The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom

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by Ralph Hassig


  19. Song Mi-ran, “For an Invincibly Powerful State,” Nodong Sinmun, April 7, 2003, 2, in Korean.

  20. “All Citizens in This Land Are Soldiers,” KCNA, April 25, 2003, in Korean, citing an April 24 Nodong Sinmun article titled “Oh, Soldier.”

  21. Hwang Chang-man and Chong Kwang-pok, “The People’s Army Is a College of Revolution Training Fervent Fighters for the Military-First Era,” Nodong Sinmun, June 13, 2002, 2, in Korean.

  22. Chong Kum-chol, “Frontline-Style Political Work and Work with People’s Emotions,” Nodong Sinmun via the Korean Press Media website (http://dprkmedia.com), March 15, 2007.

  23. “Love Gun-Barrel Families,” KCBS, broadcasting a Nodong Sinmun article, January 29, 2004, in Korean.

  24. “Inheritance of the Mangyongdae Family,” KCBS, April 12, 2007, in Korean.

  25. Yang Sun, “The General Adds Luster to the Glory of the Military-First Fatherland,” Nodong Sinmun, April 2, 2003, 2.

  26. Kim Chong-su, “Creative Ideological Theory on the Balance of Social Classes in the Current Era,” Nodong Sinmun, August 13, 2004, 2, in Korean.

  27. Kim Pyong-chin, “Important Requirement for Building a Powerful Socialist State As Elucidated by the Military-First Idea,” Nodong Sinmun, May 16, 2003, 2, in Korean.

  28. Ryang Sun, “It Is Thanks to the General That We Have the Fatherland,” Nodong Sinmun, March 12, 2005, 2, in Korean.

  29. “Let Us See and Solve All Problems from a New Viewpoint and a New Height,” Nodong Sinmun, January 9, 2001, 1, in Korean.

  30. Susan Kitchens and Josephine Lee, “Royal Flush,” Forbes.com, March 4, 2002.

  31. Chon U-taek, Saram-ui Tongil, Tang-ui Tongil [Reunification of the People, Reunification of the Land], August 2007, in Korean.

  32. Hyun-Joon Chon et al., An Assessment of the North Korean System’s Durability (Seoul: Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU), 2007), in English. The survey was modeled on an earlier survey designed by Sung Chull Kim et al., as reported in The Assessment on the Crisis Level and the Prospect of Durability of North Korean Socialist System (Seoul: Research Institute of National Unification, 1996).

  33. Chon et al., An Assessment, 173.

  34. Chon et al., An Assessment, 12.

  35. Chon, Saram-ui Tongil, 174.

  36. Chon et al., An Assessment, 30–35.

  37. Chon Song-ho, “Heart of 10 Million Soldiers and People,” Nodong Sinmun via the Uriminjokkiri website, March 2, 2004, in Korean.

  38. Song Hyo-sam, “The Heart of Socialist Korea,” Nodong Sinmun, June 3, 2002, 2, in Korean, cited by KCNA on June 4, 2002.

  39. Chon, Saram-ui Tongil, 197.

  40. Chon, Saram-ui Tongil, 197.

  41. Chon, Saram-ui Tongil, 196.

  42. Chon, Saram-ui Tongil, 196.

  43. Chon, Saram-ui Tongil, 196.

  44. Chon, Saram-ui Tongil, 173.

  45. Chon, Saram-ui Tongil, 172.

  46. Chon, Saram-ui Tongil, 172.

  47. Philippe Grangereau, Au pays du grand mensonge: Voyage en Coree du Nord (Paris: Payot and Rivages, 2001), 187, in French.

  48. Cho Taek-pom, “Must Not Even in the Slightest Tolerate Imperialist Ideological and Cultural Infiltration,” Nodong Sinmun via the Uriminjokkiri website, November 22, 2004, in Korean.

  49. A good English-language survey of religion in North Korea is David Hawk’s Thank You Father Kim Il Sung: Eyewitness Accounts of Severe Violations of Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion in North Korea (Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on International Freedom, November 2005). Updates on the state of religious freedom in North Korea can be found in the commission’s annual reports.

  50. Kang In Duk, “North Korea’s Policy on Religion,” East Asian Review 7, no. 3 (autumn 1995): 89–101. The original source of the statistics is the ROK government’s annual White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea. See Soo-am Kim, Keum-soon Lee, and Soon-hee Lim, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, 2007 (Seoul: [ROK] Korea Institute for National Unification, 2007), 171.

