Everyone in the room then thought the same thing, but no one dared say the words out loud. The very idea was heresy. Finally, one quiet official at the far end of the room spoke up. “Then we’ve no choice but to ask for aid,” he said.
Normally, the immediate reaction would have been to condemn such talk—and yet no one did. Emergencies call for accepting things that one never would under other circumstances. “Comrades,” said another official, “are we sure we should go down this course?”
I cleared my throat. “At times like this, I always look to the words of the Great Leader. I remember something he said at a national farmers’ conference in 1979: ‘Only when there is plenty of food, can a nation defend its independence and have its say. If a country fails in farming and begs other countries for food, it can neither uphold independence nor have its say.’”
The mood in the room got perceptively darker. Finally, the first official piped up. “It’s not aid if it’s from the same nation, right? So we can ask for help from the south. After all, we aided them a decade ago during their floods.”
“And it’s not ‘aid’ if it’s restitution,” I smiled. “So we can seek assistance from the Japs, who owe us so much for all that they’ve done to Korea in the past. The important thing is that no foreign states become aware of the true nature of this temporary situation. The US imperialists would surely use any possible pretext to invade Korea. If they can’t blatantly attack us for militaristic reasons, they’ll be just as happy to inflate a situation under concerns of ‘humanitarianism’.”
Discreetly, our officials pointed out the emergency to the south Koreans and to the Japs, and asked for a temporary bit of assistance for that year. Our neighbors held to the UN principle that food and politics shouldn’t interfere. Though relations between us and them were poor, they didn’t want to see the Korean people go hungry and sent us the assistance that we requested. With that settled, I managed to guide the nation through the winter and the spring with only marginal difficulty.
With that behind me, on June 12, 1995 I led all the branches of the government in adopting a major joint decision: Kumsusan Assembly Hall, where the Great Leader had worked, would be renamed the Kumsusan Memorial Palace. The area surrounding the hall would be rebuilt into Juche’s most sacred temple. On July 8, the one-year anniversary of his death, the eternal image was unveiled for visitors from around the world: President Kim Il Sung preserved under glass, lying in state for all eternity.
I’d considered Korea’s troubles to be a function of the weather, an aberration, and wanted the nation to return to glory as quickly and efficiently as possible. But during the summer of 1995, the heavens again exploded in grief and sorrow. The rains were the strongest that the DPRK had ever experienced, unprecedented in their ferocity. Every day I sat in my office, looking out the window and desperately hoping for a break in the storms. But there was none, no respite whatsoever.
Then came the floods.
When our mines got flooded, we couldn’t dig enough coal to keep our thermal plants going. The DPRK’s national emblem featured a hydroelectric power plant—but now the power plants were as lifeless as the plants growing in our fields. Gone too were the grain reserves, stored underground and also flooded. Even when there was food in one location, we couldn’t move it efficiently since our railways ran on electricity.
By August I couldn’t hide the crisis any longer. Nearly two million tons of grain had been lost. Over 5.4 million people—about a fifth of our population—were displaced. It had taken over fifty years for the Great Leader to build up Juche Korea. One year later, I was on the verge of losing it all. Going against everything that I knew, I had no choice but to publicly ask for assistance. My decision was unprecedented—but so was the weather. The International Red Cross and United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) both intervened. The world at large, increasingly under the spell of “Pax Americana,” viewed the DPRK as their enemy. Why would they be willing to help?
I soon learned the answer.
I was on a field guidance tour when I was approached by one of the officials who was negotiating the assistance program. “Comrade,” he said, “the WFP is making all sorts of demands.”
“What is it that they want?”
“They want inspections, to make sure that the food is delivered where it’s supposed to.”
Inspections. Always, it was inspections! “Who are they to decide where the food is supposed to go?” I asked. “That’s the role of our Public Distribution System. Are they trying to abrogate the role of the Party? This is conquering Korea without firing a single shot!”
“What shall we do?”
“We must envelop our environment in a dense fog,” I said, “to prevent our enemies from learning anything about us. Listen carefully. Hide the worst areas from our external enemies; they must not see us as weak. Make sure that the official relief agencies don’t have any Korean speakers on their staff. Who knows how many spies are in their midst? They will be shown around at our discretion alone. At the same time, our internal enemies must never know the source of aid. Make sure that every bag of grain, every seed, is delivered through the Party via the PDS.”
“Comrade,” the official said cautiously, “if we don’t show them the worst areas, then surely they will send us less food.”
“More food means more interference in our way of operation. We’ll be the ones deciding where any food is ‘supposed’ to go. We will decide, not them! I’ll figure out where to send it, just let them deliver it.”
Now I had the most difficult decision possible: where should the food be sent? Who should eat—and who shouldn’t? Later that week, I pored over maps of the nation, noting which areas were hardest hit by the catastrophe. I matched those maps against those of transport systems, figuring out how much food could realistically be moved given our limited mechanisms. No matter what I did, I always came up short. There simply wasn’t enough food to go around. Some regions had to be given priority over others—but I needed some criterion to decide which, both in the short and in the long term.
