16. “S. Korean Agent Reports North Has Executed at Least 50 Officials in Purge,” Seoul-datelined dispatch from Agence France-Presse.
17. Suh, Kim Il-sung (see chap. 2, n. 35), p. 154.
18. Kim Kwang In, “NK Exhumes and Decapitates Body of ‘Traitor,’ ” Chosun Ilbo, October 5, 2001. According to a report from a defector, Kim Man-kum was restored around January 2000 to the good graces of history (“Fallen Political Bureau .Member Reinstated,” Chosun Ilbo, September 4, 2002, http://english. chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200209/200209040029.html).
19. Speech before Unification Council of South Korea, Nov. 12, 1997, cited in Natsios, The Great North Korean Famine, p. 203.
20. One reported practice that might be termed genocide: forcing abortions and infanticides upon female political prisoners—including refugee women, impregnated while staying illegally in China, who had been captured, returned to North Korea and put into detention. See The Hidden Gulag, pp. 65–72. And on p. 74 the report says that a group of former political prisoners feared that increased international publicity about the prison system might inspire the authorities “to ‘massacre the prisoners’ in order to destroy evidence of the camps.”
21. “K., a North Korean in his 30s, was recruited at age 17 into an elite military unit working for the agency responsible for weapons production. He took an oath to work underground for the rest of his career and was assigned to a cave in remote Musan County in North Hamgyong province, about 15 miles from the Chinese border.
“ ‘This is how we hide from our enemies. Everything in North Korea is underground,’ said K, who described the cave on condition that he be quoted using only his first initial and that certain identifying details be kept vague.
“North Korea is riddled with caves like the one in which K worked. Under its paranoid regime, virtually everything of military significance is manufactured underground, whether it’s buttons for soldiers’ uniforms or enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. A South Korean intelligence source estimates that North Korea has several hundred large underground factories and more than 10,000 smaller facilities. Joseph S. Bermudez, Jr., the author of three books on the North Korean military, puts the total number between 11,000 and 14,000” (Barbara Demick, “N. Korea’s Ace in the Hole,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 14, 2003, p. 1).
33. Even the Traitors Who Live in Luxury.
1. Kang’s remarks in this chapter are from my interview with him on June 12, 1995, and from his testimony in JoongAng Ilbo (see chap. 2, n. 7).
34. Though Alive, Worse Than Gutter Dogs.
1. Kim Kwang-in, “NKs 5 Concentration Camps House 200,000,” Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition), December 5, 2002, http://english.chosun.com/cgi-bin/printNews?id=200212050035.
2. For eyewitness accounts of such executions see Kang Chul-hwan, “Public Executions Witnessed Personally,” Chosun Ilbo, March 25, 2001.
3. Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in a North Korean Gulag, translated by Yair Reiner (New York: Basic Books, 2001). Some other works by former political prisoners have yet to be translated from Korean into English.
4. I cannot rule out that he was referring to Chinese donations, which were given without conditions.
5. See, for example, Park Son-hee and Park Chun-shik, Inochi no Tegami (English title River of Grief: The Ordeal of Two North Korean Children), Japanese main text with English summary translation by Alexander Martin (Tokyo: The Massada, 1999). This brother and sister refugee pair had hidden in China until journalist Hideko Takayama helped them get to South Korea, as she related in “Could you take us to South Korea?”—part of a cover package entitled “Escape from Hell: The secret refugee trails from North Korea—and the story of the people who got out,” Newsweek International, March 5, 2001.
Also see M裩cins Sans Fronti籥s, North Korea: Testimonies of Famine— Refugee Interviews from the Sino-Korean Border, Special Report (New York: Doctors Without Borders / M裩cins Sans Fronti籥s, August 1998), http://www. doctorswithoutborders.org/publications/reports/before1999/korea_1998.shtm.
Also see Médicins Sans Frontières, North Korea: Testimonies of Famine — Refugee Interviews from the Sino-Korean Border, Special Report (New York: Doctors Without Borders / Médicins Sans Frontières, August 1998), http://www. doctorswithoutborders.org/publications/reports/before1999/korea_1998.shtm.
