Inside the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea - A Socialist in Canada

Inside the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea - A Socialist in Canada



Inside the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea

Enclosed are three articles describing the past and present social system in the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (“North Korea”). This selection of articles does not pretend to be a comprehensive or balanced view of the country. For that, readers can turn to author Bruce Cumings, including these works:

* The Origins of the Korean War (2 vols). Princeton University Press, 1981, 1990.

* Korea: The Unknown War (with Jon Halliday), London: Viking Press, 1988.

* Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History. Norton, 1997.

* The Korean War: A History. Modern Library Chronicles, 2010



Enclosed:

* North Korea: What a terrible state to get into (ecology in the DRK, published in New Scientist)

* North Korean in 1970 (by Tariq Ali)

* North Korea’s caste system faces power of wealth (Associated Press)



North Korea: What a terrible state to get into

Few westerners have visited the world’s most secretive state, but when an ecologist was invited in to help restore its environment, he was shocked by what he saw



By Keith Bowers, New Scientist, Issue 2892, Nov. 29, 2012. Online access to subscribers only.



WHEN we landed in Pyongyang, it was March and the Korean peninsula was in the last vestiges of winter. The landscape was windswept and eerily quiet. It felt as though something was missing. It was a feeling that stayed with me throughout the trip.



I had been invited to North Korea to take part in a seminar on the country’s environmental crisis, jointly organised by two NGOs, one based in Pyongyang and the other in Beijing, China.



On receiving the invitation I was unsure what to do. Like most westerners, my image of North Korea was not a good one: a backward, totalitarian state, gripped by famine and ruled by fear, and in a state of uncertainty after the recent death of its leader Kim Jong-il.



My family were afraid that they would never see me again. But the fact that the trip was sponsored by the AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, helped, as did information supplied by the Environmental Education Media Project (EEMP), the Chinese NGO, whose executive director has travelled to North Korea many times.



I supplemented this with whatever I could find on the internet. I obsessively checked the US State Department’s travel information and looked into insurance policies for travelling to rogue states. In the end EEMPs history of leading technical exchanges with the North Koreans – and the AAAS’s sponsorship – convinced me to go.



Getting into North Korea is not easy. I am a US citizen, and my government does not maintain diplomatic relations with Pyongyang. The only way to get in was to obtain official permission from the North Korean authorities and then get an entry visa from a country with diplomatic ties to North Korea. In my case, that meant China.



With official permission to visit arranged by the North Korean NGO, the Pyongyang International Information Centre on New Technology and Economy (PIINTEC) – its director Ri Song-uk is also vice-president of North Korea’s State Academy of Sciences – I travelled to China where EEMP arranged visas for myself and three other US participants.



We left Beijing on Air Koryo, the North Korean state-owned carrier. Its slogan – To The World! – is something of an exaggeration; it flies mostly to and from China and Russia, plus a handful of other Asian destinations.



Not surprisingly, then, our group made up the majority of Sunan International Airport’s arrivals that day. At first glimpse the terminal looked surprisingly modern. But the glass-clad exterior was a mere facade for a shoddy cinder block building with plywood ticket counters and customs booths. Pictures of North Korea’s leaders hang in prominent view, the first of what was quickly to become a familiar sight.



The customs agent questioned us in broken English. Our cellphones were confiscated and placed in plastic bags for us to collect on our way back home. We were allowed to keep our laptops and cameras, but nothing with GPS or satellite-tracking devices.



This wasn’t the only restriction. Once inside, access to the international internet was all but impossible. At our hotel, we were permitted to send emails but only by typing out a message and an address and giving it to the business centre staff to send. Our rooms had land-line phones. I called home twice; I expect somebody was listening in.



North Korea occupies a land area around the size of Pennsylvania with a population believed to be approximately 25 million. Beyond that, statistics are sketchy and unreliable; not for nothing is it known as the most secretive country on Earth.



Information on the state of the environment is also quite hazy. More than 80 per cent of the land is mountainous and once harboured dense, deciduous and coniferous forests. Most of the rest is rolling countryside with deep, narrow river valleys and a wide range of coastal habitats.



The climate is at the mercy of cold Arctic fronts sweeping through Siberia and down the peninsula, often making growing seasons relatively short, especially at higher elevations.



Until the Korean war began in 1950, forest cover was apparently plentiful enough to provide wood for fuel and other forest products, plus “ecosystem services” such as regulating water runoff, stabilising steep slopes and supporting diverse flora and fauna. But after the ceasefire in 1953 the landscape that had worked in balance with human cultivation for thousands of years began to decline.



