The Hidden People of North Korea (5 page)

The Life of the Leader

To understand why the North Korean people live the way they do, it is necessary to understand the thinking and personality of their supreme leader, Kim Jong-il, who, along with his father, has shaped their lives and limited their chances. And just as the son continued his father’s work, there is every reason to believe that whoever takes over for Kim Jong-il—most likely one of his sons—will govern in the style of the first two Kims.

The North Korean people are accustomed to being ruled by autocratic leaders. Since the end of World War II, the North Korean dictators have been Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il. Before that, it was the Japanese emperor and his colonial administrators, and before that, an assortment of Korean kings and queens stretching back for millennia. Almost inevitably, dictators use their powers to serve their own personal interests before those of their people, and this is certainly the case in North Korea, which is run for the benefit of Kim and his elite supporters.

Kim Jong-il is, by occupation, a dictator, and that job description limits his choices—and also the choices of his successor. It is no coincidence that his policies strikingly resemble those of other dictators, past and present. Thus, Kim is neither crazy nor strange; he is just doing his job. Ronald Winetrobe provides a good general description of dictators based on numerous case studies (not including North Korea) that fits Kim like a glove:

Such leaders tend to be paranoid, because they lack reliable information about what their people are really thinking about them. One of their chief concerns is staying in office, and to this end, they are engaged with more or less frequency (depending on the type of dictatorship) in buying loyalty and implementing repressive measures in order to do so. We know less about their subjects, but we do know that as long as they are at all numerous—and especially if they are unorganized—the benefits to each one of overthrowing the dictator will be small compared with the potential costs. This free-rider problem helps dictators immensely in the task of staying in office, but it doesn’t solve it completely, and under the right circumstances, they can be deposed, as dictators often are.
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Winetrobe would likely place Kim Jong-il in the category of most dangerous dictators: “Of all of the systems examined, dictatorship approaches the purest form in the role of a single individual, someone who is beholden to no interest group and who is not motivated by economic concerns. And as a dictatorship approaches this form, it becomes progressively more dangerous and more interested in controlling a wider fraction of the economy and society.”
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Kim Il-sung’s Legacy

When Kim Jong-il took over after his father’s death, his official slogan was “Expect no change from me.” From his father he inherited not only a country but a system of governance. Whether the son would like to make substantial changes is a moot question. Over a decade later, the only changes that have come to North Korea have occurred in spite of Kim.

By the time he died, the man known to North Koreans as the
suryong
(“great leader”), or more reverentially as
oboi suryongnim
(“fatherly great leader”), had taken his people down a dead-end road—although it would be equally true to say that the road led directly to the Kim family estate. Beginning life as a wandering young man with a limited education and no profession other than guerrilla fighter, he ended up virtually owning a country of twenty-two million people. Although he was able to hold on to power for almost half a century, he failed to achieve his oft-pronounced goals of seeing his people “eat soup with meat, wear silk clothes, and live in tiled-roof houses.” He also failed to unite the two Koreas under communism. Yet he was, and still is, respected and even worshipped by most North Koreans. Kim enjoyed unparalleled power to shape his country, and as Adrian Buzo has perceptively written, North Korea in many respects reflects the outlook and experience of its founder.
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Lacking education and international experience, Kim and his comrades were unable to progress beyond the first and most obvious stages of nation building. When Deng Xiaoping and the ruling Chinese communist elites were authorizing significant changes in China’s economic affairs, Kim could see nothing wrong with North Korea’s Stalinist-style socialist economy. When the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe gave up on communism, Kim held firm. In the final two decades of his life, Kim gradually handed over the day-to-day affairs of state to his son and receded into semiretirement to oversee the writing of his autobiography. The book’s title,
With the Century
, is misleading because rather than living
with
the century, Kim was stuck in the first half of it. His policies of the 1950s no longer worked in the 1980s and 1990s. And because his autobiography mixes personal reminiscences with the cult stories that party propagandists invented for him, it does more to confuse his life story than clarify it. For more accurate accounts of his life, one must rely on foreign biographers.
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Kim Il-sung was born on April 15, 1912, in the village of Mangyongdae, just north of Pyongyang. His name was Kim Song-ju, not Kim Il-sung—the name change did not occur until the early 1930s, when he took the name of a legendary guerrilla fighter about whom little is known. He had an ordinary, if somewhat difficult, childhood. His father, Kim Hyong-jik, was at various times a schoolteacher, a clerk, and an herbal pharmacist who had briefly attended an American missionary school and become a Christian, which was not unusual in Korea. Most Koreans bowed to the authority of the Japanese administrators and went on with their lives, but not the Kim family, which fled to regions of China that the Japanese had not yet occupied. Kim joined a youth league that harassed the Japanese troops who were gradually spreading out over China, and at the age of seventeen, he was arrested and sentenced to several months in prison for being a member of the Korean Communist Youth League. With his entry into youthful anti-Japanese politics, Kim ended his formal schooling, having completed eight grades.

