Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  18. Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il, vol. 2, pp. 28–30.

  19. Kang Myong-do in JoongAng Ilbo.

  20. Ibid.

  21. “True Picture of North Korea” (see chap. 13, n. 21).

  22. The country’s Central Broadcasting Station announced that Kim Yong-ju had attended a ceremony and a concert on July 26, 1993. His name was listed then between the previously tenth- and eleventh-ranking officials, suggesting he had been rehabilitated (Korea Times, July 28, 1994).

  23. Kim Myong Chol, “Biography of an Infant Prodigy” (see chap. 13, n. 4). Hahn Ho-suk, “American Nuclear Threats and North Korea’s Counter Strategy,” in The US-DPRK Relations at the Close of the 20th Century and the Prospect for United Korea at the Dawn of the 21st Century, described as an English abstract of an original paper posted in Korean on the Web site onekorea.org by the author, who directs the “Center for Korean Affairs” in Flushing, N.Y. (Korea Web Weekly, http://www kimsoft.com/2000/hanho.htm).

  24. Eric Cornell, North Korea Under Communism: Report of an Envoy to Paradise (see chap. 9, n. 3), p. 124.

  25. Agency for National Security Planning, Seoul, “Questions and Answers at the Press Conference,” http://www.fas.org/news/dprk/1997/bg152.html.

  26. Lim Un says Kim Song-ae was pregnant with Pyong-il in January 1951, which means a 1951 birth date. However, Kang Myong-do, a distant relative of Kim Il-sung s, himself born in 1959, who grew up as a member of the Pyongyang elite, told me that Pyong-il was born around 1953. The 1951 pregnancy may have led to the birth of Pyong-il’s elder sister.

  27. Interview with Guenter Unterbeck, former East German diplomat, October 8, 1994.

  28. Former bodyguard Pak Su-hyon told me, “Some people used to have lavish parties with Kim Pyong-il, but they were kicked out. Kim Il-sung said, ‘I am the Great Leader. Why should you party with Kim Pyong-il?’ Actually there are two kinds of bodyguards. The military bodyguards do the real work—I was in the military—while the civilian bodyguards lead relatively easy lives. But the civilian bodyguards don’t see much of Kim Il-sung’s and Kim Jong-il’s private life. The military bodyguards can see more than the civilians and have more access to rumors.”

  29. Kim Jong-min, in Cho Kap-chae, “Interview of Former High-level Official” [see chap. 9, n. 37]).

  30. By some accounts Kim Song-ae and Kim Il-sung had two additional sons, Song-il, an officer in the People’s Army, and Kyong-il.

  31. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (2).

  32. Ibid.

  33. Ibid.

  34. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (3). Hwang does not say when this happened and he does not name the couple.

  35. Bradley K .Martin, “Kim’s Son Reported Likely Successor in North Korea,” Baltimore Sun, March 6, 1980.

  36. Bradley K. Martin, “Kim’s Son Touted as Next North Korean Leader,” Baltimore Sun, May 9, 1980.

  37. “Can Kim Jong-il Maintain … ?”

  38. Kim Jong-min, in Cho Kap-chae, “Interview of Former High-level Official.”

  39. Quoted in Bradley K. Martin, “Kim’s Son Praised—Abroad—in Glowing Terms,” Baltimore Sun, April 15, 1981.

  40. “North Korean Politics: The Primacy of Regime Security,” paper presented at the International Conference on Korean Unification, sponsored by Seoul Forum for International Affairs, November 13–14, 1992.

  41. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (2).

  16. Our Earthly Paradise Free from Oppression.

  1. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (2) (chap. 6, n. 104).

  2. Choe Dong-chol, a former prisoner I interviewed in Seoul in August 1996, quoted the Great Leader in this way.

  3. Hwang Jang-yop, interviewed by Olaf Jahn, in Far Eastern Economic Review, October 15, 1998, said each of ten areas for non-elite internal exiles housed approximately thirty thousand prisoners at a time. Former prisoners testified to frequent turnover as inmates died.

  4. See David Hawk, The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps – Prisoners’ Testimonies and Satellite Photos, U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, 2003, www.hrnk.org.

  5. See Human Rights Without Frontiers International Secretariat, “Correctional Institutions in North Korea,” October 16, 2001, http//www.hrwfnet.