6. One scholar who has continued to disparage defector testimony is Bruce Cum-ings. “Literally for half a century, the South Korean intelligence services have bamboozled one American reporter after another by parading their defectors (real and fake),” Cumings writes in his 2003 book. To back this harsh assessment he cites his own experience when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in the South in the 1960s. Crusading anti-communist defectors “used to come around the school where I taught, to tell all the assembled students that everyone was starving in the North, and no one owned a watch or leather shoes. One famous defector, Kim Sin-jo, was … an all-purpose source for exaggerated and inflamed propaganda about the North, as well as a well-known alcoholic. He later tried to re-defect back to the North” (North Korea: Another Country [see chap. 4, n. 25], pp. xii and 153). .Moving forward in time, Cumings manages to turn around the message of defector Kang Chul-hwan’s book on his gulag experiences, writing (p. 176): “The Aquariums of Pyongyang is an interesting and believable story, precisely because it does not, on the whole, make for the ghastly tale of totalitarian repression that its original publishers in France meant it to be; instead it suggests that a decade’s incarceration with one’s immediate family was survivable and not necessarily an obstacle to entering the elite status of residence in Pyongyang and entrance to college. Meanwhile, we have a long-standing, never-ending gulag full of black men in our prisons, incarcerating upward of 25 percent of all black youths. This doesn’t excuse North Korea’s police state, but perhaps it suggests that Americans should do something about the pathologies of our inner cities—say, in Houston—before pointing the finger.”
7. Kang Chul-hwan, “Public Executions All But Gone,” http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200210/200210300011.html.
35. Sun of the Twenty-First Century.
1. Yonhap news agency report carried in Seoul’s JoongAng Ilbo, December 29, 1999.
2. For more on the issue of economic sanctions see Selig S. Harrison, Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and U.S. Disengagement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), especially pp. 88–89; Marcus Noland, Avoiding the Apocalypse: The Future of the Two Koreas (Washington, D.C: Institute for International Economics, 2000), especially pp. 107–110; Michael O’Hanlon & Mike Mochizuki, Crisis on the Korean Peninsula: How to Deal With a Nuclear North Korea (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2003), especially pp. 86–89; Victor D. Cha and David C. Kang, Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), especially pp. 90–92.
3. “Despair, Détente and Dollars,” Institutional Investor (international edition— Asia), July 2000: pp. 64–67.
4. “NK Purges ‘Liberals,’ ” Digital Chosunilbo, September 29, 1998.
5. An unofficial translation of the 1998 constitution appears on the Web site of the Chongryon’s Tokyo-based English-language newspaper The People’s Korea at http://www.korea-np.co.jp/pk/061st_issue/98091708.htm.
6. The transcript first appeared in Korean in Wolgan Choson, which cited a Japanese intelligence agency concerned with North Korean matters as its source. It is translated into English on Korea Web Weekly at http://www.kimsoft.com/2003/ kji-tape.htm.
7. JoongAng Ilbo, December 29. 1999.
8. “Ex-Dictator’s Daughter Receives Warm Welcome in North Korea,” Agence France-Presse dispatch, May 12, 2002.
9. “Kim Jong Il is presiding over a process that might be called reform by stealth. He is tacitly encouraging change in the domestic economy without incurring the political costs of confronting the Old Guard in a formal doctrinal debate” (Harrison, Korean Endgame, p.
26).
10. Catherine Sung, “Kim Jong-il shows he has a lighter side,” Taipei Times, June 15, 2000. Internet: http://taipeitimes.com/news/2000/06/15/print/0000040078.
11. Hwang Won-duk, “What we have achieved at the North-South Summit and the follow-up tasks,” speech to Korean Veterans’ Association conference, June 30, 2000, reprinted in Korean by Wolgan Choson and translated on Korea Web Weekly at http://www.kimsoft.com/2000/summitsk.htm.
12. A translation of the North-South Joint Declaration is on the Web site of The People’s Korea at http://www.korea-np.co.jp/pk/142th_issue/2000061501.htm.
13. Laxmi Nakarmi, “Kim Jong Il’s New Direction,” Asiaweek, September 15, 2000. Hwang Won-duk speech.
14. Time Asia, December 25, 2000–Jan. 1, 2001.
15. Ruediger Frank, “North Korea: ‘Gigantic Change’ and a Gigantic Chance,” The Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development, Policy Forum Online, May 9, 2003, http://nautilus.org/fora/security/0331_Frank.html.
16. Zhang Xinghua, “Kim Jong-il Visits Shanghai Secretly,” Global Times, January 23, 2001, p. 2.
17. “Kim Jong-il Studies the Chinese Model,” Izvestia, January 19, 2001, p. 6; Ruriko Kubota, “Kim Jong-il Aims to Build Shanghai-like High-Tech City,” Sankei Shimbun, February 2, 2001.
