Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Kim blamed subordinates for the fact that “the people are forced to wander aimlessly looking for rice” during what he called a “march of hardship.” Party officials, “who do not use their brains to solve problems, who just sit at their desks complaining and studying words,” were at fault, he asserted. “I cannot solve all the problems … as I have to control important sectors such as the military and the party as well. If I concentrated only on the economy there would be irrecoverable damage to the revolution. The Great Leader told me when he was alive never to be involved in economic projects, just concentrate on the military and the party and leave economics to party functionaries. If I do delve into economics, then I cannot run the party and the military effectively.”

  Exhorting party officials to take “measures to guarantee rice for the military,” Kim told them that socialism had collapsed in many countries because “the party changed and could no longer control the military.” (He might have been recalling how elements of the Romanian military had executed the Ceaucescus.) Enemies, “seeing our temporary troubles, are crying out that our socialism has collapsed and are seeking the chance to invade. If the U.S. imperialists know that we do not have rice for the military, then they will immediately invade us.”

  The solution, Kim said, was to politically educate the people, especially farmers, to spare more food for the soldiers. But the officials were going about that in the wrong way Instead of leaving their desks to make direct appeals to the people, they were relying on print and broadcast media—-which people could hardly receive due to energy shortages. “Currently the farmers and miners are hiding food at every opportunity,” for the black market, Kim said. Party workers must preach to them: “ ‘Who is going to supply food to your sons and grandsons in the army? If we cannot give them rice, then when the yankees invade us we cannot defeat them and your sons and daughters will become imperialist slaves once more.’ It is this logic that must be used to persuade those who hide and smuggle food, to regain their consciences.”

  In fact, food became so scarce that many soldiers took to stealing it from civilians, even deserting from the army. “Physically they’re very frail now, very weak,” the former army captain Ahn Young-kil told me. “So their mental state has weakened, too.” Mean-while, the soldiers were losing the hope that they might enjoy good lives following their army hitches, Ahn said. “They are very depressed because they go home on leave and see their parents improperly fed. They see no hope.” In case of-war, Ahn predicted, “the majority wouldn’t run away. But their fighting power and spirit would not be the same as in the past when they were well fed.”

  Choi Myung-nam, the special forces veteran, said theft and embezzlement had increased drastically in the military, starting in the 1990s, as soldiers began to leave socialist ideals behind and adopt the attitude that “without money you can’t survive in society.” More and more, they focused on the means—almost all illicit—of accumulating the money and material goods they believed they would need if they hoped to marry and live reasonably well after finishing their army hitches, Choi said. Their talk turned to dreams of the goods—radios, fashionable clothes—that they hoped to buy once they returned to the civilian world. That did not mean they had begun to fear war, he cautioned. They continued to think “it would be an honor to die as a martyr in war.”

  Ex-sergeant Choi Kwang-hyeok said the changed situation had taken such a toll that “man for man I don’t think North Korea is a match for South Korea.” That would not mean the North could not call upon its other advantages if it made the fateful decision for war. Its military remained far larger than the South’s, for example, so the man-for-man comparison need not apply. And its ability to inflict enormous punishment on the South with its artillery remained. The North’s “main weapon is artillery,” said an intelligence professional in the South. “It doesn’t take that much practice and physical conditioning to shoot that stuff.”

  In terms of supplies, if outsiders had let North Korea suffer alone the aftermath of disastrous flooding in 1995, said Ahn, the year 1996 “would have been the most critical point.” Regarding their ability to make war, the North’s leaders would have had to conclude that it was a case of use it or lose it. In the absence of aid, by 1997 “North Korea would not have been able to retain the support system for waging war,” Ahn judged. But China, the United States, Japan, South Korea and other countries did come to the North’s aid with food shipments. Ahn criticized that aid as appeasement and complained it was “only making North Korea more confident.”

  It was questionable how much comfort South Koreans, Americans and Japanese should take from evidence of declining North Korean military morale. Even if the North’s war capabllity declined past the point where an attack could represent a rational last-ditch decision, the top leadership might not realize that because of North Korean underlings’ notorious reluctance to convey bad news to the boss. Kim Jong-il in his December 1996 speech insisted that military commanders knew they could not fool him because he had made it a habit to “visit them unexpectedly. Therefore in the People’s Army the commanders are always prepared to meet the supreme commander, so they are always on alert with clean barracks and they attempt to improve their soldiers’ living conditions while always being ready to fight.” But he acknowledged that civilian party officials had tried to pull the wool over his late father’s eyes. Once when the Great Leader visited Hamhung, “some party workers brought goods by train to fill the stores in the city. This is typical pointism that deceives the leader, so I ordered them punished. However there are still many party workers doing this.”

  Besides the possibility of delusion there was that irrational loser’s choice, reportedly articulated by Kim Jong-il in a meeting with his father and top military leaders: to “break the world.” In sum: Fireworks on the Korean Peninsula could not be ruled out, as the following interviews with former military men (presented in order of the times of their defections, from earlier to later) helped to persuade me.