  6. Hwang Jang-yop, who became the party’s ideology chief in 1958, writes about this purge in Problems of Human Rights (3) (see chap. 9, n. 25).

  7. Kang and a French co-author have published a book: Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, The Acquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in a North Korean Gulag, translated by Yair Reiner (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

  8. Kang Chul-ho told me he had heard that the mining ultimately proved uneconomical and the site was turned into a regular prison camp in 1993, the political prisoners moved elsewhere.

  17. Two Women.

  1. Kim, With the Century, vol. 3 (see chap. 2, n. 2), pp. 304–305. One may guess that this anecdote was inserted into the senior Kim’s memoirs at Kim Jong-il’s behest, because it portrays the younger Kim in what the regime’s propagandists evidently consider to be a positive light.

  2. After the family’s highly publicized defection, Pyongyang alleged that Yeo had misappropriated 100,000 won. Lee in my interview with her scoffed at that charge: “In North Korea if you had 100,000 you’d be among the wealthiest.” If the charge were true “he would have been sent to jail.”

  3. Traditionally there would be no marriage between members of the same Korean clan, but Kang and his former wife were members of different Kang clans, the names represented by different Chinese characters. “My Kang character is a higher-ranking defector who knew Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung personally and whose information generally checked out, I heard that Kang Myong-do was indeed a “distant relative” on Kim’s mother’s side.

  4. Kang told me that even Kim Yong-sun, a very high-level international affairs official in the 1990s and 2000s until his death in 2003, “doesn’t have that much contact” with his boss. “If there’s a very specific and important issue, he can get in to see Kim Jong-il. If someone else visited him once, it would be a lifelong memory. I saw Kim Jong-il a couple of times at Chilgol. The relatives didn’t like him much—they said he had a ‘cold expression.’ After he came to power I met him with a friend of my grandfather in 1983 and in 1992 at the twentieth anniversary of the opening of his palace. In 1993 I saw him at the opening of a new product line in a factory producing food for the Kims.”

  5. Kang had not heard about selected thirteen-year-olds going straight to work.

  6. His own first wife, whom he divorced before marrying Prime .Minister Kang Song-san’s daughter, was a “volunteer,” “like a waitress,” at one of Kim Jong-il’s mansions, Kang said, and “even waitresses can be termed Happy Corps.’ ” But his marriage resulted from his infatuation with her, not from having been awarded her in a drawing.

  7. Hwang Jang-yop, who worked closely with Kim Jong-il before his defection, has a slightly different version of how the women were married off: “The women who serve him get to choose their husbands, and the women are given as ‘gifts’ to the chosen men. By continuing to ‘take care’ of his harem in this ’way, he has full control over them and commands their loyalty” (Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights [3] [see chap. 9, n. 25]).

  18. Dazzling Ray of Guidance.

  1. People’s Korea, February 13, 1982. Propaganda for his father had played on similar themes. Recall the illnesses that afflicted the elder Kim during his guerrilla-fighting days. In addition, note the following passage from his official biography regarding his health in the late 1950s, when he was embroiled in a dispute over his emphasis on heavy industry over consumer goods. “In strained days Comrade Kim Il Sung … dropped in at Taisung-ri, Kangsu County, on his way to Nampo, South Pyungan Province, for on-the-spot guidance. A certain old woman whose son, a regiment commander of the People’s Army, was killed in action, said to Comrade Kim Il Sung, grasping his hand with tears in her eyes, Premier, you look so pale,
don’t you? Don’t worry. Whatever the factionalists may say, finding fault with the people’s livelihood, we have no reason to ’worry. We are all living well’ ” (Baik II [see chap. 4, n. 24], p. 554).

  2. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (3) (see chap. 9, n. 25); Kim Young-song, O, suryeongnim neomuhapnida (Oh! Great Leader! This Is Too .Much) (Seoul: Chosun Daily News Publishing Co., 1995).

  3. Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il, vol. 2 (see chap. 10, n. 43), pp. 212–216.

  4. People’s Korea, February 13, 1982, citing Kim Il-sung, “Report on the Work of the Central Committee to the 6th Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea,” October 10, 1980.

