Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  The KCNA reported that the voters in District 666 sang, danced and shouted wishes for Kim’s longevity after they had voted. Exulted one: “Experiencing the same glee that our people felt when they held Great Leader Kim Il-sung in high esteem as head of state fifty years ago, I cast my ballot for the Supreme Commander, Kim Jong-il.” Many outside analysts believed— mistakenly, as it turned out—that the hoopla was preparation for the junior Kim’s formal takeover of the country’s presidency. That title had been vacant since his father’s death in 1994, even though the son as head of the military and the Workers’ Party had exercised effective control over the machinery of power. In the end, the expertly embalmed father was kept on as the country’s president in perpetuity.

  All the folderol about unanimous elections and titled glory aside, how ?were the fifty-six-year-old Supreme Commander’s subjects really feeling about their leader? On his watch a famine, brought on by flooding and drought—and, to a large extent, by refusal to change failed economic and agricultural policies—had killed countless countrymen in the three years since 1995. Whether estimates of up to two or three million dead from famine-related causes during that period were correct or not,2 there was no disputing that hunger was extremely widespread. It afflicted even the best-fed large segment of the populace, which was the Korean People’s Army. The soldiers “get more than other North Koreans but they’re not getting enough,” an official with close ties to the Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea) and U.S. militaries told me in June 1998.

  The man told me a story that harked back to H. G. Wells’s frail, flushed, four-feet-tall Eloi. In the first year of the most devastating period of the famine, he said, “two North Korean soldiers from a frontline unit in the south-western islands got washed away in a boat while checking their nets, seeking protein. They stayed approximately two days in the boat, and were almost dead when rescued. The ROKs picked them up, and let the North Koreans know we’d return them. While they had them in the ROK Navy hospital they examined those boys from asshole to appetite. They found both had liver dysfunction due to chronic malnutrition. Both had kidney dysfunction and skin discoloration. Both had severe dental problems. The big one was five feet five and a half inches tall. The other one was four-foot-eleven. The big one, nineteen years old, weighed 98 pounds. The little one, twenty-one, was eighty-nine pounds. We don’t get a lot of North Korean soldiers to do in-depth medical analysis. We didn’t know whether we had the runts of the litter. We repatriated them through Panmunjom. About ten days later we saw on Pyongyang television these guys returned to their unit for a heroes’ welcome. Everybody in the unit was the same size.

  “We can’t extrapolate but we can draw a very firm conclusion that in that unit on the frontline islands the men were all little, all chronically undernourished and not in very good health. And when I look at other North Koreans, other than in Panmunjom, I see little scrawny guys. North Korean defectors arriving in Seoul plump up after three to six months in the South. You can conclude all are undernourished—perhaps not malnourished, but not up to their genetic potential. In South Korea there are lots of six-foot-two, 180-pound guys. Even North Korea’s big guards at Panmunjom are not nearly as big as South Korean JSA [Joint Security Area] guards. Anecdotally I’d say it’s clear about the KPA: their gas tank is running pretty close to empty.”

  This jibed with what World Food Program Assistant Executive Director Jean-Jacques Graisse told me and other journalists in Tokyo that same month. In North Korean kindergartens, Graisse said, “the children look far better than they did two years ago when the food assistance started. The food was delivered and has produced positive results among children.” But still, along the Pyongyang-Wonsan-Chongjin route, said his colleague, Eri Kudo, “we really saw in nurseries and kindergartens significantly undersized children with very, very thin limbs.” Said Graisse, “I was shocked to see in most classes that the children on the average looked two years younger than they-were”—a judgment that he said medical doctors working for aid organizations confirmed.3

  On family visits the WFP officials asked to see kitchens so they could learn what people were eating. One old woman had only a large rice bowl containing a watery porridge of rice and grated corn—mainly water. The woman explained it was for her entire family—three bowls of that porridge for the day for five family members. Walking around, Kudo found an old man lying down—her husband. He could not stand up. His digestive system was too weak to take even the porridge. Kudo saw swollen faces. One aspect of East Asian culture, she noted, is the high value placed on forebearance: “ ‘Try to put up with the situation, don’t complain too much.’ So we imagine there are many more like that.”

  Was the regime’s collapse, or at least its leader’s overthrow, at hand? That might have seemed a likely outcome in almost any other country similarly afflicted—and especially in an East Asian country traditionally imbued not only with the desire to show forebearance but also with the notion that a ruling dynasty keeps power only until the “mandate of heaven” is withdrawn. In that old way of thinking, natural disaster itself is blamed on the ruler, seen as a sign of heaven’s disapproval of a lack of righteousness in his administration and a signal that it is time for a change. It seemed clear to me and some other outsiders that the Kim dynasty really was responsible for long-term policy failures that exacerbated the disasters befalling the land.4 And in truth, North Koreans were not so far away from the traditional ways of viewing their rulers otherwise. Did some of the more simple-minded among the populace also see their woes in the mid- and late-1990s as the revenge of heaven upon the system the Kims had built?

