The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag
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What follows did not come fully to light until 1994, when Boris Yeltsin opened up the related Soviet archives. Kim Il-sung, it appears, was stamping his feet in impatience. He wanted immediately to throw his army into an assault on the South, which was poorly armed, poorly organized, and suffering under the harshest economic difficulties—not to mention harassed by a northernbacked guerilla movement. Prudent as always, Stalin waited another few months before giving the green light. On June 25, 1950, despite assurances from observers that an attack from the North was almost unthinkable, North Korean tanks broke through the line of demarcation along the thirty-eighth parallel. Seoul fell in three days, as the North Korean army stormed its way down the peninsula, making short work of Rhee Syng-man’s small South Korean army and its several hundred American advisors. North Korea soon controlled 90 percent of the peninsula.
This was the start of the Korean War, a conflict of incredible reversals. The American president, Harry Truman, reacted quickly. Standing before the UN Security Council, he denounced North Korea’s premeditated aggression and pleaded for the young international organization to respond with “all its means.” The UN’s decision was made all the easier by the Soviet Union’s sulky protest to the organization’s admittance of Chiang Kai-shek’s China into the Security Council. On June 27, the UN called on its member nations to lend military assistance to South Korea. On September 15, American forces under the command of General MacArthur landed in the rear of the North Korean army. Caught off guard, Pyongyang’s troops fled or were destroyed. Under the blue-and-white banner of the UN, the American and South Korean troops, joined now by contingents from Turkey, England, France, and the Netherlands, liberated the capital, penetrated the North, took Pyongyang, and made their way up toward the Amnok River. Known to both the Chinese and Americans as the Yalu, the river marked the northwest border between Korea and the People’s Republic of China.
Mao Tse-tung responded by throwing several hundred thousand volunteers into battle. The UN troops suffered heavy losses and were forced to beat a hasty retreat. The seesaw battle again had changed course: Pyongyang was abandoned, UN troops fell below the thirty-eighth parallel, and Seoul was abandoned. After five months of fierce battle, the front stabilized. The scale then gradually began tipping in the other direction: Seoul was recaptured for the second time and the battle line pushed a bit farther north.
On July 27, 1953, three years and one million deaths after Kim Il-sung’s surprise attack and shortly on the heels of Stalin’s death, an armistice was signed in the village of Panmunjom.
The United Nations prevented a takeover, but failed to reunify the country.
One day I met a North Korean soldier who had recently defected to the South and was still recovering from the shock. He asked me, almost pleading, to clear something up for him.
“Who won the Korean War?” he wanted to know. “Here they claim the opposite of what I was told in the North!”
What could I tell him?
Tie game would have been a fair answer, given that the two armies ended up more or less where they started. That would have seemed too flip, however, and the question had been posed in earnest. Should I have said that both sides lost? That’s certainly true if one considers the untold misery caused by the war and the hundreds of thousands who died. Yet such a reply would have ignored the subsequent development of South Korea, which only was made possible by pushing back the Communist forces.
Until it began a process of democratization in 1987, South Korea was effectively run as an authoritarian—and sometimes dictatorial—regime. Since 1960, it nevertheless has presided over an unprecedented economic boom. Thirty years of unflagging effort has lifted South Korea’s economy from Bangladeshi levels to parity with Spain. The packed-earth roads of Seoul, where little girls once sold their hair, have seen the skyline fill with skyscrapers and the streets jam with cars, most painted metallic silver, and almost all equipped with hi-fi stereos and air-conditioning made in Korea. In very little time, South Korea has grown into the world’s seventh industrial power.
During this period, forty kilometers to the north, an ideological and military hedgehog was being formed, sometimes with the patronage of Mao’s China, sometimes with that of Brezhnev’s USSR, but always under the absolute control of one man: Kim Il-sung. His bloody purges in the 1980s cleared the way for the succession of his son, Kim Jong-il, and helped establish the world’s first Communist dynasty.
Political and economic relations between North Korea and the “capitalist” South remained embryonic, while occasional quasimilitary strikes continued to smolder and flare: in 1968, commandos raided the Blue House (the presidential palace in Seoul); in 1981, a delegation of South Korean government officials came under attack while visiting the Burmese capital of Rangoon; in 1987, a (South) Korean Airlines jet exploded in midair; in 1994, there were submarine intrusions and further commando raids; in 1999, it was a sea battle, and so forth.
In North Korea, a country of 22 million, the police survey every aspect of the citizenry’s life. No travel without authorization. No news that’s not vetted first. A single, mandated ideology, exalting self-sufficiency—even when calling for international aid. Extensive prisons and camps scattered throughout the country. Its economy, modeled after Stalin’s Soviet Union—controlled, centralized, collectivized—crumbled in the 1970s and 1980s and collapsed heavily with the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, the reforms in China, and the death in 1994 of the Great Leader Kim Il-sung.
Famine gradually has spread across the country, and there’s talk of 3 million dead. Today North Korea is a ship in distress, slowly sinking beneath the waves. Thanks to substantial handouts from the international community, the state—which is really just a party—can save the hard currency it should be using to purchase produce on the international market.
