Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (136 page)

Missing in the accounts by those who demonized Kim was any hint that there might be two sides to the story.
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Surely there are unrelievedly evil people. Saddam Hussein’s sadistic sons Uday and Qusay perhaps qualified. But I could not fit the real Kim Jong-il comfortably into the role of total monster. Having studied Kim rather intensively for years, I would describe him as an often insensitive and brutal despot who had another side that was generous and—increasingly, as he matured—charming. He was an incompetent economic manager during the decades when stubbornness or insecurity
kept him from risking needed changes in the system. But then, having found somewhere a new decisiveness, he had become the apparent sponsor of reform efforts. Sale of his regime’s weapons of mass destruction to other enemy nations could cause the United States, both at home and in its role as global policeman, immense problems—but for a price he appeared “willing to relinquish at least his capacity to make and sell them.

North Korea’s human rights situation truly piled atrocity upon atrocity as readers of chapters 14, 16 and 34 know. The system in which secret police fed political prisoners to the gulag was his father’s creation, but Kim Jong-il had either actively or passively preserved it. There was precious little on the positive side of the ledger page to balance the horrors of the camps. After complaints by human rights groups, the regime had closed some of those. But the prisoners had been transferred to locations that were more remote, where the eyes of the outside world could not penetrate. The most favorable inference from that incident was that Kim could be moved by outside opinion. Then there were his moderating instructions to “avoid creating internal enemies” and his encouragement of more attention to legality. In the end, still, there was no sign that he had come close to phasing out the camps and the oppressive system of surveillance.

I wondered what Kim might be persuaded to do now that he was changing his country’s ideology. In my most optimistic daydream I imagined a very high-level envoy from a U.S. president or presidential nominee meeting Kim, perhaps in the early autumn of an election year, and saying, “Mr. Chairman, I know that you would like to meet with the man I represent. With your permission I will speak frankly on that point. In view of what we have learned about treatment of North Korean citizens who are deemed to have deviated politically from the official line, it would be hard for him to agree to meet with you. There is growing public concern in the United States regarding that situation.

“You and I have discussed measures that might begin to resolve our other mutual problems. But you are asking that we not insist upon your country’s immediate nuclear disarmament. You ask that we accept simply a freeze of your capacity to make such weapons during a period of-watching and waiting, while the two sides develop mutual trust. Without a breakthrough on human rights, I have to tell you, it would be politically difficult to justify a deal that offered no more than the Agreed Frame-work of 1994 had provided—a deal, moreover, that would hinge on trust. Let me also suggest that it would be difficult for
you.
to trust our professions of non-hostility in such circumstances. After all, you might think, whenever American public opinion became seriously aroused by news of the human rights situation here, a policy reversal in Washington could lead to renewed hostility. So let’s talk about how we might fast-forward the development of trust.”

In my daydream Kim Jong-il would listen intently as the interpreter turned those words into Korean, before the American envoy continued: “The man who sent me understands that many of the prisoners were incarcerated originally because their attitudes and class backgrounds, or those of their parents or grandparents, were considered unsuitable in the sort of economy and social system your country was building from the 1940s. He knows of your reported instruction to ‘avoid making internal enemies.’ He knows about the adjustments you have begun to make to modernize the economic system. He wonders whether you might have contemplated going farther to create a role for the surviving political prisoners—and their jailers—as free people working in the new economic enterprises that you expect to see formed. If you were to free the prisoners, he would meet with you gladly.”

We have seen how decisively (or, if you prefer, impetuously) Kim Jong-il had reacted to frank but polite talk in his meetings in 2000 with Kim Dae-jung and Madeleine Albright. His responses in person had been a far cry from the usual bloody-minded stone-walling his subordinates resorted to when they negotiated on his behalf.
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At the conclusion of our hypothetical envoy’s human-rights pitch, I imagined the Dear Leader grinning conspira-torially and asking, “So he wants me to make him the Great Emancipator here in the DPRK, in time for what your political writers call an ‘October surprise’?” The envoy at this point would smile and reply, a bit playfully “What’s wrong with your letting him take some of the credit? But seriously he wants
you.
to be the Great Emancipator.”

And then, who knows? Kim might turn to one of his functionaries and say, “Get the State Security and Public Security chiefs into my office immediately. Call the governors in from all the provinces for a meeting tonight to plan for turning those camps into ordinary communities. I’ll probably regret this, but I’m taking down the fences—-within the month.”

Such an approach would be a long shot indeed, but something of the sort seemed to me worth a try. The polite talk would be essential. A former U.S. president would have the appropriate stature to serve as envoy. “In dealing with a nation that is attempting to reform, the form matters as much as the content,” writes political scientist David C. Kang. “You can’t
tell
a Korean anything, but suggestions of a solution might be met by receptive ears.”
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One could dislike or even loathe Kim Jong-il. In my personal opinion, North Korea and the rest of the world would have been far better off if the boy called Yura had drowned in that wading pool with his little brother Shura back in 1948. Under the circumstances existing as of early 2004, however, it was no more relevant to ponder what might have been than to decide whether one liked or disliked the Dear Leader. What was essential, I thought, was to avoid overlooking anything about Kim that might point the way to a satisfactory, non-military resolution.

