Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (75 page)

Besides its reunification policy, North Korea’s emphasis on economic equality exerted enough pull on some South Korean radicals to overcome the clear fact that South Korea had advanced much farther and faster economically through capitalism. Internally, the North Korean regime’s ideological
and economic needs conflicted badly, in the long run tending to box it in. Still, Pyongyang’s leaders could hope to use the appeal of Kim’s ideas to young South Koreans to revolutionize the South and “win the race despite Seoul’s advantages.
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Of course, North Korean propaganda concerning the South was pitched not only to South Koreans but also at least equally to Northerners, and it was intriguing to see how the Northerners reacted. “I am young, so I want to know about the South Korean students’ struggle against the U.S. imperialists and the South Korean puppet clique,” my guide Pak said to me one night when I took him and our driver to supper. I explained that the demonstrations had tapered off to some extent following the movement’s success in forcing a free presidential election in 1987. A bit later, Pak said: “As you know, the United States provoked the Korean War in 1950.” No, I said, it was well established that the North had planned the invasion of the South. Pak laughed and told me that what I had said was just too ridiculous to credit. He did apologize a few minutes later for using the term
imperialist
— obviously not the thing to call one’s guest. But it was clear that he and his fellow Northerners had been given a hugely distorted view of South Korea as a uniformly horrible place in need of salvation by the Great Leader, a land where the fruits of capitalist economic development had accrued to the wealthy few. Among North Koreans who were permitted to speak with foreign visitors, even those sophisticated enough to know that the South had the higher average living standard insisted that the North’s system was better because the wealth was shared more evenly.
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(Equality in the North was not quite what the regime and faithful subjects portrayed it as being. It had little to do with the lives of top officials and their families. One illustration could be found on any street or road. Scarce passenger cars were used mainly to carry big shots, while the masses walked, or rode in the backs of trucks or on buses. The passenger car drivers almost without fail propelled their vehicles at high speed. They clearly operated on the presumption that they were entitled to the right of-way against pedestrians. Drivers approached intersections without slowing down, scattering pedestrians, who would fall back to avoid being run over. Drivers apparently felt that the importance of their high-ranking passengers justified their arrogant behavior. At the entrance to the tomb of the founder of the Koguryo Dynasty, Kim Jong-su pointed out to me an ancient inscription: “Men great or small must dismount before entering here.” I asked whether that applied to the Great Leader. Kim Jong-su’s face assumed a pained look and he replied, “Don’t make such comparisons.”)

South Korea did have a few thousand radical disciples of Kim Il-sung, problem enough for the authorities in Seoul. But to hear it from North Korean propaganda one would have thought almost the entire Southern population was ready to worship Kim. Since there was virtually no information
available to the contrary, people in the North seemed to believe all this. As was often reported abroad, radios available to ordinary citizens really were fixed so that they could receive only government broadcasts. The newspapers purveyed strictly the party line. “According to the newspaper almost all South Koreans respect the Great Leader and want reunification,” said my guide, who added that he believed everything he read in the North Korean press.

Of course, the real elite had sources of information much better than the regular North Korean media. Very high-ranking cadre who needed to keep up with the outside world could listen to foreign broadcasts, including South Korean programming and the U.S. government’s Voice of America. A slight but studied relaxation of U.S. antagonism toward the Pyongyang regime had permitted the delegation of North Koreans led by Kim Jong-su to visit Washington shortly before the youth festival. Much as sightseers in Hollywood want to see the studios and the homes of the stars, the North Koreans were keen to visit the offices of the Voice of America—-where they expressed puzzlement when told of a U.S. law that prohibited broadcasting VOA programming-within U.S. borders.
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High officials’ superior sources of information about how North Korea compared with other countries did not produce any hint of humility in their conversation and pronouncements. Rather, one of Pyongyang’s chief objects in permitting some Western journalists to visit for the youth festival was to issue a warning to the United States against continuing what amounted to a policy of letting North Korea stew in its own juices.

