Great Leadership
What I saw in North Korea. BY SUKI KIM
Monday, October 16, 2006 Despite the much-touted label of being the most secretive nation in the world, the one thing everyone knows about North Korea is that its people have been dying in massive numbers from starvation and persecution for decades, the reality of which seems to have bypassed the nations involved in the on-again-off-again six-party talks--whose diplomacy has apparently failed. By landing a punch at the nonproliferation policy of the U.N. Security Council, an organization soon to be led by South Korean Ban Ki Moon, North Korea yet again thwarted its former promises of stopping all nuclear activities. The Bush administration is advocating harsher ways of punishing a country they maintain is a member of the "axis of evil" through tougher sanctions and cutting off its financial sources, neither of which has worked so far in stopping North Korea from doing whatever it wants to do. Now that it claims to have become the world's ninth nuclear power, I wonder what will change, if anything, for its people.
On June 25, 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea, my mother's brother, then age 18 and living in Seoul, was kidnapped by the North's soldiers. Fleeing the bombs, my grandmother, with her five children, fought through the panicked crowd onto the jam-packed, southbound train when someone screamed out that young men should give up their seats for women and children. My grandmother spent her remaining life haunted by that last moment, of her eldest son rising and reassuring her that he would be on the next train. Hers turned out to be the last train out of Seoul. Later, a neighbor reported seeing him tied up and being dragged away by the North Korean soldiers. Korean Confucian ethics holds that there is no bigger sin than abandoning one's family, and yet neither Korean government has granted reunions for the millions of separated families, except for a handful who have been used as a showcase for the failed peace summits.
In February 2002, I traveled to Pyongyang in an effort to locate my uncle. I never found him, but I spent about a week with the Workers' Party leaders, ranging from the chairman of the Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries to the then-ambassador to the Permanent Mission to the U.N., who repeatedly told me that their real enemy was not South Korea, with whom they are still technically at war, but the U.S., which, along with the Soviet Union, had drawn up the 38th Parallel in 1948 and perpetuated the war by isolating them through sanctions. They were mystified as to why the United States was allowed to have nuclear weapons when it was the only nation in history to have deployed them on civilians, never mind starting wars all over the world.
My most vivid impression of Pyongyang was that an entire generation must have been eradicated for such a place to exist. Nothing on their empty, energy-deprived streets indicated that anything prior existed. Every book, piece of artwork and building was either made by the Great Leader or about the Great Leader. Their only official newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, was four pages long and consisted almost exclusively of praise for their Great Leader. Their state-controlled TV showed mostly undated footage of the Great Leader. Everywhere I went, music played in the background and the subject of the lyrics was inevitably the Great Leader.
The regime of North Korea has done a most efficient job of wiping out Korea's 5,000-year history, imbued with Buddhism, Shamanism and Confucianism, with one amnesia-inflicting spell called "Juche," its political philosophy of self-reliance. And what seems to make the Great Leader so "great" is that he has replaced their lost memory. For my uncle to have survived there, he either would have had to forget everything he had known, or learned to believe in the Great Leader. Or it is possible that he held on with the hope for the two Koreas to reunite; my grandmother did, until she passed away 25 years after he went missing.
In the 1970s in South Korea, I grew up with the anthem, "Our Wish is Reunification," which children still sing. Today, however, South Koreans readily claim North Koreans as their siblings and yet they hesitate upon the topic of the Kim Jong Il regime's collapse, which might lead to the breakdown of 38th Parallel and to millions of refugees pouring south. President Roh Moo Hyun's increasingly less popular "sunshine policy" has provided a conduit through which money is funneled into North Korea for supposed economic reform, although it now looks as though it has effectually funded the North's nuclear program.
South Korea is not the only one who fears the consequence of Kim Jong Il's demise. Neither China nor Russia, North Korea's biggest allies and neighbors, wants to foot the bill for refugees. As many as 300,000 North Koreans have crossed the northern border since the Korean War despite a joint crackdown from North Korean agents and Chinese police. For Japan, the threat from North Korea has provided a basis for lobbying for remilitarization and a revision of their post-World War II, U.S.-sponsored pacifist constitution. America, whose soon-to-be downsized 32,000 troops are still stationed in Seoul's Yong San Garrison, does not want to forfeit its control over the region to China, whose trading relationship with South Korea and economic hold over the North have grown rapidly in recent years. The prospect of One Korea benefits no one except the welfare of the North Korean people, whom the mighty six-party nations seem to have forgotten. So why are we relying on their decision on what to do about North Korea?
Just last month, the World Food Program launched an appeal for more funds to fight the food shortage in North Korea, worsened by the August flood that had, according to the state's figures, killed and left homeless hundreds, although various human rights groups claim numbers closer to hundreds of thousands if not millions. Over a third of all children are reported to be malnourished. According to Amnesty International, 400,000 have perished from political persecution; 150,000 are still held in underground concentration camps. Since the much condemned July 4 missile tests, humanitarian aid has been cut drastically.
In the 1970s, South Korean propaganda posters of starving children were forced upon us to show that North Korea was hell on earth and that its leader was a selfish, ruthless despot. In the decades since, during which time a famine killed over a tenth of North Korea's 23 million people, not much has changed at all. The 38th Parallel is still there. The most the Bush administration has done in its diplomatic strategy about North Korea is to call it evil. The peace talks are continuously stalled. The U.N. is in yet another emergency huddle to figure out a way of handling the problem. Now that North Korea claims to be a nuclear power, what will be different?
In the meantime, the Siberian winter is quickly approaching for the people of North Korea, where heat and food are scarcer than ever. The Rodong Sinmun headlines after the nuclear test revealed just one brief congratulatory paragraph on the success of the test, which has turned the rest of the world upside down. The other articles were about the floral baskets delivered to their Great Leader from the various communist parties of China, Laos and Cuba.
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