  5. September 2, 1977, Radio Pyongyang broadcast cited in Yoo, “Rise of Kim Jong-il” (see chap. 5, n. 18), p. 6.

  6. A version of the results, toned down in an attempt to make it palatable to foreigners, could be seen in an article in a Hong Kong magazine written by an informal spokesman for the regime, Kim Myong-chol: “Famous as an infant prodigy, the son proved himself a super-achiever: he finished all courses from primary school to university first on the list with full honors and captured first prizes in national student poetry, essay and painting contests. He was a voracious reader of the masterpieces of Korean and world literature, both classic and contemporary. Two episodes may be worth mentioning. When in kindergarten, he was not satisfied with a nurse’s explanation that one and one make two. Citing clay lumps, he claimed the answer could be two, depending on circumstances. Later, one of his teachers, who had returned from a trip abroad, told his high-school class: ‘Koreans are backward because they do not know how to use a knife and fork.’ Kim Jong-il challenged him by retorting: ‘Foreigners in Korea are clumsy when they use chopsticks. Are they backward?’ ” (“Biography of an Infant Prodigy” Far Eastern Economic Review [see chap. 13, n. 4]). Note that the second anecdote bears great similarity to Kim Il-sung’s noodle-slurping story from his own school days. Both are calculated to massage the nationalistic Korean ego.

  7. The Problems of Human Rights in North Korea (3). “Kim Il-sung went to the Soviet Union after 1940 to train in the 88th special brigade,” Hwang wrote. “While serving as a captain in the Soviet army, he married Kim Jong-sook, who gave birth to Kim Jong-il. The boy’s Russian name was ‘Yura.’ All these are historical facts, which at first Kim Il-sung did not deny”

  8. “Great Achievements of Mr. Kim Jong Il,” People’s Korea, February 13, 1982.

  9. “Kim’s son praised—abroad—in glowing terms,” Baltimore Sun, April 15, 1981; “Great Achievements of Mr. Kim Jong Il,” People’s Korea.

  10. Kim Jong-min in “Interview of Former High-level Official” (see chap. 6, n. 88).

  11. “Kim Jong Il has a morbid interest in terrorism and personally controls all terrorist attacks initiated by North Korea,” Hwang wrote. “The Myanmar bombing may have been orchestrated as part of the so-called ‘Class struggle’ to assassinate important figures of the South Korean ruling class” (Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights [3]).

  12. Bradley K. Martin, “Dynasty (North Korean Style): A Tedious Two-Hour Special,” Wall Street Journal, November 7, 1983, p. 27.

  13. A Pyongyang-datelined Reuters story by Andrew Browne that appeared in Tokyo’s Daily Yomiuri on June 3, 1991, said Kim was not recorded as having visited any other country except China. A German diplomat who asked to be anonymous told me that a photo showed Kim Jong-il in East Germany in 1984 when his father was visiting there and a sudden crisis came up—a flood in North Korea— that evidently required the younger Kim to travel and get his father’s advice or orders. The diplomat said there was no official record of Kim Jong-il’s presence in East Germany ever, so presumably he went under an assumed name.

  14. Tak, Kim, and Pak, Great Leader Kim Jong Il, vol. 1, p. 179 (see chap. 5, n. 15). This was the “18th World Film Festival” in 1972.

  15. Choi Eun-hi and Shin Sang-ok, Chogukeul cheohaneul cheo meolli (Pacific Palisades, Calif: Pacific Artist Corporation, 1988).

  16. Rhee Soomi translated for the author the excerpts quoted in this book from the cassette issued by Wolgan Choson.

  17. Former official Kim Jong-min told me, “I think his English has improved. He watches a lot of foreign films. He’s not good in English conversation but due to economic needs he had to know a little bit more about the West. After 1981 there was an order for everyone of higher official rank to study English one hour a day. That indicates Kim Jong-il is interested in English.”

  18. Cited in .Martin, “Kim’s son praised” (see chap. 15, n. 39).

  19. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (2) (see chap. 6, n. 104).

  20. Kim Jong-min in “Interview of Former High-level Official.”

  21. Kim Myong Chol, “Biography of an infant prodigy.”

  22. Interview with Kim Jong-min, former president of Daeyang Trading Co. and brigadier general-level officer in the Ministry of Public Security (police).

  19. A Story to Tell to the Nations.

  1. Baik II, p. 161 (see chap. 4, n. 24); Kang Myong-do testimony in JoongAng Ilbo (see chap. 2, n. 7).

  2. “The bombing of the Korean commercial plane is evidence of the perverted character of Kim Jong Il, who has little respect for human life and loves to terrorize people” (Hwang, Problems of Human Rights [3] [see chap. 9, n. 25]).

