Nothing to Envy (45 page)

On North Korea’s admission in 2005 of a food shortage: Kevin Sullivan, “North Korea Makes Rare Pleas After Floods Devastate Country,”
Washington Post
, September 22, 1995.

The statistics here come from Nicholas Eberstadt’s
The North Korean Economy
, p. 31. North Korea’s economic data is notoriously unreliable, as Eberstadt notes in the chapter “Our Own Style of Statistics.” In a submission to the United Nations in 1997, North Korea listed its own GNP per capita as $239. The export figures are also supplied by Eberstadt in “The Persistence of North Korea,”
Policy Review
, October/November 2004.

For more on the effects of poor nutrition on children and the medical system in North Korea:

On North Korean propaganda in the school system, see Andrei Lankov, “The Official Propaganda in the DPRK: Ideas and Methods” (available at
http://north-korea.narod.ru/propaganda_lankov.htm
).

A recently published memoir by a North Korean defector has
good descriptions of North Korean elementary schools. Hyok Kang,
This Is Paradise! My North Korean Childhood
(London: Abacus, 2007), pp. 64-65.

The examples used in North Korean school textbooks come from used books I bought in Tumen, China, at a shop near the border where North Korean defectors often sell their personal possessions. I’ve also reviewed the collection of textbooks at the library in Seoul run by the Ministry of Unification. The reading primer with the poem about killing Japanese soldiers was featured on Japanese television in 2007.

The Korean language uses name suffixes to indicate respect, or lack thereof. The ending
-nim
is polite;
-nom
is extremely rude. Thus North Korean propaganda often refers to Americans as
miguknom
, basically “American bastards.”

The demand that Mi-ran’s school finance the Kim Jong-il Research Institute was in keeping with a requirement imposed by the central government in the 1990s that institutions raise their own money. Even overseas missions were responsible for their own funding, which led to a number of embarrassing incidents in which North Korean diplomats were caught smuggling drugs, counterfeit money, and in one case ivory in an effort to raise money.

In Pyongyang, there are dozens of biographies of Kim Jong-il available, each more glowing than the next. For a more realistic treatment, see Michael Breen,
Kim Jong-il: North Korea’s Dear Leader
(Singapore: John Wiley & Sons, 2004).

There are several excellent studies of the North Korean famine that provided useful data.

Andrew Natsios, who was vice president of the NGO World Vision during the famine, writes, “The bulk of food shipments did not arrive until after deaths had begun to subside,” p. 186. Jasper Becker also deals extensively with the withdrawal of the aid agencies, in Jasper Becker,
Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 213-17.

Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate in economics, in his famous
Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation
(1981) pointed out the linkage between famine and totalitarian regimes. He observed that famines are caused not only by a shortage of food but also by inequalities in distribution that would not be possible in a democratic society because the hungry would vote out their leadership.

The propaganda claims that Kim Jong-il ate simple food are absurd. Throughout the famine Kim spent huge sums of his nation’s wealth on regal meals. His epicurean tastes were made famous by a former sushi chef who, under the pseudonym Kenji Fujimoto, wrote a memoir in which he described going around the world to buy ingredients for Kim. When Kim traveled through Russia in 2001, consignments of live lobster and French wine were flown in for the leader, according to a book by a Russian official, Konstantin Pulikovsky. I wrote at some length about Kim’s eating habits, “Rich Taste in a Poor Country: North Korea’s Enigmatic Leader Kim Jong-il Demands the Finest Food and Drink,”
Los Angeles Times
, June 26, 2004.

The Kim Jong-il speech of December 1996, delivered at Kim Il-sung University, was originally reported by
Wolgun Chosun
(Monthly Chosun) in Seoul. It is quoted at some length in Natsios,
The Great North Korean Famine, p. 99
.

The World Food Programme also thinks biscuits were a convenient and nutritious way of supplementing the diet. As part of its aid effort in Chongjin, the U.N. agency used factories there to make micronutrient-enriched biscuits that were distributed to schoolchildren.

North Korea’s markets are kept out of sight of foreign visitors. A North Korean with a hidden camera took a lengthy video of Chongjin’s Sunam Market in 2004. The video, provided to me by Lee Hwa-young of Rescue the North Korean People, shows food in humanitarian-aid sacks being offered for sale. World Food Programme officials say it is possible that the sacks were merely being reused.

The market prices quoted in this chapter come in large part from the work of Good Friends: Center for Peace, Human Rights and Refugees, based in Seoul. The Buddhist-inspired organization has excellent sources inside North Korea and publishes regular reports under the title
North Korea Today
, available on the Internet at
http://goodfriends.or.kr/eng/
.

The coal miner was one of the subjects of a lengthy series of articles I wrote about Chongjin, “Glimpses of a Hermit Nation,”
Los Angeles Times
, July 3, 2005, and “Trading Ideals for Sustenance,”
Los Angeles Times
, July 4, 2005.