I felt that in my years of studying Kim I had succeeded to some extent in my goal of getting into the mind of that traditional Oriental despot, who happened to be my own age. A key perhaps
the
key I concluded, was the importance of maintaining face. For years I had believed that Kim Jong-il remained determined to win—to rule all of Korea. Lately though, I had come to think that his real bottom line was to avoid humiliation. I remembered and pondered anew his odd 1998 remark (see chapter 29) about South Korean President Kim Young-sam’s refusal to attend the funeral of Kim Il-sung: “If he had come, he might have taken over North Korea and become president of a united Korea. What an idiot!” Perhaps Kim Jong-il wished he could have carried out his father’s dying wishes and brought into being the long-discussed federation or confederation, in which the two separate states could coexist, trade and gradually merge into one. In any case, the remark did not sound to me like the words of a ruler determined that he would either win or destroy the world. Kim did not, after all, speak of victory. It sounded more like the words of a ruler who could not accept the loss of his own and his country’s face. As one of his negotiators put it in December 2003: to the North Koreans, capitulation meant “death itself.”
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If that part was right, it followed that negotiated solutions to the United States’ and other countries’ problems with Kim should be possible. He could compromise if they also compromised—and if they showed respect rather than hostile contempt. Verification could be negotiated. Defector Hwang Jang-yop, who had almost nothing good to say about Kim, was skeptical when a
Washington Times
reporter asked whether the Dear Leader could be trusted to keep an agreement on nuclear weapons. But Hwang conceded, “People can change, and conditions can force a person to follow a certain path.”
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How much longer could North Korea survive as a separate country? Although no one knew, as of early 2004 it seemed that the answer might turn out to be: a while yet.

After all, it was by no means clear that forces favoring speedy Korean reunification were strong enough to prevail any time soon. Each of the major players, on and off the peninsula, had interests in seeing division continue. For Beijing, continued existence of a separate North Korea would leave a communist party-ruled buffer state between the Yalu River and the U.S. troops in South Korea. In Washington the Pentagon liked the idea of keeping U.S. troops in Asia, but countries willing to play host to them had dwindled in number. A separate South Korea might well be more willing than a unified Korea to tolerate a contingent of GIs. Moscow could derive some satisfaction from seeing a former Soviet client state remain outside the American sphere of influence. Even in Tokyo people might sleep better knowing that the Koreans, whose resentment of Japan formed a common bond between North and South, had yet to manage the creation of a politically and militarily united country. For South Korea, continued division would postpone the dreaded time of reckoning when Seoul would have to attempt to develop the northern part of the peninsula quickly enough to keep a horde of hungry and homeless job-seekers from rushing south.

Would a separate North Korea continue to change internally, as rapidly as in the period since 1998 or even faster? To the extent that Pyongyang
could find ways to proceed with its planned experiments in special zones, it did not seem unreasonable to guess that the country would change economically. Especially once long-forbidden information from outside became widely available, it could change politically as well. Still, political changes might come more slowly than economic ones—in that regard following the Chinese pattern rather than the Russian one. Mean-while, for the reasons discussed in chapter 36, coup-dreaming outsiders might think better of the notion that a new, military leadership should be installed.

Under such circumstances, the Kim dynasty might last long enough to crown a successor to Kim Jong-il. At dinner with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000, Kim signaled that this was his plan. When Albright asked if there were other models he had considered emulating besides Sweden (itself a constitutional monarchy), Kim replied: “Thailand maintains a strong royal system and has preserved its independence through a long, turbulent history, yet has a market economy. I am also interested in the Thai model.”
¹

Pyongyang began soon after to prepare the world for the next succession. A long essay in the party newspaper
Nodong Shinmun
for October 2, 2002, spun out an elaborate claim that Kim Jong-il had been the right choice to succeed his father precisely because he was “a partisan’s son,” specifically the son of Kim Il-sung. (The emphasis on the blood tie was far greater than had been the case when Kim Jong-il was put forth initially. Then, the propagandists’ argument was that he just happened to be the most capable man for the job, regardless of his lineage.)

The
Nodong Shinmun
article then quoted an article, printed in an unnamed Japanese newspaper (perhaps one published by Chongryon), entitled, “The Korean Revolution Carried Out From the Son’s Generation to the Grandson’s Generation.” It said, “Already a long time ago President Kim Il-sung expressed his determination to win the final victory of the Korean revolution by his son, if not by himself, or by his grandson, if not by his son. President Kim Il-sung reportedly expressed this determination at the secret camp on Mount Paektu in the spring of 1943.”
²

The appearance of the
Nodong Shinmun
article indicated that Kim Jong-il had decided it was time for people to start thinking about his ultimate successor. Recall that it was shortly after Kim Il-sung turned sixty that he made his choice of Kim Jong-il known to high-level intimates. Kim Jong-il himself turned sixty on February 16, 2002.

In the normal scheme of things in a Confucian society, the eldest son would be expected to carry on the family enterprise. Younger sons are, essentially, spares. But having multiple wives traditionally has complicated matters. The ruler’s favorite wife is in a good position to push the case of her own son.

* * *

In April 2001, Japanese public security authorities got word from a friendly foreign intelligence service that a person believed to be Kim Jong-nam, the eldest son of Kim Jong-il, would travel to Tokyo from Singapore on May 1. The passenger manifest of a Japan Airlines flight from Singapore that day listed a man who was going by a Chinese-sounding name, Pang Xiong. With him were three traveling companions: two women and a four-year-old boy. Security officials at Tokyo’s Narita Airport approached the four at the immigration desk and took the man into an Immigration Bureau room to question him. He refused to answer at first, but after an hour or so he told them, “I’m Kim Jong-il’s son.” He explained that the group just wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland. The date of birth given on his forged Dominican Republic passport, May 10, 1971, was Kim Jong-nam’s birth date. The man said he had paid $2,000 each for the passports. His had been stamped to record entries into Japan the previous year. Questioning went on for several hours. At one point the man announced that he was hungry, peeled off a 10,000-yen note (worth around eighty dollars) from a wad of large U.S. and Japanese bills and asked that someone be sent out for food.