  3. South Korean critics had argued since at least the 1970s that North Korean workers were exhausted from their hopped-up labors. “After the desperate struggle to strengthen the ruling system and to achieve economic growth through the system, North Korea must now work to meet the demands of the labor-exhausted people” (Chay Pyung-gil, “The Policy Directions of the North Korea Regime” Vantage Point [November 1978]: p. 12).

  4. China’s “official data seriously underestimate China’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) by a factor of three,” said a report by the East Asia Analytical Unit of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, cited in a Reuters report on page 7 of Korea Times, December 18, 1992. Tripling China’s official per capita GDP figure of $370 as the Australian analysts suggested would yield a sum in the range of most estimates of the North Korean per capita figure. The latter estimates, in turn, may have failed to reflect economic shrinkage.

  5. Kim Il-sung rode in an American-made limousine.

  6. A South Korean professor had predicted this bind in 1979: “In North Korea the mental character of a man is organized by means of formulating the official level of aspiration. The objects of the basic needs and desires of North Koreans are food, clothing and shelter. Their needs and desires beyond them are restrained and disapproved. They are trained to compare today’s living standards with those of long past, thus inducing them to be content with the apparent and meager improvement in the misrepresented reality. … [N]orth Korea does not permit the generation of desires above a certain prescribed level. … Discovery of a new object of desire may prove a major impact. If North Koreans are exposed to household appliances and housing facilities used by people of better-off countries, they are bound to be impressed and feel discontented” (Prof. Koh Young-bok, “The Structure and Nature of North Korean Society,” Vantage Point [December 1979], pp. 7–8).

  7. North Korea walked out of rescheduling talks in 1987, whereupon two syndicates comprising 140 Japanese, Australian and European banks declared Pyongyang in default on the amount owing to them: $770 million.

  8. Kim Il-sung himself voiced a similar complaint in his memoirs (With the Century [see chap. 2, n. 2], vol. 2, p. 99), in the remark I quote in chapter 3 that “[s]ome people say that communists are devoid of human feelings and know neither life nor love that is worthy of human beings. But such people are totally ignorant of what communists are like.”

  9. Official historian Baik Bong complains that, as a November 1946 election held to ratify nominations for the provincial, city, and county people’s committees approached, “political enthusiasm increased among all the people, but at the same time, maneuverings by reactionaries assumed increasingly
open proportions. Manipulated by the U.S. imperialists, the reactionaries pretended to be ‘friends of believers’ in an attempt to lead Christians to stay away from the election. They also spread slanderous and misleading statements such as ‘The election has no meaning,’ ‘The election is certain to become a one-man show for one particular party,’ and ‘We will get land back for you.’ They used all possible malicious tactics, including the instigation of what is called the ‘black box’ campaign. But all the subversive activities of the revolutionaries failed to deceive the people” (Baik II, p. 180). (Black box was for no votes, white for yes.)

  10. Kim, With the Century, vol. 1, p. 362. Kim wrote, “Their immaculate religious faith was always associated with patriotism, and their desire to build a peaceful, harmonious and free paradise found expression invariably in their patriotic struggle for national liberation.”

  Richard Read, a correspondent of The Oregonian who was in Pyongyang to cover the festival, visited the Catholic church and noticed churchgoers depositing their Kim Il-sung badges in a bowl as they entered, “telling me that something genuine or at least different was going on. A student from Kim Il-sung University interpreted my interview with the priest. The interpreter’s English was good, and he seemed relatively sophisticated. The priest, it materialized, drove a .Mercedes and made more money than the highest-ranking party member I’d been allowed to meet. Toward the end I asked: Who’s more important to you, Kim Il-sung or God? The interpreter looked thoroughly confused for the first time in the interview. Who’s God?’ he asked” (e-mail to the author, May 31, 2003).

  Thomas J. Belke in Juche: A Christian Study of North Korea’s State Religion (Bartlesville, Oklahoma: Living Sacrifice Book Company, 1999, p. 1) writes: “In fact, Juche’s approximately 23 million adherents, who worship their current and former dictators, outnumber those of more well-known world religions such as Judaism, Sikhism, Jainism, Bahaism, and Zoroastrianism.”