Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor (3 page)

One measure to understand the extraordinary nature of Kim Yong’s privilege after adoption is Mangyeongdae Children’s Palace (
Mangyeongdae sonyeon gungjeon
), where he was sent to practice judo. This place grooms talented children with superb class background in all areas of the arts and sports under the tutelage of first-rate instructors. Some learn to perfect their musical skills while others learn how to dance. The Mangyeongdae Children’s Palace arts program is so reputed that it is a must stop for visiting foreign dignitaries, who are treated to impeccable talent shows staged by the young North Korean students. It was there that the boy Kim Yong made the acquaintance of the elder sister of Go Yeonghee, Kim Jong-il’s third wife-to-be, whose sons are nowadays expected to become the successors of Kim Jong-il. In a color-illustrated handbook for foreign tourists published in English by the National Tourism Administration in 2002, Mangyeongdae Children’s Palace is described with exuberant national pride:

It is an extracurricular educational institution for the school children in Pyongyang. The palace was built thanks to the loving care of President
Kim Il Sung
[
sic
] and General
Kim Jong Il
[
sic
] who have regarded children as the kings of the country. The palace has floor space of 103,000 square metres and covers an area of 300,000 square metres. A sculptural group is in front of the palace. The central hall runs high through to the third floor, links several sections of the palace and is decorated with 19.5-metre high marble pillars and 2.5 ton heavy chandelier. On both sides of the central hall 36-metre long large lily-of-the-valley pattern chandeliers run from the first floor through to the 6th floor. The palace consists of the science hall, gymnasium, art hall, and swimming pool, over 200 circle rooms and activity rooms and a 2000-seat theatre with an automatic stage. Every day more than 5,000 schoolchildren conduct various extracurricular activities in the palace.
⁷

Such excessive opulence, truly deserving the appellation of “palace,” was partly designed to create a social network for the future elites of North Korean society. As a member of this high circle, Kim Yong continued his privileged life into adulthood, marrying a political educator with a good revolutionary background and landing a preferred position as a foreign currency–earning officer in the National Security Agency. This chapter in Kim Yong’s life is arguably one of the most extraordinary, as his job, to earn foreign currency by conducting off-the-record trade with neighboring countries such as Japan and Russia, not only escalated his high-flying career but also provides a glimpse of a very obscure brand of North Korean capitalism. With a few exceptions,
⁸
little has been documented about North Korea’s government-led enterprise to earn foreign currency. According to Kim Yong, the primary purpose of setting up a foreign currency–earning department in almost every major government agency was to provide the North Korean leaders with hard currency. These departments were operating according to the strictest rules of the market economy, where generating profit is the primary goal and the survival of the fittest forces necessary mergers and acquisitions of ill- performing departments. With this fascinating view of how the underworld economy designed to serve a few leaders’ wealth directly contradicted the official political philosophy of serving the community, it is difficult to fathom how pervasively this off-the-record system transformed North Korean society and how it might have influenced the recent emergence of limited market economy. However, it would not be far-fetched to assume that the often-reported North Korean embassies’ illegal activities on foreign soil, such as drug smuggling, arms sales, and counterfeiting foreign currency, are the descendants of the practice of using government agencies to generate profit for the leaders as recounted by Kim Yong.
⁹

Kim Yong worked hard to reach a leadership position in this trading company, and in return, he enjoyed access to material goods and access to the outside world. Such privileges cannot be shared by all members of the society. Although North Korea is supposedly a classless socialist state, it has reinforced class divisions as formidably as the premodern society with its caste system did in the past. North Koreans regard
seongbun
, or, roughly translated, “socioeconomic or class background,”
¹⁰
as the primary factor in one’s future prospects.
Seongbun
is predetermined by family background, and there is nothing an individual can do to improve it. Without good
seongbun
, individual talent stands for nothing. As Charles Armstrong points out:

Social stratification had been one of the most enduring characteristics of Korean society before the twentieth century…. Rather than push for the elimination of social distinction at first, the emerging North Korean regime attempted to make social categories
more
explicit by carefully recording the social stratum (
seongbun
) of each individual…. The result of the North Korean revolution … was not the elimination of social hierarchy as such, but a radical change in the
content
of hierarchy.
¹¹

Indeed, the extent to which such social stratification regulated people’s lives was absolutely unchallengeable, so much so that Kim Yong’s mother took the drastic measure of falsifying the birth background of her two sons, who would have incomparably brighter futures as war orphans than as the sons of an American spy. As Hunter comments: “It is very difficult to improve one’s
seongbun
, however, particularly if the stigma derives from the pre-Revolutionary class status or behavior of one’s parents or relatives.”
¹²
Considering that the Korean Workers’ Party (
Joseon rodongdang
), arguably one of the most formidable social organizations in North Korea, keeps a detailed record of individuals’
seongbun
with regular updates, we can fathom the grave risk Kim’s mother took out of sheer desperation. It is quite obvious that had she and her family, with such incorrigible background, had freedom to leave North Korea, they would have done so. But most Koreans, even now, have neither the freedom to choose which Korea they want to live in nor the mobility to visit the other side without heavy surveillance from both states.

