Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  “The notices also said that ‘hostile elements who have slipped into the leadership’ ’were committing extortion and that food coupons for rice, oil, flour and noodles ’were often obtained under false pretenses, according to Kyodo.

  “Corrupt officials offer to help citizens obtain spare parts, energy, fuel, metal and cement in exchange for food coupons, the notices said.

  “They added that such officials also extorted food under the pretexts of ‘receiving guests, earning foreign currency for the country, providing rations for the military and helping the state budget,’ according to Kyodo.

  “Offenders will be treated as anti-socialist elements, arrested and tried while their families will be deported to labor camps, the notices allegedly said.”

  6. Interview with an ethnic Korean who traveled to North Korea. The sentence for speaking ill of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il was life imprisonment, according to this informant.

  7. See, for example, “NK Bans Contact Wtih Chinese,” Korea Times, January 28, 1993, p. 1. The Yonhap news agency report picked up from the Japanese wire service Kyodo quotes a Western source in Pyongyang as saying the ban extended even to reading the Chinese newspaper People’s Daily.

  8. See Bradley .Martin, “Remaking Kim’s Image,” Far Eastern Economic Review, April 15, 1993, and the author’s similar Korean-language article, “Revisionism in Pyongyang,” Newsweek Hankuk-pan, April 1, 1993.

  9. As Dae-Sook Suh notes, some of the others ’were Kim’s seniors and equals (Kim Il Sung [see chap. 2, n. 35], pp. 1–54).

  10. Kim, With the Century, vol. 3, p. 328.

  11. Kang Myong-do series in JoongAng Ilbo (see chap. 2, n. 7). Kang described the economic situation during that period as follows: “Currently the North Korean economy is nearly collapsed, about 70 percent paralyzed. Food shortages have occurred since 1984. That was the year of flooding in South Korea, when the North gave rice to the South from northern reserves. Nineteen eighty-nine was worse, with the youth festival. That’s when the North Korean economy really dived; 20,000 foreigners attended. The government did it all for free. From 1989 to 1993 the harvests ’were bad. In 1993 there ’were zero harvests in North and South Hamgyong [and two other] provinces. It was all frozen. Not even one kilogram was produced in those four provinces. Food rations stopped in 1992. Even in Pyongyang there was a three-month suspension of rations. The authorities would go house to house, see if anyone was dying of starvation. If so, they would give them a little food. In rural areas they got dried corn.

  “The pears produced in Hwasong, North Hamgyong province, are famous. Prior to 1990, 100 percent ’were exported to the Soviet Union. In 1990, the Russians refused to import them. North Korea had to turn them into liquor or animal feed. From 1993, because the food shortage had become so serious, in North Hamgyong the party decided to ration pears instead of grain from August to October. As a result, many died of starvation. In October 1993 in a Chongjin Hospital I saw someone die. Those who got the pears boiled them. If they had any corn left, they would mix it with the pears. When it cooled, the mixture was really hard—almost impossible to digest. One man had indigestion and went to the hospital. They opened him up and found an indigestible lump. The man died during the operation.

  “People cooperatively started pillaging state-run farms. So the authorities intensified the guards at farms. There were a lot of clashes between those guards and the people. The Workers’ Party took it as a direct threat to the regime. …

  At Kim Chaek Steel Works, all three melting furnaces went out. After that, only one operated. Two remained idle. In 1993, even the one remaining furnace was out. They needed oil and coke from China, but the Chinese supplies were cut. In 1993, Choe Yong-lim, in charge of Kim Chaek Steel, rounded up people to collect coke around the factory area. He got oil from the military. After a month’s delay, they got the furnace working again.

  “The electrical power situation is horrible. Pukchang is the biggest power plant, with 8 turbines, of which only two operate now. In Pyongyang’s power plant, only two of six turbines are working. Not all areas of Pyongyang are supplied electricity. In the rural areas, it’s a long time since any power was available.

  “Chongjin Chemical Complex, which employed 12,000 workers, has been closed for three years. There is no coal supply to fire the machinery. I estimate only about 30 percent of North Korean factories are operating now.”