  When I interviewed Kim Nam-joon five years after his 1989 defection, the former army second lieutenant was a university student in Seoul but he still looked like a soldier—-with his prominent jaw and what Americans call a “white-wall” haircut, almost down to the scalp near his ears but longer on top. Kim told me that besides food problems (-which he has described in chapter 21), military men also suffered from a shortage of clothing and shoes. “I got one new summer uniform a year, and a new winter uniform every two years—not enough, considering all the training. Once a week we had to walk 40 kilometers [25 miles] in a day. I had one pair of boots to wear during the winter. That wasn’t enough. You sweated, and you had to wash and dry your boots. The problem was, there was no way of buying them. The more cunning soldiers would steal others’ boots. The training was so burdensome I even thought of killing myself. By the time soldiers finish their ten-year hitches and are mustered out to civilian society, their minds are dead. All they can think of is shooting.”

  Kim, a commissioned officer, had befriended, and later defected in company with, a noncommissioned officer. In some other countries’ armies that would violate fraternization regulations. “In communist society we don’t put much stock in rank,” he explained when I asked him about it. “We believe in equality. We don’t address each other with honorific or humble speech based on rank or age. We don’t call higher-ranking or older soldiers songsaeng-nim [honorable elder, teacher]. I commanded a platoon of thirty men. Kim Kwang-choon was my deputy. We had to be close. We became very close as people, rank aside. That was the basis of the relationship. Kim often came to my home.3

  Q. Tell me about the morale of the military. If orders were given to go to war, how would the soldiers feel?

  A. “In the first stages, 90 percent of the soldiers would do as they were told—invade South Korea, say. They are ignorant, they don’t yet know right from wrong. Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il may know an invasion would be evil, but the soldiers don’t. They just do their jobs. Officer
s who graduated from the military academy like me might have some doubts, but they lack the courage to do anything about them. Even if they had access to a television set they wouldn’t take advantage of the opportunity to watch South Korean television. Soldiers truly believe that invading South Korea would be for the purpose of expelling the U.S. imperialists.

  “In the second stage, though, if soldiers get down to South Korea they’ll see cities full of well-dressed, well-fed people. They’ll comprehend the reality of North Korea. If I went to North Korea dressed like this [nice suit of a charcoal hue, gold watch, starched white shirt with French cuffs, tie], everybody would faint. When I see South Koreans walking around, I still feel they’re so fortunate. Even the dogs I see wouldn’t be pets if they were in North Korea—they’d all be eaten. The North Korean soldiers when they see all this will become aware, but their officers will be ready for that. They train North Korean officers to be prepared for just this situation: ‘When all the people are dead with their watches on, North Korean soldiers will run to scavenge the corpses. You have to teach them not to.’ They already give that training to officers back in North Korea. I had it myself.

  “But all this ideological turmoil in the end would lead to a South Korean victory. Those North Korean scavengers would be beyond control. North Korean soldiers are soldiers first, human beings second. But when they come to South Korea and see all the advantages of the free-market system, they’ll be humans first and soldiers second. There’s a Korean saying, ‘Even a king if starved for three days will go out and steal.’ Even if they are brain-washed, people are still human.” Q. What about relations among the soldiers?

  A. “Each 120-man company has a commander, who is a captain, plus a party commissar. These days they’re like cats and dogs. If-war broke out, they’d have the right to fire their weapons and they would shoot each other. They hate each other.4 There’s a great possibility of North Korea invading South Korea, but the South Koreans would win for all these reasons.

  “By the way I heard there’s a tunnel that comes all the way down to Seoul, near Kimpo Airport. I told the South Korean authorities about it and they’re trying to find it. That tunnel is intended to take advantage of the fact that most of South Korea’s military is posted near the DMZ and there’s virtually nothing south of Seoul. So they can just come through the tunnel, going under the South Korean defenders, and head south. Bypassing the defenders, they could take over much of South Korea. Three days ago they started digging for the tunnel. It could be a couple of hundred meters deep.”

  Q. What sort of food and petroleum reserves does North Korea maintain for wartime use?

  A. “We’re taught that we have a three-year supply of food and petroleum. But I speculate there isn’t much left. It’s just a pitiful situation. Even when I was there they would take rice from the wartime reserves. Now things are much worse, so it’s very probable they’re using the petroleum reserve now. There are colonels who inspect the DMZ lines in their trucks. When they don’t have enough fuel, they have to walk, maybe twenty miles, back to camp.”

  Q. What happens following Kim Il-sung’s death?

  A. “I don’t believe in a military coup. The military wouldn’t have that much power. But inside the central party apparatus they’re not all Kim Il-sung’s family. There are also members of [Marshal] O Jin-u’s family and other first-generation revolutionaries’ families. They’ll be the leaders in any coup attempt.”

  Q. What did your superiors think about Kim Jong-il and his orders?

  A. “They follow the orders because they have to. But they hate following him. He’s a very authoritarian personality. Take the West Sea Barrage. A Soviet engineer came and said it would take twenty years to build. Kim Jong-il said to do it in five years. They did it in six years. Probably all twenty million citizens were involved. Kim Il-sung went through lots of hardship to get where he is. But most people feel just being Kim Il-sung’s son hasn’t earned Kim Jong-il his position.”

