Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  When the family moved to North Korea Kang gave his wealth to the state, to the tune of several million dollars. Indeed, his grandson told me, it was Kang who donated the funds to build the gigantic statue of Kim Il-sung in Pyongyang to which visitors were urged to present flowers—the statue that was golden for a while before being bronzed in reported response to Deng Xiaoping’s expression of distaste.

  Kang and his family rated a royal red-carpet welcome. He became vice-director of a government unit that supplied goods for department stores. His wife became a member of the Supreme People’s Assembly. Kang had four sons and two daughters. The family lived “well in the communist capital.

  In Pyongyang at the time, Kang’s grandson Kang Chul-hwan told me, “it would have been rare to find anyone with a car, but we had a Volvo. We were what you “would call bourgeois even though Grandfather ideologically was very much a socialist. A Japanese reporter got a photo of our family taken in 1966 as Kim Il-sung propaganda, and sent it to the Japanese press to show the family was living ’well.”

  That was two years before Kang Chul-hwan’s birth as son of patriarch Kang’s eldest son. Chul-hwan’s father, in keeping with East Asian custom, remained in the elder Kang’s household after going to work as a photographer, marrying another ethnic Korean from Japan and starting a family that eventually included Chul-hwan and a younger daughter. Chul-hwan recalled that the family had lived an “extravagant” life by North Korean standards— until they were imprisoned.

  “We lived “well,” Kang Chul-hwan told me. “We lived in central Pyongyang and went to the schools attended by the children of the elite. My three uncles went to Kim Il-sung University.” Not being the firstborn, the uncles as they married established separate households.

  After a while, the North Korean authorities began to find it inconvenient to host the returnees from Japan and started banishing them to remote areas or sending them to camps or prisons. Fifteen years after his arrival, the elder Kang’s turn came. “Grandfather was taken away at the time when the regime was getting rid of Koreans from Japan,” Chul-hwan told me. “He was one of the last taken away. We didn’t know what they did with him.” The grandson explained that conflicts had arisen broadly because “the Korean residents of Japan who returned to North Korea were not used to a closed society. They often badmouthed what they saw—and got penalized for it. But in Grandfather’s case we speculate that it was opposition to Han Duk-su, chairman of the Chongryon back in Japan, that got him in trouble.”

  When the grandfather was taken away, Kang Chul-hwan told me, “they sent the rest of the household including me and my youngest uncle to a concentration camp. The married aunts and uncles weren’t sent to the camp, but they were expelled from Pyongyang and sent to mountainous areas in the north. They became coal miners there, at Musangun, North Hamgyong Province. My family and I were sent to the camp at Yodok. There was a separate complex there for people who had migrated from foreign countries, including Japan and Russia. We were assigned there.”

  Only nine at the time, Chul-hwan at first “thought I was going on something like a family camping trip. It was the first time I had seen mountains. Ithought they were beautiful. But when I saw the gates with armed guards, they reminded me of a Japanese concentration camp I had seen in a movie about the evil Japanese and I thought, ‘Oh! Are there such camps in Korea?’ I thought only the cruel Japanese would do such a thing. I was so surprised to hear that the Beloved Fatherly Leader would build a camp so cruel. We asked “why we were sent there and they said, ‘Oh, you did a very wicked thing. You should be punished to death. But thanks to the benevolence of the Great Leader you are being allowed to live.’ They never explained what we were accused of, but lots of Korean former residents of Japan were there and they speculated it was because Grandfather opposed Han Duk-su’s chairmanship of Chongryon.”

  Chul-hwan attended the camp school. “The school was not for education, though,” he told me. “It was for brain-washing. They weren’t real teachers. They were all sent from State Security. We didn’t have regular courses but they taught us courses on Kim Il-sung’s revolutionary history and his thought.” Even though he was a prisoner, Kang Chul-hwan believed what he was taught, for a while. “After junior high, I started to turn against Kim Il-sung. But when you’re young, you believe the propaganda. Parents can’t say anything, because little kids would blab and the parents would get in trouble.”