  51. Kang, “North Korea’s Policy on Religion,” 94.

  52. Kang, “North Korea’s Policy on Religion,” 91. Also see Kim, Lee, and Lim, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, 171.

  53. Kim Jong-il, “Giving Priority to Ideological Work Is an Essential Requisite for Accomplishing the Socialist Cause,” KCBS, June 20, 1995, in Korean.

  54. “Religious Bodies Get Greater Role in N. Korea with Aid from South,” Yonhap, June 22, 2006, in English.

  55. “Religious Believers Do Exist in N. Korea: Survey,” Yonhap, February 26, 2008, in English.

  56. Some of the parallels noted here come from Susan Rothbaum, “Between Two Worlds: Issues of Separation and Identity after Leaving a Religious Community,” in Falling from the Faith: Causes and Consequences of Religious Apostasy, ed. David G. Bromley (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1988), 205–28; quotations from 208–10.

  57. Kim Myong-chol, “Public Awareness in Military-First Era,” Minju Choson, September 28, 2003, 2, in Korean.

  58. Rothbaum, “Between Two Worlds,” 214–16.

  59. “34 N. Korean Defectors Left S. Korea for Other Countries: Report,” Yonhap, November 13, 2004, in English, citing a recent survey by Segye Ilbo.

  60. Georgi Shalchnazarov, an aide to Gorbachev, quoted by David Remnick in Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (New York: Random House, 1993), 168.

  61. Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1957).

  62. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).

  Chapter 7: The Law, Political Class, and Human Rights

  1. Tai-Uk Chung, “Beyond the Limits of Intervention? The Dilemma of the North Korean Human Rights Act,” East Asian Review 16, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 75–86.

  2. Marion P. Spina Jr., “Brushes with the Law: North Korea and the Rule of Law,” Korea Economic Institute Academic Paper Series 2, no. 6 (June 2007): 1. For another discussion of the North Korea case, see Patricia Goedde, “Law of Our Own Style: The Evolution and Challenges of the North Korean Legal System,” Fordham International Law Journal 27 (April 2004): 1265–88.

  3. Several overviews of North Korean law are available in English. See Soo-Am Kim, The North Korean Penal Code, Criminal Procedures, and Their Actual Applications, Korea Institute for National Unification, Studies Series 06-01, March 2006. The full text of North Korea’s criminal code was published by South Korea’s news agency, Yonhap (Internet version) on December 8, 2004, in Korean.

  4. Choson Minjujuui Inmin Konghwaguk Popchon [DPRK Body of Law] (Pyongyang: DPRK Law Publishing House, August 25, 2004), in Korean.

  5. Kim Il-sung, “For the Implementation of the Judicial Policy of Our Party,” April 29, 1958. In Kim Il-sung, Works (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1983), 12:182.

  6. Soo-am Kim, Keum-soon Lee, and Soon-hee Lim, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, 2007 (Seoul: [ROK] Korea Institute for National Unification, 2007), 186.

  7. Lee Sung Jin, “Increasing ‘Deaths’ Ahead of SPA Election,” Daily NK website, March 9, 2009, in English.

  8. “Results of Election of Deputies to Local Power Bodies Released,” KCNA, July 30, 2007, in English.

  9. “Nodong Sinmun Calls for Observing Revolutionary Principle,” KCNA, December 10, 2006, in English.

  10. Kim, Lee, and Lim, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, 2007, 116–23.

  11. Kim, Lee, and Lim, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, 2007, 119.

  12. Adrian Buzo, The Guerilla Dynasty, Politics and Leadership in North Korea (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). See, for example, 241ff.

  13. Kim, Lee, and Lim, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, 2007, 256.

  14. Quoted in “North Korea Targeted South’s Elite,” Dong-A Ilbo, August 13, 2006, Internet version, in English.

  15. Victor Kuznetsov, “The Economic Factors of the USSR’s Disin
tegration,” in The Fall of the Soviet Empire, ed. Anne de Tinguy, 264–79 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 270.

  16. Interview with a former North Korean who defected in 1996, Seoul, December 1997.

  17. Interview with a former North Korean who defected in 2003, Seoul, September 2004.

  18. Interview with a former North Korean who defected in 1995, Seoul, December 1997.

  19. Interview with a former North Korean who defected in 2003, Seoul, September 2004.

  20. Chong-chol Mun, “Disabled Persons Ousted from the Revolutionary Capital of Pyongyang,” Daily NK website, April 23, 2007, in English.