18. Zhang, “Kim Jong-il Visits Shanghai Secretly.”
19. Kubota, “Kim Jong-il Aims.”
20. See, for example, “Kim Jong Il Has Inadvertently Thrown Down the Gauntlet,” Keys (Seoul: Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights). Internet: http://www.nknet.org/en/keys/lastkeys/2002/10/01.php.
21. Sin Sok-ho, “Three .Months After North Korea’s Economic Reform: Street Vendors All Over Pyongyang—‘Let us Sell More and Earn More,’” trans. FBIS, Dong-A Ilbo, October 8, 2002.
22. “U.S. Opposes N.Korea’s Attendance at ADB,” Korea Herald, April 18, 2002.
23. Yoo Choonsik, “Top Hyundai Executive Kills Self” Bangkok Post (Seoul-datelined Reuter dispatch), August 5, 2003; Vijay Joshi, “Six S. Koreans Convicted in Summit Probe,” AP dispatch from Seoul, September 26, 2003; Kwon Kyung-bok, “North Condemns Cash-Summit Convictions,” Chosun Ilbo, September 28, 2003.
36. Fear and Loathing.
1. The remarks of Prof. Kim Jae-soo appeared in an interview published in the New Year’s 2000 issue of Choson Shimpo, the Korean-language paper of the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Koreans in Japan (Chongryon), and were quoted in the January 11 issue of Seoul’s JoongAng Ilbo.
2. Madeleine Albright, with Bill Woodward, Madame Secretary: A Memoir (New York: Miramax Books, 2003), pp. 455–472.
3. James A. Kelly, “Ensuring a Korean Peninsula Free of Nuclear Weapons,” transcript of remarks given at research conference organized by Korea Institute for International Economic Policy, Korea Economic Institute and American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., February 13, 2004, on line at http://www. nautilus.org/DPRKBriefingBook/multilateralTalks/Kelly_ NKChanceforRedemption. html.
4. Jung Chul-geun and Ko Soo-suk, “Thinking Big, But Not Too Big,” JoongAng Ilbo (Englsh Internet edition), November 10, 2002.
5. Kim Ho-song, “Wise Leadership for Improving Socialist Economic Management,” Nodong Shinmun, February 1, 2003 (FBIS translation).
6. Frank, “North Korea: ‘Gigantic Change’ and a Gigantic Chance” (see chap. 35, n. 15).
7. Testimony of Stephen W. Linton, Ph.D., Chairman, Eugene Bell Foundation, before the Senate Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, June 5, 2003.
Linton said that, thanks to humanitarian aid programs, “North Koreans are far more relaxed in their dealings with foreigners today than they were only several years ago. Clearly, fear of people-to-people contacts is not the primary reason North Korea has not wholeheartedly embraced economic reforms.” Instead, he concluded, the problem was that “North Korea’s leadership has never believed in a world governed by fair play. Instead they believe that nature as well as history has created a world of natural haves’ and have nots.’ In this view, because the world’s natural resources are unequally distributed in favor of larger nations, smaller nations have to rely on diplomacy and influence (pressure) to acquire what they need. Not surprisingly, all their energies are exerted in acquiring the leverage needed to force foreign powers to take them seriously.” Linton implied that the North could not truly reform until U.S. and other sanctions were removed. “In the North Korean way of thinking, sanctions ‘prove’ that the economic playing field will never be level enough to permit their products to compete in the international arena,” he wrote. “When seen from this perspective, North Korea’s international and domestic policies are relatively easy to understand.”
8. Alexander Boronchov (name as transliterated), “Pyongyang Residents Carry Cellular Phones,” trans. FBIS Dong-A Ilbo (Internet version), July 17, 2003.
9. Kathi Zellweger, “Caritas and the North Korean Crisis: Concern for People in Need” (paper prepared for address to Evening Forum of the Korea Society in New York), October 19, 2003.
10. “North Korea May Have Devalued Its Currency,” Reuters dispatch from Tokyo, October 5, 2003, quoting a report by Asahi Shimbun.
11. Ser Myo-ja, “North Issues Tax, Labor Codes for Gaesong,” JoongAng Ilbo, October 1, 2003.
12. See Don Kirk, “86% Rise in Profit For Hyundai In Quarter,” The New York Times, August 12, 2003, p. W1, and Kim So-Young, “Hyundai Feud May Stall N.K Projects,” Korea Herald, November 21, 2003.
