The Aquariums of Pyongyang (3 page)

During this period, forty kilometers to the north, an ideological and military hedgehog was being formed, sometimes with the patronage of Mao's China, sometimes with that of Brezhnev's USSR, but always under the absolute control of one man: Kim Il-sung. His bloody purges in the 1980s cleared the way for the succession of his son, Kim Jong-il, and helped establish the world's first Communist dynasty.

Political and economic relations between North Korea and the “capitalist” South remained embryonic, while occasional quasimilitary strikes continued to smolder and flare: in 1968, commandos raided the Blue House (the presidential palace in Seoul); in 1981, a delegation of South Korean government officials came under attack while visiting the Burmese capital of Rangoon; in 1987, a (South)
Korean Airlines jet exploded in midair; in 1994, there were submarine intrusions and further commando raids; in 1999, it was a sea battle, and so forth.

In North Korea, a country of 22 million, the police survey every aspect of the citizenry's life. No travel without authorization. No news that's not vetted first. A single, mandated ideology, exalting self-sufficiency—even when calling for international aid. Extensive prisons and camps scattered throughout the country. Its economy, modeled after Stalin's Soviet Union—controlled, centralized, collectivized—crumbled in the 1970s and 1980s and collapsed heavily with the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, the reforms in China, and the death in 1994 of the Great Leader Kim Il-sung.

Famine gradually has spread across the country, and there's talk of 3 million dead. Today North Korea is a ship in distress, slowly sinking beneath the waves. Thanks to substantial handouts from the international community, the state—which is really just a party—can save the hard currency it should be using to purchase produce on the international market.

North Korea's leaders prefer to invest their limited resources in the development of sophisticated armaments. Their missiles are sold in Iran and Syria, and their longest-range model soon will have the capacity of reaching the United States. With understandably little desire to see the Korean peninsula destabilize the region, interested powers seek to mollify Kim Jong-il, convinced—though it's unclear why—that he can be seduced and even persuaded to see the virtues of political democracy and economic liberalism. The recent show put on by Kim Il-sung's son—who's a great fan of the movies—in which he appeared smiling and cheerful in his June 12, 2000, summit meeting with Kim Dae-jung, the South Korean president, has done nothing to change the base facts. After the summit,
as before, North Korea's population continues to die of hunger and suffer from a total absence of political freedom. Children are stunted, thousands of young women are sold across the border in China, and the army parades through the streets of Pyongyang, ever ready to protect its fantastical socialist paradise.

A few have managed to flee. Kang Chol-hwan is one of them. He left North Korea in 1992, before the famine reached its peak. He didn't leave the country to escape the famine, as so many do today, but because having once survived imprisonment in concentration camp number 15, he was in danger of being arrested again, this time for “listening to banned radio.”

Though it reaches a Western audience somewhat late, his testimony represents the first extended account of a young adult's life in contemporary North Korea. This is the first detailed testimony about a North Korean concentration camp to be published in the West.

I first met Kang Chol-hwan in Seoul shortly after his defection. I was visiting South Korea regularly as part of my work for the International Organization for Human Rights, interviewing renegades about repression in North Korea. Convinced that North Korea had gained as much from its own population's ignorance of the outside world as from the international public's ignorance of its crimes and threats against its own population, I suggested to Kang Chol-hwan that he tell the Western world what it was like to live under the rule of Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim Jong-il. He accepted, seeing it as his moral duty to shed light on the horrors of the Pyongyang regime and, above all, its system of concentration camps.

We met five or six times in Seoul, shutting ourselves up in a hotel room and breaking only for lunch and dinner. We communicated by
the intermediary of a South Korean academician, a specialist in French literature, whose role was both essential and irreplaceable. Her modesty was equaled only by her effectiveness in helping me understand the intricacies of the country as a whole, as well as North Korea's particular contempt for human rights.

This book thus results from the efforts of three people, working together as friends, with the common hope of raising international awareness. All those who would deal with North Korea—be they diplomats, politicians, businessmen—should know that their interlocutor is the planet's last Stalinist regime, a regime that incarcerates between 150,000 and 200,000 people in concentration camps, flouts freedom of conscience, mercilessly clubs its population with pompous, mendacious propaganda, and is responsible for one of the worst famines of the end of the twentieth century. The most fitting term to describe it has already been coined, but I will employ it here again: the regime is ubuesque. Which is to say grotesque and bloody.

Reading this book is a first step toward making the repression in North Korea a major concern for human rights defenders around the world.

 

I
n the 1960s, North Korea's disaster was not yet on the horizon. In economic terms, the country was going neck and neck with the South, and in Pyongyang, the regime's privileged showcase, it seemed the Party's talk of triumph and promise might actually hold true. I know what I'm talking about; Pyongyang is where I was born and grew up. I even lived some happy years there, under the guardian eye of Kim Il-sung, our “Great Leader,” and his son, Kim Jong-il, our “Dear Leader.”

To the child I was, Kim Il-sung was a kind of Father Christmas. Every year on his birthday, he would send us gift packages of cakes and sweets. Our beloved Number One chose them himself, with a care and kindness that gave his gifts a savoriness all their own. Thanks to his generosity, we also had the right, every third year, to a school uniform, a cap, and a pair of shoes.

