The Cleanest Race (6 page)

On July 8, 1994, the eighty-two year old Parent Leader passed away—from overwork, news announcers wailed—and the DPRK immediately contracted, to borrow a line from
Hamlet
, in one brow of woe. Orgies of weeping took place in city and
town squares across the country. Some refugees who were children at the time remember desperately trying to force tears, but most adults appear to have been genuinely grief-stricken—or at least afraid of a future without the only leader they had ever known. It was perhaps fortunate for the regime that Kim died when he did. Had he lived a few years longer, the economic collapse would have done irrevocable damage to his reputation. As it was, the famine of 1995-1997 appeared to offer retroactive proof that the Parent Leader had indeed been single-handedly feeding and clothing his people up to his death.

By the time Kim Il Sung died, it was already taken for granted, both inside and outside the DPRK, that his son would take over. Kim Jong Il had assumed command of the country’s armed forces in 1991, and his fiftieth birthday in 1992 had occasioned a massive celebration, complete with the bizarre (and utterly un-Confucian) spectacle of the Parent Leader penning a panegyric to his own son.
¹
The threat to withdraw the DPRK from the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1992, the placing of the country on a war footing in 1993: these and related measures, which were said to have brought Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang in June 1994 to negotiate the Yankee surrender, were largely credited to Kim Jong Il’s genius and resolve.
²
The nuclear crisis thus endowed the heir to the throne with his own myth of national rescue, and not a moment too soon.

The Dear Leader took over in July 1994 without formally replacing his late father; to this day Kim Il Sung remains the
“Eternal President” of the country. Meanwhile food production was in a free fall, not least because of the disruptions caused by mourning ceremonies. By the end of 1994 the ration system had all but ceased functioning outside Pyongyang. At first the regime tried to brazen out the crisis by trumpeting the record harvest sown by the Parent Leader in his last months.
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It soon realized, however, that to continue in such a vein would be to risk forfeiting its credibility altogether. Public expectations for the new leader had to be sharply reduced before the food shortage worsened into famine. After lying low for a few months, a somber Kim Jong Il appeared in 1995 at the head of a “military first” government compelled (or so the media claimed) to devote all its time and energy to national defense.

Ironically enough, relations between Washington and Pyongyang had never been better: the Agreed Framework had been signed in October 1994, President Clinton had sent Kim a groveling letter promising full compliance, and energy aid was already flowing in. Kim thus found himself in the awkward position of having to nurture Washington’s hope for better relations while at the same time whipping up anti-Americanism at home. Aware that the language barrier forced most outside observers to focus on the official news agency’s English-language service, Kim had it tone down its invective and refrain from vilifying the US president by name. Meanwhile, in domestic propaganda, the Agreed Framework was crowed over as an abject Yankee surrender. A glorious battle had been won, but not the war; for the “jackals” could never change their inherently rapacious nature. Hence the
need for the Dear Leader to spend most of his time visiting military bases, from the Yalu River in the north to the DMZ in the south. Much as it pained him, the provinces would have to take self-reliance to the next level and begin feeding themselves. Official media lamented the hardship suffered by Kim on his tireless tour. His famed diet of “whatever the troops are eating” was routinely invoked to shame everyone into working harder.

But although the Dear Leader remained popular, the economy was collapsing, and taking internal security down with it. Outside Pyongyang, social discipline had already broken down. Many citizens stayed away from work for weeks on end, re-appearing only to plunder their factories. This decline in the authority of the workplace was all the more significant because for the average citizen it had been the center of political life as well.
⁴
Soldiers roamed the countryside in search of food, robbing civilians and sometimes engaging in armed clashes with the police. Corpses lay on the steps of train stations. Refugees have provided credible testimony of widespread cannibalism.
⁵
Foreign experts now estimate that about a million people—roughly 5 percent of the population—died from hunger-related causes during the worst period of the famine, from 1995 to 1997.
⁶

By the late 1990s the DPRK’s northern border was very loosely or corruptly policed, and tens of thousands of citizens from the northeast crossed the Tumen River into China. Though there were far fewer migrants than might have been expected, and those who left the country did so only to return with smuggled goods, the influx of South Korean videos and reports
of Chinese prosperity greatly eroded the information cordon that had once sealed the DPRK off from the outside world.