  Whenever the young prisoners were not being indoctrinated, Kang Chul-hwan told me, “we were used as forced labor. The principal gave us a speech: ‘Your parents are political criminals, but thanks to the benevolence of the Great Leader the government is being very generous to you. It will educate you even though your parents did terrible things. To repay this generosity, you must work very hard for the country’ We had to go out and gather fire-wood, and also medicinal herbs that could be exported for foreign exchange. We went to the mountains to search for thick, old trees that could be cut down, and we had to help with the farming.”

  Brutality was the rule in the camp, Kang Chul-hwan said. “In North Korea a person has two lives, natural and political. But once you get sent to a prison camp your political life is over and you have only your natural life. You’re nothing, an animal, a savage. The guards have the right to kill you without penalty because you’re just an animal. If you disobey them or talk back, the guards hit you. It’s human nature then to fight back, but if you do they’ll shoot you. In one year’s time they would stage public executions fifteen or twenty times. People who tried to escape and didn’t get far were simply shot on the spot. But if you cost the guards a lot of time and trouble before they recaptured you, they would have a public execution.

  “When reunification comes, people should go to the sites of the prison camps. Alongside the camps, in the mountain areas, there are so many unmarked graves. In ten years I think about twenty thousand people died at my camp. The part of the camp I was in had a population of about twenty thousand. Enough people kept dying to make room for all the newcomers. Ihad about eighty classmates. By the time Igraduated from junior high, half-were dead, mostly from malnutrition and overwork.”

  Kang Chul-hwan told me that the camp his family inhabited was in fact “one of the more comfortable” of some twenty camps in the North Korean gulag. I wondered how he knew that. “Most people know about those camps,” he told me. “And some people in my camp came from other camps, so I heard about those.”

  Kang Chul-hwan described himself as one of the stronger prisoners. “I was able to survive a decade in the camp—nine years and eight months, to be precise, from August 4, 1977, to February 28, 1987.” His family members came out alive, but some were not as strong as he. His grandmother and his father died soon after their release. “Grandmother had been hanging on just to get out of the camp before dying.” Her motive: Dying before release makes traditional ancestral rites difficult if not impossible. Although the regime formally disapproved of such observances, “it couldn’t be stopped even by Kim Il-sung,” Chul-hwan said. “But the graves of people who died in the camp are there adjoining the camp, so their descendants can’t go and pay homage. We were very fortunate.”

  Kang said the family was released only after relatives in Japan applied great pressure. “The question of restoring diplomatic ties between North Korea and Japan came up during 1986 and 1987. A lot of Chongryon members visited North Korea to see what had become of their relatives. The lucky people who had relatives in Japan filing complaints were let out of the camps. We had lots of relatives in Japan. Relatives came twice to North Korea to find us, but each time the government told them we had gone on vacation. After that, instead of coming over, they filed complaints. They finally got to meet some of the family in North Korea. Lots of relatives in Japan sent a lot of money. My uncles and aunts, who had been sent to the mountains as miners, ended up with cars and color television sets.

  “After release we were sent to a farm in Yodok County. Then our relatives in Japan bri
bed high officials to send us to a more comfortable city in the same county. With the help of our relatives we were able to get nice clothes and other luxuries. When we met our relatives after the deaths of my father and grandmother, we weren’t supposed to tell them about the camp. When the word came that they would visit us, a State Security official came and instructed us not to say anything about it. Also, State Security sent people to repair the house. They told us to say, ‘We are living a very affluent life under the care of the Great Leader.’ In North Korea you are supposed to get free medical care, retirement benefits when you get to be sixty and other benefits. State Security told us to show the relatives the entitlement cards. We did, but our relatives said, ‘Oh, we have that in Japan, too.’ ”7

  Kang Chul-hwan eventually encountered further trouble with the regime and defected from North Korea, as we shall see in chapter 34.