Then the answer came to me.
I was so startled that my pen dropped out of my hand. To some, it sounds like poetic license when I say that the Great Leader’s presence was still felt in Korea as much as when he’d been alive. To the DPRK’s enemies, such a statement sounds like pure nonsense. But it was neither of those things. As I looked at the maps, I saw that President Kim Il Sung had anticipated the present crisis—and he’d already implemented a solution.
The Intensive Guidance Project that the Great Leader had begun in 1958 had classified the masses into core, wavering and hostile classes. As the decades passed, their songbun had been further subdivided into fifty-one subcategories via such programs as the Understanding People Project. The Party had used this information to determine much of every Korean’s life—including where they lived. Those in the hostile class had been moved into the northeast of Korea decades ago, and there they and their children had remained. Internal migration in the DPRK required official permission, which was typically denied to those in the hostile class. Nor could they have bribed their way out even if they wanted to. Due to the lack of electricity, railways that used to take hours to travel the country now literally took months. I therefore knew exactly where the enemies of the Party, the people and the Great Leader were localized: in the northeast.
I picked up my pen and crossed out those provinces on the map. They’d be the last to get sent any food—if they would, in fact, get sent any food. Those in the hostile class would simply have to find a way to fend for themselves. I considered this a good thing for them. They always crowed the loudest about their loyalty. Now they had an unparalleled opportunity to prove their belief in the Juche principle of self-reliance. This was a good thing for me as well, for having too many people in the DPRK made leadership that much more difficult.
That decided, I worked deep into the night sketching out different scenarios. There still wouldn’t be enoug
h food for the rest of the country, but I managed to coordinate a largely equitable solution. Soon all this would be over, I thought, and Korea would be on the upswing again.
Times were lean over the coming months, but even I didn’t know quite how lean they were. If I visited a chicken farm, for example, Party officials would collect all the nearby chickens to make it seem as if there were no problems. Grain harvests were supplemented by the addition of small rocks to the sacks, falsely increasing their weight. Soon we were all biting our bread with great care, trying to avoid chipping our teeth on any pebbles that had snuck through.
As 1995 came to a close, I began to work on the forthcoming New Year’s joint editorial, perhaps the most important piece of writing that comes out of the DPRK every year. Published by all three newspapers, the editorial sets the message and lays out the nation’s plans for the following year. 1995’s message had been dedicated to President Kim Il Sung; 1996’s would be the first one to truly be my own.
Times were hard, dreadfully so, but the DPRK had been through hard times before and had always come out the better for it. Though President Kim Il Sung was gone, the strong edifice he had constructed still stood tall and proud. It would take much more than some natural disaster to undermine it. I wanted the editorial to reassure the people. I also wanted to establish a sense of continuity with the past, so that my optimism wouldn’t seem like a mere attempt to placate fears. There had to be evidence that similar situations had been resolved successfully in Korea before.
For inspiration, I went to the Kumsusan Memorial Palace to visit the eternal image. I walked through the temple of Juche, proud of how beautifully everything was displayed. I smiled as I passed by the Great Leader’s car, thinking of the trips that we’d taken together. I bowed before his statue, pausing for a moment of silence. Finally, I entered the room where he lay in state, covered with the WPK flag. All around him bloomed the Kimilsungia orchid that had been bred in his honor, a touch of quiet beauty in the austere surroundings.
I looked for parallels between the current conditions and what the Great Leader had gone through. Rather than recalling his victories, I thought about the worst moments of his life, times when a lesser man would have been defeated or quit: The strategic retreat during the Fatherland Liberation War. The coup attempt against him from abroad, and the one from within. The loss of his wife and my beloved mother, anti-Japanese heroine Kim Jong Suk. These were all dark days, but the situations were never not quite the same as the present. None of these experiences were as prolonged and as intense. None seemed so bleak.
That’s when I remembered what surely were the worst moments that the Great Leader had ever faced.
During the days of anti-Japanese struggle, General Kim Il Sung’s guerrilla army had trekked through the bitter winter weather for over one hundred days. They constantly fought life-and-death battles to break the encirclement of the Japanese army in what was later dubbed the “Arduous March.” Things couldn’t have looked worse—but the General turned adversity into good fortune. That journey set the stage for his eventual victory.
It was the Korean people who were now facing an Arduous March of our own.
The New Year’s editorial that we published acknowledged how difficult things seemed. But—just as in the original Arduous March—only victory could come at the conclusion. The spirit of the Arduous March was one of being determined to carry out the revolution to the end. It was the spirit of bitter struggle which knew no defeat in the face of severe adversity. It was the spirit of optimism that challenged and broke through all obstacles. It was, plain and simple, the spirit of General Kim Il Sung’s Juche Korea.
