean War erupted because the United States pushed the South Korean army into it,” Chae said. “We were taught that the Americans at some time would start another war, so we must be prepared. It would bring a lot of casualties on both sides. But we had to beat the United States. They told us that a war, which the U.S. would start, was necessary to bring reunification. We would have to win it. They told us the war would start with a U.S. attack, but in looking back on it since my defection I have to assume the plan was for North Korea to invade South Korea.”

  Reunification would bring material benefits, the trainers told their military charges: “They said, ‘We are deprived now because of the United States. But once reunification comes, North and South will prosper together and Korea will become the head of the Asian world.’ We were taught that North Korea was poor because the U.S., with its forces in South Korea, prevents reunification of the peninsula. They said North Korea is very mountainous compared with the South. We don’t have much farmland and can’t grow enough rice. But South Korea has great farming potential while North Korea has mineral resources and advanced heavy industry. They told us that even though South Korea has lots of farmland, they don’t use it to the fullest but instead build army and air bases on it. Therefore, South Korea is poor. So once we reunite, Korea will emerge as the leader of Asia.”

  When I pressed him on the connection in the indoctrination sessions between making war and getting more to eat, Chae replied: “I should clarify that we were not taught that we would invade South Korea to gain its land so we could increase our agricultural production. We were taught that the U.S. and South Korea would invade North Korea, and we then would have to bring about reunification. The benefit of increased food is just an incentive given to soldiers.”

  Chae said he had been taught that Kim Il-sung would be in charge of the reunified Korea—“but then I couldn’t have imagined anything else. He had been our sole leader for decades. I had no doubts. I just presumed that would be the natural outcome.” Soldiers like Chae had “no specific orders” regarding their post-reunification role, “but basically all the political instruction taught me that once reunification came the South Korean army and others, being enemies, would have to change their ideology to socialism. We would have to keep a watch on them.” That didn’t seem a terribly difficult task, in light of what the North Korean soldiers were taught about the South. “I thought South Koreans would be delighted to be reunified by the North Koreans,” Chae said. “In North Korea they broadcast news of South Korean student demonstrations, anti-government and pro-unification. After seeing those broadcasts we assumed that South Koreans were anti-government and would favor the North Korean regime after reunification. When I was in North Korea I believed people were basically the same. The only differences were due to their leaders. The South Korean and U.S. governments, not the people, were the villains, I thought. I even thought I understood U.S. soldiers. I was a sergeant, with a squad of eleven men under me. Being a low-ranking soldier myself, I knew the American soldiers just followed orders.”

  Starting in 1984 when the North sent food aid to the South following flooding there, Chae told me, even for the military “the food problem was an important issue.” Civilians who were supposed to get 600 grams of grain a day got 520. The military suffered a lesser reduction in rations. “We went from 800 grams to 760.” Reasons given were that “the harvest was not so good that year. And we were told we had to help our brothers in South Korea in their desperate straits. Each year the situation worsened, and they explained that the harvests had not been satisfactory. From 1985 through 1988 things got worse, but not so drastically. When I left the military in April of 1987, I was sent to North Hamgyong Province. When I got there I realized the grain ration had been delayed. January, February, March and April rations were not provided. Finally, in June, they gave us the delayed ration. North Hamgyong was an exception, though. Other places were only a couple of months late. People blamed the provincial governor, saying he lacked the ability to overcome the problem by bartering with another province.” The central government did not, however, punish the governor. After all, Chae noted, “the government had sent him there.”

  Chae said that, in civilian life, “my first job was as an engine repairman, but I couldn’t earn much so I took a job as a diver in Rajin. It would pay better and I could buy food on the black market. I dived for marine products on the sea floor—crabs, octopus, clams and so on—-which were exported for foreign exchange. That meant I could make more money.” Chae told me he had harbored no doubts about the system at that point. “I just thought the food shortages were due to poor harvests.”

  Chae went to Russia in October 1989. “According to what I heard from people at home, the youth festival earlier that year caused things to get drastically worse. I heard from some officials that if a country wins the right to host the Olympics, there are lots of economic benefits. The youth festival, on the other hand, drains a country’s treasury so badly it takes five years to recover. To hold the festival the government spends a lot, and the people have to pay”

  Chae wanted very badly to go to the Soviet Union as a logger. But he found that “it’s very difficult to be sent to Siberia if you’re single. Only 1 or 2 percent of those who go don’t have families.” The authorities reasoned that a family’s presence back home would serve as a guarantee of a logger’s return after his contract was up. Chae devised an ingenious strategem. “I made a contract marriage with a woman who had a child. She was the wife of a coworker who was sent to a prison camp, which meant they were automatically divorced. I knew him. He was a senior official, head of the production line. He stole a lot of products that were supposed to be exported, and got caught for embezzlement.”

  That was an economic crime, but Chae said that even in the case of political crimes it was no longer automatic that the offender’s family would be sent away with him. There had been a change of policy. “In 1991 a woman defected with two men and went on television to talk about North Korea. The broadcasts could be seen near the DMZ. This brought about a lot of problems, so the government wanted to get rid of all her relatives. But there were too many, including a number of high-ranking officials. From 1992 the regulations changed. Whoever betrayed the regime, that person was the only traitor. That’s the reason there have been more defections since 1992. People don’t have to worry so much about families they leave behind. Family members now just lose social privileges—no promotions, no central party membership, etc. There�
�s the report that Marshal O Jin-u’s son escaped to China. This won’t affect O Jin-u.”

  Chae said one big reason he was so eager to go to Russia was that, although he had not picked his bride, he did hope eventually to have a real marriage. Mean-while, “the diving job was too dangerous. I almost died three times, twice because of a blocked oxygen hose and another time because of a compression problem. I knew this dangerous job would kill me, but I couldn’t earn enough in normal jobs to get married. So I decided to use my pay from the diving job to give gifts to officials so I could go to Siberia and make more money. I used about 3,000 won to pay off officials: the party secretary at my work unit, the city director in charge of sending people overseas, the vice-head of the State Security office.” I asked him if having to make payoffs to those officials had caused him to doubt the system. “No,” he replied. “It just seemed the natural route to get to Siberia. I wanted very badly to go.”

  It was his arrival in Russia that started to change his attitude. “I realized Siberia and Russia were decades ahead of North Korea. This brought out a discrepancy, because I’d been taught that the Soviet Union was the poorest country among European nations. I realized the government was lying to us. From Koreans I met in Russia, I learned it was North Korea that had invaded South Korea, and that Kim Jong-il hadn’t been born in Korea on Mount Paektu but near Khabarovsk. That was shocking. While I was in Siberia I saw a documentary on [then South Korean President] Roh Tae-woo’s meeting with Gorbachev. The documentary showed South Korean automobile assembly lines. I realized that to sell all those products that I saw in the markets of Khabarovsk, South Korea had to have become industrialized. Over the course of about a year I realized all the facts through conversations with Russians, reading newspapers, watching movies from France, Italy and the United States, watching TV My ideology shifted and became unstable. There was no time to listen to the radio, but occasionally I heard South Korean popular music.”