To the world’s surprise, this development did not significantly undermine support for the regime. Refugees claim that people were just too hungry to think of politics. An equally obvious explanation is that people do not easily toss aside a worldview dinned into them since childhood. But also important is the
nature
of that worldview. By the mid-1990s the North Koreans had ceased paying even lip service to Marxism-Leninism.
⁷
Socialism or “our style of socialism” had come to mean only “how we do things,” capitalism a catchword for “how Yankees enslave the southern brethren.”
⁸
It was because the regime no longer derived its legitimacy from a commitment to improve material conditions that it did not have to deny there was an economic crisis, something the Soviet and Chinese parties had destroyed their own credibility by doing.

Needless to say, the regime neither acknowledged the full extent of the food shortage—the word famine was never used—nor accepted any responsibility for it. Instead one spoke of economic “difficulties” while blaming them on bad weather, Yankee sanctions and lazy mid-level bureaucrats. All this, it must be noted, was at least partially true. If anything, the famine may have strengthened support for the regime by renewing the sense of ethnic victimhood from which the official worldview derived its passion. Many migrants remember a widespread yearning for war with America during the famine.
⁹

By 1998 the worst of the food shortage was over, and the official media had begun to cheer Kim Jong Il for dashing the Yankees’ dreams of regime change. Tasteless though these congratulations may have been, they were well-deserved, for the DPRK had survived a crisis far worse than the mere malaise that had seen off the communist bloc a decade earlier. In a new flurry of confidence the regime announced the forward-looking slogan “A Great Country, Strong and Prosperous” (kangsŏng taeguk), and agreed to a meeting between Kim Jong Il and the South Korean president Kim Dae Jung, the advocate of a new “Sunshine Policy” of reconciliation with the North. The summit took place in June 2000 in Pyongyang and ended in the so-called June 15 Declaration, in which both sides pledged to work peacefully “among ourselves” towards the goal of unification. There ensued massive infusions of unconditional aid from Seoul, much of it in the form of cash.

For all its help in financing his military and nuclear program, the Sunshine Policy put Kim Jong Il in a difficult position. He could hardly admit that the ROK wanted friendlier relations, because this would mean it was no Yankee puppet after all. Neither could he endanger the flow of aid by continuing to vilify his counterpart in Seoul as if nothing had happened. So it was that the official news agency ceased its attacks on the South Korean government, and less prominent propaganda outlets picked up the slack. The latter asserted that Kim Dae Jung had come to Pyongyang in 2000 to make the North renounce socialism, only to be dazed by the Dear
Leader’s genius into accepting his demands for inter-Korean cooperation.
^†
The ensuing years saw the regime devote ever more energy to demonizing the Republican administration in Washington. In 2002, President George W. Bush’s reference to North Korea as part of an “axis of evil” was met with aggrieved posturing by the KCNA (which since its founding in 1948 had vigorously applied the word “evil” to the United States). Propaganda contradicted itself: On the one hand the Americans’ allegations of a nuclear weapons program were condemned as far-fetched lies, while on the other it was truculently implied that they were true. “Under the pretext of a so-called ‘nuclear problem’ the US is making its military threats against our republic ever more explicit,” wrote a KCNA scribe in May 2003, weeks after North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. “The only way to guard the nation’s peace … under these circumstances, which cause such deep concern to the entire Korean people, is to have a strong deterrent against war. We have already prepared such a military deterrent.”
¹

By the summer of 2003 the DPRK had agreed to take part in nuclear negotiations with the US, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. While the regime’s diplomats expressed hope for better relations, domestic propaganda stridently insisted that the Yankees were inherently evil and would never change. In August, with the first round of the six-party talks about to convene in Beijing,
Jackals
(1951), the canonical tale of murderous Christian missionaries, re-appeared simultaneously in three monthly magazines, complete with drawings of sunken-eyed, hook-nosed Yankees.
²

The DPRK’s recovery from the famine years did not mean a full restoration of the internal security of old. Many in the
northern provinces continued tuning in to Chinese TV on their smuggled sets, and communicating with migrants by smuggled cell phones. Some near the DMZ had even taken to watching television broadcasts from Seoul. Despite periodic crackdowns by the authorities, South Korean videos and DVD’s did a roaring trade in rural markets.