Casting a sideways glance at other socialist states, we find practices similar to the North Korean
seongbun
, which marked undesired social groups and stigmatized them permanently in the aftermath of the socialist revolution. Richard K. Carton notes that “every Communist assumption of power—in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania—was accompanied by mass arrests aimed primarily at the elimination of the opposition. Some prisoners were interned and others were assigned to forced labor.”
¹³
Likewise, in the People’s Republic of China, as Philip F. Williams and Yenna Wu’s study shows, a similar process of grouping undesirable people took place on a massive scale: “Justification of large-scale political arrests … would recur in the legal policies of and criminal law instituted by successive Chinese Communist regimes throughout the twentieth century. This general pattern was much the same for Leninist regimes throughout Eurasia, especially during the phase of consolidation.”
¹⁴
What is intriguing about this effort at massive elimination of certain social classes, however, is not only the creation of the so-called antirevolutionary class but also the fact that most of the antirevolutionaries ended up being absorbed by the state as a source of free labor. As Williams and Yu argue, “Because of their bad class background and the government’s need for cheap labor, able-bodied rich farmers and landlords who were charged with no crime at all were also often conscripted for coercive service in the hard labor brigades.”
¹⁵

The political cleansing of class enemies obviously had repercussions in the economic sphere across the socialist states, but the question of how the North Korean purge of antirevolutionaries became linked to the government’s economic policy has not yet been fully investigated. According to Kim Yong’s account, the North Korean prisoners provided more than twelve hours of labor a day, which makes it reasonable to assume that the state must have reaped a handsome profit from their forced labor. And yet, the degree of near-death starvation that the prisoners experienced would have limited their productivity, so it is difficult to imagine any significant revenue being generated in such a devastating environment. The driving force that created the penal labor camp system in North Korea seems to have been political rather than economic. Kim Yong was generating significant profit in foreign currency for the government before his arrest, and keeping him in that position would have been much more useful for Kim Jong-il’s financial needs than sending him to the mining camp, where nearly dead prisoners worked much slower than normal workers. The labor camps introduced in Kim’s testimony are extermination camps where purging the antirevolutionary elements of the society must have been the primary purpose.

Kwanliso
, simply referred to as “labor camps”
¹⁶
or “camps” in this book, occupy a special place in North Korean life. Located in secluded areas, each contains between 5,000 and 50,000 prisoners, totaling perhaps some 150,000 to 200,000 prisoners throughout North Korea, according to David Hawk’s report for the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
¹⁷
However, what seems more significant about the camps is the horror they conjure up in the minds of the people and their symbolic function in disciplining the behavior of North Koreans in society. North Korean people know too well that once labeled as anti-revolutionary, they will be sent to the labor camps “without any judicial process or legal recourse whatsoever, for lifetime sentences of extremely hard labor in mining, timber-cutting, or farming enterprise,”
¹⁸
and that “the prisoners live under brutal conditions in permanent situations of deliberately contrived semi-starvation.”
¹⁹

Kim Yong’s narrative provides a unique glimpse into two different camp sites, No. 14 and No. 18, where he was detained. He is the only person known to have walked out alive from No. 14 and the only one to have successfully escaped No. 18 to tell the details of conditions at these facilities. His testimonies are invaluable: without his willingness to share his experience, these clandestine sites would have been unknown to the outside world.
²⁰
Of all the harrowing accounts regarding labor camps, the most disturbing arguably is the torment of near-death starvation to which inmates are subject while forced to do more than twelve hours of backbreaking labor every day. According to Kim Yong, the daily food ration in No. 14 and No. 18 consisted of three handfuls of corn kernels accompanied by a little rough salt and a bowl of watery soup—a portion deliberately designed to starve inmates to slow and excruciating death.

The extreme conditions at the North Korean labor camps become clear when we compare them to the food-rationing systems in political prisons of other socialist countries. To provide but one example, the early Soviet labor camps in 1935 rationed meager portions of food, but when compared to the testimonies of the North Korean camp survivors,
²¹
the Soviet ration described in the following passage comes across as a rather sumptuous feast:

According to norms adopted in December 1935, camp prisoners daily received at least 400 grams of rye bread, along with hot dishes for breakfast and lunch. Approximate guidelines for food preparation called for 15 grams of flour per person per day, 60–80 grams of groats, and 500 grams of vegetables. Fish (160–80 grams) was served twenty-two times per month, and meat (70 grams), eight times per month. Prisoners received 350–400 grams of sugar per month. In theory, this meager ration could be increased if the work tasks were completed.
²²

The Soviet inmates, as was the case with their PRC counterparts, could also receive food parcels from family members, although there was a strict regulation as to how much they could get each time. According to Williams and Yu’s research, the Chinese camp inmates could receive no more than one parcel per month, the weight of limited to five kilograms or so.
²³
Such food parcels sent by family members are unknown to North Korean camp prisoners.

The extreme food rationing in labor camps must have been exacerbated by the deadly famine that swept across North Korea in the 1990s. The failure of the state-engineered food distribution system, coupled with natural disasters in 1994–95, devastated the countryside where most prison camps were located. Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland’s recent study tells us that this apocalyptic event, claiming up to one million lives, “ranks as one of the most destructive of the twentieth century.”
²⁴
It was a man-made disaster stemming from the combination of the central government’s poor decision making and systemic failure rather than from natural calamity.

Slow to respond to crisis—as closed, authoritarian governments so frequently are—the government not only limited effective targeting, monitoring, and assessment of humanitarian assistance, but cut off whole portions of the country from desperately needed help just as the famine was cresting. These government actions—and failure to act—are not incidental to the famine and ongoing food shortages; they are central to any explanation of it. The state’s culpability in this vast misery elevates the North Korean famine to a crime against humanity.
²⁵