Strategists in the United States and South Korea had developed a theory, over the preceding few years, that the balance of power in the Korean peninsula was about to shift. According to that theory, South Korea’s economic growth rate was so much higher than the North’s that it would be a matter of only a few years before the South’s military expenditures—-while representing a much smaller percentage of gross national product—-would match and exceed those of Pyongyang. When that happened, the theory went, South Korea would be able to field enough of a defensive force of its own to provide a credible deterrent against North Korean attack, without the help of U.S. troops. (Unspoken was the obvious corollary that if the South should develop aggressive intentions toward the North, Seoul would have the force advantage to contemplate carrying them out.) According to the theory, North Korea was desperate to do something to keep the balance from shifting decisively against it. Adding to North Korean frustration were the flight from communist orthodoxy of Pyongyang’s allies, their flirtations with South Korea and pressures on Pyongyang from within to reform its own lagging economy.

Seeing all that, American and South Korean policymakers figured they could deal effectively with the North Korean threat simply by leaving the U.S. troops in place as a deterrent, taking modest steps to ease tensions and allowing time to pass. Thus, neither Washington nor Seoul seemed to feel any great urgency to push vigorously for negotiated solutions to the standoff in the peninsula. That disturbed North Korean officials. Although they showed no real interest in genuinely negotiating with Seoul, nonetheless they still obviously hoped to play up to the United States sufficiently to get the U.S. troops removed from the South. True, American and North Korean mid-ranking diplomats had begun to meet periodically in Beijing. But this was really little more than another aspect of Washington’s measured, very slight approach to relaxing tensions. Pyongyang—in search of diplomatic, military and economic concessions—-wanted higher-level, more frequent contacts to get the talks off dead center. Kim Jong-su complained to me that the Beijing talks were proceeding like a very slow-moving bicycle—in danger of falling down for lack of momentum.

Kim Jong-su let me know that his government had not issued its invitations to American journalists lightly. “You have to understand that it’s difficult to invite Americans here,” he said. “Our people are very sensitive about the United States. In America you are maybe not so sensitive about Korea.” What seemed to have overcome Pyongyang’s reservations about inviting us was an urgent need to convey a message to Americans and others in the Western alliance. The message: North Korea was a powerful country, a country to be reckoned “with, not only militarily but as a revolutionary society of impressive economic and social achievements, a beacon to the poor and to those oppressed by inequity in South Korea and the Third World.

Although it was tempting to imagine that North Korean leaders had started to believe their own propaganda, there was much more than that to their demand for respect. They meant to leave us with the impression of a country we should take seriously, if for no other reason than the enormous amount of trouble it could cause. Washington must not assume that the continued presence of U.S. troops in the South, coupled with an American policy of benign neglect of other issues, would solve the Korean problem. Americans should not make the mistake of assuming it was only a matter of time before North Korea would collapse or otherwise decisively lose the race with South Korea. More to the point, we had better realize that Pyongyang simply-would not permit itself to lose without doing something drastic.

There did seem to be some basis for questioning the U.S. policy of deterrence-plus-malign neglect. North Korea still had gold and other mineral resources to barter abroad. Militarily reports had started to appear that Pyongyang might be trying to develop nuclear weapons. Already it was known that the North had the capability to launch another surprise attack with conventional weapons. Add the factors of Pyongyang’s ideological
penetration of the South and uncertainty about what would happen after Kim Jong-il’s succession, and the picture of what was yet to come looked a bit less reassuring. Those troubling facts were reason enough to intensify the search for new policy approaches. Arms-control experts, including John W Lewis of the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford, were indeed talking with North and South Korean counterparts about confidence-building measures that could lead to a reduction of the danger of war on the peninsula.