  12. Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas (see chap. 24, n. 9), pp. 297–299. Andrew S. Nat-sios has more on Kim Il-sung’s belated interest in reform and the rumored clash ?with his son on pp. 165–167 of The Great North Korean Famine: Famine, Politics, and Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001).

  13. Kang’s remarks on the Kim Dal-hyon case are from the 1995 interviews in JoongAng Ilbo and my own interview on June 12, 1995. In my interview he gave further details on the personalities involved in the power struggle. “Kim Yong-sun is not a relative of Kim Il-sung’s,” he said. “Kim Jong-u is not a relative of Kim Il-sung’s despite what is said. Kim Jong-u is allied with Kim Guk-tae against Kim Dal-hyon. Kim Jong-u graduated from the People’s Economic University and studied in East Germany. He’s an economic expert and has visited the Middle East for trade—mainly Kuwait. He’s 51 or 52, quite young. He’s opposed to Kim Dal-hyon but the direct rivalry is between Kim Dal-hyon and Kim Guk-tae. Under them, Yi Song-dae is opposed to Kim Jong-u. Yi is now the chairman. Kim Jong-u is not very modest. That’s why he has lots of enemies. Yi Song-dae right now doesn’t have the backing. He’s shrinking back. It’s Kim Jong-u’s world.

  “There are some other bright and promising people. Kim Chung-il was a U.N. observer, now is in the propaganda department as vice-head—because Kim Jong-il specifically selected him to become the next foreign minister. He speaks English impeccably so he always interprets when Kim Jong-il meets foreigners. Yi Chol, ambassador to Switzerland, is important because of the bank accounts. Only the top elite know of those accounts. They are supposed to be for the country but really they are for Kim Jong-il.”

  14. Kim Jong-il, “Abuses of Socialism Are Intolerable,” Kulloja,. March 1, 1993, cited in Korea Times,. March 5, 1993.

  15. July 11, 1994 (translated by Korean Central News Agency in Korean News Semi-weekly, July 12, 1994). The reference to Kim’s leadership of this “20-year struggle” illustrates the escalation effect that sooner or later inflated so many claims advanced by or about Kim, no matter how immodest to begin with. But it would be especially difficult to justify this claim historically, since it has him leading the anti-Japanese struggle from 1925, the year he turned thirteen, all the way up to 1945.

  16. Kenji Fujimoto is the pseudonym of the chef, who published his book Kim Jong-il’s Chef in Japanese and Korean. See Yonhap dispatch from Tokyo, “NK Leader’s Obsessed By A-Bombs: Ex-Chef,” Korea Times, June 23, 2003.

  17. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (3) (see chap. 9, n. 25).

  18. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (I) (see chap. 2, n. 1).

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

  20. Korea Times, May 12, 1995.

  21. The transcript first appeared in Korean in Wolgan Choson, which cited a Japanese intelligence agency concerned with North Korean matters as its source. It was translated into English and posted on Korea Web Weekly at http://wwwkimsoft. com/2003/kji-tape.htm.

  30. We Will Become Bullets and Bombs.

  1. Kim, With the Century, vol. 3 (see chap. 2, n. 2), p. 27.

  2. “On the 50th Anniversary of Kim Il-sung University,” Dec. 7, 1996, speech to party officials reportedly taped by Hwang Jang-yop and taken south when he defected the following year, published in the April 1997 edition of Wolgan Choson, extracts translated on Korea Web Weekly, http://www.kimsoft.com/korea/ kji-kisu.htm.

  3. On this subject Kim Il-sung wrote, “It is now a matter of course that our People’s Army contains neither those who insist on unprincipled equality and impartiality nor those who dispute the
ir superiors’ orders. The soldiers answer their superiors’ orders only by saying, ‘I understand!’ Our People’s Army is a collective of loyal soldiers who live in a spirit of unity of superiors and subordinates, unity of army and people, a spirit of constant self-reliance and fortitude from the day they take the oath of the military code of conduct to the moment they are discharged from the service. If anyone wants to know our soldiers’ attitude towards democracy, he need only understand their militant slogan, ‘When the Party decides, we do everything.’ If he wants to see the genuine features of unity between superiors and subordinates manifested in the deeds of our soldiers, he need only learn of the last moments of Heroes Kim Kwang Chol and Han Yong Chol, who had sacrificed their lives for the sake of many of their comrades in arms” (With the Century, vol. 3, p. 220).