Andrei Lankov writes that the North Korean identification cards were designed to act somewhat like passports, restricting travel within the country
(North of the DMZ
, pp. 179-80).

The references to cannibalism come from Jasper Becker’s
Hungry Ghosts
, pp. 211-19.

The description of the funeral comes from Andrew Natsios’s
Great North Korean Famine
, p.
76
.

Information about the North Korean criminal code comes from Yoon Dae-kyu, “Analysis of Changes in the DPRK Criminal Code,” Institute
for Far Eastern Studies, Kyungnam University, January 31, 2005. Portions of the code are also translated in Korea Institute for National Unification,
White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea
(Seoul, 2006).

Few defectors have emerged from the long-term political prisons that make up the North Korean gulag, so much of what is known is based on satellite intelligence and hearsay.

The most detailed account of life in the gulag comes from Kang Cholhwan’s
Aquariums of Pyongyang
. Kang spent much of his childhood in Yadok, the most notorious of the political prison camps.

Statistics and some of the terminology used for the prisons come from this meticulously researched human rights report: David Hawk,
The Hidden Gulag
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Committee on Human Rights, 2003).

The 927 centers were a cross between homeless shelters and prison camps. Natsios estimates that between 378,000 and 1.9 million North Koreans passed through the camps over the course of a year.
(The Great North Korean Famine
, pp. 74-75).

Former Chongjin residents have differing accounts of when the purge of the 6th Army took place. Kim Du-seon, the former trade official, lived close to the military base in Nanam and told me in an interview on August 26, 2004, that the largest movement of military vehicles was in the fall of 1995.

The incident is mentioned in the following authoritative study of the North Korean military: Joseph S. Bermudez, Jr.,
The Armed Forces of North Korea
(London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001), p. 202.

The information on students executed for streaking comes from
White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea
, p. 30.

On the reading habits of North Koreans and North Korean literature, see Brian R. Myers,
Han Sorya and North Korean Literature: The Failure of Socialist Realism in the DPRK
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell East Asia Series no.
69
, 1994).

The quotation from the Russian economic treatise is based on Jun-sang’s recollection. I was not able to locate the original book.

Family reunions were agreed to at the landmark summit between Kim Jong-il and Kim Dae-jung in June 2000 and commenced two
months later. As of this writing, 16,212 Koreans have participated in face-to-face meetings and another 3,748 have seen one another through video links. More than 90,000 South Koreans remain on a waiting list to participate in reunions. South Korean Red Cross figures quoted in
Korea Herald
, May 13, 2009.

The most comprehensive study I have seen of North Korean defection is Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, eds.,
The North Korean Refugee Crisis: Human Rights and International Response
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, 2006).

As of October 1998, only 923 North Koreans had come to South Korea. See Yonhap News report of October 11, 1998, citing figures from the South Korean Ministry of Unification.

The figures on East German defectors are quoted in Haggard and Noland,
The North Korean Refugee Crisis
(p. 54), and attributed to Albert O. Hirschman, “Exit, Voice and the Fate of the German Democratic Republic: An Essay in Conceptual History,”
World Politics
45:2 (1993).

Information about DVDs comes from a North Korean smuggler I interviewed in Bangkok in May 2005. He said that people brought videotapes into the country in the 1990s, but that the coming of the DVD boosted the business because the disks were slim enough to be hidden under other goods.

The lecture was published by the Chosun Workers’ Party Press, April 2005. A copy was provided to me by Rescue the North Korean People.

The estimated number of North Korean women sold to the Chinese comes from Choi Jin-i, a North Korean poet and writer who defected to South Korea and was herself in an arranged match in China. I interviewed many women in Chinese villages near the North Korean border as well. “North Korea’s Brides of Despair,”
Los Angeles Times
, August 18, 2003.

There have been several excellent reports on the phenomenon:

Revisions of the North Korean criminal code in 2004 slightly reduced penalties for illegal border crossing. See Haggard and Noland,
The North Korean Refugee Crisis
, p. 18.

Nongpo Detention Center is described in some detail in David Hawk’s report
The Hidden Gulag
. The report also includes a satellite photo of the facility and other prison camps. Former detainees have said that it was common practice to kill babies born to the inmates, because their fathers were Han Chinese. Oak-hee said she did not know of infanticide taking place at the time she was there. She believes it is possible that the practice was discontinued in 2001 before her arrest.

The title of this chapter comes from a lecture entitled “How to Thoroughly Crush the Schemes of the Enemies Who Disseminate Unusual Lifestyles,” Chosun Workers’ Party Press.

On the various “planned escapes” out of North Korea, Blaine Harden of
The Washington Post
wrote, on November 18, 2007: