Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (86 page)

“I had turned thirty,” Ahn continued, “and I realized that the principles of Kim Il-sung that I had been learning were all lies. I felt a sense of loss, but
at the same time I became very curious about the world. I bought a radio and started listening to South Korean broadcasts, which came at certain times only. In the other room they heard something and figured out I must be listening to the broadcasts. An accountant was on the point of deciding to report me to State Security but a friend warned me and told me not to listen to the broadcasts. I stopped, but after three or four days I couldn’t resist and listened again. I realized South Korean broadcasts were very different from North Korean ones. North Korea only criticized South Korea. South Korean radio gave very clear accounts of real news. It was more humanistic. The next day my friend came over and said, ‘You listened, didn’t you? I think the other guy is going to report you.’ At that point I had no further hope, so I ran away. I took the money I’d saved and a knife and walked 35 kilometers [22 miles] in freezing weather to a train station and went to Moscow. I waited in Russia for a year and eight months before stowing away on a Russian ship at Nakhodka and coming to South Korea.”

When I met Ahn in August of 1996, he had been in South Korea only a year or so. He had made a truly impressive transition from logging camp worker to salesman. Cars were his product—he had been named in advance to become the post-reunification manager of a Kia Motors dealership in his home city back in North Korea, Hamhung. But I felt that his propensity to sales talk included an obvious urge to expound on the differences between South and North Korea. I had to keep telling him to forego the lectures and just give me his personal story. Round-faced, with the usual metal-rimmed glasses and what looked like a gold and platinum watch, Ahn wore on the lapel of his business suit—in place of his old Kim Il-sung button—a pin bearing the Kia Motors logo. He had already sold an automobile to fellow defector Yeo Man-cheol, husband of Lee Ok-keum (chapter 17).

Ahn had married in the South and was considered well enough adjusted that he was no longer the subject of full-time attention by the South Korean authorities. I inquired whether the Agency for National Security Planning (as the KCIA had been renamed in an attempt at sanitizing it under the democratically elected government) made any efforts to censor his accounts of North Korea. No, he replied. “Now South Korea is stronger and won’t collapse if people know about North Korea.” As we talked I realized that what I took to be Ahn’s sales pitches could represent something more complicated. “I consciously make efforts to forget about North Korea because if I think about it I can’t do my work,” he told me. “When I first had to speak out in a press conference, I couldn’t speak. All images of my childhood, parents, friends were all mixed up. But now I feel at ease in this interview.” A bit ashamed of my earlier feelings of impatience with his preachy pronouncements, I realized that for Ahn our conversation represented a catharsis of sorts.

* * *

Shin Myung-chul had been described to me as a logger, but when I met him in August of 1996 he turned out to have been a policeman. Shin, very young looking, came to the interview in jeans and a T-shirt on which were printed a cartoon picture of a shark and the English phrase “Hot Summer.” Wiry of build, he had combed his short hair forward in front, in the style popular in Seoul, and wore the gold-rimmed spectacles that were de rigeur. Shin had joined the air force straight out of high school and served in the Ninety-seventh Radar Battallion, stationed at Chongjin, at the time one of the most militarily sensitive port cities. “When I was growing up, socialism seemed superior to capitalist society. Someone like me who learned Russian in high school got preference. From each of the nine provinces, ten like me were chosen to be tested and of those ninety tested, nineteen were finally selected to go to the radar division of the air force. The radar equipment came from Russia. You had to know the language to read the manuals.”

When his ten-year military hitch ended in 1988, Shin went to work in a county outpost of State Security, in the communications office. “I was selected,” he told me. “They look at family background, how long you’ve been in the party and so on before deciding who goes to State Security and who goes to the mines.” When I asked if he had been a true believer, he flashed an odd smirk. “I was very devoted to the ideology,” he said. “I entered the party at twenty.”

Shin told me how one’s military assignment affected later job prospects:

• Bodyguards had the best assignment and could go back home after completing their service.
  

• The air force was the most prestigious of the main services. Radar was a key skill. One could go from there either to State Security or back home. Anyhow, “radar guys like me aren’t robust enough for the coal mines,” Shin said.
  

• Others, who had recommendations from universities or had been named most outstanding in their units, could go home.
  

• The rest were relocated en masse.
  

Shin quit his job in State Security to go to Russia because he wanted more money. “Usually in North Korea you have to save for thirty years to buy a television set,” he explained. In Russia he had worked for the party in a police role, limiting reception on loggers’ radios and connecting them to propaganda feeds from home. “Of course, I was still loyal then. The loggers have short-wave radios. I opened them up and set the gearing that controls band selection, made a connection with aluminum. Those don’t last forever, so sometimes the loggers could listen to forbidden broadcasts in Korean from KBS, Radio Moscow, China, America. So I had to do it continuously. I was
like a cop, restricting loggers’ lives, but not in such a big way. And I didn’t create the propaganda broadcasts. I just connected the loggers’ radios by cable to programming that I got over radio frequencies. I worked there about two and a half years.”

Like others who went, “I started realizing there were vast differences between Russia and North Korea. I started facing a dilemma. What really changed me was the fact that I had a radio room that no one could enter. There I listened to Korean-language broadcasts every day usually KBS and broadcasts from Moscow. There was so much difference between their accounts of events and the North Korean version.