  4. Party organs were introduced into the KPA after Kim Il-sung’s 1959 speech in which he said the biggest problem in the Korean War had been “total lack of political training and revolutionary heroism.” The party organs were needed to give soldiers firm ideas of what they were asked to fight for and reasons why, Kim said (Kiwon Chung, “The North Korean People’s Army and the Party” in Scalapino, ed., North Korea Today [see chap. 3, n. 11], p. 116). On page 118, citing a 1961 book by Kim Yon-hoe, Chung adds that political commandants’ “responsibilities concentrate on supervising the training and promotion of the soldiers, ensuring their positive devotion to the Party, the preparation of political programmes and materials for use in classes, and supplying pamphlets and newspapers, pictorial exhibitions and films. Promotion for the soldier is almost completely dependent on the recommendation of the political commandants whom the rank-and-file soldiers fear more than the professional military commanders.”

  For a detailed description of the military’s General Political Bureau see Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., The Armed Forces of North Korea (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), pp. 28–33.

  31. Neither Land nor People at Peace.

  1. Kang Myong-do testimony in JoongAng Ilbo, June 8, 1995.

  2. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (3) (see chap. 9, n. 25).

  3. His remarks appeared in Chosun Ilbo, October 12, 1995.

  4. “S. Korean Agent Reports North Has Executed at Least 50 Officials in Purge,” Seoul-datelined dispatch from Agence France-Presse, July 13, 1998.

  5. “The enemy reporters claimed that an army unit mutinied and took over the Hwanghae Steel Mill,” Kim told those visitors. “A Taiwan news organ went so far as to claim that the coup was led by the joint chief of staff. Moon Myong-ja [a Korean-American reporter] heard about the army ‘coup’ and rushed here to find out the truth. Miss Moon found that no such event had occurred. The enemy news organs seem to track every move made by the joint chief of staff. If he is not seen in public for several days, they wonder what he is up to. You comrades have families and know that family life goes through many events. Our joint chief of staff, too, has a family to take care of. The basic problem is that the Japanese and South Korean bastards have dark, shady motives and assume that we have dark, shady motives, too. They see the events here through their colored glasses. Those people from hostile nations who visit us are shocked when they see the real truth here.”

  The remarks apparently were taped by the visitors, officials of Chongryon. In 2003 Japanese intelligence leaked them and Wolgan Choson published them. For an English translation see “Kim Jong Il’s Candid Talk Caught on Tape,” Korea Web Weekly, http://www.kimsoft.com/2003/kji-tape.htm.

  Western versions of what happened are in Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas (see chap. 24, n. 9), p. 375, and Bill Gertz, Betrayal (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1999), p. 264.

  32. In a Ruined Country.

  1. “Leader Kim Jong-il Wins Landslide in North Korea-style Elections,” Seoul-datelined dispatch from Agence France-Presse, August 4, 2003.

  2. A religious group, Buddhist Sharing, estimated two million to three million dead, but the methodology of the estimate was widely criticized. In its September 11, 2002, issue, however, a Seoul daily, Chosun Ilbo, citing refugee testimony, reported that a country-wide census the previous year had found that people “missing in North Korea including those who starved to death in the six years from 1995, when the food crisis peaked, to early 2001 reached … 2 million to 2.5 million” (http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200209/200209110023.html).

  3. According to Nicholas Eberstadt, North Korean seven-year-olds were twenty-two pounds lighter and eight inches shorter than South Korean seven-year-olds. See Eberstadt, “Disparities in Socioeconomic Development in Divided Korea: Indications and Implications,” Asian Survey 406 (November/December 2000), pp. 875–876.