In the 1990s, disaster struck. The fall of communism in Russia and China’s dash for capitalism led to a downward economic spiral. Widespread food and fuel shortages forced people to turn to the forests for their basic needs. At the same time devastating storms and floods ravaged much of the country, wiping out harvests and infrastructure. Lifeless land



That was 15 years ago, and the landscape is still in a state of shock. Much of the country is deforested, save for a very few steep slopes and some protected areas. Erosion, sedimentation and habitat loss are pervasive, and many watersheds are ecologically lifeless.



The environment is now near total collapse. Conditions are so bad that even the notoriously closed North Korean state has been forced to acknowledge that it needs outside help. That is why we were there.



It took about 20 minutes to drive the 25 kilometres from the airport to downtown Pyongyang, travelling through a landscape devoid of traffic and people. We stopped once to clear a checkpoint, where our two minders spoke to the armed guards for a few minutes. Pyongyang itself was quiet, conspicuously lacking in the bustle I have come to expect when visiting a foreign capital.



The minders would be our constant companions for the next few days, monitoring every move we made outside the hotel grounds.



Also accompanying us throughout was PIINTEC’s Ryu Kumran, who was instrumental in organising the visit. Our minders spoke little English, but Kumran’s was good and we could talk to her openly. She was eager to answer our questions, but she was guarded and at times protective of her homeland. There were several occasions when we wanted to vary from our prescribed itinerary. For the most part, we were politely told: no.



Before we could check in to our hotel, we made a surprise detour to visit bronze statues of Eternal President Kim Il-sung (who died in 1994) and his son Kim Jong-il, the Eternal General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea (died 2011), both on horseback. We were unprepared, but our minders supplied a bouquet of flowers to place at the base of the statues. Such detours became a regular feature of our stay.



After that, we were shuttled to Yanggakdo Hotel, which is on an island in the Taedong river and reserved for foreign guests. The hotel was comfortable but surreal. It has 47 storeys, but as far as we could tell we were pretty much the only guests. The lights only came on when we entered the hallway and only individual rooms were heated. The corridors, bar and restaurant were cold.



The primary purpose of our visit was to attend the International Seminar on Forest and Landscape Restoration at the People’s Palace of Culture – three days of presentations and discussion with some of North Korea’s leading scientists and top government officials. Our delegation consisted of 15 restoration ecologists and policy-makers from around the world, but before we arrived it was hard to know what our hosts expected from us. It quickly became clear that what they wanted was know-how: practical information about planting forests and restoring the landscape.



We made alternating presentations with simultaneous translation. The first slide of each of the Koreans’ presentations, and sometimes the second too, paid homage to Kim Il-sung for recognising the need for healthy landscapes, restored forests and economic prosperity.



Once they were past the formalities, the Koreans proved refreshingly au fait with the latest environmental terminology. Some of them had travelled abroad; a few spoke English. They seemed surprisingly open about their country’s plight; climate change, loss of biodiversity, water scarcity and food security were mentioned often.



Initially, I felt encouraged that the North Koreans appeared to acknowledge the connection between a healthy, robust and resilient landscape and social and economic security – an awareness shared by few governments around the world. There also appeared to be a genuine desire for change, and a commitment to work within international environmental conventions.



Prior to our visit, for example, the government had ordered the mass planting of trees to emphasise the importance of individual initiative – or Juche, the national ideology – in the task of reforestation. Travelling around Pyongyang, I noticed many newly planted trees. Any large city would be envious of the speed at which this effort was carried out.



However, when we asked specific questions, the cracks began to show. When we quizzed them about what data they were collecting, the resources they had at their disposal and the methods they used to engage citizens, it became clear that their depth of knowledge was limited, resources were scarce and community engagement was nonexistent. They were badly in need of computers, access to satellite imagery, data collection tools and, most of all, funding. Several presentations exposed a fixation with the immediate and desperate need for food and wood.



Dialogue was very limited. They asked few questions and informal conversation was heavily discouraged. During breaks, lunch and at the end of sessions we were directed to separate rooms.



Some of us were able to strike up limited discussions during lulls in the presentations and chance meetings, which confirmed for me their desire to embark on more meaningful discussions if only they were given time and approval. But the constant presence of government officials was stifling. Government censorship



Many of us brought books, papers and pamphlets to hand out, but we were not allowed to distribute them directly. All had to pass a government censor first, which we were told could take weeks. I don’t know if any got through. I have had no direct contact with any of the Korean scientists since the trip.



Travelling through Pyongyang was depressing. The city is supposedly for the elite and privileged but poverty and poor living conditions were everywhere. Power outages occurred almost every night between midnight and dawn. It was not uncommon to see bonfires on high-rise balconies at night, presumably lit for warmth. People in every walk of life appeared crushed by poverty and total government control.



After the meeting our delegation was granted permission for two day-trips outside Pyongyang. We visited a forest nursery not far from the demilitarised zone, a farm in Sariwon City and the World Biosphere Reserve at Mount Myohyang. There was also homage-paying at the birthplace of Kim-Il sung.



As we travelled along the highways the feeling of quietness haunted me again. Shops, hotels and gas stations were nonexistent. The roads, mostly empty of cars, carried a few cyclists and many people on foot. Movement appeared in slow motion, and so did the countryside. Beyond the roadside trees lay what appeared to be a lifeless landscape except for scraps of woodland clinging to steep slopes and the tops of mountains. River valleys were severely eroded; every inch of arable land was cultivated, mined or fallow. We often saw families in the frigid rivers collecting minerals for fertiliser.



Given that it was winter and temperatures hovered around freezing, I didn’t expect to see a lot of wildlife. We saw almost none. This was a constant topic of conversation for many of us. The landscape was eerily quiet.



We were told, often, of heroic reforestation efforts. At the nursery we were proudly shown a newly built greenhouse for tree propagation. But it turned out there was usually no power for heating or running the potting machines.



After a week, it was time to return to the outside world. Back at the airport they returned our cellphones, and confiscated our visas. I guess I won’t be needing it again.



There was a strangely proud and defiant attitude among the Koreans I met, but I wonder how deeply that had been shaped by the regime. They clearly need help. Their landscape needs help too.



Restoring North Korea’s destroyed environment will take time, resources and money, but it can be done. To improve people’s lives, two types of restoration should be given priority: biodiversity and agro-forestry, focused on providing food, fibre and wood.



To that end I am working on setting up a chapter of the Society for Ecological Restoration in China in the hope that it can serve as a conduit for scientific and technical exchange with North Korean scientists. Many of my colleagues on the trip are exploring similar opportunities for the exchange of information and technical know-how.



We can’t ignore the repressive regime that controls every aspect of life in North Korea. But I would argue that restoring the landscape and lifting people out of poverty will help them in spite of their leaders. The health of the land and food security could serve as catalysts for them to effect positive and lasting change in this depressing and forgotten country.



Keith Bowers is a restoration ecologist and landscape architect and president of Biohabitats, an ecological restoration consultancy based in Baltimore, Maryland.







Diary: North Korea in 1970

By Tariq Ali, London Review of Books, January 26, 2012



Forty-two years ago, I was mysteriously invited to visit North Korea. Pakistan’s military dictatorship had been toppled after a three-month struggle and in March 1970 the country was in the throes of its first ever general election campaign. I was travelling to every major town and many smaller ones, interviewing opposition politicians and those who’d taken part in the uprising for a book. I was still there in May, my work unfinished, when the invitation arrived. North Korea was even then a country set apart.



The letter came via a local Communist known as Rahim ‘Koreawallah’, secretary of the Pak-Korea Friendship Society. Short, paunchy, loquacious and full of beer, he was out of breath as he handed me the letter from Pyongyang. I had to leave straightaway, he said. Why? Because the North Koreans were convinced that the US was preparing to invade and needed global solidarity. In January 1968 the Koreans had captured the USS Pueblo, a naval intelligence vessel, and arrested its crew. Relations between the two countries remained poor. Could I leave next week, Koreawallah asked? I laughed and said no.



I was on my way to what was then East Pakistan. North Korea was a distraction. Koreawallah was both angry and insistent, but his argument was weak. There was no evidence that Washington was preparing for war. I had experience to back me up. A few years earlier I had spent six weeks in North Vietnam and, as well as crouching in air-raid shelters during US bombing raids on Hanoi, I sat through several military briefings by senior Vietnamese officers who made it clear that they would eventually win the war. For the Americans, already overstretched in Indochina, a new war in Korea would be suicidal.



I had other reasons not to go. I thought Kim Il-sung a ridiculous and abhorrent leader, his regime a parody of Stalinist Russia. I turned down the offer again, this time more forcefully. But my parents, both of them Communists, thought I should take advantage of the opportunity to see the country (they had never been). And Koreawallah would not be deterred. With a sly smile, he let drop that I could go via China, taking a train from Beijing to Pyongyang. That decided the matter. I was desperate to visit Beijing and this seemed my only chance. I just said I couldn’t go until mid-June.



When I returned to Dhaka after two gruelling weeks in the countryside, a problem had arisen. The East Pakistan trade unions had called a one-day general strike – a show of strength against General Yahya Khan’s transitional regime in Islamabad – on the day I was due to get an early morning flight from Dhaka to Canton. I took it personally. Friends asked the Communist leaders of the taxi and rickshaw drivers’ unions for a 30-minute exemption so I could get to the airport. Their pleas were rightly rejected. When the local student leaders stepped in, the unions relented. There could be no motorised traffic on the streets, but I could travel by cycle rickshaw.



