Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  One American involved with private relief efforts took note of the somewhat less harsh face the justice system had begun to present. “North Koreans break the rules on internal passports for the starving,” he said. The authorities had been permitting unprecedented freedom of movement so that desperate people could search for food. “They’re not shooting people for cutting trees on the hills or farming on slopes even though it causes erosion and means deforestation that will deprive the military of hiding places.” Meanwhile, he said, “enlisted men are almost starving.”12

  There had been a policy since Kim Il-sung’s day to “root out three generations” of the families of disloyal subjects, and the prisons continued to be used for that purpose. (See the testimony of Ahn Myong-chol in chapter 34.) However, as other researchers also have found,13 apparently that did not translate into a special starvation regime for prisoners once the famine began in earnest. While more and more inmates died as a result of malnutrition, the political prison camps continued to be run more as slave-labor and slow-death camps than as instant-death camps. It may seem a small distinction, but it shows that in this regard at least Kim Jong-il was no Hitler.

  Choi Myung-nam defected in 1995. I asked him what he thought had happened to the family he left behind. “I believe they would have been resettled to a rural area in the mountains, maybe in South Pyongan Province,” Choi said. “From 1993, families of defectors are not sent to prison camps but just resettled in the mountains. From 1993, unless a person actually commits a crime he’s not sent to prison camp. It’s just a policy of Kim Jong-il’s.”

  That sort of leniency, as opposed to the crackdown that Robert Collins would have predicted if the regime were entering his fourth phase, suppression, in the process of collapse, suggested to me that the regime might be around for a while.

  In fact, although of course he had not used those terms, reversing the local independence of Phase Three and avoiding Phase Four had been main thrusts of Kim Jong-il’s December 1996 speech. As for local independence, his argument was: “If the party lets the people solve the food problem themselves, then only the farmers and merchants will prosper, giving rise to egotism and collapsing the social order of a classless society. The party will then lose its popular base and “will experience meltdown as in Poland and Czechoslovakia.” Kim clearly feared that party officials were opting for suppression. Instead, he insisted, they must persuade the people that “this is the time of the march of hardship” and thus permit the regime to “control the situation without resorting to using law enforcement bodies.”14 One can see in his handling of the situation hints that in the aftermath of his father’s death he had become an effective national leader in his own right, correctly analyzing the reasons for communism’s collapse elsewhere and taking steps to avoid that outcome in North Korea.

  It turned out that Kim Jong-il in 1998, only shortly before I started inquiring into the mystery of the thirty-nine counties, met with Japanese-Korean representatives of Chongryon and spoke to them enthusiastically about what he saw as the need for more attention to legality in North Korea. “Our people have incorrect understanding of how our laws should work,” Kim complained. “In a socialist country, party organs, government officials and social groups are keen on political indoctrination but little attention is paid to the laws of the land.” It appears that although some of the examples of leniency during the famine would prove to have been merely temporary expedients, Kim contemplated changes of a more permanent nature that could make the system less arbitrary15

  The immediate impetus for Kim’s new stance apparently had been an incident at Hwanghae Steel Mill that forced him to confront the extent to which corruption had taken hold since the 1980s. “I will tell you what really happened at the Hwanghae Steel Mill,” he said to his visitors from Japan. “We spent three years mourning the death of our Leader Kim Il-sung and coinci-dentally were hit with natural disasters. We found ourselves in a dire situation and could not provide enough electric power to the Hwanghae Steel Mill. The mill had to stop operation. Some bad elements of our society in cahoots with the mill management began to dismantle the mill and sell its machines as scrap metal to Chinese merchants.

  “By the time we got wind of what was going on, more than half of the mill had been stripped away. For nearly a year, the thieves took over the mill and stole the people’s property at will. They bought off party leaders and security officers and, consequently, no one had informed us about their thievery. Everybody was on the take at the mill and we had to send in an army to retake the mill. The army surrounded the mill and arrested the thieves. The army recovered the people’s property from the thieves. Some of our trading people were involved in this massive fleecing of the mill.”

  Was Kim extolling the rule of law because he wanted to crack down on the leniency that rank-and-file officials had exercised in the face of the population’s difficulties? Perhaps the facts of the mill incident as he recited them could permit the interpretation that local officials had been trying heroically to raise cash with which to feed the population of unemployed mill employees. Suggesting a different interpretation, however, is the fact that people connected with the mill incident were by no means the only ones made to answer for corruption around that time. There were high-level targets, some very close to Kim himself. South Korean intelligence chief Lee Jong-chan told his country’s National Assembly in July 1998 that seven members of the Kim Il-sung League of Socialist Working Youth had been executed in the fall of 1997 while the league’s chief Choe Yong-hae, had been dismissed for corruption. That’s the same “Jerkoff” Choe who, as we saw in chapter 11, hung out with Kim when they were youngsters. Chang Song-taek, Kim Jong-il’s brother-in-law and the man rumored to be his closest friend and advisor, had been sent off to atone for corruption by going through a “revolutionary education” course and had already returned to Kim’s good graces, the Southern spy boss reported.16

  In his talk with Chongryon representatives Kim spoke with evident respect about the legal systems of capitalist countries. In North Korea, he complained, “party cadres and security officers operate outside the law without exception.” In capitalist nations, on the other hand, “people abide by the law from cradle to grave,” he said. “All persons must obey the law and the law is enforced universally.” That praise was in contrast to his father’s dismissal of legal impartiality as nonsense.17 To be sure, Kim Jong-il’s interest was thoroughly mixed with caution, as he then emphasized. “Revisionists,” he said, using the term applied to anti-Stalinist communist reformers such as Khrushchev, “weaken socialist systems by overemphasizing laws and ignoring political indoctrination. Gorbachev brought down the Soviet Union using this tactic. Today, the Chinese leaders are on the same path.”

