The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (64 page)

In these dire circumstances, Kim Jong Il paid a visit to Kim Il Sung University on December 7, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of his alma mater, the nation’s foremost institution of higher education. The transcript of his lengthy and rambling remarks, evidently delivered in confidence to several Workers Party secretaries who accompanied him, was brought out of North Korea by Hwang Jang Yop, who was not present but was privy to such materials in his post as a party secretary. The text of the speech was eventually published in
Monthly Chosun
in Seoul. As of the spring of 1997, it was the only record of Kim Jong Il’s candid utterances available outside North Korea, except for the tapes surreptitiously made by the kidnapped filmmakers more than a decade earlier.

In his remarks, Kim acknowledged to some extent the difficulties facing the country, saying that “the most urgent issue to be solved at present is the grain problem. . . . [T]he food problem is creating a state of anarchy.” Despite the onslaught of “heart-aching occurrences,” Kim was highly critical of the street-corner food sellers and peddlers who had spontaneously emerged in response to urgent needs. “This creates egotism among the people, and the base of the party’s class may come to collapse. Then, the party will lose popular support and dissolve. This has been well-illustrated by past incidents in Poland and Czechoslovakia.”

Kim absolved himself of responsibility for the country’s economic problems, maintaining that his father, who had spent much of his time in economic guidance, “repeatedly told me that if I got involved in economic work, I would not be able to handle party and army work properly.” He implied that his job was too important to deal with mere economic issues: “If I handle even practical economic work, it will have irreparable consequences on the revolution and construction. . . . The people now unconditionally accept the directives of the Party Central Committee because of my authority, not because party organizations and functionaries carry out their work well. . . . No functionary assists me effectively. I am working alone.”

The only institution to win unstinting praise from Kim Jong Il was the army, on which he had become increasingly reliant. Of forty-seven of his activities during 1996 made public in North Korea, thirty were visits to military units or other military-related activities. In contrast to the
laggard youth he had observed at Kim Il Sung University, he declared, “all soldiers are politically and ideologically sound and their revolutionary military spirit is lofty.” He was satisfied that the soldiers would “protect with their lives the nerve center of the revolution”—himself and other high-level leaders.

Kim’s speech confirmed that, as suspected by American and South Korean intelligence, food shortages were affecting even the army. He proclaimed that the people must be told, “If you do not send rice to the army, even if the wretched Americans attack us, we cannot win. Then you will also become slaves, and your sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters will too.”

In January 1997, despite the catastrophic state of the economy, Kim as commander in chief ordered a return to the full-scale conduct of the winter training exercises, which had been severely truncated the previous year. At great expense in fuel, ammunition, and other resources, a large proportion of North Korea’s huge army moved along the roadways and trails to new positions, fired weapons, and practiced for combat operations. In March Kim also ordered highly unusual “total mobilization” exercises in which cars in Pyongyang were covered with camouflage netting and thousands of people took refuge in underground shelters, as they would do in case of war. On April 25, the anniversary of the founding of the army, tens of thousands of troops paraded in mass formations in Pyongyang to mark the occasion.

At his headquarters in Seoul, General Tilelli watched the vigorous military activity in the North with deep concern. He was “intuitively” certain, he told me, that the DPRK military forces had been degraded by shortages and the general deterioration affecting the country. On the other hand, US and South Korean forces had been continuously modernized and improved. Although this had affected the military balance on the peninsula to the detriment of the North, he said, it was impossible to say by how much. The DPRK military continued to be highly capable, making up in mass what it lacked in modernization, the American commander said, and it “might be the only viable instrument of national power the regime has left.”

What worried him and his staff was the possibility that the North Korean leadership could become so desperate that the combined power of the US and South Korean forces might no longer deter a massive attack. Tilelli was certain that “the explosion,” as such an attack was known among his military planners, would fail after a period of bloody and destructive fighting, which would wreak death and destruction in the South but would also destroy much that North Korea had built in its half century of existence. Given the lack of what Pyongyang’s leadership considered its other options, said a member of Tilelli’s staff, “I don’t think a decision to attack would be irrational—though it might turn out to be wrong.”

Beginning in 1997, the supply of food to alleviate the devastating situation at home became increasingly the central focus of North Korean diplomacy and of international concern, eclipsing other issues. This placed the United States and South Korea, and much of the world at large, in a terrible dilemma. North Korea was continuing to feed and supply a huge and menacing army even while many of its people were hungry or even starving. The regime’s statist and shortsighted policies, as much or more than the floods, were to blame for its current crisis, but it refused to undertake major changes in economic policy. Few nations wished to aid such a regime. Yet a growing number of reports placed North Korea on the brink of a great humanitarian disaster, making it intolerable to do nothing to help. Moreover, for strategic reasons and considerations of international stability, most of North Korea’s neighbors and the US government as well wished to stave off the sudden downfall of that regime, fearing it might bring devastating violence that could affect all of Northeast Asia.

The United States was willing to provide funds to purchase food on a humanitarian basis and proceeded to do so in response to UN appeals. However, Washington rejected attempts by North Korean diplomats to link their attendance at peace talks and agreement to various tension-reducing steps to the supply of food assistance. Washington also ruled out supplying the massive amounts of aid that would be required to end the famine. The US problem was essentially political: Congress would not support “aiding” North Korea, but would permit modest contributions to UN humanitarian efforts intended to feed its people.