My suitcase and I were too much for the emaciated driver. After ten minutes of huffing and puffing we’d got nowhere. Worried I might miss the flight, I asked him to get in the back and pedalled like crazy for the five or so miles to the airport. Apart from stray animals, there was nothing else on the road. When we got to the airport the rickshaw-wallah, seeing me bathed in sweat, grinned broadly and refused to accept my money. I stuffed it down his dry vest and ran to the plane. Soon after it took off, the strike committees closed down the airport. I had predicted that Pakistan was about to break up but I didn’t think as I watched the morning sun rise over the paddy fields that it would be my last glimpse of East Pakistan.



In Beijing posters decorated the streets, loud music blared from speakers and groups of children bowed before portraits of the Great Helmsman. A stream of bicycles flowed along unpolluted thoroughfares. How lucky they were, I thought, not to fetishise the car. I wandered away from the hotel, managed to find Tiananmen Square, discovered a cheap and good restaurant, then headed back to the hotel, where two Korean Embassy officials were waiting to take me on a low-key tour of the Forbidden City. We appeared to be the only foreign visitors. Chicago Journals – Critical Inquiry



Later that afternoon, I packed for the two-day train journey to Pyongyang and we set off for the station. There was no phrasebook in the hotel. The only Chinese I knew was ‘Mao Chushi Wansui’ – ‘Mao Zedong will live ten thousand years’ – which wasn’t much help in ordering a meal or finding the lavatory. Mercifully a Sikh courier from the Indian Embassy came into my compartment before the train left the station. By chance, I think. After we had exchanged greetings in Punjabi he told me he was fluent in Mandarin and, much more important, that his wife had cooked food for the journey and he hoped I would share it.



Just before the train began to move, two PLA officers also entered the compartment. No, they laughed, they were not going to Pyongyang. My efforts to draw out their thoughts on the Cultural Revolution failed, but they were eager to discuss Pakistan and surprised to hear my criticism of its military dictators: Chinese propaganda portrayed them as ‘anti-imperialist allies’. They hadn’t heard about the recent uprising. The jollier of the two warned me about the ‘personality cult’ in Korea and my Sikh friend roared: he never stayed more than a night at the embassy in Pyongyang. The PLA men got off at Beidaihe, a seaside resort east of Beijing. Once frequented by emperors, their wives and concubines, it had become a favourite spot for Communist Party leaders. ‘If these two are holidaying here,’ my fellow traveller muttered, ‘they must be important or related to someone who is, just like in our part of the world.’ Unlike me, he found this thought reassuring.



Colonised by the Japanese between 1910, when they annexed the country, and the end of the Second World War, Korea experienced both ‘modernity’ and extreme brutality and repression. The country’s mineral wealth was used to buttress Japanese militarism; local workers were paid starvation wages; tens of thousands of women were treated as prostitutes by the occupiers but not paid for their services. The Japanese aimed at total integration: Korean was forbidden in schools, Korean-language newspapers were banned and people were to use Japanese names. Agriculture met imperial needs – thousands of farmers were expelled from the land and the bulk of the rice and wheat produced was sent to Japan – leading to mass starvation. A Japanese proconsul admitted that every spring half of Korea’s farmers lived off grass and bark. The two million Koreans transported to Japan as slave labourers were lucky in one sense: they were fed.



All this, unsurprisingly, led the Koreans to develop strong nationalist feelings, though fear limited the number who joined clandestine groups. Indigenous Communists were active in these groups: they worked alongside the nationalists and were widely seen as heroic figures. During the Second World War a resistance movement gradually took shape, at its strongest in the South. Its members – students, intellectuals and peasants – faced the usual penalties of occupation: torture, rape, mass killings and burial in unmarked graves.



The defeat of Japan in 1945 was greeted joyously, and popular committees sprang up in a number of cities. The future of Korea wasn’t discussed at Yalta where the division of Europe was decided, but Moscow and Washington privately agreed on a similar division of the Korean peninsula. The Red Army marched into North Korea, with Kim Il-sung reportedly in one of its tanks; the United States took the South. General MacArthur flew into Seoul with a valuable piece of hand luggage: Syngman Rhee. Rhee had little support, however, so MacArthur used the Korean members of the Japanese Occupation Army to keep control of the new state. This in itself was enough to alienate the people. Dissent was crushed, people were imprisoned en masse, Communists and anti-American nationalists were disappeared or openly assassinated. ‘The jails in Seoul are overcrowded with political prisoners,’ Frank Baldwin, an adviser at the US Embassy, reported:



Six weeks ago I inspected a police jail in Inchon. The prisoners there were living under conditions which I hesitate to describe in this letter. It reminds you of a sense of the Divina Commedia. Goya could have painted what we saw there. What is going to happen to the almost 10,000 political prisoners in case the capital is to be surrendered? It is hard to imagine the acts of vengeance and hatred which people will commit if they survive the conquest of Seoul by their ‘liberators’.



The involvement of the US and the Soviet Union had put an end to any chance of Korean autonomy, but Soviet prestige was still high and many believed that the Russians would help liberate and reform the whole country. Few believed partition was permanent. Kim Il-sung, installed as leader of the People’s Committee by the Soviets, was barely known, but local Communists had no reason to doubt him.



Growing popular anger in the South and an overwhelming desire for reunification triggered the invasion of the South by the North in 1950. Lacking popular support, the Rhee government collapsed and had to be rescued by US troops. The Soviet Union boycotted a Security Council session at which they could have vetoed America’s war, conducted under the UN flag. The Chinese revolution had panicked Washington. It couldn’t be allowed to spread.



US troops and their allies (including the Japanese navy) pushed the North Korean army back. The Chinese revolution was less than a year old and its leaders saw the war in Korea as an attempt to reverse events in China. A Politburo meeting determined to save the Koreans. Chinese troops under the command of General Peng Dehuai crossed the Yalu River in droves. The Americans and their allies were driven back to the 38th parallel. General MacArthur declared that it might be necessary to nuke Chinese air bases; Truman sacked him. In 1953 a truce was signed at Panmunjom on the 38th parallel. Around a million soldiers and two million civilians had died (there are many different estimates). One of them was Mao’s oldest and favourite son.



Twenty years later I was about to cross the Yalu River on a Chinese train. At Sinuiju, I was welcomed onto the sacred soil of the DPRK with a bunch of flowers. Standing in front of a life-size statue of Kim Il-sung, my host told me that he was a bit disturbed by the scale of the personality cult in China. In Pyongyang a Young Pioneer gave me another bouquet of flowers. I was shocked at what I saw as we drove through the city: we could have been in Eastern Europe after the Second World War. Then I remembered that what General Curtis LeMay had threatened to do to North Vietnam had already been done to North Korea: it had been bombed into the Stone Age. There were no protests in the West against the heavy bombing of Pyongyang at only 15 minutes’ notice: 697 tons of bombs were dropped on the city, 10,000 litres of napalm; 62,000 rounds were used for ‘strafing at low level’.



Three years earlier in Phnom Penh the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett had told me that what I had seen in Vietnam was ‘nothing compared to what they did to Korea. I was there. There were only two buildings left standing in Pyongyang.’ It was alleged that the US had used germ warfare, and although the US dismissed these claims as ‘outrageous’, on 9 August 1970 the New York Times reported that chemical weapons had been considered after ‘American ground forces in Korea were overwhelmed by Chinese Communist human wave attacks near the Yalu River’. Pentagon policymakers wanted to ‘find a way to stop mass infantry attacks’, so ‘the army dug into captured Nazi chemical warfare documents describing sarin, a nerve gas so lethal that a few pounds could kill thousands of people in minutes if the deadly material were disbursed effectively.’ Was it used in Korea? Probably not, though germ warfare tests were conducted in US cities. In one test ‘harmless’ bacteria were introduced into the Pentagon’s air-conditioning system.



I asked to see the foreign minister to discuss the tensions with the United States, but, to my minders’ surprise, I didn’t ask to meet Kim Il-sung. My first few days in Pyongyang were spent visiting museums with my excellent interpreter and a minder – ‘the chief of protocol’. They both accompanied me everywhere. At the war museum I asked why there was no sign of the Chinese ‘volunteers’ without whom the war would have been lost. No reply. Finally the guide went upstairs and returned with the museum director. I repeated my question. ‘We did have the display but those rooms have been closed for repairs and painting. The photographs have been removed to safe places.’ I asked to see where they had been, but the men’s embarrassment was so painful I gave up. We moved on to the museum of art. After seeing four rooms filled with bad paintings of Kim Il-sung, his mother and other relatives, I lost my cool and asked to see something from earlier centuries. After a hurried consultation with my minder, the director asked us to follow him, making it clear that he was doing me a huge favour.



Locked away in the underground vaults were the most stunning tomb paintings I have ever seen. Some dated back two thousand years, others were from the 11th and 12th centuries. They depicted soldiers, hunters, scenes of wealth, exquisitely beautiful women. I thanked the director profusely and said I hoped that Koreans would one day be able to see these treasures. He smiled and shrugged. He was the only person I met there who didn’t mention Kim Il-sung once, let alone refer to him as the ‘great and beloved leader’ – GBL – of 40 million Korean people. One day I was driven to Mangyongdae, where I was promised a real treat. It turned out to be Kim’s birthplace and virtually the whole city was a shrine to him, with all the same stories I had heard dozens of times about his heroism repeated yet again.



Back at the hotel I saw a very pregnant Kathleen Cleaver in the lobby with Maceo, her son with the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. We spoke briefly before she was whisked away and I never caught sight of her again. Later I discovered that her husband had met Kim Il-sung and pledged the support of the Black Panther Party. That no money changed hands in return for this is inconceivable. American friends told me afterwards that Kathleen had been kept in her room in Pyongyang for four months, a punishment her husband had decreed after discovering that the baby wasn’t his. Kim had obliged his new friend. Useful to know, I thought.



It was still early evening. There was no bar in the hotel so I went to the billiard room to bash balls. Three tall men I hadn’t seen before were at the table. Two of them spoke English. They were students from the University of Havana, in Pyongyang on a three-year course in exchange for the hundreds of Korean students who were sent to Cuba to train as doctors. Why them? They laughed. Protocol demanded that someone be sent. They thought I would get on with the Cuban ambassador and so we left in the embassy car for tamarind juice and mojitos followed by a very good meal. The ambassador was a veteran of the revolution. Sending him to Korea had not been a friendly act: ‘I’d got a bit critical of Fidel and the way things were being done in Cuba. I talked to many others about this and Fidel got angry. I would have preferred prison but they sent me here instead. It’s worked. Havana’s a paradise and Fidel is god. Just get me out of here. I’ll never open my mouth again.’ It was the most enjoyable evening I spent in the DPRK.



The next week was spent in trains and cars. The car would often stop in the middle of nowhere. We would get out and I would be shown a site where ‘GBL Comrade Kim Il-sung gave on-the-spot guidance to peasants on the wheat harvest.’ At one point, in the middle of nowhere, I asked them to stop. My bladder was full. As I got out of the car I said: ‘I’m just going to give on-the-spot guidance to that tree.’ The interpreter and minder convulsed with laughter. It was the most reassuring sight of my trip. Nothing was said when I returned to the car, but we never stopped again. Chicago Journals – The Fate of Rural Hell



At Panmunjom on the 38th parallel the loudspeakers were blaring out cliché-ridden propaganda. American soldiers were lounging around, occasionally pointing at the speakers and laughing. I asked the Koreans if I could use a loudhailer. When they finally agreed, I asked the Americans why they were hanging around in Asia given that their own country was on fire. They woke up a bit. I gave an account of the Kent State shootings – the Ohio National Guard had fired on and killed four students for protesting against Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia – which had taken place only a few weeks before. Four million US students had gone on strike. I asked the soldiers to join me in a minute’s silence in memory of the dead students, at which point a senior officer came and shepherded them all back to barracks. The Koreans were amazed. I resisted the temptation to point out that my ‘on-the-spot guidance’ had been more effective than GBL’s propaganda.



Back in Pyongyang I was granted my appointment with the foreign minister, who gave me the official Korean position on the world. I listened politely. As I was about to leave he said: ‘We appreciated your talk at Panmunjom, but there is one thing you don’t seem to understand about our country. You do not appreciate the role that Comrade Kim Il-sung played in liberating and creating the DPRK.’ I couldn’t deny this. He gave me an odd smile.



Two years later I was asked back, to give a speech at a conference on the ‘role of US imperialism in Asia’. I was reluctant but the Vietnamese persuaded me. They hadn’t been invited and wanted their position on the subject defended. This time the journey took even longer. We were flown first to Prague, where the Russian military plane that was to transport us to Pyongyang was five days late. When it finally arrived it was filthy and rank; in the middle of the night it stopped to refuel at Omsk in below freezing conditions, and a few of us rushed out to breathe some fresh air. In Pyongyang, each delegate was assigned a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. I’d been hoping to be assigned the same interpreter, but my luck was out. He’d asked me for an English dictionary: I gave the one I’d brought to the new team and asked them to pass it on to him. They said he’d been transferred to a small town. At the hotel a senior party apparatchik was meeting with each delegate or delegation separately. The subject of the conference had been changed, he told me. It was GBL’s 60th birthday and they thought we should discuss ‘Comrade Kim Il-sung’s contribution to Marxism-Leninism’. I refused point blank and demanded a flight back home. The apparatchik left the room in a nervous state.



Over dinner that night an affable Algerian professor and a representative of Frelimo from Mozambique couldn’t believe what I’d done. The Algerian said he had sold himself for $5000, the friend from Frelimo was too ashamed to name the sum he’d accepted. The next morning I was offered $10,000, which would have come in extremely handy for the magazine I was editing. I was tempted to accept and then make a purely satirical speech, but I declined. They still wouldn’t let me leave. There was no flight to Europe for a week. I said I’d fly to Pakistan. They told me that was difficult too. The Vietnamese ambassador came to see me. He pleaded with me not to leave. ‘The personality cult is bad here,’ he said. ‘Very, very bad.’