  But he quickly resumed praising Western systems: “As you comrades know so well, having lived in a capitalist nation for so long, people in a capitalist society must obey the law no matter where they live. Chongryon, too, must obey the Japanese laws, otherwise the Japanese police will crack down.” A North Korean ship calling frequently at the Japanese port of Ni-igata was under official Japanese scrutiny at the time, in view of evidence it was being used for smuggling prohibited items, among other infractions. “I hear that our cruiseship Mangyong 92 has to cater to Japanese businessmen and bribe the police with large sums of money in order to get anything loaded,” Kim told his visitors. “In our country, a few hundred dollars are enough to bribe some security officers. This shows in a way how bad our judicial system is in comparison to that of a capitalist nation.”

  Kim observed, “In a capitalist nation even the prime minister and the president are prosecuted if they break the law. We must study how to strengthen our legal system. Japanese police fear the prosecutors. Whom do the prosecutors fear? Do they fear the police? You said that the police will go after any prosecutor who breaks the law. Few prosecutors have been arrested in Japan. The main reason is the strict process of selecting prosecutors. Law graduates take tough exams
to become lawyers, judges or prosecutors. Only the best get to become prosecutors or judges.”

  Thus, Kim said, “cops and prosecutors are miles apart in qualifications. [But] in our nation, any college graduate can become a prosecutor, if the college so wishes. Because of this, prosecutors in our nation carry no special authority. In a capitalist nation, prosecutors are sworn to uphold the law and defend the nation. Kakuei Tanaka, a former Japanese prime minister, was arrested by a prosecutor.”

  Kim wanted a system in North Korea in which “law graduates must pass a special exam in order to become prosecutors, and only the best qualified people should become prosecutors. Currently, prosecutors are appointed just like other jobs and they stay chummy with their former classmates. It is tough for prosecutors to wield any authority in this kind of system.”

  In the same conversation, Kim talked about food and agriculture policy. North Korea’s agriculture minister, So Kwan-hui, had been executed in September 1997, accused of intentionally ruining the country’s agriculture as a spy in the service of the United States. At the same time the regime had dug up the remains of Kim M.an-kum, So’s predecessor and mentor, from the Patriots’ Cemetery and subjected them to ritual execution by a firing squad—a modern update of the feudal custom of exhuming and decapitating the corpse of a posthumously disgraced official. The two officials’ fate had then been held out to officials, the military and the public as examples of what would befall any other “traitors.”18

  Kim alleged to his visitors that So as agriculture minister had “failed to introduce higher-yield seeds and distributed non-existent fertilizers to our farms. This traitor ensured that our farms failed to produce enough food for our people.” The minister “was a long-time party member and did everything he could to ruin our agriculture,” Kim said. “For a long time, So refused to send a farm delegation to Japan using one excuse after another because he feared that they might receive better seeds from Chongryon. Better seeds would have worked counter to his plan to starve us slowly. So became a traitor in 1950. He would hardly do anything at the party meetings for discussing farm problems. Even when he was the party secretary for agriculture, he had precious little to say about farming. He was a filthy traitor loyal to his masters to the very end.

  “We continue to ask the International Red Cross for food assistance, because we are in fact short of food; but the main reason is that our seeds have degraded thanks to So Kwan-hui’s treachery. Our production has declined steadily because of the bad seeds. We are replacing them with better seeds but it will take about three years to fully recover. We need food aid to tide us over during this transition period.

  “You may have received letters from your relatives living here about the food shortage. The situation is not as bad as it may appear. We make sure that the army has enough to eat, and the farmers and government workers get less food. The residents of Pyongyang receive many benefits from the government and they live better than the people in the rest of the country. For this reason, we cut back rations to the Pyongyang residents and at the same time, increased rations for the rest of the people. Ignorant of this, some people panicked and wrote you that our nation had only a week’s supply of food left, and so on.

  “Last year, the whole army was mobilized to grow food. The main finding ofthe army is that the seeds must be replaced, and we have began to bring in better seeds. But it will take two to three years at the least to replace the old seeds with the new. Until then, our food shortage will persist.

  “We have been on a forced march for several years now and we are finding a number of structural problems. Had we held a Party Congress or the Supreme People’s Assembly plenum before the end of the three-year mourning period after Leader Kim Il-sung’s death, we would be facing food shortages for ten years or more. The lesson learned is that you need to know who is who. Today, all of the senior leaders are old revolutionaries who had worked with Leader Kim Il-sung. We have to ensure that they stay on for a long time to come.”

