Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (126 page)

The end of the second millennium saw increased foreign interest in North Korea’s human rights situation, a positive if belated development. Clearly there was more concern in Japan, Europe and North America, as well as South Korea, for oppressed North Koreans. This had much to do with news that thousands of refugees who had crossed the border into China, principally in search of food, had to hide there for fear of being captured and returned to North Korea.

Pyongyang-watchers who were not blinded by ideological sympathy had known all along, of course, that Pyongyang gave full expression to the theory and practice of totalitarianism. As late as 1972, when Scalapino and Lee published their landmark two-volume
Communism in Korea,
this was said freely, in strong terms. But pointed criticisms largely went out of fashion later in the 1970s after the revisionist movement took hold among those
young Korea specialists in the United States who were influenced by leftist thinking. Well into the 1990s quite a few of them refused to credit the accounts of North Koreans who defected to the South.

Take away the defectors’ accounts and there was almost no firsthand information available on which to base assessment of human rights abuses. Unfortunately leftist scholars were not alone in dismissing the defectors as propaganda tools of Seoul’s Korean Central Intelligence Agency. Many in foreign governments agreed.

Around 1999, though, the credibility of the defectors in Seoul started to receive a major boost from the availability of a new crop of first-hand stories about the realities of North Korea—this time told by refugees who had crossed into China. What they were telling interviewers corroborated, in spades, the main points of what the all-but-ignored Seoul-based defectors had been saying for years.
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The former trickle of defectors, refugees, escapees—call them what you wish—turned into a flood due to food shortages and the collapse of the North’s economy. That meant there were thousands of North Koreans testifying or ready to testify—a large proportion of them not in South Korea or under South Korean government supervision. Thus, even the most skeptical researcher might be hard-pressed to keep a straight face while citing “lack of reliable information” in dismissing wholesale the many accounts of how North Koreans had been systematically oppressed.
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Starting in 1999 and 2000, long-isolated Pyongyang tried to improve relations with old enemies and old friends alike, an effort that seemed to offer some carryover to its human rights situation. North Korea’s quest for new relationships in Europe, in particular, aroused hopes of an accompanying increase in sensitivity to international concerns over the regime’s treatment of its subjects. Encouraging in that regard was a report, during a “dialogue” in November 1999 with the European Union, that Pyongyang had issued a large-scale amnesty to mark the September 9 founding anniversary of the Northern government.

The South’s Yonhap news agency in a dispatch from Seoul a few days later quoted an unnamed diplomatic source as having reported the claim. But the source said the North Korean delegates, speaking with EU counterparts in Brussels, had given no details on the contents of the amnesty. Rather, they had followed up with the assertion that the regime always worked to enhance its people’s rights. To bolster that claim, they had added that the country intended to join an international covenant banning gender discrimination; that United Nations human rights standards had been translated for domestic publication; and that a national judicial committee on juvenile rights had been established.

Sketchy as those remarks were, “It’s a big change for the North to have elaborated on its human rights situation,” said Yonhap’s diplomatic source, attributing the change to Pyongyang’s mounting concern over international criticism of its human rights record. To understand part of the reason for such concern, one had only to recall North Korea’s dismay at NATO’s Kosovo intervention, which was justified on the basis of human rights.

In the quest for better foreign relationships, establishment of diplomatic relations with Italy was viewed as a milestone. Previously no members of the Group of Seven industrialized countries had relations with Pyongyang. Australia, the Philippines, France, Taiwan, Japan, even Britain were on the list of countries that contemplated joining in the diplomatic dance. But with all the additional diplomatic activity there were few reports of positive results in human rights terms.

Some analysts worried that, on the contrary, having more polite government-to-government relationships might be giving the regime added leverage to do as it pleased with—and to—its own people. After all, outright enemies and long-time critics or detractors of a country don’t hesitate to condemn its human rights violations—but countries that are in the process of improving diplomatic relations think at least twice before speaking their minds in such cases.

John Pomfret of
The Washington Post
in a February 19, 2000, article reported that the situation of North Korean refugees in China had worsened precisely because of Pyongyang’s improved relations with other countries. The article quoted a United Nations official who lamented the “total silence” with which the international community greeted the forced repatriation of seven North Koreans who had fled to China and thence to Russia. “In most parts of the world the Americans would be outraged,” the UN official continued. But the article quoted aid officials as saying foreign (read American?) officials’ gratitude for progress on weapons issues had made them less eager to put pressure on North Korea regarding refugee issues.

Pyongyang had further plans to use diplomacy in ways that could bode ill for starving or otherwise unsatisfied, or dissatisfied, citizens of North Korea who might wish to vote with their feet. Those plans involved the country most interested in improved relations, South Korea, whose President Kim Dae-jung was pursuing a “sunshine policy” to try to lure the North into a peaceful relationship. South Korean press reports quoted a unification policy official in Seoul as saying on February 17, 2000, that North Korea had offered Seoul some secret reunions of families divided by the Demilitarized Zone—a hot-button issue in South Korea. In exchange, though, Seoul would have to agree to help Pyongyang deter the defection of North Koreans with relatives in the South. That category had accounted for a large percentage of successful defections, since the Southern family members were often willing to pay for agents to undertake rescue efforts.

