Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (59 page)

As for Kim Jong-il’s secretiveness, it may have been justified by fear of the consequences in case his secrets were revealed. Kim “has cruelly killed countless people,” Hwang asserted. “His worst fear is having these crimes exposed. Thus he says that ‘keeping secrets is the essence of life in the party,’ and forbids everyone from revealing anything more than what is reported in the papers. He has forbidden the wives of party officials holding positions any higher than vice-director from holding a job for fear that they would leak party secrets while at work.”
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Without giving names or the date, Hwang offered a horrifying example of the intersection between secretiveness and killing: “One of Kim Jong-il’s secretaries got drunk once and told his wife about Kim Jong-il’s life of debauchery. The good wife, a woman of high cultural and moral standards, was genuinely shocked, and thought, ‘How can a leader who leads such an immoral life safeguard the happiness of his people?’ After much thought, she decided to write a letter to Kim Il-sung asking him to reprimand his son. Needless to say, the letter went to Kim Jong-il, who threw a drinking party and had the woman arrested and brought before him. In front of all the guests at the party, he pronounced the woman a counterrevolutionary and had her shot on the spot. Kim Jong-il’s intention was to issue a warning to those present that leaking whatever went on at drinking parties would be punishable by death. The poor woman’s husband actually begged Kim Jong-il to let him do the shooting. Kim Jong-il granted the secretary his wish, and gave him the weapon to shoot his wife.”
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In 1979, the coast apparently clear, official pronouncements resumed their mention of the “Glorious Party Center.” Still, when I visited North Korea that spring I found that questions about Kim Jong-il were discouraged. Only one official, the forthright Bai Song-chul, would confirm for me that the younger Kim was being groomed to succeed his father. While his portraits reportedly had reappeared in some public places, those did not include the usual sites visited by foreigners. Evidently the regime wished to avoid stirring up foreign criticism of the dynastic succession scheme, perhaps because the plan still needed some tidying up.
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So well did Pyongyang hide its cards during my visit at the time of the 1979 table tennis tournament that I had almost no idea of the enormous extent to which the country already bore the imprint of Kim Jong-il. In fact the younger Kim had exerted major influence for fifteen years already, and had served as co-ruler for five years. The economic achievements I was permitted to see were, it is true, largely those of the father, displayed shortly after they had peaked. But I realized only much later that what I had observed of North Korea’s cultural life—including the extreme form that the personality cult had taken—-was largely the work of the son.

It was May of 1980 before an on-the-record acknowledgment to the outside world of the plans for Kim Jong-il’s future came from a spokesman for North Korea. Meeting foreign journalists, Choe U-gyun, editor of pro-Pyongyang newspapers published in Tokyo, attacked what he called the Western mass-media view that the younger Kim’s accession to power would be a case of “hereditary” succession. “We understand hereditary succession normally means takeover of power by foolish, spoiled offspring,” Choe said. But Kim Jong-il, he said, “is a brilliant leader. He is possessed of excellent leadership qualities in terms of policy decision-making. Not only that, he is possessed of moral integrity worthy of an excellent leader. He is endowed with unrivaled leadership capability over economic affairs, political affairs, cultural affairs and over even military affairs.”

Choe extended the catalog of virtues of the junior Kim even further, piling on the sort of praise long associated with Kim Il-sung himself as he listed such a blinding array of qualities as to make dissent by ordinary mortals unthinkable. He focused especially on Kim Jong-il’s artistic achievements. The Pyongyang Art Theater Troupe was then visiting Tokyo, Choe noted. Among its members, “many of those musicians and dancers, magicians and jugglers received the personal guidance of Kim Jong-il.” The younger Kim even invented a system of notation for prescribing the dancers’ movements, Choe said. “He’s also an excellent film director—maybe something like Hitchcock but of a different genre. Lenin is credited with fostering and training and inspiring Russian novelist Gorky, but Kim Jong-il is doing a similar job.”

Attending that briefing, I attempted to listen respectfully and keep a straight face during Choe’s recital of Kim Jong-il’s virtues. I found it a bit much, though, and finally I could not resist asking, irreverently, whether the junior Kim could juggle and dance at the same time. Choe did not answer directly, but said simply that a great composer is never the best singer, and that Alfred Hitchcock, although a great director, was never a great actor.
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By the time of the sixth party congress in October of 1980, Public Security Minister Li Jin-su was able to announce: “In the course of our struggle against the anti-revolutionary elements, the extremely few antagonistic elements were completely isolated.” Next, he said, the regime would rally the public and “shatter” those “antagonistic elements”—presumably the opponents of the succession plan.
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By then, according to a former high-ranking official, anyone Kim Jong-il was unable to control had been completely isolated. The elder forces knew what their role would be and were prepared not to interfere in Kim Jong-il’s role.
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A party congress provided a rare chance for Pyongyang-watchers abroad to catch up on the relative rankings of officials. One interesting change: Kim Song-ae, Kim Il-sung’s official wife and the mother of Kim Pyong-il, was demoted from number
67
on the 1970 party Central Committee membership list to number 105 in 1980.

In the competition to glorify and cater to the aging Great Leader, supreme flatterer Kim Jong-il had emerged as the winner, hands down. “Among Kim Il-sung’s children he was the one who got his father’s trust,” a former North Korean diplomat explained to me many years later.
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“He supported Kim Il-sung’s deification.”