At the age of twenty-one, Kim graduated from politics to the military, joining a guerrilla band of Koreans that North Korean propagandists would later call the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army, and it was at this point in his life that he began using the name Kim Il-sung. The Japanese were able to break up the group, but Kim eluded them and joined other resistance groups that were usually affiliated with contingents of the Chinese army. Most of the time the guerrillas fought the Japanese in Manchuria, but occasionally they conducted raids into Japanese-occupied Korea.

Thanks to his leadership qualities, Kim soon had command of his own small group of fighters, who rarely numbered more than a hundred men. His most famous “battle” was fought in and around Pochonbo, a small Korean town close to the Chinese border. Leading a band of two hundred men, grandly named the Sixth Division of the Chinese Second Army (of the First Route Army), Kim and his men staged a daring early-morning attack on June 4, 1937, destroying Japanese administrative offices, setting fire to a corner police office, the elementary school, and the post office, and quickly retreating back across the border. Although North Koreans are taught that Pochonbo marked a “decisive turning point” in the liberation of Korea, in fact skirmishes such as these had no effect whatsoever on the tide of war.
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In 1940 or 1941, Kim and his soldiers took refuge in Russia, where Kim settled in a Soviet army camp outside the village of Viatsk (Viatskoe or Vyatskiye) near the city of Khabarovsk (Chabarovsk) and was commissioned a captain in the Eighty-eighth Independent Brigade. There he stayed for the remainder of the war, undergoing Soviet military training and marrying Kim Jong-suk, one of the Korean women who had joined his guerrilla group. Their first son, Yura, later to be known as Kim Jong-il, was born on February 16 in 1941 or 1942 (some sources say his birth date was moved back a year so he could be exactly thirty years younger than his father).
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On September 19, 1945, just over a month after the Japanese surrender, a Soviet naval vessel carried Capt. Kim Il-sung and sixty of his Korean comrades to Wonsan, Korea. Back in Pyongyang, Kim was installed in office and controlled by the Soviet military, who considered him to be a disciplined and reliable surrogate communist leader. After a few administrative false starts on the part of the Russians, who were not sure how best to govern North Korea, a provisional people’s committee was formed in February 1946, and Kim was appointed to lead it.

To make a long and complicated story short, over the next several years Kim used his political talents, along with the advice of his Soviet advisors and the support of Soviet troops, to take control of the newly established Korean security and military forces, thereby enabling him to outmaneuver political rivals who lacked a military base. By 1950 he had consolidated his position and created a miniature version of the Soviet Union in the northern half of the Korean Peninsula.
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His next goal was to extend his control over the southern half of the peninsula. What the North Koreans call the “Great Fatherland Liberation War,” known to foreigners as the Korean War, began with a surprise attack on June 25, 1950, although the North Korean people are told that the Korean People’s Army (KPA) was launching a counteroffensive against a South Korean attack.

