Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (115 page)

“Why did the investigation take so long? This was because of structural problems among security organizations. The head of North Korea’s authority system is State Security. Under it there are provincial and city security authorities. The People’s Armed Forces security is [formally] under the direction of State Security but the PAF maintains its own security department and trains its workers at its own security school. For State Security to investigate or arrest an army member it needs the cooperation of the military
security authorities. They usually don’t work well together. In my case, State Security requested cooperation from the PAF Security Department but the PAF authorities didn’t cooperate. That left it to civilians in State Security to investigate me with no help. Military security authorities hoped State Security would give up due to lack of evidence so they could then solve the case, arrest and charge me and keep all the credit for themselves.”

One American involved with private relief efforts took note of the somewhat less harsh face the justice system had begun to present. “North Koreans break the rules on internal passports for the starving,” he said. The authorities had been permitting unprecedented freedom of movement so that desperate people could search for food. “They’re not shooting people for cutting trees on the hills or farming on slopes even though it causes erosion and means deforestation that will deprive the military of hiding places.” Meanwhile, he said, “enlisted men are almost starving.”
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There had been a policy since Kim Il-sung’s day to “root out three generations” of the families of disloyal subjects, and the prisons continued to be used for that purpose. (See the testimony of Ahn Myong-chol in chapter 34.) However, as other researchers also have found,
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apparently that did not translate into a special starvation regime for prisoners once the famine began in earnest. While more and more inmates died as a result of malnutrition, the political prison camps continued to be run more as slave-labor and slow-death camps than as instant-death camps. It may seem a small distinction, but it shows that in this regard at least Kim Jong-il was no Hitler.

Choi Myung-nam defected in 1995. I asked him what he thought had happened to the family he left behind. “I believe they would have been resettled to a rural area in the mountains, maybe in South Pyongan Province,” Choi said. “From 1993, families of defectors are not sent to prison camps but just resettled in the mountains. From 1993, unless a person actually commits a crime he’s not sent to prison camp. It’s just a policy of Kim Jong-il’s.”

That sort of leniency, as opposed to the crackdown that Robert Collins would have predicted if the regime were entering his fourth phase, suppression, in the process of collapse, suggested to me that the regime might be around for a while.

In fact, although of course he had not used those terms, reversing the local independence of Phase Three and avoiding Phase Four had been main thrusts of Kim Jong-il’s December 1996 speech. As for local independence, his argument was: “If the party lets the people solve the food problem themselves, then only the farmers and merchants will prosper, giving rise to egotism and collapsing the social order of a classless society. The party will then
lose its popular base and “will experience meltdown as in Poland and Czechoslovakia.” Kim clearly feared that party officials were opting for suppression. Instead, he insisted, they must persuade the people that “this is the time of the march of hardship” and thus permit the regime to “control the situation without resorting to using law enforcement bodies.”
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One can see in his handling of the situation hints that in the aftermath of his father’s death he had become an effective national leader in his own right, correctly analyzing the reasons for communism’s collapse elsewhere and taking steps to avoid that outcome in North Korea.

It turned out that Kim Jong-il in 1998, only shortly before I started inquiring into the mystery of the thirty-nine counties, met with Japanese-Korean representatives of Chongryon and spoke to them enthusiastically about what he saw as the need for more attention to legality in North Korea. “Our people have incorrect understanding of how our laws should work,” Kim complained. “In a socialist country, party organs, government officials and social groups are keen on political indoctrination but little attention is paid to the laws of the land.” It appears that although some of the examples of leniency during the famine would prove to have been merely temporary expedients, Kim contemplated changes of a more permanent nature that could make the system less arbitrary
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The immediate impetus for Kim’s new stance apparently had been an incident at Hwanghae Steel Mill that forced him to confront the extent to which corruption had taken hold since the 1980s. “I will tell you what really happened at the Hwanghae Steel Mill,” he said to his visitors from Japan. “We spent three years mourning the death of our Leader Kim Il-sung and coinci-dentally were hit with natural disasters. We found ourselves in a dire situation and could not provide enough electric power to the Hwanghae Steel Mill. The mill had to stop operation. Some bad elements of our society in cahoots with the mill management began to dismantle the mill and sell its machines as scrap metal to Chinese merchants.

“By the time we got wind of what was going on, more than half of the mill had been stripped away. For nearly a year, the thieves took over the mill and stole the people’s property at will. They bought off party leaders and security officers and, consequently, no one had informed us about their thievery. Everybody was on the take at the mill and we had to send in an army to retake the mill. The army surrounded the mill and arrested the thieves. The army recovered the people’s property from the thieves. Some of our trading people were involved in this massive fleecing of the mill.”

Was Kim extolling the rule of law because he wanted to crack down on the leniency that rank-and-file officials had exercised in the face of the population’s difficulties? Perhaps the facts of the mill incident as he recited them
could permit the interpretation that local officials had been trying heroically to raise cash with which to feed the population of unemployed mill employees. Suggesting a different interpretation, however, is the fact that people connected with the mill incident were by no means the only ones made to answer for corruption around that time. There were high-level targets, some very close to Kim himself. South Korean intelligence chief Lee Jong-chan told his country’s National Assembly in July 1998 that seven members of the Kim Il-sung League of Socialist Working Youth had been executed in the fall of 1997 while the league’s chief Choe Yong-hae, had been dismissed for corruption. That’s the same “Jerkoff” Choe who, as we saw in chapter 11, hung out with Kim when they were youngsters. Chang Song-taek, Kim Jong-il’s brother-in-law and the man rumored to be his closest friend and advisor, had been sent off to atone for corruption by going through a “revolutionary education” course and had already returned to Kim’s good graces, the Southern spy boss reported.
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In his talk with Chongryon representatives Kim spoke with evident respect about the legal systems of capitalist countries. In North Korea, he complained, “party cadres and security officers operate outside the law without exception.” In capitalist nations, on the other hand, “people abide by the law from cradle to grave,” he said. “All persons must obey the law and the law is enforced universally.” That praise was in contrast to his father’s dismissal of legal impartiality as nonsense.
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To be sure, Kim Jong-il’s interest was thoroughly mixed with caution, as he then emphasized. “Revisionists,” he said, using the term applied to anti-Stalinist communist reformers such as Khrushchev, “weaken socialist systems by overemphasizing laws and ignoring political indoctrination. Gorbachev brought down the Soviet Union using this tactic. Today, the Chinese leaders are on the same path.”

But he quickly resumed praising Western systems: “As you comrades know so well, having lived in a capitalist nation for so long, people in a capitalist society must obey the law no matter where they live. Chongryon, too, must obey the Japanese laws, otherwise the Japanese police will crack down.” A North Korean ship calling frequently at the Japanese port of Ni-igata was under official Japanese scrutiny at the time, in view of evidence it was being used for smuggling prohibited items, among other infractions. “I hear that our cruiseship
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has to cater to Japanese businessmen and bribe the police with large sums of money in order to get anything loaded,” Kim told his visitors. “In our country, a few hundred dollars are enough to bribe some security officers. This shows in a way how bad our judicial system is in comparison to that of a capitalist nation.”

Kim observed, “In a capitalist nation even the prime minister and the president are prosecuted if they break the law. We must study how to strengthen our legal system. Japanese police fear the prosecutors. Whom do the prosecutors fear? Do they fear the police? You said that the police will
go after any prosecutor who breaks the law. Few prosecutors have been arrested in Japan. The main reason is the strict process of selecting prosecutors. Law graduates take tough exams to become lawyers, judges or prosecutors. Only the best get to become prosecutors or judges.”

Thus, Kim said, “cops and prosecutors are miles apart in qualifications. [But] in our nation, any college graduate can become a prosecutor, if the college so wishes. Because of this, prosecutors in our nation carry no special authority. In a capitalist nation, prosecutors are sworn to uphold the law and defend the nation. Kakuei Tanaka, a former Japanese prime minister, was arrested by a prosecutor.”

