North Korea Undercover (9 page)

Hoe-Yeong played table tennis for a bit, until the power died and his ball vanished in the gloom. Dinner kicked off in an unusual way. Our hosts spread clams on a slab of cement, soused them with petrol and then set them alight. Feeling a bit queasy, I pulled a face. Mr Hyun, attentive as ever to the need to demonstrate the very best of North Korea, picked up a clam and opened it up an inch from my mouth. I lunged forward and ate the flesh. As petrol-flambeed molluscs go, it went down my throat. Others were less enthusiastic to the point of profound nausea, so Mr Hyun carried on hand feeding me the clams, like aninfant. After three clams, I felt I was placing diplomacy against the well-being of my stomach. Mr Hyun offered me ahefty glass of soju, the local hooch. I proposed, ‘Here’s not to thermo-nuclear war, anytime soon’ and, not wanting to seem
a Milquetoast, downed it in one. The soju knocked out the taste of carbonized clam a la Esso like a punch from Muhammad Ali. Mr Hyun downed his glass, giggled infectiously and then proclaimed that I was ‘Professor of Drinking’. These North Koreans, they know everything.

¹
Lindsay Fincher, an American tourist who went on the zombie tour in 2009, has a brilliant memory for detail, which helped trigger my reflections. See http://www.lindsayfmcher.com/

²
This is a homage to a joke by P.G. Wodehouse. I can't remember which book.

³
Breen,
Kim Jong Il,
pl3.

⁴
Tiziano Terzani:
In Asia
[in Italian], Longanesi, Milan, 1999, p53.

⁵
Ian Vandaelle: ‘Way to go: If Kim Jong Il is embalmed, here's how they'd do it’,
National Post of Canada
, 29 December 2011, http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/12/29/way-to-go-if-kim-jong-il-is-embalmed-heres-how-theyd-do-it/

⁶
Andrew Higgins: ‘End is nigh for mummified Marxists’,
Independent
, 2 June 1993.

⁷
Martin, p438.

⁸
Myers:
The Cleanest Race
, p46.

⁹
Myers, p138.

¹⁰
Myers, p74.

¹¹
Everard, pl98.

¹²
Aidan Foster-Carter: ‘Is North Korea Stalinist?’,
Asia Times
online, 5 September 2001.

¹³
Adrian Buzo:
The Guerilla Dynasty: Politics and Leadership in North Korea
, I.B. Tauris, London, 1999.

¹⁴
Breen, pl58.

¹⁵
Myers, caption to Plate 9.

¹⁶
Ken E. Gause: ‘Coercion, Control, Surveillance and Punishment: An Examination of the North Korea Police State’, Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, Washington DC, 2012, pi8, p27.

¹⁷
The
Hankyoreh
newspaper report was picked up by a website: see http://www.nkeconwatch.com/2011/06/16/losses-grow-for-south-korean-firms-invested-in-dprk/

¹⁸
Myers, p106.

3

God the Waxwork Father

Alex and I got up before dawn and walked through the softening light up a steep slope at the back of the hotel, led by one of the students, ‘Erica’. She had become fascinated by North Korea after watching an undercover National Geographic documentary on the country. She had gone for a walk the night before and found something she wanted us to see. From the top of a bluff onthe very edge of the hotel grounds, you could peer through a bedraggled barbed-wire fence and spy a sleeping town. In the grey luminescence, just before sunrise, the town looked unutterably miserable. It wasn’t justdirt-poor. Poverty stinks wherever you find it, but even in the polluted towns in the Katanga copper belt of the Congo or in the gunfire-ridden barrios of Caracas, there’s some sense of energy and hope, that a few people if they graft or use their cunning can get out and end up someplace better. The crowded grey apartment blocks, like so many human hen coops, just on the other side of the fence from the core class’s privilege and ease, spoke of hopelessness and helplessness, of a poverty of the human soul so deep no one in this
town could possibly escape from it. The electricity was off, so the propaganda hadn’t started up yet. But soon it would.

Gripping the barbed fence, I wound up my reporter’s voice, nodded at the misery in concrete a head of me and said: ‘Welcome to the real North Korea.’ Alex and Erica took some more footage and photographs of the town, and then we were off, hurrying back to the hotel before anyone noticed we had gone missing.

History – the study of how the past moulds the future – is too important to be left to history professors, even fake ones like me. The unholy trinity of the Kim dynasty has ruled North Korea since 1945, and the man who most stamped his bloodline on the country was Kim Il Sung. But who was the real man inside the wax?