  The previous year, high-ranking defector Hwang Jang-yop had reported that even an arms factory in Chagang Province had received no food rations for nine or ten months straight. Despite the emphasis placed on military security, the state had permitted some two thousand weapons engineers to starve to death, according to Hwang.19 Kim Jong-il tried to knock down such reports in his conversation with Chongryon representatives. “Our enemies report almost daily so many millions have starved to death and so forth, and do all they can to defame and demonize us,” he said. “You comrades are here to witness the truth and report what you have seen here when you are back in Japan. That is why I took you along on my on-the-spot guidance trip to an armament factory in a remote village. I wanted you to see how the factory workers lived and how they differed from the residents of Pyongyang. I wanted you to see if there were people dying on the roadsides from hunger. As you have seen from your auto trip, there were no starving people on the roadsides and the factory workers are healthier than the people in Pyongyang. I hope that you saw the might of our nation and the optimism of our workers.”

  Nevertheless, Kim explained, it had been necessary that pride before foreigners give way to begging for food. “Previously, only our foreign service people cried for help but now all people do so,” he said. “Thus, all of us tell foreigners about this shortage or that shortage, and take them to the worst place for them to see. In the past, foreign visitors were taken to the best show places and people were taught to say that they were living well. But now, faced with the economic isolation forced on us by our enemy, we need foreign aid and so we present sad pictures to foreign visitors.”

  There were, of course, no sad pictures of Kim’s own table to be presented. Throughout the period of the famine, Kim had been dining like the king he was, according to a Japanese who claimed to have been his personal sushi chef since 1988. Kim kept a 10,000-bottle wine cellar and liked shark’s fin soup several times a week, Kenji Fujimoto (that’s a pseudonym) told the Japanese weekly magazine Shukan Post. “His banquets often started at midnight and lasted until morning. The longest lasted for four days.”

  All this still leaves us without a final solution to the mystery of the thirty-nine counties—most of-which, according to the World Food Program’s Web site, remained closed to the agency. I suspect that most of the theories related above—-with the exception of my worst-case scenario involving a genocidal plot to starve to death immediately the people suspected of lack of loyalty to the regime—are partially correct.20 But a full answer probably-would have to emphasize national pride and the East Asian concept of face. “The nature of North Korean society is not to admit that things do not function properly,” the World Food Program’s Jean-Jacques Graisse said. His Foreign Ministry contact, a vice-minister, had told him that national pride was behind much of the denial of access. The official “admitted I had seen only 50 percent of the problem,” he said.

  Another aid worker, who requested anonymity, told me she had spoken with an anguished North Korean official who told her: “Our country’s not Africa! We used to assist some African countries!” The aid worker added: “They believe it’s just a natural disaster, not a structural problem, and therefore it is not fair to compare them with Africa. Extending the argument, they’re probably afraid that if we take note of these places [in the off-limits thirty-nine counties], the only medium of communication is the oxcart.”

  After all, even where that aid worker had been permitted to visit, soldiers walking around “don’t even carrry a stick, much less a gun. They’re in the fields, or repairing the truck. The cities look like car repair shops.” Even in the fancy Pyongyang guest house where she and some other visiting aid workers had stayed, there was no running-water. Relatively privileged women had to manage to stay presentable despite lack of water. They used a lot of foundation makeup, she told me. Female aid workers were experiencing gynecological problems due to lack of water. Just imagine, she said, what conditions must be in the thirty-nine counties.


  Then again, Kim Jong-il’s boast to his Chongryon visitors about well-fed armaments workers in a remote village suggested one last, if fanciful, theory. Maybe counties populated by invisible people, living and working underground with their machinery21 like H. G. Wells’s Morlocks, were so well off at the expense of citizens above ground that they had no need of foreign aid—much less of monitors to see to its proper delivery.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Even the Traitors Who Live in Luxury

  Interviewing North Korean defectors, it did not take me long to realize that quite a few of them had practiced an occupation that would have been rare earlier. They had been traders, in some cases entrepreneurs. They had often earned very large incomes from buying, selling, bartering, deal-making. Trading companies had been set up in response to Kim Jong-il’s demand for foreign currency. The companies had multiplied. Not only high-level government and party organizations but military, agricultural and industrial units at lower levels, as well, had their own trading subsidiaries.

  Trading is a challenging occupation even for those who are trained for it. North Korea’s new traders had no training in business. Most had only military or police experience. Some traders who ended up defecting did so because, ultimately, they had failed at their new jobs. But many had succeeded.

  The new occupation attracted people from the highest to the lowest levels of society. Kang Myong-do grew up as a member of the Pyongyang elite. His father headed the capital’s construction department and his mother taught party history at the Potonggang district party headquarters. Kang majored in French at Pyongyang Foreign Languages University, graduating in 1979, and joined the staff of the League of Socialist Working Youth, guiding foreign V.I.P. visitors. I asked him if he knew the crude nickname of the league’s top boss, Choe Yong-hae. He did not—the age gap was considerable and the two men were not on intimate terms—but he did tell me that Choe was reputed to like women.