B00BY4HXME EBOK

by Lankov, Andrei

  His fellow student, Alexandr Yakovlev, was a young party propagandist. In due time, he was to become a Central Committee secretary, the closest associate of Mikhail Gorbachev. He made a remarkable contribution to the collapse of the Communist regime in Moscow (some people even insist that it was Yakovlev rather than Gorbachev himself who could be described as the real architect of perestroika).

  Eventually, both men said it was their experiences in the United States that changed the way they saw the world, even if they were prudent enough to keep their mouths shut and say what they were expected to say.

  Indeed, academic and personal exchanges seem to be the most efficient way to promote the spread of subversive information. By their nature, such exchanges imply a great deal of immersion into the host society by the visiting North Koreans. As a result of gained access to such a thorough view of everyday South Korean life, the North Koreans will be much less likely to suspect that they are dealing with the sort of staged propaganda show their own country is famous for. Such an approach also targets people who tend to belong to the elite and who, upon their return, will quietly share their impressions with the people who really matter. Last but not least, interpersonal exchanges will also help introduce North Koreans to the knowledge and technology that will be so necessary when the decades-long North Korean stagnation finally ends.

  It is unlikely that the North Korean authorities will agree to send a significant number of their students, scientists, and officials to the United States (and it is virtually impossible that such people will ever be allowed to visit South Korea). So in most cases, education programs should be conducted by other countries, including those that are seen as more or less friendly toward North Korea. South Korean and American hard-liners may take issue with this, but they may be proven wrong in this regard: all exchanges with the outside world are good for promoting North Korea’s transformation.

  Naturally, these programs are not going to be paid for by the North Korean government itself. To paraphrase a remark by veteran North Korea expert Aidan Foster-Carter, North Korean leaders are people who never do anything as vulgar as paying their bills. There is, however, a need to financially support academic and interpersonal exchange programs and this is a place where both official agencies of third-party countries and perhaps private foundations will have a role.

  This issue might be somewhat difficult politically. From personal experience, I know that diplomats from some developed countries are reluctant to openly support exchanges with North Korea out of fear that such exchanges might be perceived in Washington as a breach of international solidarity with the South and as rewarding a brutal and disgusting regime. Taking into consideration the conservatives’ approach to the issue, these fears might be quite justified. This is unfortunate, however, since exchanges are not means to reward the North Korean elite but rather a way to change North Korean society, thus undermining this elite’s grip on power.

  Apart from academic exchanges, one should encourage all activities that create an environment conducive to contact between North Koreans and foreigners (and especially between North and South Koreans). This is the major reason why the Kaesong Industrial Zone is actually a very good idea: projects where North and South Koreans work together are bound to produce many situations where uncontrolled and unscripted exchanges between them will take place.

  Judged from the regime’s point of view, Kim Jong Il’s decision to tolerate and even encourage the Kaesong Industrial Zone was a grave mistake—perhaps even the greatest mistake ever made by the North Korean oligarchs, whose survival depends on the ability to keep the populace in ignorance of the outside world. The Kaesong Industrial Zone might generate a significant income for the North Korean authorities, but it has also produced a dramatic transformation of the worldview of the 150,000 to 200,000 North Koreans who live in Kaesong and whose family members or friends work in the Industrial Park.

  Regarding the political consequences that are likely to result from apolitical interaction at the workplace, I would like to relate an incident that happened a few years ago, when the present author was flying from Seoul to Moscow. In the plane I sat next to a Russian couple in their late 50s. Judging by their dress and behavior, the husband was a moderately successful businessman who had begun his career in the Soviet days as an engineer in my native Leningrad. He told me how, in the mid-1970s, a team of French engineers came to his plant to assist in the installation of newly purchased French equipment. The factory’s “first department” (that is, the resident KGB bureau) told Russians that it would be okay to talk to the French about anything as long as politics was avoided. For their part, the French engineers did not touch upon dangerous topics.

  One night, the French equipment stopped functioning. It was too late to go home, so the French and Russian engineers had to stay all night drinking tea, talking, and waiting for a repair team. In the middle of their conversation, a French engineer said, “You are so happy here!” Sincerely or not, the Russian engineers gave a patriotic answer: “Thanks to our Socialist System we are happy!” The French engineer, however, did not leave it at that: “Your life is so shitty, but you have no clue how awful it really is and this is why you are so happy!” This exchange was obviously not a life-changing experience for my fellow traveler—but sudden life-changing experiences are more common in B-grade movies than in real life. Nevertheless, this short exchange had a real impact—it was, after all, recollected some 35 years later.

  From this perspective, it is unfortunate that in 2008 the Seoul administration postponed and, for all practical purposes, cancelled the plans for a second industrial park that were discussed by the Roh administration in 2007. The more industrial parks there will be around, the better.

  An added—but very important!—advantage of the industrial parks and other forms of joint North-South enterprises is the role they play in introducing North Koreans to the modern industrial environment and modern technologies. In effect, they can teach North Korean workers some practical manufacturing skills. These skills are not going to be particularly sophisticated, but in the future even these moderate abilities might make a difference.