The best book I’ve ever read that peers intothe mind and soul of a dictator is a novel,
The Porcupine
by Julian Barnes.
¹
It’s set in a post-revolutionary country, clearly Bulgaria, where the old Communist tyrant is facing trial. The old brute in the novel, Stoyo Petkanov, is based on the ex-dictator Todor Zhivkov. The trick that Barnes cleverly pulls off is to make the dictator act like a real flesh-and-blood human being, not just a creature from darkness. The dictator, with his back against the wall, comes out fighting, a bruiser, contemptuous of the lickspittles, funny, amusing, hard as concrete. Barnes, who conjures with the English language like a magician plucking out a rabbit from his hat, makes you sympathize with the devil. Zhivkov’s Bulgaria in 1989 was a much less darkplace than Ceausescu’s Romania. Back in December 1989 and January 1990, Romania was frozen, half starved and frothing with fear; Bulgaria was so much better – it had power and light and food and calm – we called it Hollywood. But the heft of
The Porcupine
makes a simple point: you don’t get to be a dictator of a country unless you’ve got serious qualities, of conviction, self-belief, a hardness of thesoul. That goes for Kim Il Sung, too.

Kim Il Sung left Korea when he was seven years old. Apart from a brief spell back in Pyongyang when he was eleven, he spent the next twenty-three years of his life outside his own country: the simplest explanation for the taunt by his enemies that when he spoke Korean, he quacked like a duck. A dysfunctional childhood and broken education – he never completed high school – gave way to the great formative influence on his life: being in a guerrilla band in Manchuria, surviving by kidnapping, robbery and extortion. In 1940, on the run from the Japanese, he fled into the care of the only regime heever admired: Stalin’s Soviet Union, where he spent the next five years, sitting out the war. Adrian Buzo, one of the harshest critics of all Kim Il Sung’s historians, writes that his broken education, guerrilla brutalism and Stalinist tutelage framed the man and his regime: anti-intellectual, deeply mistrustful of the outside world, contemptuous of morality: ‘He lived in a predatory, political subculture of force which encouraged in him an outlook that accepted callousness and criminality as a dailyreality.’
²

In other words, Kim Il Sung was a Korean version of Al Capone.

Kim Il Sung’s official biography is a fiction. It exaggerates and airbrushes and tells lies about history. More sympathetic Western historians than Buzo painta softer picture, pointing out that young Kim’s achievements were real enough. They say he survived an extraordinarily difficult youth – his nation under the thumb of hated occupiers, exile, loss of his father at an early age, and then
effective loss of the rest of his family – to become a hardened warrior in a cruel guerrilla war where the odds were almost impossibly stacked against him and his men. From 1935 to 1940 the Japanese Army hunted Korean Communist fighters like Kim and their Chinese Communist masters in Manchuria with a ferocity that is hard to imagine. Captured fighters were guillotined. The guerrillas repaid that ferocity in spades. Kim and his men survived by kidnapping rich Chinese farmers, extorting guns, money and food, or else ears or heads would be cut off. The Japanese police used bribery, torture and threats to play the Koreans against one another, so cleverly that the Chinese Communists, sick of a string of betrayals, turned on the Koreans, torturing, imprisoning and executing innocent men. At one point Kim Il Sung was locked up by the Chinese Communists, suspected of being a spy – a necessary introduction to how their system worked, perhaps. Hunted, paranoid, criminal, murderous, frozen, starved, Kim Il Sung was the only Korean officer of his rank in Manchuria who survived to escape to the safety of Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East in 1940, after the Japanese rolled up the resistance.

Much of the detail of Kim’s war is opaque orlost in the gush of the subsequent personality cult, but it is fair to say that as a Communist resistance fighter Kim survived, and to that extent, he was successful. Buzo notes the scar tissue: ‘His experience in the Manchurian guerrilla campaign seems to have rendered him extraordinarily callous and indifferent to suffering.’
³

It is also fair to say that every single terrifying feature of North Korea’s gangster dynasty he created was forged in the guerrilla war in Manchuria: the paranoia, the criminality, the murder, the
inurement to starvation and the cold, even the kidnapping. This is a man whose moral compass was smashed to pieces in one of the darkest and least-known wars in history. North Korea is the result.

Once Kim was gifted the pretence of power in October 1945, by a Soviet Union looking around for a Korean they could play with, he seized his opportunity with both hands. He died in July 1994, an absolute monarch, outliving the Soviet state by three years. Kim Il Sung started a civilwar he almost lost, survived, prospered, killing his enemies, real and imaginary, in a series of purges, and was able to hand power on to his son. So the very first thing to say about Kim One is that he was a tough and shrewd tyrant, who outfoxed his enemies throughout his long life. ‘Let them hate, so long as they fear’ was the bespoke aphorism for tyrants adopted by Caligula. Kim Il Sung’s philosophy of power, perhaps, can be summed upin an even crueller phrase: ‘They must fear me, but they must love me, too.’ No other dictator in modern history, neither, Hitler, nor Stalin, nor Mao, nor Pol Pot, has demanded such slave-like devotion from his people – and got it unto the third generation.

Kim Il Sung was born Kim Song Ju on 15 April 1912, in Pyongyang.
⁴
His country had been annexed by the Japanese only two years before – a gross insult to Korea’s national pride. Koreans had traditionally looked down on the Japanese as rustic country bumpkins. But in 1905 the Japanese had flattened the Russians in a short war, knocking the prestige of the tsar and marking the first victory of an Asian military might against a Western power in the modern age. The rise of Japan, and
Kim’s part in his country’s struggleagainst it, scarred his life.

Kims father and mother were both Christians; his maternal grandfather had been a Presbyterian missionary, a fact readily admitted by the official biographers. That would seem to be an odd admission for a Communist ruler, but an understanding of Christianity’s role in the making of Korean independence makes it less so. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Confucianism was the official religion of Korea, but its grip on people’s faith was weak, especially in the North. One layer beneath the surface was an ancient shamanism or paganism, which still has its sway amongst the poor today, away from the Kim dynasty’s propaganda. Christian missionaries, especially Protestants, arriving from the 1880s onwards, when the Korean government signed a treaty with the Americans, were extremely successful in Pyongyang, which became known as Korea’s Jerusalem.
⁵
There was a political, patriotic component to Christianity’s popularity. Confucianism was, in essence, Chinese; Buddhism Japanese; Christianity a third force which somehow chimed with Koreanness. Come the Japanese takeover of the whole of the Korean peninsula in 1910, the men from the land of the rising sun turned out to be an effective recruiting sergeant for Jesus. Christianity was somehow considered to be un-Japanese. Today, South Korea is one of the most Christian nations in the whole of Asia, with around one in four of the population holding to the faith. In the North, despite decades of repression, Christians continue to oppose the regime with a heroism that is breathtaking.

Kim Il Sung was to adopt another faith from the West – Marxism-Leninism – and his belief in that soon blotted out the old
religion, His autobiography states: ‘I, too, was interested in Church.’ But after a while: ‘I became tired of the tedious religious ceremony and the monotonous preaching of the minister, so I seldom went.’
⁶
Other accounts suggest that he deliberately down played his old devotion. For example, they say that both Kim Il Sung’s father and he himself played the church organ.
⁷

Mischief-makers might add that the Presbyterians’ stress on the Elect of God does not sound so very different from the ‘core class’ of the Korean Workers’ Party.

Kim’s father had been a peasant farmer who became a backstreet doctor, treating people with traditional herbal medicines. When Kim was seven, the family upped sticks and shifted across the border into north-eastern China. Kim described his family’s move into exile as being ‘like fallen leaves to the desolate wilderness of Manchuria’.
⁸
The relocation had a lasting legacy for the young Kim. He started school and became fluent in Mandarin – which stood him in good stead when keeping the trust of the Chinese Communists was a matter of life and death. The downside was his Korean started to suffer. To make up for weakness in his mother tongue, shortly before his eleventh birthday, his father packed him off to Pyongyang, a journey of 250 miles, so that he could brush up on his Korean while staying with his maternal grandparents. Two years later he was back in Manchuria. Shortly afterwards, his father, nevera well man, died at the age of thirty-two. Kim continued his education in Chinese, and learnt his Marxism from a teacher, Shang Yue, at the age of fifteen. Shang became a famous
historian, who later recalled his star pupil being ‘diligent’ and asking the right sort of questions. One young Korean friend, who later became a pathologist in Nebraska, admired the young Kim greatly: he was not interested in trivia but ‘very enthusiastic onpolitical and social problems... Imposing... a charmingly handsome man... a future leader, he had able leadership already in those days.’ He stood out, ‘like a crane in a flock of pheasants’.
⁹