At an official reception the day before the conference began we were all introduced to GBL. Never in my life had I felt such an aversion to a political figure on the left. His bloated neck seemed to be inviting a bullet. I wished I’d been a Decembrist. The only words he addressed to me were distinctly odd: ‘London, yes? “The Red Flag”. They still sing it?’



They made the mistake of seating me on the plenum. I didn’t applaud a single speech, but I did keep notes. The Politburo star who opened the conference – the subject was ‘the task of social science to thoroughly defend the great leader Comrade Kim Il-sung’s revolutionary thinking and propagate it extensively’ – quoted a GBL speech. ‘There is a revolutionary song which says: “Let cowards flinch and traitors sneer. We’ll keep the Red Flag flying here.” This expresses our unvarying determination.’ I wondered who in Moscow had introduced him to the anthem of British social democracy. His appalling speech was interrupted 143 times for applause, standing ovations etc. My table in the hotel restaurant expanded each day as more and more desperadoes came to joke about our situation. Our codename for GBL was Peterson.



The reason for the absurdly narcissistic cult was obvious. Who the hell was Kim Il-sung? Where did he come from? Had he ever operated as a guerrilla leader? There had been other well-known Korean Communists, including a female general. Kim Il-sung killed some of them. Others had fled to China during the Japanese occupation and fought alongside Mao’s partisans. Many veterans of the Long March were Koreans. It is possible that Kim Il-sung operated as a guerrilla in China and then fled to Russia. We don’t know for sure. What we do know is that the Red Army freed the country in 1945 and the Chinese saved it during the Korean War. But these facts were never mentioned in DPRK propaganda. ‘Juche’, an aggressive form of self-reliance, was the word coined to designate this xenophobia. When I asked the interpreter on my first trip whether he had read any Marx or Engels or Lenin, he looked puzzled. ‘No,’ he told me. ‘Everything is interpreted by Comrade Kim Il-sung.’ He wasn’t sure whether any of the classic texts were available in libraries.



At one stage it appeared that the United States was going to buy out the North Koreans. Clinton despatched Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang in 2000 to do a deal – loadsamoney for the Kims, denuclearisation of sorts followed by a soft reunification with the South – but it didn’t go through. Bush had no interest at all in contact. Why? I got an answer of sorts after a public debate on the Iraq war in Berlin in 2003. My opponent was Ruth Wedgwood from Yale, an adviser to Donald Rumsfeld. Over lunch I asked her about their plans for North Korea. She was cogent. ‘You haven’t seen the glint in the eyes of the South Korean military,’ she said. ‘They’re desperate to get hold of the North’s nuclear arsenal. That’s unacceptable.’ Why? ‘Because if a unified Korea becomes a nuclear power, it will be impossible to stop Japan from becoming one too and if you have China, Japan and a unified Korea as nuclear states, it shifts the relationship of forces against us.’ Obama seems to agree with this way of thinking. His problem is China. The Chinese once appeared indifferent to Korea’s fate. That’s no longer the case. The areas near the border with China are experiencing a boom and Chinese TV programmes are heaven compared to Kimmist output. How long will Beijing allow this absurd opera to continue? We hope you enjoyed reading this free diary from the London Review of Books. Subscribe now to access every article from every fortnightly issue of the London Review of Books, including the entire LRB archive of over 12,500 essays and reviews.



Letters



Vol. 34 No. 3 · 9 February 2012



‘Who the hell was Kim Il-sung?’ Tariq Ali asks (LRB, 26 January). ‘Where did he come from?’ Well, he first came to prominence in 1933 at the battle at Dongning when he led two Korean guerrilla companies against a strong Japanese counterattack. By 1937, mention was made of him as a talented leader against ‘Japanese imperialists’ in a Soviet military journal. Kim Il-sung’s fight against the Japanese in China and ‘Manchukuo’ is documented. It profits Ali little to question it.



R. Jakob Cambria New York



Vol. 34 No. 4 · 23 February 2012



I was struck by Tariq Ali’s mention of allegations that the US had used germ warfare in Korea (LRB, 26 January). I was teaching in China for a year in 1987 at the West China University of Medical Science in Chengdu. We had an elderly friend there, Stephen Yang, who was head of the department of thoracic surgery and whom we visited often. I quote from my diary written at the time:



Supper at Stephen’s and we look at old photos. Quietly he shows us an album of poor black and white snaps, his record of 1953-54 when he was a member of a small medical team in what is today North Korea. He described how they were constantly bombed by the US but the hospital was built in caves along the sides of minor tributary valleys, and the bombs were directed to the main valley so they were spared. He recalls two young American prisoners being brought in, trembling with fear, anticipating torture and death; he was able to reassure them and amazed them by recalling his days as a student in the US. In one or two pictures, there were strange sets of what looked like small metal cages. ‘Oh yes, those are the cages that contained plague infested animals dropped by the Americans. Luckily it was very cold weather and animals and viruses quickly froze to death’ was his calm explanation.



