The Hidden People of North Korea (46 page)

Finding a spouse is even more difficult for defectors who were married in the North. Because the South Korean government has conferred citizenship on all Koreans who live in the North, if the defector left behind a spouse, his or her marriage is considered legal until the courts determine otherwise. In some cases the defector was escaping from an abusive spouse (North Korea is still a male-dominated society, and poverty can make people mean); in other cases, the spouse was left behind for economic reasons, and there is no news of what became of him or her. In early 2007, the Seoul Family Court ruled that petitions from defectors for divorce can proceed as long as the unification ministry has issued a determination that the missing spouse does not reside in South Korea. Shortly thereafter, the court granted divorces to thirteen defectors—the first of 429 cases that had been filed at that time.
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Personality problems make jobs, marriages, and social relationships more difficult. Most defectors have lived a difficult life and faced physical and emotional challenges that few South Koreans can imagine. A lifetime of coping with fear and deprivation leaves emotional scars. Defectors also suffer from strong guilt when they think of the family and friends they have left behind, who may lose their jobs and their homes and, in the worst cases, be sent to a prison camp. Some defectors also feel guilty about having turned their back on their country, and even some South Koreans blame them for having done so.

Defectors who have left members of their immediate family behind suffer the most. One defector we interviewed said that she had voluntarily left her husband and son because her father had recently been branded a member of the hostile class. Although she was not responsible for this misfortune, her in-laws blamed her for jeopardizing her husband’s welfare, so she decided to leave for China, where her mother was living. She gave her son a package of candy and kissed him goodbye, saying that she would be gone for a few days. She told her husband she planned to stay in China (although she really intended to go on to South Korea), and she said that if she didn’t return in several months, he should divorce her and remarry. After she arrived in South Korea, she heard that her husband had indeed remarried, and she was working to earn money to bring her son out.
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A more tragic story involved the loss of a child. The mother and her husband, who was a security official, were fleeing across the border in heavy snow, with border guards in close pursuit. The mother knew that if they captured her husband, he would be tortured and perhaps killed because of his job. Their little boy began crying, and frightened that he would give away their location, the mother buried him in the deep snow in order to save her husband and herself. They escaped to China and then to South Korea, but she never recovered from the horror of having killed her child and ended up in a psychiatric facility.
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Although North Koreans exhibit a broad range of personality traits, as do any large group of people, a South Korean psychiatrist who conducted a survey of 528 defectors in 2001 identified several characteristics that they shared widely: passivity, belief in equal distribution of wealth, reluctance to disturb the status quo, reluctance to express thoughts, a tendency to attribute success to special opportunities rather than individual effort, and a strong need to justify their actions.
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In some respects, North Koreans hold to more traditional values than do South Koreans. The psychiatrist suggests that defectors have more in common with older South Koreans than with the younger generation, which he notes is ironic because the younger generation of South Koreans tends to be more enthusiastic about reunification.

Several surveys conducted in South Korea have attempted to assess defectors’ physical and mental health. The most common physical ailments are digestive problems and arthritis, whereas the most common psychological problems are depression and anxiety.
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Defectors already suffered from most of their physical illnesses before leaving the North, but the trials of defection exacerbate the psychological illnesses.
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In a mental-health survey of 196 defectors conducted in 2007, 37 percent were found to be suffering from depression serious enough to require treatment, and 30 percent had milder forms of depression.
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North Koreans love their homeland, and were it not for the impact of their collapsed economy, most would probably be willing to live under a dictatorial government—at least for the time being. Only when their basic economic needs were met might they turn their thoughts to gaining more freedom. Albert O. Hirschman’s exit-voice theory, introduced at the beginning of the chapter, includes a third factor: loyalty. The more loyal people are, the less likely they are to defect (and if given the opportunity, the more likely they are to complain in an attempt to change the organization or state to which they are loyal). The Kim regime has worked mightily to instill loyalty in its people, but its efforts have had only mixed success in the face of North Korea’s failed economy.
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As a consequence, the regime must depend on its social- and information-control mechanisms to keep more North Koreans from defecting.

Compared to the 4.5 million East Germans who fled to the West between World War II and German unification (about half of them coming before the Berlin Wall went up in 1961), the number of North Koreans reaching the South is a mere trickle. Should that trickle become a flood, it will put severe strains on both North and South Korean society—strains that the South Koreans, at least, are not prepared to cope with.

CHAPTER NINE

The End Comes Slowly

North Korea is designed and run for the benefit of the Kim family and their elite supporters. The fact that Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il have remained in power for over half a century under difficult circumstances is a testament to their sagacity, and the political edifice they have so painstakingly constructed will not be quickly torn down.

The portrait of North Korea drawn in the preceding chapters looks something like this. Kim Jong-il is not crazy: he is callous of the welfare of his people, distrustful of almost everyone, and sometimes emotional and even impulsive, but he knows what he is doing. The model of government the two Kims have chosen to adopt and perpetuate is totalitarian dictatorship— although government control is not as total as it might at first appear. Once dictatorship has been chosen as a governing style, the social structure is to a large extent determined, thus explaining the marked similarity of dictatorships around the world.

