Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (85 page)

It was his arrival in Russia that started to change his attitude. “I realized Siberia and Russia were decades ahead of North Korea. This brought out a discrepancy, because I’d been taught that the Soviet Union was the poorest country among European nations. I realized the government was lying to us. From Koreans I met in Russia, I learned it was North Korea that had invaded South Korea, and that Kim Jong-il hadn’t been born in Korea on Mount Paektu but near Khabarovsk. That was shocking. While I was in Siberia I saw a documentary on [then South Korean President] Roh Tae-woo’s meeting with Gorbachev. The documentary showed South Korean automobile assembly lines. I realized that to sell all those products that I saw in the markets of Khabarovsk, South Korea had to have become industrialized. Over the course of about a year I realized all the facts through conversations with Russians, reading newspapers, watching movies from France, Italy and the United States, watching TV My ideology shifted and became unstable. There was no time to listen to the radio, but occasionally I heard South Korean popular music.”

Still, it took a series of additional shocks before Chae started contemplating defection, he told me. “Even though my ideology had changed, my basic sentiment was that I planned to go back to North Korea. After three years in Siberia I wanted to return. But due to some agreement with the Russians, everybody had to stay another year. My father passed away then. They wouldn’t let me go home for the funeral. That enraged me, and I came up with the idea that I should escape, go to the Russian authorities, obtain a Russian passport and then fly back to North Korea.” Hearing Chae relate his desperate plan, and feeling certain he would have been caught and either executed or sent off to a camp if he had attempted it, I was reminded yet again of my equally screwy 1979 thoughts of fleeing across the DMZ.

“Even though I hatched that scheme,” Chae continued, “the occasion didn’t arise. And while I was still thinking about it, my roommate got drunk and stabbed a fellow worker. He was going to be sent back to a prison camp, so he escaped. The authorities started questioning me to find out where he was so they could capture him. They threatened that if I didn’t help them they wouldn’t let me return to North Korea. There were three opportunities to return that year. Although I had been on the list for the first group, they took my name off. So I decided to escape. I still had that plan of going back to North Korea, but people demanded too much money for a passport. I decided to go to Moscow with a friend. There I met some South Koreans who
were managing a restaurant. I worked as a security guard at night and carved jewelry in the daytime. With the money we asked the Russian mafia in Siberia to make Russian passports. But we realized we would just be sent to prison camps if we did go back to North Korea, so finally we decided to go to South Korea. We thought of going to the United States, but South Korea is, after all, Korean. Arriving at Kimpo Airport as tourists with Russian passports, we turned ourselves in. We had return tickets to Russia in case we should be rejected. We went through immigration and then asked people how to find the intelligence officials. We caused some confusion because North Korean spies might come in the way we did.”

Chae said he was working at Sempyo Company, a South Korean maker of soy sauce, in the factory. “It’s temporary work,” he said. “Then the government will send us somewhere else.”

Chae had teamed up with a friend, Kim Tae-pom, for the escape from their logging camp and defection to South Korea. When I went to interview Kim, I met a slender man wearing a light green suit, a floral necktie with a big knot, metal-rimmed glasses and a black plastic watch—unusual, as noted earlier, among defectors, who typically sported expensive timepieces.

Kim was born in Pyongyang, in 1962. In 1976, when he was in high school, the family was sent to South Pyongan Province because of his sister’s polio. “Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il didn’t want disabled people in Pyongyang,” he told me, echoing what I had heard from other sources about a policy of removing handicapped people, midgets, beggars and anyone else considered unsightly from the showcase capital. The forced move came despite a “good” family background. Kim Tae-pom’s mother was a Korean War orphan. There were siblings in the army and at the Mansudae Art Theater. “My parents were upset,” Kim told me, “but this was a government order. What could they do? My father took a demotion from a high party official’s job in the Department of Administration to become a much lower-ranking member of the local economic committee in Songchon. The clothing we could get there was not as nice, and our house was smaller. But we still had relatives in Pyongyang. With their influence we eventually moved to a bigger house. Because of my father’s demotion, our food rations were smaller. In Pyongyang our grain ration had come in rice, every week, and we had received two kilograms of meat weekly After the move we got mixed grain, which was lower in quality. It was distributed only every ten days, along with one kilogram of meat.”

I asked Kim to recall for me a time when he had been really happy. He replied: “Do you have a religion? In North Korea the
juche
ideology is another form of religion. I was very faithful to that. I felt ecstatic when we got presents from Kim Il-sung—clothing, food.” I asked him then about negative feelings. “I never felt any dissatisfaction toward Kim Il-sung himself,” he
said. “Maybe I had some criticism of the regime, especially regarding the food situation. But unless you’re a true dissident, there’s no crticism of Kim Il-sung—only of the government.” He added, however, “Before we moved we were part of the elite, but after we moved I felt some discrepancies in the social structure, the gap between the elite and others.”

After graduating from high school, Kim Tae-pom had gone to a trade school but dropped out on account of eye problems. He went to work in a car factory, then became a member of an elite paramilitary “shock unit” of the Central Committee of the League of Socialist Working Youth. Everyone joined the youth league (around age fourteen), and there were chapters even in the army, but those shock unit members were special. They came from “good” family backgrounds. To be accepted, applicants had to demonstrate ideological stability. They got paid “well and were in line to become cadre. Kim Jong-il had founded the shock units and they were somewhat similar to Three Revolutions teams, which were run by the party itself.

Kim Tae-pom and his colleagues wore military uniforms and had military ranks. From 1982 to 1984 his unit was responsible for security at an arsenal. The members spent from 8 to 9 A.M. studying the life and works of Kim Il-sung, then worked from 9 A.M. until evening constructing facilities. After supper, from 9 to 10 P.M., they attended indoctrination sessions. Following a full hitch, a member was entitled to party membership and a factory job back home without having to go to work in the mines. Kim’s post-shock unit job, which he held from 1984 to 1989, was as an equipment repairman in a thread factory near his South Pyongan province home. At the factory, 90 percent of the employees were women.

Eventually Kim Tae-pom wanted to leave the thread factory, and his salary of 80
won
per month, for better pay and a better life. He applied to go to Russia. “Pay in Siberia would be 70 times what I’d made before, even after the government had taken its big cut. The men who go there expect to make enough to live on for the rest of their lives. Usually they buy household appliances in Russia that are not available in North Korea. Sometimes they sell those back home; in other cases they use them.”

Basic requirements for getting sent to Russia included party membership, no criminal record and a good family background with no capitalist forebears. But Kim said that, when he applied, the ratio of largely qualified applicants to those who actually would be employed was fifteen or twenty to one. “To get on the list, you had to give or promise a television set or refrigerator to a higher official involved in the selection process. Some applicants actually wrote contracts promising to send the appliances to their official patrons after a year’s work in Siberia.” I wondered how such an obviously corrupt contract could be enforced. “The worker is bound to come back,” Kim replied, “so they get him one way or another. This official would have enough power over your later career to ensure misery if he so chose.”

I probed in vain for any sense of revulsion on Kim’s part concerning such arrangements. “I feel it’s justified,” he said. “The official works hard to send the worker to Siberia, so there should be a payoff for him. Above that official there may be higher officials. This lower official has to work hard to get his own candidate to Siberia, has to pay off higher-ups. I just thought that was the way things were. I thought it was understandable. This system is prevalent throughout society. For example, if I couldn’t make it to the factory one day I’d see the manager and give him some gifts and ask him to look the other way In North Korea most bribery involves goods, not money. When my father worked as an official at a county economic committee he received so many ‘presents’ from farmers—potatoes, green onions and so on. In North Korean law, if a person receives a present in the form of goods, that’s a ‘friendly present.’ Money is a bribe.”

In 1989, Kim Tae-pom went to Russia as a truck driver, hauling food from local markets to a logging camp. For his third year the assignment changed to loading the food onto trains. His story was, I realized, a typical one: He arrived as a young man devoted to the regime of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, but soon started to have his assumptions challenged. “Factors that influenced me included conversations with Russians and being able to find and read South Korean newspapers. Other parts of the world became accessible. I learned that the rest of the world was different from what I’d been taught. There was more freedom to criticize the regime because we were in Siberia. Among friends, people often let out their dissatisfaction. The situation in North Korea had drastically worsened in 1986. And by 1989, when I left, it was far worse still. Letters from our families back home openly described problems with food. But the North Korean official broadcasts always insisted that things were getting better. I was aware of the discrepancies. I listened to Radio Moscow, Yanbian [China] radio and KBS.”

In 1992, Kim said, “I bribed officials to alter my papers so I could get home leave for five months, see my family and give them some money. In December 1992, I returned to Siberia, realizing that nothing had changed in North Korea and feeling that I could no longer endure North Korean society. Coincidentally I learned I was going to be sent home on account of the bribery. That’s why I escaped.” On February 1, 1993, Kim Taepom fled to Khabarovsk, where he hid until he met some Americans and a Russian reporter who were able to help him get to Moscow and then to South Korea.

The reader has met Ahn Choong-hak already. In chapter 6 Ahn told us about his childhood pal who had been punished for comparing his frozen pile of feces to the sacred Mount Paektu. In chapter 12, we saw Ahn, enraged at learning that his family background was too flawed to get him into an elite college for spies and infiltrators, flinging his mother’s sewing machine to the
ground. After that outburst he returned to his military unit, where he was a model soldier and the driver for the Eighth Division commander, and remained there for four more years until his ten-year hitch ended in 1984.

Ahn did not leave the military entirely then, but took up a post as an inspector at the army’s Hamhung Military Equipment Plant, which made parts. Later he transferred to the South Hamgyong Mining Rear Equipment Supply Center at Kwangop as a staff member. “It was a good job,” he told me. “This was a distribution center so we had enough to eat. It was one of the hardest organizations to enter. You needed a lot of bribery to get in. Liquor, cigarettes—I got it on the black market using money my mother made tailoring suits. I also knew the younger brother of a high-ranking administrator of South Hamgyong Province.” Ahn stayed in that second post until September 1991, when he went to Russia. Getting there required “even more bribery than before, a lot of goods: a sewing machine, two boxs of liquor, women’s shoes, cigarettes.”

Since the rejection of his application to attend Kumsong Political University, Ahn told me, “I had been disappointed but still hadn’t blamed Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Until I went to Siberia, I didn’t blame them for my problem. I knew that I was limited in what I could achieve politically because of my family background, so I wanted to become wealthy and, through that route, be somebody. I decided to go to Siberia and make a lot of money. My father’s sixtieth birthday was coming in 1993, and I wanted to do something lavish to celebrate it.”

Once he got to Siberia, though, Ahn “realized that the Russians made fun of us for our Kim Il-sung badges. They said we were ignorant, stupid people who still worshipped Kim Il-sung even though he did nothing for us. At first I fought with them. I still believed in the system and had aspirations for my children’s future. But the Russian stores were so well stocked that I felt what I guess you could call material shock. I was also frustrated because our lives were restricted. We weren’t allowed to walk around freely. From December 1991, they prohibited us from watching Russian television. South Korea had come into the news. I had thought of South Korea as a poor country but that image started to change. I started asking, ‘Why? Why?’ Once the foreign media, including South Korean reporters, got interested in the logging camps and requested a visit. One morning the authorities took all the loggers by truck to a cucumber field and replaced them with a model platoon of soldiers who pretended to be loggers. Although I was a party member, because of my family background I was sent to the cucumber field. I wasn’t considered fit to meet the reporters. Those who were put there were not allowed to speak with reporters individually but only in twos and threes, and they had answers to eleven questions memorized in advance.