  Hence, if one wants to change North Korea, all exchanges between the North and the outside world, especially exchanges between North and South Korea, should be actively encouraged—even if ostensibly such exchanges enrich the regime, providing it with money, or benefit members of the current elite. This is the reason why the Sunshine Policy, so much criticized and even vilified by the South Korean Right, was probably not a bad idea. It is true that such a policy was not based on the reciprocity principle. But, one cannot expect reciprocity when dealing with such an impoverished country, anyway (and of course, the goal remains to change North Korea, not make economic gains through cooperation with it).

  Unfortunately, at the time of writing, the full-scale revival of the Sunshine Policy does not look likely. Its opponents firmly believe that the policy was at best a waste of resources, at worst the savior of a brutal regime. They also pin much hope on the current approach of, essentially, ignoring the North. This policy line might sell well with ideologically inclined voters, but its actual results are very different from what is intended. Such policy is more likely to extend the life expectancy of the Kim family regime while also maintaining an unnecessary high level of tensions on the Korean peninsula. It is possible that conservatives will never realize that they are wrong on this issue, so they will persist with this pseudo-hard-line approach for a few more years. Their stubbornness is a true waste of time, but much can be done in the meantime and, paradoxically, conservatives seem to be the people best suited to do it.

  A FLOWER OF UNIFICATION

  In the summer of 1989 Pyongyang was hosting a lavish international event—the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students. Such festivals were essentially gatherings of young left-leaning intellectuals and artists, heavily subsidized by the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc. The Pyongyang festival was meant to be a symbolic reactio
n to the Olympic Games, which had been successfully hosted by South Korea in 1988. (In those days North Korea still tried hard to compete with the South.)

  That summer, North Koreans were exposed to a great number of happenings and personalities, but none left as much an impression as a young girl named Im Su-gyong. Im Su-gyong was a student of Hankook University of Foreign Studies and also an activist from the National Council of Student Representatives, a left-leaning, nationalistic, and generally pro-Northern students’ organization in Seoul.

  During that era, North Korean sympathizers played an important and even decisive role in the South Korean students’ movement, so one should not be surprised that a powerful South Korean students’ association decided to dispatch their delegation to Pyongyang. The South Korean government, then still dominated by hard-line anti-Communists from the then recently overthrown military regime, banned the trip. But Im Su-gyong and some other activists ignored the ban and went to Pyongyang nonetheless (they had to go to Pyongyang via third-party countries, since then, as now, there was no direct way to go to the North).

  In North Korea, Im Su-gyong was met with the greatest pomp imaginable. North Korean propagandists saw the girl as a gift from heaven: she was beautiful, charming, charismatic, and full of enthusiastic belief in the glories of Stalinism with North Korean characteristics. They did their best to present her as representative of South Korean youth, who if the North Korean official media was to be believed, spent their days and nights secretly studying the works of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il and planning demonstrations in front of US army bases.

  There is no doubt that a many South Korean students, at that stage at least, sincerely believed that North Korea was a viable alternative to the capitalist South, which was seen by progressive intellectuals as an “underdeveloped victim of US neo-colonialism.” Thus, the Seoul student did not say anything to embarrass her handlers and duly delivered the politically correct statements the authorities wanted to hear.

  However, more than 20 years later, one can see that Im Su-gyong’s visit to North Korea was a major blunder by the North Korean authorities. Regardless of the subjective beliefs of Ms. Im herself and the calculations of her handlers, her trip to Pyongyang inflicted a major blow to the then officially approved image of South Korea, allegedly a place of destitution and poverty. According to the official media, South Korean workers were starving whilst their kids made a miserable living by working in sweatshops, begging, or polishing the shoes of sadistic American soldiers.

  It would have been difficult not to believe these stories, since the North Korean public was cut off from the outside world to an extent that would have been unbelievable in any other Communist country, including the Soviet Union of the Stalin era.

  But the message was dead wrong. In those decades, North Korea stagnated while South Korea went through an economic miracle, transforming itself into a developed industrial society. Nonetheless, North Koreans knew none of what was happening just a few hundred miles from their villages, towns, and cities.

  Nowadays, we would probably describe what happened as “Im Su-gyong mania.” The girl was known in official propaganda as “the flower of unification”—the epithet is still remembered by virtually all North Koreans. North Koreans noticed that the girl looked healthy and optimistic and was very well dressed. For a while, she became a trendsetter in the world of North Korean fashion—North Korean women wanted to wear “Im Su-gyong–style trousers” (even though North Korean women at the time were discouraged from wearing trousers outside the workplace), and imitate her short, straight haircut. North Koreans also noted—with some shock—that she often did not wear a bra.