  21. Kim, Lee, and Lim, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, 2007, 31–42.

  22. Kim Min-se, “Summary Execution during Famine Arouses Fear,” Daily NK web-site, January 6, 2007, in English.

  23. Soon Ok Lee, Eyes of the Tailless Animals: Prison Memoirs of a North Korean Woman (Bartlesville, OK: Living Sacrifice Books, 1999).

  24. Sindong-a, January 1, 2004, Internet version, in Korean.

  25. Kim, Lee, and Lim, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, 2007, 128.

  26. A good source on the North Korean prison system is David Hawk and the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps (Washington, DC: U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, 2003). Also see the ROK government’s annual White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea published by the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU).

  27. Pyongyang Broadcasting Station, January 18, 2002, in Korean.

  28. According to Kim, Lee, and Lim, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, 2007, 73, defectors who worked as prison guards are Kang Chul-hwan, Ahn Hyuk, Ahn Myung-chul, and Choi Dong-chul. Excellent satellite photographs of concentration camps are included in Hawk’s The Hidden Gulag.

  29. For example, Kim, Lee, and Lim, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, 2007, 81.

  30. “North Korea’s Concentration Camps for Political Prisoners,” Keys (winter 2001): 23–44, in English. Also available at www.nknet.org.

  31. The interesting story of the Korean-Japanese migration to North Korea is told by Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s Cold War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007).

  32. Kim, Lee, and Lim, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, 2007, 261 and 273.

  33. Hawk, The Hidden Gulag, 29–30.

  34. Detailed daily schedules as reported by various former inmates are reported in Korean Bar Association, 2008 White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea (Seoul: Lee Jin-kang, 2009), 553–55.

  35. A slide show of the Stanford Prison Experiment is available on the web at www.pri sonexp.org.

  36. Kang Chol-hwan, “5,000 Prisoners Massacred at Onsong Concentration Camp in 1987,” Chosun Ilbo, December 11, 2002, Internet version, in English.

  37. “Nodong Sinmun on Defense of True Human Rights,” KCNA, June 24, 1995, in English.

  38. A spokesman for the DPRK foreign ministry, KCBS, March 1, 2001, in Korean.

  39. “The United States’ Human Rights Commotions against the Republic, Which Are Becoming More Blatant Than Ever Before,” KCBS, December 30, 2005, in Korean.

  40. Chong Pong-kil, “Blatant Declaration of Hostility against the DPRK,” KCBS commentary, October 7, 2004, in Korean.

  41. “ROK President: Too Early to Press DPRK on Human Rights,” Korea Herald, October 25, 2000, Internet version, in English.

  42. Doug Struck, “A Survivor Recounts Horrors of N. Korea’s Prison Camps,” Washington Post, May 3, 2003, A20.

  43. DLA Piper and the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, Failure to Protect: A Call for the UN Security Council to Act in North Korea (Washington, DC: U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, October 30, 2006), 72.

  Chapter 8: Defectors

  1. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Declines in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).

  2. Soo-am Kim, Keum-soon Lee, and Soon-hee Lim, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, 2007 (Seoul: [ROK] Korea Institute for National Unification, 2007), 149.

  3. Andrei Lankov, Crisis in North Korea: The Failure of De-Stalinization, 1956 (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 214.

  4. Andrei Lankov, North of the DMZ: Essays on Daily Life in North Korea (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2007), 297–98.

  5. “Pyongyang Accuses Seoul of Abducting N. Koreans,” Yonhap, July 29, 2004, in English.

  6. “Government Can’t Bear Unlimited Responsibility for North Korean Defectors,” Yonhap, August 16, 2004, in English.

  7. Kelly Koh and Glenn Baek, “North Korean Defectors: A Window into a Reunified Korea,” in Korea Briefing 2000–2001, ed. Kongdan Oh and Ralph C. Hassig, 205–25 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe and the Asia Society, 2002), 211.

  8. Interview with a former North Korean who defected in 2002, Seoul, April 2006.

  9. Keumsoon Lee, The Border-Crossing North Koreans: Current Situations and Future Prospects, Korea Institute for National Unification, Studies Series 06-05, May 2006, 12, in English. Also reported by Yonhap, December 5, 2004.

  10. Keum-Soon Lee, “Policy Implications of North Korean Escapees: Protection and Resettlement Assistance,” KINU Insight (June 2007): 6. KINU Insight is a publication of the Korea Institute for National Unification.

  11. “Family of POW Escapes North Korea,” Korea Herald, April 1, 2006, Internet version, in English.

