Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (172 page)

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.

16.
“S. Korean Agent Reports North Has Executed at Least 50 Officials in Purge,” Seoul-datelined dispatch from Agence France-Presse.

17.
Suh,
Kim Il-sung
(see chap. 2, n. 35), p. 154.

18.
Kim Kwang In, “NK Exhumes and Decapitates Body of ‘Traitor,’ ”
Chosun Ilbo,
October 5, 2001. According to a report from a defector, Kim Man-kum was restored around January 2000 to the good graces of history (“Fallen Political Bureau .Member Reinstated,”
Chosun Ilbo,
September 4, 2002, http://english. chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200209/200209040029.html).

19.
Speech before Unification Council of South Korea, Nov. 12, 1997, cited in Natsios,
The Great North Korean Famine,
p. 203.

20.
One reported practice that might be termed genocide: forcing abortions and infanticides upon female political prisoners—including refugee women, impregnated while staying illegally in China, who had been captured, returned to North Korea and put into detention. See
The Hidden Gulag,
pp. 65–72. And
on p.
74
the report says that a group of former political prisoners feared that increased international publicity about the prison system might inspire the authorities “to ‘massacre the prisoners’ in order to destroy evidence of the camps.”

21.
“K., a North Korean in his 30s, was recruited at age 17 into an elite military unit working for the agency responsible for weapons production. He took an oath to work underground for the rest of his career and was assigned to a cave in remote Musan County in North Hamgyong province, about 15 miles from the Chinese border.

“ ‘This is how we hide from our enemies. Everything in North Korea is underground,’ said K, who described the cave on condition that he be quoted using only his first initial and that certain identifying details be kept vague.

“North Korea is riddled with caves like the one in which K worked. Under its paranoid regime, virtually everything of military significance is manufactured underground, whether it’s buttons for soldiers’ uniforms or enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. A South Korean intelligence source estimates that North Korea has several hundred large underground factories and more than 10,000 smaller facilities. Joseph S. Bermudez, Jr., the author of three books on the North Korean military, puts the total number between 11,000 and 14,000” (Barbara Demick, “N. Korea’s Ace in the Hole,”
Los Angeles Times,
Nov. 14, 2003, p. 1).

33. Even the Traitors Who Live in Luxury.

1.
Kang’s remarks in this chapter are from my interview with him on June 12, 1995, and from his testimony in
JoongAng Ilbo
(see chap. 2, n. 7).

34. Though Alive, Worse Than Gutter Dogs.

1.
Kim Kwang-in, “NKs 5 Concentration Camps House 200,000,”
Digital Chosunilbo
(English Edition), December 5, 2002, http://english.chosun.com/cgi-bin/printNews?id=200212050035.

2.
For eyewitness accounts of such executions see Kang Chul-hwan, “Public Executions Witnessed Personally,”
Chosun Ilbo,
March 25, 2001.

3.
Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot,
The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in a North Korean Gulag,
translated by Yair Reiner (New York: Basic Books, 2001). Some other works by former political prisoners have yet to be translated from Korean into English.

4.
I cannot rule out that he was referring to Chinese donations, which were given without conditions.

5.
See, for example, Park Son-hee and Park Chun-shik, Inochi no Tegami (English title River of Grief: The Ordeal of Two North Korean Children), Japanese main text with English summary translation by Alexander Martin (Tokyo: The Massada, 1999). This brother and sister refugee pair had hidden in China until journalist Hideko Takayama helped them get to South Korea, as she related in “Could you take us to South Korea?”—part of a cover package entitled “Escape from Hell: The secret refugee trails from North Korea—and the story of the people who got out,” Newsweek International, March 5, 2001.

Also see M裩cins Sans Fronti籥s, North Korea: Testimonies of Famine— Refugee Interviews from the Sino-Korean Border, Special Report (New York: Doctors Without Borders / M裩cins Sans Fronti籥s, August 1998), http://www. doctorswithoutborders.org/publications/reports/before1999/korea_1998.shtm.

Also see Médicins Sans Frontières,
North Korea: Testimonies of Famine
—
Refugee Interviews from the Sino-Korean Border, Special Report
(New York: Doctors Without Borders / Médicins Sans Frontières, August 1998), http://www. doctorswithoutborders.org/publications/reports/before1999/korea_1998.shtm.

6.
One scholar who has continued to disparage defector testimony is Bruce Cum-ings. “Literally for half a century, the South Korean intelligence services have bamboozled one American reporter after another by parading their defectors (real and fake),” Cumings writes in his 2003 book. To back this harsh assessment he cites his own experience when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in the South in the 1960s. Crusading anti-communist defectors “used to come around the school where I taught, to tell all the assembled students that everyone was starving in the North, and no one owned a watch or leather shoes. One famous defector, Kim Sin-jo, was … an all-purpose source for exaggerated and inflamed propaganda about the North, as well as a well-known alcoholic. He later tried to re-defect back to the North”
(North Korea: Another Country
[see chap.
4,
n. 25], pp. xii and 153). .Moving forward in time, Cumings manages to turn around the message of defector Kang Chul-hwan’s book on his gulag experiences, writing (p. 176):
“The Aquariums of Pyongyang
is an interesting and believable story, precisely because it does not, on the whole, make for the ghastly tale of totalitarian repression that its original publishers in France meant it to be; instead it suggests that a decade’s incarceration with one’s immediate family was survivable and not necessarily an obstacle to entering the elite status of residence in Pyongyang and entrance to college. Meanwhile, we have a long-standing, never-ending gulag full of black men in our prisons, incarcerating upward of 25 percent of all black youths. This doesn’t excuse North Korea’s police state, but perhaps it suggests that Americans should do something about the pathologies of our inner cities—say, in Houston—before pointing the finger.”

7.
Kang Chul-hwan, “Public Executions All But Gone,” http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200210/200210300011.html.