Face the fact that dealing with human rights issues in the North would be a slow process, the South’s President Kim advised early in 2000. “Interest by the international community in North Korea’s human rights conditions may have effect to some extent,” he told an international conference on engagement policy toward the North. “But it would be difficult to produce great results under any circumstances.” Kim added that “solving poverty is most important in terms of North Korean human rights. Dialogue with the West and wider investment must take place before one can expect improvement.” While perhaps a pragmatic and realistic assessment, that would have been a bitter pill for anyone in or out of North Korea who was hoping for a flowering of human rights as a result of all the current diplomatic activity.

But there was some encouraging evidence that Pyongyang’s change of policy amounted to more than just such cosmetic touches as moving political prison camps from border areas to more remote, less easily observed sites. In October 2002, former political prison camp inmate Kang Chul-hwan, in his capacity as a
Chosun Ilbo
reporter, was able to report:

“It has recently been learned that the notorious public executions carried out across North Korea in the latter half of the 1990s are all but gone since 2000, and that the family life of political prisoners has eased significantly ‘Under Kim Jong-il’s order issued to the State Security Agency and border guards early in 2000, “Don’t fire shots in the Republic,” no public executions have been carried out in the North, particularly in the border area,’ said a North Korean who has fled to China and who had served with the border guard. … The reported suspension of open [as opposed to secret] executions is reportedly ascribed to censure by the world community. Pyongyang is also said to have suspended punishing the families of political criminals, unless involved in grave offenses.”
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Such changes, if real, might have been too late to help Hong Won-myung, the twenty-year-old ex-hostage in Thailand, if he had returned to North Korea in accordance with his shock announcement to the press. But a Thai newspaper reported after his press conference appearance that the real reason Hong had expressed the wish to return home was that he wanted to protect his remaining family members there from retaliation by the Pyongyang regime; in fact he had decided to defect with his parents to the United States.

His captors each day had made him telephone his brother in North Korea, who had told him he should follow the North Korean officials’ instructions or the brother and the brother’s wife would come to serious harm, perhaps be killed, according to the account in the vernacular daily
Naew Na.
The paper attributed to unnamed Thai intelligence sources its version of what young Hong recounted privately after having been reunited with his parents. His captors fed him his lines for the press conference, telling him
they wanted to make sure North Korea’s image would not be hurt further, the article said.

Naew Na’s
sources quoted Hong as saying his captors had tranquilized him and kept him in his underwear after the kidnapping. Using a carrot-and-stick approach, besides arranging the daily calls to his frightened brother they had promised him an elite career if he would do as he was told and return to Pyongyang. Hong would be made a diplomat and dispatched to Bangkok in two years as a third secretary in the North Korean embassy there, they assured him. The captors also offered to return cash amounting to some $100,000 plus 200,000 Thai baht that they had seized when they broke into the family’s apartment, according to the
Naew Na
account.

Stern-faced soldiers stood every few hundred meters along a road that skirted freshly plowed and flooded rice paddies, the dark brown ooze ready for planting. A few goats grazed. Oxen pulled plows; one pulled a “honey wagon” full of night soil—human excrement, traditionally used as fertilizer. People carried loads of fire-wood or straw on their backs, going to and from the single-family houses and small apartment buildings that dotted the countryside. Long winter underwear hung out to dry.

This was the North Korea that a tourist like me could see from one of the tour buses that pulled up every day at the base of Mount Kumgang, home of the 100-meter Nine Dragons waterfall. The buses parked in a vast lot surrounded by souvenir stands and snack shops. After hiking up a steep, river-hugging trail, the drill was to admire ancient Buddhist inscriptions and contemporary communist slogans that had been chiseled into the rock faces. When we had taken in enough of the scenery, we could spend our hard currency bathing in therapeutic hot spring water or watching circus performers from Pyongyang perform in a covered stadium.

North Korea always put its best foot forward in areas frequented by visitors. Mount Kumgang, when I went there in the spring of 2000, proved to be no exception. As the well-fed locals who maintained it could have attested (-were they permitted to speak about such matters), the site bore little resemblance to most of their country. The Dear, now Great, Leader Kim Jong-il had remained adamant in his refusal to endorse capitalism. He continued to
isolate citizens from outside influences. Like Cuba, North Korea remained an economic outcast in a world mostly folded into the market economy. Next-door China, while still politically a one-party communist state, was growing rapidly and was on course to become an export powerhouse—the next Japan. Pyongyang’s ideological intransigence had left it far behind China, farther still behind South Korea. Yet this mountain resort thirty miles from the border, developed by South Korean conglomerate Hyundai, offered a tantalizing clue that the rulers in Pyongyang might be ready, at long last, for major economic change.

Some people, both Korean and foreign, were hoping that a summit meeting between Kim Jong-il and South Korea’s president Kim Dae-jung would prove to be a turning point. And when those leaders did meet in June 2000, the initial signs were promising. In an atmosphere akin to a love-in, the two Koreas agreed to live in peace while pursuing eventual reunification. Seoul was to promote South Korean investment in the North. Pyongyang, in turn, agreed to permit meetings of family members separated a half-century earlier. A few days after the meeting, President Bill Clinton agreed to relax most U.S. economic sanctions against North Korea, a move heralded (prematurely, as it turned out) as clearing the way for trade in all goods and services except for the most politically sensitive.