North Korea’s leaders prefer to invest their limited resources in the development of sophisticated armaments. Their missiles are sold in Iran and Syria, and their longest-range model soon will have the capacity of reaching the United States. With understandably little desire to see the Korean peninsula destabilize the region, interested powers seek to mollify Kim Jong-il, convinced—though it’s unclear why—that he can be seduced and even persuaded to see the virtues of political democracy and economic liberalism. The recent show put on by Kim Il-sung’s son—who’s a great fan of the movies—in which he appeared smiling and cheerful in his June 12, 2000, summit meeting with Kim Dae-jung, the South Korean president, has done nothing to change the base facts. After the summit, as before, North Korea’s population continues to die of hunger and suffer from a total absence of political freedom. Children are stunted, thousands of young women are sold across the border in China, and the army parades through the streets of Pyongyang, ever ready to protect its fantastical socialist paradise.
A few have managed to flee. Kang Chol-hwan is one of them. He left North Korea in 1992, before the famine reached its peak. He didn’t leave the country to escape the famine, as so many do today, but because having once survived imprisonment in concentration camp number 15, he was in danger of being arrested again, this time for “listening to banned radio.”
Though it reaches a Western audience somewhat late, his testimony represents the first extended account of a young adult’s life in contemporary North Korea. This is the first detailed testimony about a North Korean concentration camp to be published in the West.
I first met Kang Chol-hwan in Seoul shortly after his defection. I was visiting South Korea regularly as part of my work for the International Organization for Human Rights, interviewing renegades about repression in North Korea. Convinced that North Korea had gained as much from its own population’s ignorance of the outside world as from the international public’s ignorance of its crimes and threats against its own population, I suggested to Kang Chol-hwan that he tell the Western world what it was like to live under the rule of Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim Jong-il. He accepted, seeing it as his moral
duty to shed light on the horrors of the Pyongyang regime and, above all, its system of concentration camps.
We met five or six times in Seoul, shutting ourselves up in a hotel room and breaking only for lunch and dinner. We communicated by the intermediary of a South Korean academician, a specialist in French literature, whose role was both essential and irreplaceable. Her modesty was equaled only by her effectiveness in helping me understand the intricacies of the country as a whole, as well as North Korea’s particular contempt for human rights.
This book thus results from the efforts of three people, working together as friends, with the common hope of raising international awareness. All those who would deal with North Korea—be they diplomats, politicians, businessmen—should know that their interlocutor is the planet’s last Stalinist regime, a regime that incarcerates between 150,000 and 200,000 people in concentration camps, flouts freedom of conscience, mercilessly clubs its population with pompous, mendacious propaganda, and is responsible for one of the worst famines of the end of the twentieth century. The most fitting term to describe it has already been coined, but I will employ it here again: the regime is ubuesque. Which is to say grotesque and bloody.
Reading this book is a first step toward making the repression in North Korea a major concern for human rights defenders around the world.
Pierre Rigoulot
ONE
A HAPPY CHILDHOOD IN PYONGYANG
In the 1960s, North Korea’s disaster was not yet on the horizon. In economic terms, the country was going neck and neck with the South, and in Pyongyang, the regime’s privileged showcase, it seemed the Party’s talk of triumph and promise might actually hold true. I know what I’m talking about; Pyongyang is where I was born and grew up. I even lived some happy years there, under the guardian eye of Kim Il-sung, our “Great Leader,” and his son, Kim Jong-il, our “Dear Leader.”
To the child I was, Kim Il-sung was a kind of Father Christmas. Every year on his birthday, he would send us gift packages of cakes and sweets. Our beloved Number One chose them himself, with a care and kindness that gave his gifts a savoriness all their own. Thanks to his generosity, we also had the right, every third year, to a school uniform, a cap, and a pair of shoes.
Our mothers said these polyester uniforms were sturdy, easy to wash, and permanently pressed. As for the shoes, daily use showed them to be of excellent quality. The ceremony for the distribution of uniforms, a most solemn event, was held in the large hall adjoining the school, which was specially decorated for the occasion with slogans and portraits. The parents in attendance applauded speeches by the school principal and several representatives of the Party. Student delegates got on the rostrum and thanked the Party in their little childish voices, pledging allegiance to the Clairvoyant, and pouring imprecations on all our enemies, American imperialism first among them, “because its claws still grip part of our dear Fatherland.” At the end, the student delegates were entrusted with the precious gifts, which they distributed to the rest of the pupils the following day.