A totalitarian dictator must run a centrally controlled economy in order to regulate the lives of the people, and it helps if the economy is collective in nature, the better to prevent people from going off on their own. An economy of shortages has the virtue that it focuses people’s attention on earning a living and prevents them from cultivating other desires, for instance, for political participation. Government control of information is an important lever of power, and the Kim regime has quite successfully kept its people ignorant of both the outside world and their own society, although this ignorance is not as great as it once was. On the other hand, repressive constraints on information flow pose a problem for the regime, creating what Ronald Winetrobe calls the “dictator’s dilemma”: people are afraid to tell the dictator what they truly think, and as a consequence, the dictator’s knowledge is flawed.
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To stay in power, Kim must be above the law, and the law must serve his interests; consequently, he is the only person in North Korea who enjoys full human rights. To legitimize his extralegal status, Kim has equated himself with the state, saying, “Without me, there can be no North Korea.”

While few foreigners would want to live in a country like North Korea, not all North Koreans live a life of misery. The majority are probably sufficiently satisfied with their country that they would not want to leave, even if given a chance. They are devoted to their families, treasure their friendships, find meaning in their lives, and hope for a better future. They have picnics in the park, go to movies, and enjoy parties with friends—just like people everywhere. They do not have access to the variety or quantity of food that South Koreans do, and they are sometimes hungry, but they enjoy a good meal on occasion. Still, their existence is precarious and subject to changing economic and political conditions. According to a World Food Program (WFP) survey conducted in 2004, one-third of the people never have enough to eat, half sometimes do not have enough, and only 10 to 20 percent always have enough to eat.
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The food situation has not materially improved since then, with the WFP and other organizations reporting in 2008 that North Korea was experiencing its worst food shortages since the mid-1990s.

Regardless of their situation in life, whether they are members of the upper political class whom foreign visitors may come into contact with or are poor people living in the mountains, North Koreans could and should be much healthier, happier, and freer than they are now. Preventing their lives from improving is, to put it simply, the Kim regime.

Prospects for Survival

To adopt a phrase from the American social reformer W. E. B. DuBois, the end is coming slowly for North Korea. The regime is trying to convince its people that by 2012, the centennial of Kim Il-sung’s birth, North Korea will have become an economically powerful state, but there is no prospect of this happening. The regime’s political decisions have locked the economy into a cycle of failure, and the government’s campaign for economic self-sufficiency is self-defeating. The country’s isolation, while protecting the regime, has cut it off from the global economy. And the saber rattling of Kim’s military-first politics is isolating the country even more.

Ever since Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994, North Korea watchers have speculated about the impending collapse of the Kim Jong-il regime. Kim stayed out of the public eye for three years, during which time no meetings of the Supreme People’s Assembly were held. Floods in 1995 and 1996 devastated the countryside and triggered the Arduous March famine. Most concessionary trade with the former Warsaw Pact signatories ended. Bureaucratic corruption continued unabated. The country was drifting. In the late 1990s, top defector Hwang Jang-yop predicted a collapse within five years.

Then the United States and the international community threw the Kim regime a lifeline. Billions of dollars in aid began flowing into the country in 1996, including over $1 billion from the United States, which in 1994 had signed the Agreed Framework between the United States of America and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which provided North Korea with an annual delivery of a half million tons of heavy fuel oil and construction of a new light-water nuclear reactor, all in return for a freeze of Pyongyang’s aging nuclear facilities. More important than the oil and the reactor construction was the political recognition that the Kim regime received as a dialogue partner with the United States. In October 2000, North Korea’s top political military officer, Vice Marshal Jo Myong-rok, received an invitation from President Bill Clinton to visit the White House, and later that month Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Pyongyang—two diplomatic firsts for U.S.–North Korean relations. Other countries also engaged the Kim regime at the highest levels. South Korean president Kim Dae-jung visited Pyongyang in June 2000, and his successor, President Roh Moo-hyun, visited in October 2007. Russian president Vladimir Putin paid a visit in July 2000—the first Russian president ever to visit North Korea while in office. Chinese president Jiang Zemin traveled to Pyongyang in September 2001, marking the first presidential visit since China angered North Korea by normalizing relations with South Korea in 1992. In September 2002, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi became the first Japanese head of state to go to Pyongyang and paid a return visit two years later. “Why on earth do I have to go visit big countries?” asked Kim Jong-il in August 2000. “Even though I stay in Pyongyang, various powerful countries come visit me, do they not?”
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This international recognition, coming at a time when the country was undergoing its greatest domestic trials since the Korean War, could hardly help but impress the North Korean people, despite their bitter disappointment with Kim’s domestic leadership. It undoubtedly emboldened Kim, who took it as a sign that his policies were a success.

The Kim regime continues to employ leverage provided by its nuclear and missile programs. At the Six-Party Talks, first convened in 2003 (and further legitimizing the Kim regime), a new denuclearization agreement was reached in principle in September 2005. Unhappy with delays in its implementation, North Korea detonated its first nuclear device in October 2006, angering the other five parties to the talks. However, no one could think of a better option than continuing to negotiate, and in February and September 2007, steps were taken to implement the October 2006 agreement, including resuming economic aid to North Korea. It is doubtful that this most recent agreement will be any more lasting than previous ones. At the time this book goes to press, six years after the start of the Six-Party Talks, North Korea appears to have more nuclear weapons and more long-range missiles than before the talks began, and the talks themselves are, once again, in jeopardy.