Reflecting his victory at the same congress Kim Jong-il was elected to the five-person presidium of the politburo and became a member of the party military commission, chaired by his father. Celebrating this decision,
Nodong Shinmun
in a pre-Christmas editorial offered foreigners a pair of replacements for the father and son of the Christian trinity. “People of the world, if you are looking for miracles, come to Korea!” the paper urged. “Christians, do not go to Jerusalem. Come rather to Korea. Do not believe in God. Believe in the great man.” At the party congress that had made the junior Kim’s heirship official, “the cheers shaking heaven and earth … were an explosion of our people’s joy, looking up at the star of guidance [Kim Jong-il] shining together with the benevolent sun [Kim Il-sung].”
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Cheer as they might, designating Kim Jong-il the heir was to prove “very costly,” as scholar Lee Manwoo has observed, since “much of North Korea’s inflexibility and isolation is due to this decision.”
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Hwang Jang-yop put it this way: “It is clear that Kim Jong-il’s dictatorship is cruel and that he has a remarkable aptitude for it. It is with this remarkable aptitude that he ruined his own father, North Korean society and the naive people who follow him. I cannot help but worry that eventually, his aptitude for dictatorship will end up ruining South Koreans and foreigners and bring unprecedented tragedy to the 70 million compatriots on the Korean peninsula.”
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Hwang probably was too kind to Kim Il-sung. The elder Kim’s policies were largely responsible for the disasters that were soon to befall North Koreans. But it is true that, by he-wing to his father’s policies, by ruthlessly cutting down anyone who suggested a new approach, Kim Jong-il ensured the ruination of the country.

Woe betide any North Korean suspected of “behavior that runs counter to the will of the Great Leader.” As one former party official wrote, “you are stripped of your titles or expelled from school, your food rations are cut off and you are chased out of your house.”
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Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans found themselves banished to the remote countryside because their devotion was deemed unsatisfactory.

Far worse would lie in store if one should be found guilty of serious disloyalty. During one of his purges of the suspected opponents of one-man rule, Kim Il-sung warned “factionalists” that their actions “will destroy three generations of a family.”
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He and his son made good on that threat. Over decades, the regime executed uncounted critics. Politically incorrect North Koreans sent to prisons and concentration camps numbered in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps in the millions.
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In the typical case, family members including small children, spouses and elderly parents shared in the punishment given anyone identified as an enemy of the regime. For many political prisoners, the expectation—and the fact—-was that they would never return from the North Korean gulag. They would die from overwork and hunger, or be shot for trying to escape.
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The regime set up an array of incarceration facilities, starting with detention centers for locking up citizens deemed to have broken relatively minor rules. Failure to get permission before boarding a train and being absent from work were typical of the offenses that could land a citizen in a detention
center. Terms of one or two years in reformatories were reserved for heavier criminal offenses such as theft, assault and slander (as well as escaping across the Chinese border in search of food, which became common when shortages reached famine levels in the 1990s). In the reformatories, otherwise known as labor drill units, officials used harsh discipline and hard labor to attempt to “re-educate” the inmates. Regular prisons received general offenders sentenced to more than two years. The Ministry of Public Security the general police agency, was assigned to administer the detention centers, reformatories and regular prisons.

The Ministry of State Security was put in charge of most of the facilities designed to get really tough with major political offenders. That secret police and intelligence agency was given responsibility for political prisons as well as concentration camps housing “factionalists” and other people deemed opponents of the party, the revolution or the leader. Offenders who were not executed or placed in noncamp prisons would be sent to camps. Families of offenders also would be sent to the camps, accompanied or not by the offenders depending on the fate of the latter. In one type of concentration camp, eventual release might be possible. Facilities in a second, no-hope and no-exit, category could be described as slow-death camps.
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Architect-engineer Kim Young-song tasted punishment at the milder end of the scale when he was sent to work in the mines in 1974. Afterward, until his 1992 defection to South Korea, he lived with the fear that he and his family would end up dying in a political prison or concentration camp. Family background was his initial problem, he told me. “We were intellectuals. Father taught at elementary school. I had five older brothers. Four attended university.” While the regime encouraged education, it suspected educated people—especially pre-liberation white-collar families.

Fifty-nine years old when I interviewed him, intense and bespectacled, Kim impressed me with his obvious intelligence as well as his sardonic worldview. “I was put under surveillance for thirty years,” he told me with a sort of disgusted relish. And what did the watchers find? He laughed derisively at my question and replied, “Nothing. Everybody’s watching each other in North Korea.”

Kim Young-song wanted to join the army when he turned seventeen in 1951, “but I wasn’t tall enough yet, so I studied in Pyongyang from late 1951 to the summer of 1952. I was with my eldest brother there, so I got a food ration. In 1952, I went to Czechoslovakia to continue my studies. I couldn’t go straight to university then because I didn’t have a high school diploma. I attended a specialized training school, got great marks and went on to the university in Prague. It took me about two years to learn Czech. I studied architecture and engineering, and stayed from 1952 to late 1959.”

During that time, in 1956, his eldest brother went to study in Leningrad— just in time to watch Khrushchev lambaste the recently dead Stalin for his personality cult. Picking up on that theme, the brother joined some friends in criticizing Kim Il-sung’s Stalin-style personality cult and his increasingly one-man rule. “That got him executed,” Kim told me. The brother “wasn’t an activist in the movement, just a scholar. But his friends were involved in politics. When they-were executed, so-was he, in 1958.”
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