13. Hans Greimel, “N. Korea Unveils Industrial Zone Rules,” AP dispatch from Seoul, December 18, 2003.
14. Jeong Yong-soo, “Unification Minister Says Reform Afoot,” JoongAng Ilbo, October 1, 2003.
15. “North Korea Wants Foreign Lawyers, Accountants,” Reuters dispatch from Beijing, October 28, 2003.
16. “Ko Soo-suk, “North Expects Gains in Bank .Mergers,” JoongAng Ilbo, November 11, 2003.
17. Andrew Ward, “European Investors Move into N Korea,” Financial Times, November 21, 2003, p. 5.
18. Hans Greimel, “EU Makes Economic Overture,” AP dispatch from Seoul, January 13, 2004.
19. “ROK Official Says North Sees Tangible Accomplishments in IT Industry,” Yonhap, January 8, 2004.
20. Peter Hayes, “Enemy to Friend: Providing Security Assurances to North Korea,” The DPRK Briefing Book, Nautilus Institute, February 9, 2004, http://www. nautilus.org/DPRKBriefingBook/multilateralTalks/PHEnemytoFriend.html.
21. Richard Halloran, “New Warplan Calls for Invasion of North Korea,” Global Beat (Internet), November 14, 1998.
22. Richard Halloran, “Plan targets Pyongyang’s ‘commandos, ” The Washington Times, February 25, 2003.
23. Jeong Yong-soo, “Unification Minister says Reform Afoot.”
24. Ruediger Frank, “The End of Socialism and a Wedding Gift for the Groom? The True Meaning of the Military First Policy,” The DPRK Briefing Book, Nautilus Institute, December 11, 2003, http://www.nautilus.org/DPRKBriefingBook/ transition/Ruediger_Socialism.html. For a contrary view describing the military-first policy as a barrier to economic recovery, see Aidan Foster-Carter’s “North Korea: Guns or Butter?” posted April 6, 2004, Northwest Asia Peace and Security Network, http://www.nautilus.org/fora/security/0418_FosterCarter. html.
25. George Wehrfritz, with B. J. Lee and Hideko Takayama, “The First Signs of Life: Will economic reforms in the Hermit Kingdom save Kim Jong Il’s regime or hasten the fall?” February 2, 2004.
26. John W. Lewis, “Hope on N. Korea,” Washington Post op-ed article, January 27, 2004.
27. Wehrfritz, Lee and Takayama, “The First Signs of Life.” Like so much other fine material in the international editions, this extremely important article did not appear in the Newsweek edition circulated to U.S. readers. I am grateful to Hideko Takayama for sending a copy to me.
28. “North Korea is cutting the workforce of its government and ruling party by up to 30 percent in an effort to reduce bureaucracy and use the workers in more productive
areas, a Japanese daily reported Tuesday. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who is also chairman of the National Defense Commission, recently ordered the reassignment of administration officials and members of the Rodong (Workers’) Party to enhance the government’s efficiency, the Sankei Shimbun said. The glut of officials has slowed the regime’s operations, it said” (“N. Korea to Cut 30 Percent of Gov’t, Party Workforce: Report,” Yonhap dispatch from Tokyo, January 27, 2004).
29. “When China began its reforms in 1979, more than 70 percent of the population was in the agricultural sector. (The same held true for Vietnam when it began reforming the following decade.) Debureaucratization of agriculture under these conditions permits rapid increases in productivity and the release of labor into the nascent nonstate-owned manufacturing sector. … In contrast, North Korea has about half that share employed in agriculture” (.Marcus Noland, Korea after Kim Jong-il [Washington, D.C: Institute for International Economics, 2004], pp. 48–49. Noland’s study offers various scenarios for the country’s future and assesses the prospects for successful reform).
30. See, for example, remarks by South Korea’s foreign minister in Norimitsu On-ishi, “Seoul Has Big Plans for North Korea (Nightmares, Too),” The New York Times, December 17, 2003.
31. “South Korea Emerging as N. Korea’s No. 1 Export .Market,” Yonhap, December 9, 2003. From 1996 to August 2003 the Souths cumulative private-sector investment in the North came to $1.15 billion. More than 80 percent of that was invested in the two light-water nuclear reactors that had been promised to North Korea in exchange for its 1994 nuclear freeze. But the total also included investments by Hyundai, the Unification Church and others (“South Korean Private Investment in North Amounts to 1.15 Billion Dollars,” Yonhap, October 28, 2003).
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