  Kang Chul-ho and Kang Chul-hwan were not related, despite the similiarity of their names. But each could trace his troubles with the authorities back to a grandfather who was out of favor with the regime. Kang Chul-ho could not even remember the name of his grandfather. All he knew was that the old man was a respected veteran of the anti-Japanese resistance movement who was working as a party official in the east coast city of Hamhung when the authorities barged into the house at night, seized a book manuscript in which he had written critically about Kim Il-sung and took him away. The family never heard from him again. The grandmother always spoke favorably of Pak Hon-yong—the “domestic faction” leader who had been condemned to death in 1955 and presumably executed—so perhaps Kang Chul-ho’s grandfather had been purged as a remnant of that faction.

  What happened afterward to Kang Chul-ho is one of the more gut-wrenching of the stories I heard in my interviews with defectors. His father had been working as a management official in an electrical products factory in Hamhung. Five days after the authorities seized the grandfather, they banished the rest of the family—Chul-ho’s grandmother, parents and elder brother—to Koyang in remote Hamju County. After the move, his father worked as a bricklayer and “was questioned repeatedly by Public Security,” Kang Chul-ho told me. The hot-blooded father was so annoyed by the constant questions that he set fire to the local State Security building. For that he was executed, in 1976. “It was a public execution by shooting. I was there with my family when my father was executed. I witnessed it, at the public execution site near the riverside, close to Hamhung.” Could it get any worse for a little boy? Oh, yes. “My mother committed suicide when my father was executed. Grandmother lived far away, and was too old to help. Local people discriminated against my family, shunned us because of what had happened,” he continued. Thinking of-what this poor fellow had been through at the age of eight, I already felt like hugging him.

  Alas, the sudden deaths of his parents and the unkindness of his neighbors had been by no means the end of his woes. Chul-ho continued in school, and the indoctrination he received there made him blame his parents and grandfather for their misfortunes. “I believed in the party,” he told me. Indeed, when the time came he applied to join the military—but was rejected. “I checked the record. There was a rule against having people of bad family background in the military. I was sent to a mine instead.” Only then did he start to question the system. “I had expected to live a normal life but it was all a dream.”

  Whenever I heard stories like this one I could not help noting the irony:

  The regime acted as if blood “were more important than ideology—-while people like Kang Chul-ho were more than willing to forget blood ties and buy into the ideology if only the authorities would permit them to do so. This, even more than he-wing religiously to the personality cult and refusing to adjust an imperfect Marxist vision, may prove to have been the central tragedy of the Kim regime.

  At the phosphorous mine in Tanchon, Tongam County Kang Chul-ho “suffered from the tough rules. At criticism meetings I had many arguments with group leaders, so I got a worse and worse reputation. When I was late for work, I was questioned while others weren’t. We were supposed to get gloves and rabbit skins to send to the military. But since I didn’t have family members I was always behind in meeting the quota.

  “They pointed out my bad family background. I couldn’t stand that. They used the issue of my father and grandfather as the final card. ‘Because you had a bad father and grandfather you behave this way’ I argued that my father was my father; my grandfather, my grandfather. I’m not them. But that didn’t faze them.

  “At first they didn’t use the issue in the beginning of a criticism session. They would bring it up at the end. Fellow workers didn’t know about my family background. But local officials did, so they brought it up at the end of the session. We had those sessions weekly They would assemble a group of forty or so and then choose around five people who were the worst—for family background or other reasons—and put them on the stage, then question them continuously. It takes around one hour and twenty minutes. Two or three times a month I was one of those up on the stage. The party secretaries chose us. Mainly people who had no backing or support were selected, people with no influential family members to help us. They started selecting me for criticism about a month after I arrived.