  Q. Soldiers serve for ten years or so. Do they go without sex all that time?

  A. “Although it’s not allowed, guys fantasize and masturbate. Others go to nearby villages and rape women, or seduce them with promises of marriage. Officers who have graduated from the military academy are allowed to marry and bring their wives to the camp. I was married. I never heard the word ‘homosexual’ until I came to South Korea, but I saw a lot of that in the military. The veterans would latch onto new, seventeen-year-old recruits. It’s not like homosexuality in the West. It’s just that there are no women. In their sleep, the men are lined up in their bunks. A young guy with soft skin may seem like a woman. Around half of the soldiers were involved in that sort of thing.”

  Q. Did you notice any changes in the military from the cultural inroads made by foreigners at the 1989 youth festival?

  A. “No. In the military you can’t satisfy your cultural wishes. There wan’t that big a change. From a foreigner’s viewpoint it may have seemed bigger. The government made people wear colorful clothing, and brought in discos and disco music. A foreigner may have imagined North Korean society had opened up, but the government’s policy actually has become more rigid by the year in terms of restraints on behavior. Kim Jong-il has a slogan about openness. ‘If you want openness, you open a window.

  But flies and mosquitoes can come in then. So we’ll have mosquito nets.’ We actually had to become more tightly knit than before, rather than opening up.”

  Q. What do you think about Radio Free Asia?

  A. “It’s a very good idea. I have a lot of expectations for the U.S. role in opening up North Korea. South Korea has limitations in dealing with that. The U.S. should do its utmost to knock at the door and make the North Koreans open up.”

  Q. What about radio availability?

  A. “Most people don’t have radios. If people could listen to this kind of broadcast the regime would have collapsed years ago. The people who can listen are those who already have power—those in the central committee of the party.”

  Kim Kwang-choon, the master sergeant on the front line who defected in 1989 with Kim Nam-joon by swimming the Imjin River, was a handsome, clear-eyed man of twenty-nine when I met him in 1994. He was quite short. If I had not known he was Korean I would have assumed from his appearance that he was Southeast Asian, perhaps Thai.

  A native ofPyongsong in South Pyongan province, Kim had been assigned for eight years to security details ofthe city ofKaesong, just north of the border. “While I was working near Panmunjom I got to know about Seoul and South Korea,” he told me. “When you first enter the military you don’t know, but ifyou work four or five years around the DMZ you get to realize what’s happening. There’s an atmosphere of war. Both sides spread leaflets and broadcast propaganda. South Korea gives away watches and stockings, and the South Korean literature includes articles from newspapers like Dong-A Ilbo and Chosun Ilbo. The watches are electronic. Now that I’m in the South I see them everywhere. They’re pretty cheap, too. The South Koreans would send up balloons filled with those materials during the night. They were supposed to explode after two hours—usually around Kaesong. So I would pick them up. I had to give them to State Security, but while picking them up I got to see the materials.”

  Q. I notice that just about every defector I’ve interviewed so far, including you, has worn a fancy gold watch.

  A. “When I came South I bought a gold-plated Seiko. In North Korea gold is very rare, so every defector wants a gold watch. A government person takes us to a watch store and says, ‘Pick the one you want.’ Then the government pays for it.”

  Q. You were able to read Dong-A Ilbo and Chosun Ilbo even though the North Korean school system doesn’t teach Chinese characters?

  A. “This is part of psychological warfare. The Ministry of National Defense in Seoul replaces the hanja [Chinese characters, which are used by most South Korean publishers for many loan words] and reprints the articles all in hangul [the indigenous Korean alphabet, which is
used in combination with hanja in the South but whose use Kim Il-sung made exclusive in the North as an affirmation of linguistic nationalism]. Sometimes they leave the hanja in, but we can try to guess the meanings.

  “When I was low-ranked I couldn’t look at those. I had to turn them in. Actually I didn’t even want to read them. But later, starting around 1986 as I got promoted in rank, I was able to read them secretly in the woods. I didn’t really grasp the South Korean political scene, but I read articles on foreign affairs and the outside world. I got interested in articles about demonstrations and crime. I was fascinated because in North Korea you couldn’t possibly dream of having a demonstration or riot. I was amazed that people could have their voices, could even criticize the head of state. I read a lot of articles on that. I was very surprised and thought, ‘There must be a lot of freedom in South Korea for them to have these demonstrations.”

  Q. Why were you interested in crime stories?

  A. “In North Korea they don’t put that bad stuff in the papers. At first I thought South Korea must be in turmoil. Everybody must be a criminal. Ultimately, I started thinking that South Koreans must have a lot of time for theft and such. It must be an individualistic society.”

  Q. How could you think such thoughts, having been raised in North Korea?

  A. [Evidently he didn’t quite get the question.] “Even to this day I don’t know how I defected. But to tell you the truth, it was the lack of material goods in North Korea that made me defect. The biggest difference between South and North is that the North Korean economy is based on rationing. I realized that South Korea was a free-market society where people could go to the market and get what they liked.”