  12. Ser Myo-ja, “North Korean Defects Three Times,” JoongAng Ilbo, July 6, 2007, Internet version, in English.

  13. Many accounts of defection have been published over the years. A recent example is Mike Kim, Escaping North Korea: Defiance and Hope in the World’s Most Repressive Country (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

  14. All aspects of border-crossing North Koreans are well covered by the annual White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea. Also see Lee, The Border-Crossing North Koreans. See also International Crisis Group, Perilous Journeys: The Plight of North Koreans in China and Beyond, Asia report no. 122, October 26, 2006; James D. Seymour, China: Background Paper on the Situation of North Koreans in China, Writenet analysis commissioned by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, January 2005.

  15. “Let Us Vigorously Wage the Struggle against Phenomena to Uproot the Acts of Smuggling,” instructions to North Hamgyong Province Committee, published in 2003 by the KWP, obtained and published on the website of Rescue the North Korean People (RENK), November 22, 2004, English-language website at www.bekkoame.ne.jp/ro/renk/ englishhome.htm.

  16. “Mass Education Document for Struggle against Spies,” Chosun Ilbo, August 26, 2005, Internet version, in Korean.

  17. “North Korean Defectors Reside Abroad Longer before Coming to Seoul: Survey,” Yonhap, November 4, 2003, in English.

  18. International Crisis Group, Perilous Journeys, 13. Also see Han Young Jin, “NK Women Sold for the Price of a Pig,” Daily NK website, August 9, 2005, in English. The $50 price is mentioned in “Human Trafficking Thrives across N. Korea–China Border,” Chosun Ilbo, March 2, 2008, Internet version, in English.

  19. Good coverage of the conditions of defectors in China and their routes to third countries is provided by International Crisis Group, Perilous Journeys.

  20. Interview with a former North Korean who did not say when he defected, Seoul, March 2005.

  21. A South Korean newspaper cites statistics from the Institute of World Economics and Politics for one of China’s provinces. “4809 North Korean Defectors in China Were Deported in 2002,” Dong-A Ilbo, June 8, 2007, Internet version, in English.

  22. For good coverage of the repatriation process, see Lee, The Border-Crossing North Koreans, 41–52. Also see David Hawk and the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps (Washington, DC: U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, 2003). Also see the annual White
Paper on Human Rights in North Korea.

  23. Lee Jin-woo, “Unemployment Frustrates Defectors in S. Korea,” Korea Times, November 13, 2006, Internet version, in English.

  24. This information is from a study by Professor Park Sang-in, reported in “Almost 70 Percent of N. Korean Defectors in S. Korea Unemployed: Survey,” Yonhap, April 16, 2007, in English.

  25. Yoon-Hwan Suh, “Suggestions for Building a Social Support System for the Regional Settlement of North Korean Defectors,” Journal of East Asian Affairs 16, no. 2 (fall/winter 2002): 395.

  26. “North Korean Defectors Dissatisfied with Jobs: Survey,” Yonhap, February 17, 2004, in English.

  27. “Defectors Face Double Standard,” Korea Times, October 18, 2004, Internet version, in English.

  28. “Nearly 70 Percent of North Korean Defectors in South Feel Discrimination: Poll,” Yonhap, January 26, 2006, in English.

  29. Cho Ji-hyun, “New Divorce Law for N. K. Defectors,” Korea Herald, March 1, 2007, Internet version, in English. Also see “Court Permits Remarriage of DPRK Defectors in ROK,” Yonhap, June 22, 2007, in English.

  30. Interview with a former North Korean who defected in 2003, Seoul, September 2004.

  31. Episode related to the authors by a South Korean human rights expert, Washington, D.C., January, 2007.

  32. Jeon Woo-Taek, “Promoting National Harmony in a Unified Korea,” Korea Focus 10, no. 1 (January–February 2002): 88–99.

  33. “North Korean Defectors’ Health Worse Than South Koreans with Illnesses,” Yonhap, April 9, 2007, in English, reporting on research conducted by a Seoul National University team headed by Dr. Choi Myeong-ae.

  34. “Most Common Health Problem among North Korean Defectors Is Arthritis,” Yonhap, October 14, 2005, in English, reporting on research conducted by Korea University professor Yoon In-jin.

  35. Kim Tae-jong, “Depression Hits 70 Percent of Defectors,” Korea Times, June 26, 2007, Internet version, in English, reporting on a research report by Chungnam National University professor Kim Hyun-li.

  36. Ri Un-chan, “Loyalty to Party and Leader [Suryong] Is Functionaries’ Foremost Life,” Nodong Sinmun (via KPM Internet), August 20, 2007, in Korean.

 

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