Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  There were some ghastly communist precedents. Stalin used famine “to achieve mastery” over the Ukraine, as the North Korea demographic expert Nicholas Eberstadt has written. “Soviet troops were actually emplaced at border points to prevent travelers from smuggling food into the desperate region.” Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, once it had taken power country-wide, says Eberstadt, “selectively inflicted” hunger on a group that the communists called “the new people”—Cambodians who had not been with the movement from its guerrilla days.7

  Could the Pyongyang regime be so brutally cynical as to have devised a genocidal policy of ensuring that all or most of the people classified as disloyal would die quickly from hunger—-while the survivors of the famine would include the people whose loyalty was considered essential for regime survival, especially the military and the police? Had Pyongyang calculated that the regime would thus emerge from the period of famine stronger than before, because almost all the survivors would be loyalists? It was a horrifying thought. Knowing something of the ruthlessness of the regime, and with the example of Hitler and the Holocaust so fresh in the West’s collective memory, I could not dismiss the theory out of hand. I arranged a round of intensive interviews, in Seoul, of Koreans and non-Koreans who had knowledge of the North. I showed all the people I interviewed a map of North Korea, downloaded from the Internet. The counties that had been visited by WFP monitors were shaded in green. I asked them to venture explanations of why the areas in white were still closed.

  ***

  Officials who were familiar with Pyongyang’s military deployment shared my doubt that military installations were the sole sticking point regarding the closed counties, most of which are in the mountainous northern part of the country. “I don’t think they’re hiding another nuclear site up there,” said one official.

  “Obviously they have the bulk of their forces echeloned right at the Demilitarized Zone,” another official offered. But only eight of the thirty-nine counties bordered the DMZ. And in the far north “they don’t have very much stuff.” Sensitive military installations in the excluded mountain counties “would surprise me.” As for missile launching sites, “It’s my personal understanding that even the Nodong is on a missile launcher, and the Scuds are on mobile launchers. They don’t want a fixed site because they know we can go after it.” The North Koreans would not have excluded a county “just because there’s a launcher,” he continued. “A county is, like, really big. It’s not like a launcher is so dominating that, like bam! you run into it.”

  A third official looked at the map and wondered if missile manufacturing might account for some—but not all—of the excluded territory. He noted that North Korea’s “two invasion corridors, Chorwon and Munsan, are both in the middle area on the Z”—slang for the Demilitarized Zone. “The Ongjin Peninsula is on the west. Presumably they have significant defenses there, too. Where they build the Nodong missiles may be somewhere in the west— I heard that. They wouldn’t put that too close to the Z.”

  “Kanggye is a defense industry center,” said another official. “But that doesn’t justify making the whole province off-limits.” He was not certain about his assertion, though. Later in our conversation he remarked that he did think it possible that county officials might block access to their entire territory just to protect a single sensitive installation. “County administration can’t be broken up,” he said. “It makes sense to keep the whole county off limits if there’s something you don’t want people to see. Everywhere within that county there’s one political boss—the party boss, who also sits on the economic committee and controls the whole jurisdiction. North Koreans never break up jurisdictions [in such a way that in] this part of the county you can, that part you can’t. It would lead to conflict between policy and lifelong training, [-which] starts with ideology training in kindergarten.”

  That same official mentioned the presence of coal mines, full of disappointed former soldiers who had hoped for better assignments when their hitches expired, as an explanation that might apply to some of the counties. Due to the shortage of electrical power, water could not be pumped from the bottoms of the mines. Fuel shortages and other transportation problems made it difficult to move coal from the mines. Thus many miners (who in many cases remained reserve soldiers, with some access to arms) were effectively out of-work. “I don’t see a military reason in the middle area” of the map, that official said, noting that mountainous Kangwon Province had seen very little combat during the Korean War. However, the North Koreans “consider the coal-mining areas highly sensitive,” he said. “There are lots of coal mines in the top right of the middle white area.” (In 1999 a Beijing correspondent of Seoul’s Chosun Ilbo quoted “people who frequently visit North Korea” as reporting a riot in North Hamgyong’s Onsong mining district.)8

  Several officials mentioned concentration camps as a possible explanation of why those counties were closed. “There’s been some speculation that they might also include prison camps,” one said. “I do think that part of the reason they do it is not just for military installations but for various criminal camps they have up there,” said another.9

  But one official sought to shoot down that theory arguing that the public distribution centers for rationed foodstuffs in a given county would not likely be situated very near any prison camp.

  One promising category of answers could be summed up by an official’s pithy remark: “I suspect that what’s really stopping the WFP from going there is probably that conditions really suck there.” He began tapping on his computer keyboard and soon had called up from the Internet a map from the U.S. Agency for International Development, showing distribution of supplies.10 The distances between ration distribution centers were great in the white regions of the WFP map, he noted. He suspected the roads were bad, as well.