  Leaving aside heavenly portents and omens, a study entitled “Pattern of Collapse in North Korea,” written by an American expert and circulated among Pyongyang-watchers in the latter half of the 1990s, hypothesized a seven-phase process. Much of North Korea seemed already to have passed through the first three phases listed in the paper by Robert Collins, who based his theorizing on accounts of communism’s collapse in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and on his decades of experience as a U.S. government employee observing North Korea.5

  The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea long since had encountered resource depletion, which was Collins’s Phase One. The country then had moved into Phase Two, prioritization, in which someone had to decide either that everyone would suffer equally or—the decision actually made—that certain groups such as the party elite and the military would be given priority in distribution of scarce food and other resources. (American food aid specialist Andrew S. Natsios argues in The Great North Korean Famine that this setting of priorities in favor of Pyongyang and nearby west coast areas meant cutting off the east coast of the country from food subsidies. Natsios calls such a policy “triage,” a term normally applied to decisions by frazzled military medics, following bloody engagements, that certain wounded soldiers will be treated—because their chances of recovery seem high—-while others, whose prospects are considered relatively hopeless, must be left to die.)

  Robert Collins’s Phase Three, local independence, also seemed well established in much of the country by mid-1998. In that phase, working-and-living units—even whole localities—that got little or nothing from the center because they were left off the priority list had to adopt their own means of coping. That often involved circumventing regime policies, as we shall see in chapter 33.

  Thus, as the end of the millennium approached, North Koreans should have been moving into Phase Four—suppression—if the regime was heading toward imminent collapse according to the pattern Collins posited. In what he called a “most pivotal phase,” the core group of the regime would feel its ultimate political control threatened by the new disdain for the rules shown by groups pursuing survival-at-any-cost schemes. So Kim Jong-il and company would crack down, handing to their formidable internal security apparatus “maximum, even indiscriminate, powers” to suppress actions that contradicted state policies.

  In case suppression should f
ail to put a cap on local independence, it would instead push the country into Phase Five: resistance by organized groups and leaders. If the drama should play out fully, there would then ensue Phase Six, the fracture of the core group, a splintering that would occur because of opposing views about how to handle increasingly violent resistance; and, finally, Phase Seven, realignment of the national leadership without necessarily eliminating all of the core group.

  Were things happening the way Collins, writing in 1996, had postulated? No outsider can know for sure about much of anything that happens in North Korea, of course. But there are always the Pyongyang-watcher’s fallback techniques of analysis based on scraps of information from all kinds of sources including defector testimony and the regime’s news media and propaganda—the sort of “tea leaf reading” that also characterized the work of kremlinologists and sinologists.

  Thus, my attempt to solve another, seemingly unrelated mystery—-why the DPRK had barred United Nations World Food Program aid monitors from thirty-nine of the North’s counties—turned out to be instructive. My findings suggested that Kim Jong-il and company so far might have avoided falling into the trap of Phase Four, as Collins defined it. In that case, the Kim family regime (let us eschew obvious comparisons to Satan and his beastly manifestations) still might have some staying power.

  The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea deserved its title as the most secretive country in the world. In the atmosphere of constant preparation for a new war that had prevailed in North Korea since the end of the first Korean War in 1953, secretiveness had always been about regime survival, first and foremost. Besides the obvious wish to prevent hostile, spying eyes from seeing the country’s strengths and weaknesses, the authorities were determined to keep ordinary North Koreans from contact with foreigners who might inform them that much of the information their rulers drummed into their heads about their own country and the outside world was blatantly false.

  So it was news when the regime’s need for international aid to respond to a full-blown food crisis forced it to ease the restrictions on foreigners’ presence and movements. More than one hundred international aid workers based themselves in North Korea. Their organizations demanded freedom of movement sufficient to assure themselves that the food reached hungry people. World Food Program monitors from abroad numbered thirty-six by 1998. They had visited 171 counties. They worked out of six offices spread around the country and drove about in their own Toyota Land Cruisers to avoid the interminable delays of the creaking public transportation system. “The DPRK two years ago barely had an international presence,” said the WFP’s Graisse. “This has been a breakthrough.” Indeed, an optimist could see in those developments a positive omen presaging a wider opening by the regime.

  Why, then, did I focus on the negative—on the thirty-nine counties that were not open to WFP monitors and whose inaccessibility had led the Rome-based organization to announce on May 18, 1998, that it was withholding 55,000 metric tons of food worth some $ 33 million? (That was 7 percent of the aid it had planned to deliver that year, the proportion based on the fact that those counties accounted for about seven percent of the total population.) My lack of optimism stemmed from having watched North Korea for more than two decades. Always eager to credit signs of opening in the isolated and rigidly controlled country I had become increasingly skeptical as I saw how little actually changed—and as I came to realize how very strong was the interest of the Kim family and other members of the top elite in resisting change, regardless of the citizenry’s needs.