South Korea was less hesitant about linking food to its diplomatic and political objectives. Early in 1997, ROK officials sought to use food as a bargaining chip, supplying or permitting private groups to supply only limited amounts in order to maximize diplomatic leverage over North Korea. As reports of starvation multiplied, however, public pain over the suffering of fellow Koreans brought a shift in government policy. Beginning in the spring, Seoul provided 50,000 tons of food—a drop in an ocean of need—through the Red Cross. In 1998, with a new administration in office, the ROK relaxed most restrictions on the nongovernmental supply of food and other aid. In a spectacular consequence of the new policy, Hyundai group founder Chung Ju Yung, who was born in the North, brought 500 head of cattle through the DMZ in June and 501 in October 1998 for starving North Koreans to use in farming. Chung’s private diplomacy led to unprecedented visits by South Korean tourists to the North and promises of much bigger North-South economic deals to come.

After initial generosity, Japan, whose warehouses were bursting with surplus grain, was held back by requests for restraint from Seoul and then by new revelations that several Japanese citizens, including a thirteen-year-old girl, had been kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1970s
and never returned. North Korea refused to accept responsibility for the kidnappings, and Japan refused to supply more food.

China, which announced modest contributions of grain to North Korea, was believed to be supplying much greater amounts at cut-rate prices and through private barter deals. Customs data suggested that at least 1.2 million tons of grain crossed the China-DPRK border in 1997. China also supplied more than 1 million tons of oil yearly. These flows of Chinese assistance were essential to the survival of the North Korean regime and maintenance of the status quo on the peninsula, which China strongly favored.

A variety of other nations and charitable organizations also contributed food or funds to purchase food. Yet the emergency continued, compounded by a serious drought in the summer of 1997, followed by tidal waves along the western coast that devastated additional growing areas. It was as if nature had conspired with the unyielding economic policies of their government to bedevil the lives of North Koreans.

The scale of the human tragedy was immense, yet impossible to measure with precision in the secretive country. A team of researchers from the Buddhist Sharing Movement interviewed 1,019 refugees from North Korea just across the Chinese border during eight months in 1997–1998 and reported that a shocking 27 percent of the family members of the refugees had died since mid-1995. The movement’s executive director estimated that 2.5 million people or more may die—“a famine that may be among the worst in human history.” US intelligence officials who had been accumulating and examining the evidence told me in September 1998 they had no precise data, but that “certainly hundreds of thousands” of North Koreans had died from starvation or starvation-related illnesses and that 1 million deaths up to that time seemed “not impossible.” About the same time, a State Department official with direct responsibility for Korean relations said he believed that “easily more than 500,000 people” had died. Besides the toll in human lives, the famine had an enormous impact on the thinking of those who survived. Never again would they completely trust the state to provide for their well-being. The social contract between the regime and the people of North Korea, if not completely broken, had been irrevocably transformed.

THE PASSAGE OF HWANG JANG YOP

On the morning of February 12, 1997, a South Korean businessman in Beijing telephoned the South Korean Consulate in the Chinese capital with a momentous request: that a car and escort be sent to initiate the political asylum and defection of party secretary Hwang Jang Yop, the architect of North Korea’s
juche
philosophy. ROK officials, who were expecting the call, declined to send one of their diplomatic vehicles to pick up the
seventy-four-year-old North Korean, fearing they would later be accused of kidnapping him. A few minutes later, Hwang, accompanied only by his longtime aide and fellow defector, Kim Duk Hong, arrived by taxi and walked into the consulate, asking for protection and safe transit to Seoul.

The passage of Hwang Jang Yop was the most sensational—and one of the most complex—defections from one side to the other in the half-century history of struggle between the two Koreas. Hwang was the first high-level insider ever to take refuge in the other side. Although Hwang was no longer in the inner leadership circle, and was slowly being pushed aside, his defection was a political blow to North Korea and a potential political bonanza for the South, since he brought to the South a lifetime of experience in rarefied circles in the North. However, what he had to say was complicated by his messianic belief that his mission was to prevent a devastating war on the peninsula, to liberate the North from feudalism, and to pave the way for the reunification of Korea.

Born in 1922, Hwang studied in Japan during World War II and majored in philosophy at Moscow University during the Korean War. After returning home, he was a professor of philosophy at Kim Il Sung University, where he had special responsibility for the education of Kim Jong Il. In 1965, the year after the younger Kim graduated, Hwang was appointed president of the prestigious university. About the same time, he began to assist Kim Il Sung in elaborating the
juche
philosophy, which Kim had mentioned a decade earlier but did not emphasize until the mid-1960s, after the deepening of the Sino-Soviet dispute between his two important sponsors.

Based on his close relationship with the Great Leader, Hwang became an important—and unusual—figure in Pyongyang. From 1972 until 1984, he was speaker of the Supreme People’s Assembly, the country’s compliant parliament, and after that secretary of the Workers Party for international affairs and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the parliament. His most important position, however, was that of principal authority on
juche
, which became the official credo of the DPRK in the 1972 constitution. In his dual capacity as a chief philosopher for the regime and an international affairs official, Hwang was freer than others to travel abroad, to have lengthy discussions and close relationships with foreign scholars, and to express opinions that were often less militant than those of others.

When Selig Harrison, the American scholar, was in Pyongyang in 1987, Hwang told him that a communist revolution in the South was “completely out of the question” and that “we must find a way for North and South to co-exist peacefully under different social and economic systems.” The same year, Hwang met surreptitiously in Japan with Samuel Lee, a South Korean philosophy professor, who found him “a very reasonable thinker, and quite free from indoctrinated communist and North
Korean ideology.” Young C. Kim, of George Washington University in Washington, DC, a political scientist who often visited Pyongyang, found Hwang far more interested in philosophy than in international affairs—and his philosophy abstract and difficult to fathom.