Kim Il-sung was actually even better than Father Christmas, because he seemed eternally young and omniscient. Like his son, Kim Jong-il, who was said to be in line to succeed him, he was more like a god to us than Father Christmas. The newspapers, the radio, posters, our textbooks, our teachers: everyone and everything seemed to confirm this. By marrying our singular Korean genius with the immutable ideals of the Communist revolution, these two masterminds, these two darlings of the universe, were building for us the Edenic socialist state. Had not Kim Il-sung’s political acumen and incomparable intellect already been the cause of wonders, against the cruel American invaders, for example, whom he dealt the most humiliating of defeats? Only much later did I learn how the war was really started and what happened in its aftermath. Like millions of other North Korean children, I was taught that thanks to the military genius of our Great Guide and, to a lesser degree, the international aid of China, to whom we were united “like lips to teeth,” our valiant People’s Army had routed the Americans. Kim Il-sung—a.k.a. the Light of Human Genius, the Unequaled Genius, the Summit of Thought, the North Star of the People—was the object of a personality cult extravagant enough to rival that of Stalin or Mao Tse-tung, and indeed, even to outlive them. In 1998, the People’s Supreme Assembly even made the astounding decision to name Kim Il-sung president “for all eternity”—four years after his death!
To my childish eyes and to those of all my friends, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il were perfect beings, untarnished by any base human function. I was convinced, as we all were, that neither of them urinated or defecated. Who could imagine such things of gods? In the portraits of their paternal faces I found comfort and all that was protecting, kindly, self-assured.
Like other children, I started grammar school at the age of six—or seven, if you count according to the traditional Korean formula, where year one begins at conception and another year is added every January 1. (The Korean and Western calculus for determining age can vary by as many as two years.) While ordinarily eager to defend its traditions, North Korea has officially renounced this manner of calculating age, although it is still widely used in private.
The name of the grammar school I attended was the School of the People, and Kim Il-sung once honored it with a visit—a truly exceptional event, which conferred the greatest prestige on the parents whose children attended the institution. Of this place, too, I have fond memories. I recall with particular warmth Mrs. Ro Chong-gyu, a teacher of enormous kindness and pedagogical skill, who always found the right word to encourage me. Despite their adherence to communist educational methods, almost all the teachers I had were attentive and patient with their pupils, even during our criticism and self-criticism sessions. Anyone who has never lived in a Communist country may be shocked at the thought of little children mimicking their politicized elders and denouncing themselves and others for lacking revolutionary vigilance or for not meriting the Great Leader’s confidence. Yet these sessions generally ended with words of encouragement from our teachers, not of reproach, and with the hope that we would try harder in the future. I don’t believe any of us were really traumatized by these sessions.
To help initiate us into North Korea’s highly militaristic brand of communism, we were awarded different ranks at school. We were hardly seven years old when our uniforms first began bearing stars—two or three, depending on our level. Already we were being directed by a “political leader,” the number one of the class, and by a delegate, the number two, who were appointed by the teacher and confirmed by a vote of the pupils. Admittedly, I was never much taken with military discipline: one day I convinced about fifteen of my classmates to ditch school and go to the zoo. It didn’t take long to notice fifteen absentees, and the episode soon caused a big stir. Since I was the class delegate, I was not only publicly demoted but was expected to execute my self-criticism with deeper-than-usual compunction and with exceptionally good form.
In the curriculum, too, training the revolution’s little soldiers was given first priority. Like students everywhere in the world, we learned to read and write with as few mistakes as possible; we studied arithmetic, drawing, music, performed gymnastics, and so on. But above all, we were taught about the morals of communism and the history of the revolution of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Given its singular import, the latter subject demanded that we learn by rote answers to questions such as: On what day and at what hour was Kim Il-sung born? What heroic feats did he perform against the Japanese? What speech did he give at such-and-such a conference, on such-and-such date? Like my fellow pupils, I thought cramming myself with such important facts was perfectly normal, and doing it gave me great pleasure. An education of this sort resulted in a wellspring of admiration and gratitude for our political leaders and in the willingness to sacrifice everything for them and the homeland. Like everyone in my class, I signed up for the Pupils’ Red Army. What a sight we must have made marching into battle, fake machine guns slung across o
ur shoulders. Though we mostly just learned to form ranks and sing while marching, we loved these exercises and never had to be asked twice to strike a military pose. Right away we felt we were Kim Il-sung’s little soldiers. We were never asked to do anything too demanding. The training was adapted to our tender age and generally consisted of marching around the schoolyard a few times or around a block of houses. It wasn’t until the penultimate year of high school that we would be allowed to undertake the more serious and difficult exercises. The high school students went on mountain hikes, memorized emergency air-raid instructions, learned to hide from enemy planes, and to steer the population to the nearest air-raid shelters.
When I wasn’t in school, I could usually be found playing outside with the kids in my neighborhood. My favorite thing was to meet up under the weeping willows that ran along the Daedong River not far from where I lived. My friends and I knew the place well and felt completely safe there. At regular intervals we could hear a nearby bell, whose ringing had gradually become an integral part of the landscape. In warm weather, we waded in the water, catching dragonflies and other insects. And winter could be just as wonderful, during the festive time in late December, for example, when the statues of Kim Il-sung were decorated with footlights and draped with banners wishing us a happy New Year. Winter break ran from December 31 to mid-February, and when we tired of snowball fights, we would go back to our beloved river to ice-skate or play a game of ice hockey.