  The regime continued to display a remarkable ability to thwart both external and internal forces for change. Take, for one example, the very concept of monitoring aid deliveries. In the mid-1990s, in the immediate wake of flooding that had devastated much of North Korea and precipitated the food crisis, one Westerner who was raising funds for aid insisted that he must deliver it personally. Renting trucks, he traveled through country seldom seen by Western visitors and handed over the goods directly to people identified as the end-recipients. That relief organizer prepared a lecture that he illustrated with slides showing one of his deliveries. I attended his presentation in Tokyo and saw that the supposedly needy North Koreans who were pictured lining up to receive his gifts were not gaunt and haggard, shabbily dressed people. Their faces did not appear discolored by the malnutrition-caused disease pellagra. Rather, in those slides they looked “well dressed, robust and well fed—in some cases exceptionally handsome or beautiful. I guessed that they were either local party officials or actors. Did the fund raiser who was showing those slides realize that the recipients of his handout did not look like ordinary North Koreans? If so, he did not tell his listeners on the night when I sat in on his presentation.

  Insisting on accompanying aid to the end-users was not the only technique used by visiting foreigners. Journalists no less than aid monitors and visiting U.S. congressmen asked or demanded, in the midst of their travels within the country, to see places not on their previously arranged itineraries. Visitors hoped, thus, to find the real, unvarnished truth instead of prepared scenes. Were the famine’s effects on the condition of the population worse than the authorities wanted the world to know? Was the food aid getting to the people—or, rather, was it being diverted to high officials or the military? Sudden requests for schedule changes were one of the few means for trying to check. Any visitor who did not relish being fooled was duty-bound to try that tactic, but often the effort was futile. One international aid worker told me he had learned while in North Korea that the authorities typically dispatched sound trucks to alert residents of districts that were about to be subjected to “surprise” visits by foreigners. The trucks’ loudspeakers warned that only party members were authorized to speak with the guests.

  Sometimes, a last-minute request elicited more or less full disclosure, but usually not without a struggle. “Of course we have to indicate in advance we wish to visit this or that,” Graisse of the World Food Program said in Tokyo, “but there can be small deviations from the plans.” He had just returned from a visit to the city of Sinuiju, across the Yalu River from China. His original itinerary there had emphasized kindergartens and nurseries, since the WFP’s aid program focused primarily on feeding children. But his organization was planning a new program of assistance to hospitals, so Graisse after his arrival in the city asked to see a pediatric hospital. He got his wish, but after he arrived at the hospital he ran into trouble when he asked to see the kitchen. That request caused “visible pain on the face of the hospital administrator.” A long discussion ensued before the administrator permitted his visitor to open pots and see what was inside, which was not much: a bit of rice brought by the family of one patient and some “very clear” soup made of weeds, spinach and sea-weed.

  But let’s return to the part of the WFP’s batting average that especially intrigued me: those thirty-nine counties to which it had failed to gain access. Aside from the Hitchcockian spy-chase associations of the number (The 39 Steps), what was so special about those counties? How were they different from the 171 counties to which the monitors did have access? With foreigners permitted to go to the other counties, why were thirty-nine still closed tight? Here was a mystery. And anyone who disliked trying to solve mysteries would have no business spending his or her days watching so secretive a country as the DPRK.

  Pyongyang itself vaguely cited reasons of security for barring foreigners from those areas. But in a country-where the regime’s security-was the be-all and end-all, that explanation hardly narrowed down the practical possibilities. The authorities did mention sensitive military installations, and I phoned a Western diplomat in Seoul to ask him if those might explain the exclusion. “I can’t comment on that at all,” he said. “You’re asking me to discuss USFK [United States Forces Korea] targeting information on an open line for publication.”

  North Korea did have plenty of military installations, all of them more or less sensitive. The fact that food monitors wer
e permitted to travel to certain food-distribution centers certainly did not mean they were welcome on military bases within the same county jurisdictions. Presumably the authorities could, if they wished, give access to food-distribution centers in some or all of the thirty-nine still-closed counties while forbidding the monitors to travel near military installations.

  Pondering the whys of keeping thirty-nine counties closed to outsiders, I noted that some of them were in areas where—as former political prisoners and prison guards had told me—the regime had maintained concentration camps for political offenders. And in the same harsh and remote northern mountains were communities largely comprising families that had been banished from Pyongyang and other desirable parts of the country on account of “bad family background.” In the 1990s additional families had been tarred with the designation because relatives had defected to South Korea.

  I wondered: Were some of the thirty-nine counties off limits precisely because the regime did not want outsiders to see what was happening to the members of the “hostile” and “wavering” classes who lived there? A-worst-case scenario occurred to me. I knew that prisoners already had been half-starved as a matter of policy. Their official daily grain ration even in times of relative plenty had been as little as 300 grams per person, versus the 700 grams rationed to a normal working adult.6 Now the food shortage had become so severe that grain rations failed to appear for months on end. Even citizens classified as loyal were reduced to receiving as little as an average of 100 grams a day or less. So what was happening to those North Koreans who were politically out of favor? Were the prisoners in their camps and the banished families in their mountain communities being treated even worse than before? Specifically had the regime systematically abandoned them to starvation?