Our mothers said these polyester uniforms were sturdy, easy to wash, and permanently pressed. As for the shoes, daily use showed them to be of excellent quality. The ceremony for the distribution of uniforms, a most solemn event, was held in the large hall adjoining the school, which was specially decorated for the occasion with slogans and portraits. The parents in attendance applauded speeches by the school principal and several representatives of the Party. Student delegates got on the rostrum and thanked the Party in their little childish voices, pledging allegiance to the Clairvoyant, and pouring imprecations on all our enemies, American imperialism first among them, “because its claws still grip part of our dear Fatherland.” At the end, the student delegates were entrusted with the precious gifts, which they distributed to the rest of the pupils the following day.

Kim Il-sung was actually even better than Father Christmas, because he seemed eternally young and omniscient. Like his son, Kim Jong-il, who was said to be in line to succeed him, he was more like a god to us than Father Christmas. The newspapers, the radio, posters, our textbooks, our teachers: everyone and everything seemed to confirm this. By marrying our singular Korean genius with the immutable ideals of the Communist revolution, these two masterminds, these two darlings of the universe, were building for us the Edenic socialist state. Had not Kim Il-sung's political acumen and incomparable intellect already been the cause of wonders, against the cruel American invaders, for example, whom he dealt the most humiliating of defeats? Only much later did I learn how the war was really started and what happened in its aftermath. Like millions of other North Korean children, I was taught that thanks to the military genius of our Great Guide and, to a lesser degree, the international aid of China, to whom we were united “like lips to teeth,” our
valiant People's Army had routed the Americans. Kim Il-sung—a.k.a. the Light of Human Genius, the Unequaled Genius, the Summit of Thought, the North Star of the People—was the object of a personality cult extravagant enough to rival that of Stalin or Mao Tse-tung, and indeed, even to outlive them. In 1998, the People's Supreme Assembly even made the astounding decision to name Kim Il-sung president “for all eternity”—four years after his death!

To my childish eyes and to those of all my friends, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il were perfect beings, untarnished by any base human function. I was convinced, as we all were, that neither of them urinated or defecated. Who could imagine such things of gods? In the portraits of their paternal faces I found comfort and all that was protecting, kindly, self-assured.

Like other children, I started grammar school at the age of six—or seven, if you count according to the traditional Korean formula, where year one begins at conception and another year is added every January 1. (The Korean and Western calculus for determining age can vary by as many as two years.) While ordinarily eager to defend its traditions, North Korea has officially renounced this manner of calculating age, although it is still widely used in private.

The name of the grammar school I attended was the School of the People, and Kim Il-sung once honored it with a visit—a truly exceptional event, which conferred the greatest prestige on the parents whose children attended the institution. Of this place, too, I have fond memories. I recall with particular warmth Mrs. Ro Chong-gyu, a teacher of enormous kindness and pedagogical skill, who always found the right word to encourage me. Despite their adherence to communist educational methods, almost all the
teachers I had were attentive and patient with their pupils, even during our criticism and self-criticism sessions. Anyone who has never lived in a Communist country may be shocked at the thought of little children mimicking their politicized elders and denouncing themselves and others for lacking revolutionary vigilance or for not meriting the Great Leader's confidence. Yet these sessions generally ended with words of encouragement from our teachers, not of reproach, and with the hope that we would try harder in the future. I don't believe any of us were really traumatized by these sessions.

To help initiate us into North Korea's highly militaristic brand of communism, we were awarded different ranks at school. We were hardly seven years old when our uniforms first began bearing stars—two or three, depending on our level. Already we were being directed by a “political leader,” the number one of the class, and by a delegate, the number two, who were appointed by the teacher and confirmed by a vote of the pupils. Admittedly, I was never much taken with military discipline: one day I convinced about fifteen of my classmates to ditch school and go to the zoo. It didn't take long to notice fifteen absentees, and the episode soon caused a big stir. Since I was the class delegate, I was not only publicly demoted but was expected to execute my self-criticism with deeper-than-usual compunction and with exceptionally good form.

In the curriculum, too, training the revolution's little soldiers was given first priority. Like students everywhere in the world, we learned to read and write with as few mistakes as possible; we studied arithmetic, drawing, music, performed gymnastics, and so on. But above all, we were taught about the morals of communism and the history of the revolution of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Given its singular import, the latter subject demanded that we learn by
rote answers to questions such as: On what day and at what hour was Kim Il-sung born? What heroic feats did he perform against the Japanese? What speech did he give at such-and-such a conference, on such-and-such date? Like my fellow pupils, I thought cramming myself with such important facts was perfectly normal, and doing it gave me great pleasure. An education of this sort resulted in a wellspring of admiration and gratitude for our political leaders and in the willingness to sacrifice everything for them and the homeland. Like everyone in my class, I signed up for the Pupils' Red Army. What a sight we must have made marching into battle, fake machine guns slung across our shoulders. Though we mostly just learned to form ranks and sing while marching, we loved these exercises and never had to be asked twice to strike a military pose. Right away we felt we were Kim Il-sung's little soldiers. We were never asked to do anything too demanding. The training was adapted to our tender age and generally consisted of marching around the schoolyard a few times or around a block of houses. It wasn't until the penultimate year of high school that we would be allowed to undertake the more serious and difficult exercises. The high school students went on mountain hikes, memorized emergency air-raid instructions, learned to hide from enemy planes, and to steer the population to the nearest air-raid shelters.