“I had a wife and a one-year-old daughter in North Korea when I left there. While in Russia I sometimes went to Khabarovsk to buy things to take back to North Korea. It was a seven-day round trip. One day while I waited in a park to return to the camp, by chance I met a South Korean preacher and we struck up a conversation. Nothing serious, but we planned to meet again. The next time I was in Khabarovsk, the preacher had returned to South Korea and another preacher, Yu Jae-hee, came and we talked a while. I was always concerned that State Security would find out.

“A close friend and schoolmate was at the camp as a logger. I let him listen to all the overseas radio broadcasts, and I was concerned they’d find out about that. On August 20, 1994, he was caught by the manager of the logging camp and arrested. As soon as I heard that, I knew I had to escape. I didn’t intend to come to South Korea. I went to Khabarovsk, and had to work for my living expenses. After two months I went to the South Korean consulate in Vladivostok to apply to defect. Permission didn’t come easily. While I waited I worked as a merchant. That made me known to some Korean residents of China, who reported me to North Korean State Security because there was an $8,000 re-ward for catching me.

“On August 30, 1995, State Security officers in cooperation with armed Russian police came after me. I was cornered on top of a three-story building. I ended up on the ground with both legs broken and was sent to the Russian police hospital for casts. The State Security officers thought I couldn’t escape with two casts, but I got away that night. I stayed in seclusion for a while and then applied to the International Red Cross in Moscow to become a refugee. The Red Cross and the South Korean consulate helped me.”

Shin had no job at the time I spoke with him but said he hoped to put his radio and cable experience to work in the telecommunications field.

For me, on the basis of those interviews, the verdict on the Russian logging and mining camps was obvious: from the standpoint of human rights the camps were far more an opportunity than they were a problem. Even that great majority of workers and officials who did not defect would have
returned to North Korea with some changes in their outlook as a result of their liberating experiences in Russia. Their knowledge of the real world would, to some extent, have percolated into the common understanding. While some foreign editorial writers and activists for human rights campaigned against the camps and urged the Russian leadership to shut them down, I only wished there were more of them.

Instead, the number of North Korean workers in Siberia peaked at around 15,000 and then approximately 90 percent were sent home when Russia experienced a financial crisis in 1998. In April 2002, during a period when Pyongyang was focused on reinvigorating its economy, its national airline instituted twice-weekly service between Pyongyang and Khabarovsk. North Korean Prime Minister Jo Chang-dok, on a trip that month to promote economic exchange, asked the Russians to accept at least ten thousand laborers. The request was denied.
²

If any North Korean’s story ought to be made into a sequel to Joseph Heller’s novel
Catch-22,
that might be Pak Su-hyon’s. Pak was born on October 28, 1966, in Kyongsong, North Hamgyong Province, the son of a disabled father who was on welfare and a factory-worker mother. Considered to have a relatively “good” family background in the North Korean context, he grew up getting his ticket punched in all the right places for a young man eager to rise in station. He was a member of the leaders’ bodyguard service—a super-loyal military unit, so large that Pak never personally encountered Kim Il-sung. Studying at a medical college in the east coast port city of Chongjin, Pak by the early 1990s was hungry like most other people but at least could look forward to a good career. But then his brother was caught stealing food. On the North Korean principle that the misdeeds of an individual call into question the loyalty of his whole family, Pak was forced out of college and reduced to working in the electrical factory that employed his mother.

Disillusioned, he defected to South Korea in 1993. When I met him on February 7, 1994, I encountered a passionate and humorous man who was preparing to resume studies of traditional herbal medicine, which he had begun in the North. His stature was small; his face, pointed. The word “elfin” came to my mind. Wearing a generously cut new suit with wide lapels, grinning a survivor’s “wry grin as he related some of the worst of his misfortunes, Pak listened intently to my questions and took his own notes on them before he replied to each. Here is his story, pieced together from his answers:

The biggest problem now is the food shortage. There isn’t enough food for the people. How can they have food for cattle and other livestock? That’s why you didn’t see any during your 1992 visit.

Until the 1970s it was all right. From 1976 to 1979 the food shortages started. Those shortages were even worse than the ones of the early 1990s. They cut the rice ration in half. We speculated it was due to lack of supplies donated by the Russians. Or it was used for something else instead of being distributed to the people. But in the 1976 to 1979 period, people still had hope. North Koreans believed very strongly in the ideology of Kim Il-sung. And from 1979 the government did resume supplying all the rations. Also from that year some people plowed their own land. That was the “privatization” movement.

Things did improve around the end of 1979. But in 1984 the government sent rice to South Korean flood victims. That caused a great shortage at home. Certain amounts of grain had been provided regularly to each household, but from that point supplies became irregular. When the 1989 youth festival came we worked up some hope because there were lots of food supplies for that one week of festivities—although, of course, the rural areas were not as favored as Pyongyang.

Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il said we would concentrate on improving agriculture and put factory workers into the fields. People believed in those intentions, but by 1992 we felt it was only words and had given up hope. Now people realize it’s not going to get better. It’s going to get worse year by year.

In the distribution of food grains to each household, they started substituting all kinds of grain and even flour for rice. Sometimes the supplies didn’t get through. From January to March you would get the food supply. Then for a long time they wouldn’t give you any. Then later, in July, they would give you imported grain. Again, with the harvest, they would resume the supply. From March to July people would borrow food. In July they’d have to pay it back with the rations they got then, so they would have little left to eat. After coming to Seoul I saw a South Korean documentary of the Korean War period. It was called, “Do you remember that time?” But in North Korea conditions were that same way again, forty years after the war.