  4. Specialists ’were beginning to address the question of causality. Nicholas Eberstadt the following year said that more information was needed on whether the North Korean famine resembled other twentieth-century communist famines in having followed quickly after major, closely related policy changes. See Eberstadt, The End of North Korea (Washington: The AEI Press, 1999), p. 65. In a later work, Andrew S. Natsios notes general agreement that the collapse of the North Korean public distribution system, which handled food rationing, followed long-term trends: “steadily declining agricultural production caused by poor agricultural practices, perverse economic incentives, a declining volume of inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides, and several years of natural disasters, beginning in 1995.” A second factor, outside the immediate control of the Pyongyang regime, was “the precipitous decline in food subsidies from the Soviet Union and China.” However, Natsios argues, the factors that “transformed a small, regionalized famine into a national catastrophe resulting in the massive death tolls of 1996 and 1997” ’were two very recent policy decisions by the Pyongyang regime. One was “cutting off food subsidies to the eastern coastal plain in 1994 and 1995” while the other was “the central government’s decision to reduce farmers’ per capita rations from 167 kilograms per year to 107 kilograms after the disastrous harvest of 1995. This decision ended the voluntary cooperation of the peasants in supplying their surplus to the urban and mining areas” (The Great North Korean Famine [see chap. 29, n. 12], p. 91).

  5. Collins submitted the study to Seoul’s Hanyang University as an academic thesis in 1996.

  6. Kang Chul-hwan and his family, former Korean residents of Japan, spent ten years in a prison camp before relatives in Japan pressured and bribed officials to treat them better. Kang escaped to China in January 1992 with Ahn Hyuk, another former camp inmate, and they defected to South Korea in August 1992. “While I was there,” Kang told me, “North Koreans were having two meals a day, sometimes rations of animal feed. That’s what I got in the industrial city where I worked in the factory, a city with a big population and not enough food. In the camp, people like Ahn got around 300 grams a day. [Ahn himself said 360.] People like us, in the family complex, got around 500 grams a day. Corn and salt. The corn was uncooked. You had to cook it yourself.”

  7. The End of North Korea, p. 62.

  8. “One source said that the Onsong riot occurred around October 11 and North Korean authorities brought in helicopters to control the riot, and conducted a massive search for the leaders and ‘rebellious elements.’ The source said that North Korean officials told him to quickly return to China since it was difficult to do business in North Korea at the moment. However, no specific reasons for or the current situation of the riot were uncovered.

  “What is known, though, was that North Korea’s so-called ‘Special Unit’ was mobilized to control events. This troop is known as the special forces that deals with riots and conducts espionage activities in the northeast region of China. The Onsong district is a mine area where criminals or people of bad character’ are banished to, and the people there are known to have strong revulsion of North Korean society. .Moreover, thanks to relationships with people in China, the people of the Onsong district are known to be fairly well-informed of the outside world” (Jee Hae-bom, “Riot Reported in North Korea,
” Digital Chosun, Nov. 1, 1999).

  9. A catalog of camps may be found in David Hawk, The Hidden Gulag (see chap. 16, n. 4).

  10. Ref. No. KN010, from AID/BHR/OFDA (Bureau for Humanitarian Responses, Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, AID).

  11. From around 2000 a few prominent defectors seemed to step into the pulpit to become specialists in single-minded condemnation of Pyongyang on behalf of human rights and religious organizations. Some of those in the 1990s had been among the defectors who gave me nuanced accounts of their experiences. While I had no doubt that they had good cause to take up activism, and likewise did not doubt that their passion was very real, I felt fortunate to have conducted my interviews with them earlier. Those interviews also occurred before the administration of President Kim Dae-jung, who took office in 1998, had begun in an obvious way to try to muzzle certain defectors to suit a new and diametrically opposite propaganda purpose: to keep their strongly negative views of the Pyongyang regime from derailing the “sunshine policy” of reaching out to find accommodation with the North.

  12. Graisse of the WFP said, “Is the army better fed than the average citizen? The only answer you can give is: Show me one country where it’s not.”

  13. See Natsios, The Great North Korean Famine, pp. 209–211.

  14. “On the 50th Anniversary of Kim Il-sung University” (see chap. 30, n. 2).

  15. For the citation to that 1998 speech see chap. 31, n. 5. Regarding the temporary nature of some measures, Natsios writes: “As the famine waned and the regime remained in power,” top officials sought to restore “the highly centralized, totalitarian structure that existed before the catastrophe struck.” For his examples, see The Great North Korean Famine, pp. 229–230.