As a result, the South’s prosperity quickly became common knowledge inside the DPRK. Realizing that it would do no good to deny it, the propaganda apparatus in 2000 began openly admitting that South Koreans enjoy a higher standard of living. This prosperity was rather ingeniously attributed to the Dear Leader’s “military-first” policy, which had allegedly kept the Yankees from unleashing another ruinous war on the peninsula. At the same time, of course, it was claimed that despite their wealth, the southern brethren yearned to rout their oppressors and rush to the Dear Leader’s embrace.

This line was not as preposterous as all that. Koreans in both republics generally agree that they are a uniquely homogenous, i.e. pure-blooded people whose innate goodness has made them perennial victims of foreign powers. While the DPRK expresses itself more stridently on such matters, there has never been as sharp an ideological divide as the one that separated West and East Germany. The dictators that ruled the ROK until the late 1980s thus had to keep strenuously downplaying the rival state’s Koreanness, referring to it as “the northern monster,” a Soviet satellite of strange “reds”; these were depicted primarily in animated cartoons. (Middle-aged South Koreans recall with a chuckle how in their childhood they had believed the “reds” were literally red!) The rise of public sympathy for the DPRK in the late 1990s was caused not by pro-Pyongyang propaganda but by the mere disappearance
of the anti-Pyongyang kind: “As soon as we saw that they are Korean too, we stopped hating them,” is a typically naive account of the change. In the ROK’s southwestern provinces, a hotbed of left-wing sentiment and anti-Americanism, one encounters widespread sympathy even for the North Korean dictator himself.

Although South Koreans are glad that they compromised their nationalist principles for wealth and modernity, many of them feel a nagging sense of moral inferiority to their more orthodox brethren.
They may disapprove of the North’s actions
, but rarely with indignation, often blaming America or Japan for having provoked them. Eager to assuage their guilt about not wanting re-unification, they prefer to see in the DPRK’s lack of democracy and human rights only a benign difference in stages of development.

The Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun administrations that ruled the country from 1998 to 2008 heightened these tendencies by encouraging an anti-American line in education and urging the media to “finlandize” their coverage of the DPRK. As a result, a North Korean surreptitiously watching TV broadcasts from Seoul would have seen little in these years that
directly
contradicted the myth of a rich-but-shamefaced South chafing under the Yankee yoke. Instead he would have heard news announcers referring respectfully to Kim Jong Il as the “National Defense Council Chairman,” a title that implicitly acknowledged the legitimacy of both the North Korean state and its nuclear program. He would have seen numerous anti-American demonstrations, attended by tens of thousands of South Koreans of all ages and economic classes. He would have learned of the opinion polls according
to which the US is the country most widely perceived as South Korea’s main enemy. He might even have seen romantic comedies in which a virginal girl from the North appears as the better, purer Korean.

None of this, however, discouraged the DPRK’s youth from trying to follow the Yankee colony’s music, slang and fashions. The regime responded by condemning the influx of heterodox culture and information as a CIA plot to destabilize the republic. A lecture written in spring 2005 for party-internal use (and later smuggled out of the DPRK) quotes Kim Jong Il as saying, “Through all manner of falsehoods and trickery, the imperialists and reactionaries are paralyzing the healthy thinking of the masses while spreading among them bourgeois-reactionary ideas and rotten bourgeois customs.”
³
These included living in a lazy, corrupt or decadent fashion, wearing long hair and clothes with “politically problematic words or pictures on them,” and otherwise copying other countries’ ways.
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