Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (103 page)

“One thing I feel sorry for him,” the North Korean leader told his visitors, “is that he surrounded himself-with bad advisors. When Leader Kim Il-sung passed away, Kim Young-sam could not attend the funeral because of his advisors. I hear Kim himself regrets having bad helpers. When Leader Kim Il-sung died, I discussed with Secretary Kim Yong-sun what to do if Kim Young-sam wanted to attend the funeral, and made a detailed plan to receive him. But he did not come, and we were very upset with him. If he had any wisdom, he would have come to the funeral. If he had come, he might have taken over North Korea and become president of a united Korea. What an idiot!”
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The nuclear negotiations that Carter had arranged went forward despite Kim Il-sung’s death. In agreements reached in October 1994 and June 1995, Pyongyang promised it would neither restart its suspect reactor nor reprocess the spent fuel. A consortium of countries with interests in the region agreed to provide light-water reactors to replace the existing graphite-moderated technology.

Nevertheless, in the regime’s propaganda an ominous theme became increasingly evident: a negative fate awaited North Koreans and they must embrace it. “We must be prepared to die for the leader.” “Life is not valuable
without valuable deaths.” “Your life is meaningless except in the context of the party.” “We must be prepared to share the fate of the leader, good or bad.” A diplomat in Seoul saw parallels to the atmosphere in Nazi Germany during its final days. The Allies tried to starve the country into submission but Germans instead showed resilience and—-when all hope was gone— readiness for catastrophe, the diplomat noted.

In that part of the world there were neither shops nor markets nor merchants, nor any money in circulation. Here the law of value had no effect. Shoes and clothing for the population were obtained by capturing the enemy’s supplies.

—
KIM IL-SUNG, DESCRIBING CONDITIONS IN THE MANCHURIAN GUERRILLA ZONES IN THE 1930s
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Consider a typical war scenario widely circulated in the waning years of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first: Like Japan in 1941, the Pyongyang regime decides its survival is at stake and war is its last realistic—albeit desperate—chance. Responding to a real or manufactured provocation, and counting on problems elsewhere in the world to distract Washington and slow any American response, North Korea unleashes artillery barrages that destroy Seoul. Mean-while fanatical troops sneak into South Korea, disguised as locals. Some infiltrate via larger-scale versions of a September 19, 1996, coastal landing by a band of armed northern commandos aboard a submarine. Others ride tanks and armored personnel carriers
through secret tunnels beneath the Demilitarized Zone. Soon swollen by troops victorious in conventional battles along the DMZ, the Northern force sweeps south and bowls over its rich—and therefore soft—foe to reunite the peninsula in a matter of days.

Other scenarios could be imagined as well, of course. But regardless of the specifics, the message that defecting North Korean soldiers repeatedly took south was this: If-war should come, South Koreans and Americans would have their work cut out for them fighting an enemy more formidable than they might realize. Lulled by the passage of time since the last Korean war ended in 1953, civilians in South Korea and the United States at times were tempted to brush off such warnings. Drawing confidence from their state-of-the-art armaments, many expected that their combined forces would turn back an offensive by the merely medium-tech North Koreans, with more or less ease.

Military and intelligence professionals based in South Korea, on the other hand, were more inclined to cast a respectful eye at their prospective foe. Whatever the technological gap, North Korea had a significant advantage in the location of the border—just to the north of the suburbs of Seoul, which put the Southern capital easily-within range of the North’s massive artillery. Besides, the Pyongyang leadership had spent decades of effort and vast sums honeycombing the North’s hills to turn the country into an underground fortress, which it boasted would prove impregnable to attack or counterattack.

Despite such factors, the Gulf, Kosovo and Iraq wars inspired confidence that the American arsenal of “smart bombs” and other conventional weapons could tip the balance in Korea—-without the need to use nuclear weapons. But an intangible remained for knowledgable South Koreans and Americans, even those possessed of unbounded faith in the latest gizmos. That intangible was morale.

For a long while, Northerners’ fighting spirit withstood—indeed, thrived upon—food shortages. Shortages became a regular fact of life in the 1970s and by the start of the 1990s had seriously afflicted much of the North’s population. The regime fanned popular hatred of outside enemies, blaming all internal trouble—notably citizens’ reduced and intermittent grain rations—on South Korea, the United States and Japan. Ordinary people bought into that theory massively, defectors and refugees reported. Most North Koreans did not find the cause of the food shortages in the top leadership or in the country’s political-economic-social system, both of which they had been taught to revere. Rather, they blamed their troubles on the military threat from their enemies. It was on account of that threat, they were told—and they believed—that they had to sacrifice in order to keep up a credible military capability.

For many years grain rations had been reduced across the board with the explanation that the difference was going into the nation’s war reserves
as a patriotic contribution. But when would the sacrifice and consequent misery stop? Defectors in the 1990s began saying that an overwhelming percentage of the people believed only war could end the North-South impasse, which they saw as the cause of hard times. “The North Korean people have been suffering a long time,” Bae In-soo, a truck driver who defected to South Korea in 1996, told me. “They’ve been investing everything” in preparations for war. And so, for them, “war is the only answer.”

Ominously, those who felt that way included the younger soldiers who would have to do most ofthe fighting and dying if war should break out. Youngsters serving their hitches in the army-were—the overwhelming majority ofthem—not only ready but eager to fight. Combined with the war reserves ofgrain and fuel made possible by popular sacrifice and foreign aid, such focused hatred among the troops could be a formidable advantage in wartime—especially against a generation ofSouth Korean and American soldiers raised on abundance and more focused on consumption, leisure-time activities and post-military careers than on fighting.

How “would the South Koreans and Americans perform once the bullets started flying and their buddies started dying? Ahn Young-kil, a former North Korean army captain, saw enough following his defection to the South to warn that “in case of a long, drawn-out war—anything over two months— the South Korean army doesn’t have the potential to continue and the Americans would lose interest.” The South Koreans’ “mentality is not as strong as North Koreans’,” said Ahn. “South Koreans don’t have a strong sense of-war and the sacrifice needed when war erupts.” North Koreans, on the other hand, because of what they had been taught, “believe that they have to root out the main problem.” That main problem was that “the food shortage and other difficulties in livelihood result from U.S.-led economic sanctions, and from the fact the United States and South Korea have been preparing for war and forcing North Korea to prepare for war.” Get rid of that problem, they believed, and “they won’t have this economic difficulty. So they are determined to have this war.”

Choi Myung-nam, who served in the 124th Special Forces (the unit whose members had infiltrated to try to attack the Blue House in Seoul), offered a similar view: “The mentality and morale are very different. In South Korea, discipline is very loose. Soldiers only have to stay in the army for three years. During that time they can take leave to go meet their girlfriends.” North Korean soldiers, in contrast, Choi said, were in uniform typically for ten-year hitches filled with tough, intensive training. In their Spartan lives, the Northern soldiers had “no chance to meet girlfriends,” Choi said. They constantly shouted Kim Il-sung’s slogan: “We don’t want war but we are not afraid of war.” In fact, Choi said, “all my comrades wanted “war to break out—partly because they wanted to flaunt their potential, but also partly because the economic situation was so harsh they just
wanted some change.” While he was in the North, Choi “thought we would win. I knew that in a single day we would go all the way to the Naktong River” in the southern part of South Korea. His experiences in South Korea did not change his mind materially on that point. “Coming to South Korea, I realized that in a one-on-one war with South Korea the North would always win, assuming the Americans and others didn’t get involved,” he said.

True, North Koreans looking at the South might “miss the fact that pluralism in a democratic society has potential strength,” as Kim Kyung-woong, an official in the South’s Ministry of National Unification, noted. “In troubled times, society becomes cohesive.” But in terms of the prospects for the outbreak of a second, probably bloodier Korean war, the more significant fact was that fighting spirit reached such a height in the North that the leader—Kim Il-sung or his son, Kim Jong-il, after him—had only to say the word and the masses would march off enthusiastically into battle.

A big question after the mid-1990s was whether all that Northern mental readiness for war had peaked and started to decline. Some in Washington saw reasons to think so. A congressman, Tony Hall, said at a September 12, 1996, hearing that during a trip to North Korea in August that year he had seen soldiers looking as undernourished as civilians, thin and hollow-cheeked. “That may be the best evidence that most of North Korea’s military isn’t getting much more to eat than the rest of the people,” Hall said.

Rear Admiral William Wright, director of Asian affairs in the Pentagon’s Bureau of International Security Affairs, said at the same hearing that hunger could lead to a breakdown in discipline among the North’s soldiers. “They will begin to see indiscipline, perhaps, and infractions … as they continue to struggle to look after their own families and their own survival,” Wright said. Such slippage did indeed occur. Several defectors told me that hunger and associated health problems were starting to become more of a hindrance than a spur to military performance.

Historians a generation hence may well point to August 1995 as the high point on a chart of North Korean fighting spirit. August 15, 1945, was the day-when the Korean peninsula-was liberated from Japanese colonial rule— only to be divided into the American-ruled and Soviet-ruled zones that subsequently became South Korea and North Korea. In the early 1990s, the Pyongyang regime made much of the necessity of ending Korean division in time for the approaching fiftieth anniversary of the liberation, August 15, 1995. North Koreans believed that “if division still prevailed on the fiftieth anniversary, it would continue forever,” said Choi Kwang-hyeok, a twenty-five-year-old former KPA sergeant who escaped across the DMZ to the South. He said Northerners were also determined to achieve reunification as a gift to Great Leader Kim Il-sung during his lifetime, as Kim Jong-il repeatedly promised.

By 1992, the widespread belief was that all able-bodied young men
should join the army so that they could take part in the war for reunification expected before that fiftieth anniversary said Choi, who was a university student but made the patriotic decision in the war fever of that year to enlist as a soldier. Already the food situation was severe enough, even for the military that the usual strenuous training had to be deemphasized, Choi said. Ideological readiness sessions that emphasized hatred of the enemy filled much of the soldiers’ time. But then Kim Il-sung died, in July
1994,
having ruled for almost a half century. Like many others, Choi Kwang-hyeok was “devastated” by the Great Leader’s death. He “started doubting that reunification would occur, doubting the whole regime” and its future. When August 15, 1995, came and “went, reunification still only a dream, “people started thinking, ‘Maybe war will happen—but maybe it won’t,’ ” said Choi.

Like an apocalyptic sect confronted with the world’s failure to end on the scheduled day, the regime did its figures again and pushed the date forward, telling the people, “We’ll have reunification by the end of the 1990s.” People still bought in, but not as thoroughly as before. “They still think war may break out, but motivation and morale are not as high,” Choi said. “Even the [military] trainers complain, ‘With that kind of morale, how are we supposed to win the war?’”