I didn’t have solutions to our problems yet. In fact, much of our funds were frozen due to the American sanctions. Over the following months, I did the best I could with what I had while the march to victory continued. Our food-processing factories might not have been able to deliver actual food, so I ordered them to produce “substitute foods”: Corn byproducts were mixed with husks, grass and seafood and then formed into noodles or meal bars. Though they had virtually no nutritional value and could barely be digested, I knew they could at least be used to allay one’s hunger. As did drinking water. As did sucking on one’s fingers.
Then the DPRK was plagued by beasts. First came “the march of the ants.” Starving people traveled in long lines to the mountainsides to look for wild grass or acorns to eat, looking like ants scurrying from their hills. Then there were the “penguins,” vagabonds who wandered the countryside clad in dark, filthy rags on their backs.
Yet neither of these “beasts” horrified me as much as the kotchebi, the “little sparrows.” Many children became orphaned during the Arduous March, or were simply abandoned by families who could no longer take care of them. I issued orders to supply our orphanages with what we could, but it still wasn’t enough. There wasn’t sufficient coal to stay warm or sufficient food to feed the children. So these kotchebi hopped around the roads, scratching at the dirt and looking for some small morsel to eat just like the birds which gave them their name. At first the sight of these starving homeless tykes discouraged and depressed the masses. But then the people grew accustomed to them, and finally viewed these kotchebi only as a nuisance. Per my instructions, the authorities eventually rounded them up and took care of them.
As the summer of 1996 approached, the news got worse and worse. I learned that starving farmers were eating their corn cobs before the crops had time to develop—and they were the lucky ones. Things that had never been regarded as fit for consumption now became the very basis of the Korean diet: Dandelions. Wormwood. Grass roots. Tree bark. “Broth” made out of boiled leaves. After those were gone any organic matter had to do. The people took in weeds that were so inedible that they could barely be swallowed, and, once swallowed, could barely be kept down. The gorgeous Korean mountainsides turned yellow, as any vegetation was systemically removed and consumed. Finally it got to the point where people were simply drinking saccharine, their faces bloating from the chemicals before they inevitably passed away.
Things got so bad that there was no precedent for it. I didn’t know what to do because no nation had ever been in such a bad situation. In 1996 floods came once again—and they were just as crippling, if not more so, then the previous year’s had been. It was as if the heavens themselves wanted me to fail. I needed the masses to believe that their nation was the best, even though they ate very little. They had to see the DPRK as “a poor country of abundance.” But it grew harder and harder for me to tell people with empty dishes that socialism is good. They simply weren’t buying it. They weren’t buying anything. The shelves in the distribution centers were empty, often for months at a time.
Everywhere I went, the people cheered louder than ever. Candidly, I was glad that they had the strength to cheer. But I had cut my teeth on the film industry. I revolutionized the world of theatre and opera. I knew bad acting when I saw it—and I saw it aplenty. The cheers were all fake. They were not cheering from the bottom of their hearts. When I was gone, the masses would whisper about me. Soon their grumbling was so loud that even I couldn’t avoid hearing it. They quipped that “water always flows downhill” and said that grass no longer grew wherever I sat on the ground. “Tiger father, dog son.” Some began to call me the “gruel lord.”
Everyone in Korea was suffering—none more so than myself, who felt the agony of the people as no one else did. Yet of all the many groups in the DPRK, only one never lost their faith in me: the military. No military on earth was as imbued with revolutionary consciousness as the Korean People’s Army. The KPA looked to the anti-Japanese guerrillas for inspiration like no one else. They saw the Arduous March as an opportunity to live just as their predecessors did, fighting as they had for an independent Korea.
Rather than having soldiers sit idly by, waiting for a war that hopefully would never come, the state put them to work in the field of socialist construction. Even during the grimmest days of the Arduou
s March, the KPA men and women followed through with the remaining projects that the Great Leader had planned: the second stage of the Chongryu Bridge; the Pyongyang-Hyangsan Tourist Motorway; the Mt. Kuwol recreation ground. Not only did the DPRK have the best military in the world, but we had the only military that was also a national construction force.
One of the most important of these construction projects was building the Anbyon Youth Power Station. More power stations meant more electricity, which meant lives would be saved. I braved the drizzling rain on the morning of June 10, 1996 to inspect how progress was going. The solider-builders stood at attention as I pulled up to the site, and I noticed with great sadness that all their uniforms were dingy, frayed and stained. That this didn’t seem to embarrass them told me that this was now the norm. I understood, for cloth was very hard to come by. What bothered me was how the men’s uniforms hung on them, as if the clothes were two sizes too big—when in fact it was the men who were two sizes too small, shrinking from hunger.
The commanding officer showed me around the site with great dignity in his voice. It pleased me to hear that he still had pride in his country while it was undergoing indescribable hardships. “We’ve built dams and dug waterway tunnels through rugged mountains,” he explained. “All in all we’ve braved 128 cave-ins.”
“Have there been any injuries?” I said.
The officer paused. “This is a revolution.”
“No matter how acute the power situation of the country may be,” I said, “you should take radical measures to protect the workers’ health and safety.”
He nodded. “Of course, comrade. But it’s the workers who are putting themselves in danger.”
Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il Page 29