  “One day I had failed to obey an order to obtain gloves and rabbit skins. Others got them from their parents or other relatives who raised rabbits or knitted gloves. My monthly quota was five pair of gloves and two rabbit skins. But I couldn’t steal them so I ignored it. Since I didn’t have any assets, or influential family background, I argued with the secretary. After that, they said, ‘Because you have a bad family background you didn’t obey’”

  Following that incident, having spent only a year at the mine, Kang Chul-ho was sent to a maximum-security prison camp. I asked about the trial, and he told me there had been none. “The local party secretary and youth league leader wrote the report on me and signed it. The charge was that I didn’t follow the party’s orders and had a bad attitude against the party. The party worried about my influence on colleagues. They wanted to make an example of me.”

  He arrived at prison camp No. 19, Taeheung-dong, Tanchon, in the northeastern corner of South Hamgyong Province, on December 28, 1987.

  “I remember that date because after three days in prison I realized it was New Year’s Day.” The prisoners were employed mining magnesite clinker, which was used to make fire bricks and was one of North Korea’s main exports. Foreign exchange from its sales went to a national security fund.8 “Once I got to prison I had no time to complain, the rules were so tough. All I could do was follow the rules.” Electric fences surrounded the camp. “During working hours we were taken to the mine and guards watched us. It was both an open-pit and an underground mine.”

  After a 5 A.M. wake-up call, the prisoners rotated into the mess hall for breakfast. There followed a one-hour period for washing up and preparing for their thirteen-and-a-half-hour workday after which they went to the mine at 6:30. Lunch break was from 12:00 to 1:00, supper break from 8:00 to 9:00 and the working day ended at 10 P.M. when the men returned to their cells.

  “There was no mining machinery such as railroad cars. We mined with pick and shovel. We were truly confined at hard labor. Clothing was distributed every six months. The workplace was so dusty we had to wear dust coats. There was one bathroom in each cell for the forty inmates in that cell. At least the cell was relatively clean, because there were duty shifts among prisoners for the cleaning detail.

  “But the most unbearable thing was hunger. The prisoners were always hungry,” Kang told me. “The standard was 700 grams of staple food a day, but we were given only 300 grams a day—and that only if-we mined our daily quota. If you couldn’t mine enough you got a percentage accordingly. Less than 40 percent of your quota, you only got 10 to 20 percent of the ration, 50 percent got 40 percent and 70 got 70. The food was beans and corn. Only a tenth of the prisoners could make the full quota, generally. Normally we could get only 70
percent or so. This was done intentionally to keep people working hard.” Although the guards didn’t normally steal prisoners’ food, “at the manager level there was lots of corruption.”

  It wasn’t possible to work and survive on just 200 grams or so a day, so supplemental efforts were necessary. “I was so hungry I caught frogs in the mountains. I sometimes ate elm bark, which can be used to make noodles. I chewed the bark, dried it and ate it.

  “To the guards, prisoners are animals, not human. They’re beaten and mistreated all the time. But we were so hungry, if we noticed anything edible—or a cigarette butt on the ground—-we tried to pick it up. Then they’d beat us. I was beaten severely many times. It’s very natural to want to eat or smoke, but the guards didn’t allow it. The guards were well educated and trained. They regarded prisoners as ‘enemy class.’

  “There were around five thousand prisoners in four divisions. Once you were in, there was no way out except escape, as a practical matter. Many were shot to death trying to escape. Theoretically you can get out for good behavior but it’s very hard. I tried that approach for three years before I decided to escape. I behaved myself very well. It was so painful for me to be there that my only hope was to get out. So I was very careful not to disobey. But it takes ten years before you’re eligible for parole.”

  What happened to those who disobeyed? “They suddenly disappeared, during the night. People assumed they were killed. There were seventy prisoners in my unit. During my stay ten disappeared—not including attempted escapees.”

  There were many other deaths as well. “In any one year fifteen to twenty people died of malnutrition-related causes. A total of thirty to forty people either died or went unconscious and were taken out while the authorities called family members. I guess in fact they all died. That’s the other way to get out. People died of malnutrition. Some ate poisonous plants. Others had accidents with the machinery and lost arms or legs. Most died after going to the medical section.