On balance, though, it would have been hard to justify an immediate and drastic shift from the basic watch-and-wait policy—especially a shift to any of the alternatives Pyongyang was pitching. Kim Il-sung had proposed a “confederation” in which the Northern and Southern systems supposedly could thrive separately, with no need for American troops to guard the peace. The catch was that there would be a common army and a common foreign policy—under whose control? The South Koreans understandably were not interested in taking a chance that the North would gain control of the army and impose its system on the South, completing Kim’s revolution. North Korea’s proposal for a nuclear-free zone in the peninsula seemed more worthy of discussion, but an agreement clearly-would be worthless unless the North opened itself to permit verification.

New ideas would have been welcome, but no one seemed to have any. The regime was loath to open the country in any way that could admit outside influences, which might challenge its control of the people. So for Pyongyang’s adversaries there remained a good argument in favor of waiting for internal strains to intensify further—mean-while ensuring that the North’s rulers would always have a way out, would not feel cornered.

Still, I left pondering the thought that North Koreans, after all, were Koreans—possessed of the toughness and determination that had made their fellow Koreans extraordinarily successful, not only in the South but as immigrants in the United States and other countries. Waiting for them to fall on their faces could be a long wait.

North Korean officials were unhappy with my coverage of that visit for
Newsweek.
As a Chongryon official told me later, the main complaint was that the articles had dwelled on Kim Il-sung’s personality cult. Pyongyang vehemently insisted that the popular worship of Kim Il-sung was purely voluntary and from the heart and should not be described in the same terms as a state-imposed Stalinist personality cult. During my visit, an official had told me pointedly that the bottom-line minimum was that Westerners who wanted any sort of relationship with Pyongyang at all must stop making fun of its leaders. “Some parts of the body are more sensitive than others,” the official told me, advising me not to hit him “in the eyes.” In the monolithic society
that North Korea boasted of having become, as I knew “well enough, talk of the regime’s “eyes”—or “brains”—-was intended as a direct reference to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.

Presumably as a result of the official unhappiness with my articles, Kim Jong-su after that visit treated me distantly ignoring my letters. Eventually I heard that he had gone to Peru as a diplomat. Some time later he reappeared in New York with ambassadorial rankas deputy chief of the North Korean mission to the United Nations. Still, despite calls and letters from me, he showed no interest in resuming our acquaintanceship.

Toward the end of my 1989 visit I had learned of his meeting with some foreign televison journalists—but under his earlier name, which this time seemed to be spelled Bae instead of Bai. He had explained, when I mentioned it, that his two names involved his having been orphaned and then later having acquired a stepfather; only “old friends” knew him as Bae. That didn’t make much sense; the TV people now calling him Bae were strangers while I had known him earlier and was now calling him Kim. I could only continue to wonder about who and what—-with his changes of name and occupation, and the orphan story he had told me—he really-was. I guessed that he must be some sort of intelligence official and that Bai/Bae was his name when dealing with foreign visitors to North Korea while Kim was his traveling name. Other foreigners dealing with North Koreans had encountered such name changes.

Still, the mystery continued to intrigue me. Eventually I heard a vague report—no names were attached—about Kim Il-sung’s unacknowledged children who had filled important posts in the regime. I wondered if Kim Jong-su might be one of them. Comparing photos, I thought I detected a physical resemblance to the young Kim Il-sung, particularly in facial bone structure. Kim Jong-su shared part of his given name with Kim Jong-il—the way Korean siblings often do. He had been virtually the only North Korean willing to talk forthrightly with me during my visits. Then there was the obvious and, as things turned out, justified confidence in his own influence that he showed when he guaranteed that he could get me—a reporter out of favor with the regime, at least since publication of my negative film review— admitted to cover the youth festival. All those factors suggested a status above that of ordinary mortals. I did once see him carelessly garbed in a suit of which the grays of the trousers and jacket did not match, more rumpled than royal, a costume appropriate to his current role as an academic intellectual. However, other North Koreans treated him with deference, close to awe, that the average think-tank scholar would not expect or receive.