In the years immediately following the war, Kim’s generalship was questioned, and those who naively believed that he was the first among political equals made a political attempt to unseat him.
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As is often the case when people are gradually deprived of their individual freedoms, Kim’s political opponents did not realize that he was well on his way to becoming a totalitarian dictator. Kim used his political skills, as well as the backing of the army and secret police, to purge political opponents and secure his regime, and by the late 1950s he had firmer control over the country than before the war. Kim Il-sung incorporated the guerrilla lifestyle that had enabled him to survive in China into his governance of North Korea and wedded it to the regimented economic and political structures that had made the Soviet Union a world power and kept Stalin in office.
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A decade after the Korean War, Premier Kim (he would take the title of president under a new constitution in 1972) could be proud of himself. Despite having little formal education and no political connections, he had become the unrivalled leader of half a country. Communism continued to spread through Asia, and Kim surely believed that the tide of history was on his side. He rarely traveled outside his country, except for occasional trips to China and the Soviet Union, but in his own little corner of the world, he was a god-king.

Kim ruled by what seemed to him to be common sense, and technocrats had little impact on policy. He traveled around the country giving what the press called “on-the-spot guidance.” In this sense he was like a king traveling among his subjects, dispensing advice on matters great and small. His people loved him, and most foreigners who met him thought him a charming man. It was hard to believe that behind the hearty handshake and jovial manner was a man who had ruthlessly started the Korean War and cold-bloodedly purged his political rivals and who oversaw a gulag system that imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Koreans for crimes no more serious than questioning his policies.

Kim’s thoughts and actions were more like those of the mayor of a small city or the lord of a fiefdom than the leader of a twentieth-century state. Policy mistakes, of which there were many, were covered up by aid from China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. His people were kept so isolated that they could not compare their standard of living with that of the South Koreans or Chinese. The one sphere of life in which Kim had to stay on top of his game was domestic politics; he had a sixth sense about how to influence and control people, a sense that his son would develop as well. Motivated by adoration for their leader and by their own self-interest, party officials created for Kim a cult of personality that he gracefully accepted. He was not an evil or intentionally corrupt man. Better to say, he was a normal human being who gradually succumbed to adulation and privilege and who used whatever power his followers granted him.

The goal of Korean reunification continued to elude him. After the Korean War truce, he kept looking for an opening, but South Korea grew faster than the North and remained firmly under the protection of the United States. The Korean War had turned most South Koreans into ardent anticommunists who accepted their own military dictatorships as a necessity for national survival. In the late 1960s, Kim increased North Korea’s commando raids into the South, but they were repulsed and made the South Korean people even more hostile toward the North.

Judging by his lack of significant policy initiatives, Kim did not seem to notice that international communism was losing its legitimacy as a provider of people’s welfare. The gap between rich and poor was smaller in communist than in capitalist economies, but communist economies were never healthy, and North Korea found itself locked into a trading system with other inferior economies. North Korean factories turned out third-rate products that were traded to other communist countries for their second-rate products. Meanwhile, South Korea was joining the other East Asian economic “dragons” on its way to prosperity.

In the 1970s, as the shortcomings of North Korea’s economy were becoming more evident, Kim was in his sixties and beginning to sink into a comfortable semiretirement. It seems likely that in the 1980s and 1990s, Kim Jong-il was running the country with his father presiding over formal diplomatic tasks and public appearances. Kim Il-sung reportedly died of a heart attack at 2 a.m. on July 8, 1994, although the exact circumstances of his death are not likely to be known until after the secretive North Korean regime has been replaced. News of his death was announced thirty-four hours later on the Korean Central Broadcasting Station (KCBS), the country’s only domestic radio station, and an hour after that to the international community by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). Millions of sobbing mourners appeared at the thousands of Kim Il-sung monuments scattered across the country to pay their respects (although one former North Korean we interviewed said that she only pretended to cry in order not to stand out from the crowd and attract the attention of the police). To this day, a visit to the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, where Kim’s body lies in state, is a moving experience for the tens of thousands of North Koreans who go every year.