Kim wanted a system in North Korea in which “law graduates must pass a special exam in order to become prosecutors, and only the best qualified people should become prosecutors. Currently, prosecutors are appointed just like other jobs and they stay chummy with their former classmates. It is tough for prosecutors to wield any authority in this kind of system.”

In the same conversation, Kim talked about food and agriculture policy. North Korea’s agriculture minister, So Kwan-hui, had been executed in September 1997, accused of intentionally ruining the country’s agriculture as a spy in the service of the United States. At the same time the regime had dug up the remains of Kim M.an-kum, So’s predecessor and mentor, from the Patriots’ Cemetery and subjected them to ritual execution by a firing squad—a modern update of the feudal custom of exhuming and decapitating the corpse of a posthumously disgraced official. The two officials’ fate had then been held out to officials, the military and the public as examples of what would befall any other “traitors.”
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Kim alleged to his visitors that So as agriculture minister had “failed to introduce higher-yield seeds and distributed non-existent fertilizers to our farms. This traitor ensured that our farms failed to produce enough food for our people.” The minister “was a long-time party member and did everything he could to ruin our agriculture,” Kim said. “For a long time, So refused to send a farm delegation to Japan using one excuse after another because he feared that they might receive better seeds from Chongryon. Better seeds would have worked counter to his plan to starve us slowly. So became a traitor in 1950. He would hardly do anything at the party meetings for discussing farm problems. Even when he was the party secretary for agriculture, he had precious little to say about farming. He was a filthy traitor loyal to his masters to the very end.

“We continue to ask the International Red Cross for food assistance, because we are in fact short of food; but the main reason is that our seeds have degraded thanks to So Kwan-hui’s treachery. Our production has declined
steadily because of the bad seeds. We are replacing them with better seeds but it will take about three years to fully recover. We need food aid to tide us over during this transition period.

“You may have received letters from your relatives living here about the food shortage. The situation is not as bad as it may appear. We make sure that the army has enough to eat, and the farmers and government workers get less food. The residents of Pyongyang receive many benefits from the government and they live better than the people in the rest of the country. For this reason, we cut back rations to the Pyongyang residents and at the same time, increased rations for the rest of the people. Ignorant of this, some people panicked and wrote you that our nation had only a week’s supply of food left, and so on.

“Last year, the whole army was mobilized to grow food. The main finding ofthe army is that the seeds must be replaced, and we have began to bring in better seeds. But it will take two to three years at the least to replace the old seeds with the new. Until then, our food shortage will persist.

“We have been on a forced march for several years now and we are finding a number of structural problems. Had we held a Party Congress or the Supreme People’s Assembly plenum before the end of the three-year mourning period after Leader Kim Il-sung’s death, we would be facing food shortages for ten years or more. The lesson learned is that you need to know who is who. Today, all of the senior leaders are old revolutionaries who had worked with Leader Kim Il-sung. We have to ensure that they stay on for a long time to come.”

The previous year, high-ranking defector Hwang Jang-yop had reported that even an arms factory in Chagang Province had received no food rations for nine or ten months straight. Despite the emphasis placed on military security, the state had permitted some two thousand weapons engineers to starve to death, according to Hwang.
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Kim Jong-il tried to knock down such reports in his conversation with Chongryon representatives. “Our enemies report almost daily so many millions have starved to death and so forth, and do all they can to defame and demonize us,” he said. “You comrades are here to witness the truth and report what you have seen here when you are back in Japan. That is why I took you along on my on-the-spot guidance trip to an armament factory in a remote village. I wanted you to see how the factory workers lived and how they differed from the residents of Pyongyang. I wanted you to see if there were people dying on the roadsides from hunger. As you have seen from your auto trip, there were no starving people on the roadsides and the factory workers are healthier than the people in Pyongyang. I hope that you saw the might of our nation and the optimism of our workers.”