  Another official, looking at the map, said similarly: “They don’t have the resources to assist the [aid workers] to get to these areas. Almost all are incredibly high mountains. Their infrastructure in these areas is no better than Rwanda or the Central African Republic—miserable.” He thought this factor might combine with the presence of prison camps. Yanggang Province “is so isolated, so hard to get to, and there are many camps up there. And the camps are very large.”

  One official spoke of the map’s white regions this way: “We’ve heard the government has just written them off as far as getting food to people. They’re completely on their own. No doubt in large part these are mountain areas with bad infrastructure.”

  I heard several variations of the write-off theory. One of them imputed thorough cynicism to North Korean leaders. In that case an official said: “I suspect these are places that the North Koreans have written off and decided to let them starve.” He added that he found the estimate of up to three million dead to be credible. He noted a certain Korean cultural trait: officials tend to be fiercely protective of their home regions, sharply antagonistic to rival regions. I had seen that trait at its most deadly in South Korea’s 1980 massacre of more than two hundred citizens of the south-western city of Kwangju by paratroopers, sent from a rival region in the southeast to put down pro-democracy demonstrations. In the Korean political culture, “regions without important native sons get nothing,” the official observed. (In this case, though, as we saw in chapter 29, Kim Il-sung himself reportedly had taken pity on North Hamgyong Province although it was not his home province.) The official had heard that the North Korean People’s Army, just as the South’s army had done, “raises regional units but assigns them to other regions so they won’t hesitate to shoot.”

  The North Korean economy, that same official asserted, “never worked. It was subsidized. When big neighbors bugged out, the North Koreans were on the margin. They were unable to respond to natural disaster. They had to prioritize. The military is always first. Whenever you prioritize something, you have to deprioritize something else. The concept that they’ve written people off is right. It’s inevitable they’re going
to write people off. They can’t afford to feed those who are not critical to the survival of the regime, such as coal miners. If you’re in a factory or cooperative that’s [even less] necessary to support the regime—a doll factory, an ice cream or widget factory—you were deprioritized long ago. You close down a factory, it becomes a ghost town. The ration center moves. If you’re not part of the group, you get scre-wed and have to go down the road. There is definitely a fringe population that is being intentionally sacrificed. They don’t really have much choice.”

  There was one other notion that imputed bad faith to the North Korean officials. That was the theory that those thirty-nine counties were off limits because authorities didn’t want food monitors to know that the populace was secretly growing enough food to produce a surplus that could have alleviated the shortage elsewhere in the country. I heard no support for that idea during my interviews, although I did hear that North Koreans farming leased land in the Russian Far East were producing more than their compatriot workers there needed and were shipping the extra supplies back to North Korea.

  But I felt I was getting especially warm in my quest when one official told me: “My gut instinct is that because the region is so blighted they just don’t want people to see it.” The strong points of that theory include its acknowledgement of the importance of face in Korean culture.

  ***

  Besides officials, I interviewed recent defectors. One was Lee Soon-ok, a distribution center chief who had been imprisoned on what she said were trumped-up criminal charges related to her work. I asked her what was in those thirty-nine counties. “Special military factories,” she replied. “North Pyongan, Chagang and Yanggang Provinces are special military production areas. Hamhung has a huge chemical research center. It does research both for the military and for the civilian economy. There’s a military research center in Chagang Province.”

  Q. Anything else?

  A. “That’s where all the regular prisons and political prison camps are. There’s a huge prison in Kyowaso, Yongdam, Kangwon Province. There’s a big political prison at Mount Chol, Tong-nim, North Pyongan Province. In fact [that white part of] North Pyongan is all prison camp area. The white part near Pyongyang is Kaechon. That’s where I was. In the far northeast, at Hoeryong and Kyongsong are two political prison camps. Hoeryong is No. 13 or 14 and Kyongsong is No. 11. I know that because my son was a prison guard. Looking at the map, probably the places are where they have camps. That’s the likely reason for keeping the monitors out.”

  Q. Would the authorities fear simply that foreigners would see that there are prison camps? Or is the fear that they would see that people are starving in the camps?

  A. “There’s no way they’ll let foreigners in those areas. It’s not just the food—people do starve—but when they see the conditions that are created, it’s worse than any starvation that can be imagined. If the outside world sees that, North Korea can’t survive. Prisoners get beaten with belts while working. When you enter prison you get a uniform. You’re supposed to use it for ten years. You don’t wash it. People’s skin has turned dark gray due to malnutrition. The natural oils from their skin build up in the uniforms and they become like synthetic leather, like part of your skin.”

  Q. Do you think it’s possible the authorities now have decided to cut or eliminate the rations for prisoners, in effect kill them off?

  A. “It’s possible. But each of these prison camps is given an annual quota to produce so many truckloads of clothing and so on. It takes about six months to adjust to the environment, but lots of prisoners die off first. Because of those quotas there are also certain regulations. You have to have a certain number of prisoners. If you lose some you have to get more prisoners. If those die you have to get more.”

  Q. So it’s in the interest of the prison authorities to keep them alive? A. “Right.”

  Choe Dong-chul, Lee’s son, had been a prison guard until 1986 when his mother’s troubles with the authorities ruined his career and got him sent away. “I don’t think the prison camps are the reason” for aid workers’ exclusion from the thirty-nine counties, he said. “The camps are already remote, isolated, not so easy to see. The white areas on the map in Chagang and North Pyongan Provinces are where there are military factories. The Yongbyon nuclear complex is in North Pyongan. In Hwadae, North Hamgyong, there are Nodong missile launchers, not mobile but from tunnels.

  “There are prison camps in Dongshin County, Chagang Province, and in Chonma County, North Pyongan Province. Chongjin has another camp, and it also seems to be in the white area. Dongshin is a coal mine; Chonma, a gold mine; Chongjin, a factory making bikes and military equipment. The Yodok prison camp is in the white area of South Hamgyong Province. The Hoe-ryong, Hwasong and Kaechon camps are in the green area. Kaechon is where my mother was sent. [It makes garments, artificial flowers, doilies and furniture covers for export.] Yodok, Hwasong and Hoeryong mainly farm and raise livestock. Anyway the monitors can’t visit every corner of a county. A prison camp is very remote. They wouldn’t necessarily see it. Generally a prison camp is forty to sixty kilometers from any ordinary village. Ordinary people can’t go in. But camps could be part of the reason why some areas are off-limits.”

  Q. Are the prison camps still producing goods? Do they receive food?

  A. “I haven’t heard [from more recent defectors] about any change. There’s a quota. You have to meet the quota. You can die, but you have to produce. The farms at the camps are not for the inmates. If they steal anything, even a grain of rice, they’ll be shot. So the situation is all the same.”

  Q. Why should we think these prison factories and mines are operating when so much ofthe rest ofthe manufacturing sector has closed down?

  A. “We don’t know for sure. But the reason to operate these camps is that it’s the easiest way to produce. Prisoners can be controlled.”

  I digressed, asking Choe Dong-cheol whether he thought outsiders should continue to provide food aid to North Korea. “Continue it, but monitor it and insist on better protection of human rights in North Korea,” he said. “We need more control of distribution. And it’s not necessary to send high-quality grain. Send corn instead of polished rice, and there will be more possibility that ordinary North Koreans will get it. Officials want polished white rice.”

  Choe Seung-chan, an army paratroop sergeant turned factory supply official in Kaesong, told me: “I don’t think there are military bases up north. It’s a tough area for farming. It’s the fertile areas the monitors have been to—the white area is the bad land for growing. I guess for propaganda they wanted to show better places. The roads in general up there are not paved.”

  Q. Are there underground military facilities up there?

  A. “Yes. Missile factories. But they’re underground so foreigners wouldn’t be able to see them anyhow. I doubt that’s the reason.”

  Nam Chung and his family had been exiled to Tongpo mining camp in On-song County North Hamgyong Province, in 1992. “From around April 1994 we got no rations at all,” he told me. “People sold everything they could, to buy food. We did get 500 grams a person on the three holidays. The situation varied from area to area from April 1994, as I knew because I worked for the railroad. Farming areas ofthe country got a little.”

  Q. Did that situation apply to people in your area who were not being punished as well?

  A. “They didn’t get rations either, although the people who watched us got paid every time they gave information to the authorities. It’s not that everybody was without rations. Officials, State Security and party people, the military and bureaucrats always got rations. Sometimes they got more than they needed and would sell the leftovers. The officials’ theme song is ‘These Days Are So Good; Don’t Let Them End.’ They make incredible profits. They buy things from the ration centers. If they pay eight cents, they sell for 150 won for a 2,000 percent profit.”

  Q. How do you analyze the map?

  A. “In Chagang Province ther
e are lots of military factories. Workers there were given rations. The two areas in the north-western part of the map are well known for military factories. There are lots of political prison camps in the middle of the map. In the far northeast are marine and navy bases. There are lots of military bases in Kangwon Province. Near Pyongyang, that’s a political prison camp. As for the northeastern mountains that aren’t on the coast, I don’t know why they are shown in white. The south-western areas are military. Most camps are in the middle of the map in South Pyongan and South Hamgyong Provinces. As for Yanggang Province, I don’t know. Chagang and North Pyongan Provinces have lots of military factories, mostly in tunnels carved underground. There are few people living above ground. People living in the villages eat more than other people. They usually don’t show outsiders those areas. Also, I heard that in South Hamgyong near Tanchon they mine uranium; I heard it’s for nuclear weapons. My friend’s father worked for a nuclear reactor plant. He used to go on a lot of trips to South Hamgyong.” (Nam was a recent enough defector to retain a South Korean police minder. The minder was present in the room during the interview, but had shown no interest in other parts of the interview. He paid close attention to this map talk.)

  Q. Were any areas of the country written off treated unfairly during the food crisis?

  A. “I don’t think so. Each area has its quotas, how much it has to give Pyongyang. A certain portion of the leftovers goes to Pyongyang, a certain portion to the military. They decide in the province how to distribute the rest.”