  People were also surprised by her willingness to deliver unscripted speeches—something that was quite unusual for North Koreans, who took it for granted that all political statements had to be carefully prepared and rehearsed countless times. Even though she did not say anything to contradict North Korean slogans, her apparent sincerity and the ease with which she spoke were striking and so very different from what the North Korean public was used to.

  After a month and a half spent in North Korea, Im Su-gyong and Mun Ik-hwan, another South Korean leftist/nationalist dissident, went back to the South. As a way to protest the division of Korea, on the 15th of August, 1989, on the anniversary of Korea’s liberation from the Japanese colonial regime, they chose to cross the DMZ at Panmunjom, even though such a move was against South Korean law.

  The duo crossed the border, whereupon they were immediately arrested. The North Korean public assumed that Im Su-gyong made a great sacrifice. It was widely believed that she would spend the rest of her life in the terrible dungeons of the South Korean dictators.

  Im Su-gyong indeed stood trial after her return to the South. The anachronistic and nondemocratic National Security Law, then and now still in operation in South Korea, criminalizes any kind of unauthorized visit to the North. As a result, Im Su-gyong was sentenced to five years in prison (she was released after three-and-a-half years of imprisonment). Needless to say, this was a shameful decision, but it is not the focus of our story.

  North Korean propaganda then miscalculated again. Trying to capitalize on Im Su-gyong’s tremendous popularity, they aired an interview with her parents, who lived in Seoul. This interview is widely remembered by the North Koreans, since it produced an explosive impact on their thinking about the South.

  North Koreans were surprised to discover that the family members of a political criminal were allowed to stay in their home in the capital city, keep their jobs, and talk freely to journalists. Having seen the interview, North Koreans began to suspect that South Korea was not only far more affluent than they were told: they also came to the conclusion that the “ruling Fascist clique” in Seoul was unusually soft when dealing with the internal opposition.

  I think they would be much more surprised to learn that in 2012, Im Su-gyong—whose views have not changed that much—became a member of the South Korean Parliament. However, from the mid-1990s, her exploits ceased to be reported by the North Korean media.

  Im Su-gyong’s trip was the beginning of major changes. A few years later in the late 1990s, unauthorized information about the outside world began to filter into North Korea—largely thanks to the spread of videotapes and, later, VCDs and DVDs, as well as the effective collapse of immigration controls on the border with China.

  However, the first breaches in the information blockade were inflicted by North Korean authorities themselves. They wanted to show how popular their regime was in the South, but they ended up unwittingly providing proof of South Korean economic success and political freedom.

  REACHING THE PEOPLE

  Personal exchanges seem to be the best way to put the knowledge of the outside world within the reach of North Koreans. However, apart from such officially approved activities, different channels might be used to reach the same goal—and not all such channels need be to the North Korean government’s liking.

  Until recently, there was good reason to be skeptical about attempts to reach the North Korean masses over the heads of their masters. In Kim Il Sung’s North Korea all possible channels of uncensored interaction were safely sealed by the regime, which maintained a strict policy of self-isolation. However, in recent decades the situation has measurably changed. DVD players are common now, and even computers are not unheard of anymore. Tunable radios, while still technically illegal, are smuggled into the country in growing quantities, together with banned South Korean DVDs. Additionally, North Korean people are less afraid to talk amongst themselves and even sometimes raise politically dangerous topics. Authorities are less willing to enforce old regulations that still remain on the books.

  These changes mean that nowadays, for the first time in decades, it is becoming possible to deliver unauthorized knowledge directly to North Koreans. The information blockade can be penetrated, and the North Korean public seems to be more receptive to critical messages than it has ever been since the end o
f the Korean War.

  Of the ways to break through, one has to first mention radio broadcast. The general population and resistance leaders of the post-Communist countries now widely recognize the special role of the radio broadcast during the Cold War era. When Lech Walesa, leader of the Polish democracy movement Solidarity, was asked about the degree of influence Radio Free Europe had on the Polish opposition, he famously replied: “The degree cannot even be described. Would there be Earth without the Sun?”3

  Fortunately, recent years have been marked by a dramatic increase in broadcasts targeting North Korea. According to a study conducted in the summer of 2009 by the InterMedia Group, at that time there were five radio stations that specifically targeted the North Korean audience—not counting the government-run KBS and some Christian stations in South Korea. The total broadcast time amounted to 20.5 hours a day (once again, excluding KBS). If one takes into account the fact that a few years ago the total broadcast time did not exceed four to five hours, this is a remarkable breakthrough.4 The scale of the audience is difficult to estimate, but different sources indicate that it is not insignificant. For example, in early 2010 Peter Beck estimated that the number of listeners might have reached one million (or some 5 percent of the total population).5

  The North Korean audience is currently targeted by large government-owned stations, of which KBS (Korean), Radio Free Asia, and Voice of America play chief roles. There are also a number of smaller defector-based stations staffed by former North Koreans. They gravely lack funds and expertise, but are not short on enthusiasm and often have clandestine networks that collect valuable information from inside North Korea. These stations—both large and small—need more active support.