Stephen was a Quaker, a life-long pacifist, who did his medical studies in the US and Canada and returned to China in 1951. He is dead now, and I do not know what happened to his photographs.



Pat Stapleton Beaumont du Ventoux, France







North Korea’s caste system faces power of wealth

By TIM SULLIVAN, Associated Press, Dec. 29, 2012



A rare report on the North Korean social structure. It seems quite similar to the system that existed under Mao in China before the so-called counter-revolution.



In this setup the top leaders were labeled workers or poor peasants based on the social positions their families had had at the time of the victory of the 1940 revolution or even back in the 1920s when some of them had joined the Communist Party. The poor peasants who descended from those who had been landholders before 1949 and the great land reform that followed, would be labeled landlords.



A way of covering up the actual social position of the bureaucrats at the top (and even of denying the existence of the caste).

Fred Feldman



For more than a half-century, a mysterious caste system has shadowed the life of every North Korean. It can decide whether they will live in the gated compounds of the minuscule elite, or in mountain villages where farmers hack at rocky soil with handmade tools. It can help determine what hospital will take them if they fall sick, whether they go to college and, very often, whom they will marry. It is called songbun. And officially, it does not exist at all.



The power of caste remains potent, exiles and scholars say, generations after it was permanently branded onto every family based on their supposed ideological purity. But today it is also quietly fraying, weakened by the growing importance of something that barely existed until recently in socialist North Korea: wealth.



Like almost all change in North Korea’s deeply opaque society, where so much is hidden to outsiders, the shift is happening slowly and often silently. But in the contest for power within the closed world that Pyongyang has created, defectors, analysts and activists say money is now competing with the domination of political caste.



“There’s one place where songbun doesn’t matter, and that’s in business,” said a North Korean soldier-turned-businessman who fled to South Korea after a prison stint, and who now lives in a working-class apartment building on the fringes of Seoul. “Songbun means nothing to people who want to make money.”



Songbun, a word that translates as “ingredient” but effectively means “background,” first took shape in the 1950s and ’60s. It was a time when North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, was forging one of the world’s most repressive states and seeking ways to reward supporters and isolate potential enemies.



Historians say songbun was partially modeled on Soviet class divisions, and echoes a similar system that China abandoned in the 1980s amid the growth of the market economy there. In Korea, songbun turned a fiercely hierarchical society upside down, pushing peasants to the top of the caste ladder; aristocrats and landlords toward the bottom. The very top was reserved for those closest to Kim: his relatives and guerrillas who had fought with him against Korea’s Japanese occupiers.



Very quickly, though, songbun became a professional hierarchy. The low caste became farmers and miners. The high caste filled the powerful bureaucracies. And children grew up and stepped into their parents’ roles.



“If you were a peasant and you owned nothing, then all of a sudden you were at the top of the society,” said Bob Collins, who wove together smuggled documents, interviews with former North Korean security officials and discussions with an array of ordinary North Koreans to write an exhaustive songbun study released this year by the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. While the songbun system theoretically allows for movement within the hierarchy, Collins said most families’ standing today remains a reflection of their ancestors’ position in the 1950s and ’60s.



Generations after the system began, many of North Korea’s most powerful people are officially identified as “peasants.”



But starting in the mid-1990s and accelerating in recent years, songbun – long the arbiter of North Korean life – became one part of something far more complicated.



“Songbun cannot collapse. Because that would mean the collapse of the entire system,” said Kim Hee Tae, head of the Seoul-based group Human Rights, which maintains a network of contacts in the North. “But people increasingly believe that money is more important than your background.”



Despite its power, songbun is an almost-silent presence. Few people ever see their own songbun paperwork. Few low-caste families speak of it at all, exiles say, left mute by incomprehension and fear. It’s only when young people stumble into glass ceilings, normally when applying to universities or for jobs, that they begin to understand the years of slights.



Eventually, most grow to understand and accept its power, but they rarely have more than a general idea of where they fit into the pecking order, experts said. In a country where secrecy is reflexive, the state simply denies it exists.



“This is all nonsense!” a North Korean government minder said, interrupting a visiting American journalist when he tried to ask a woman about her family’s songbun. “People make up lies about my country!”



Certainly, few ordinary North Koreans understand the staggering and sometimes shifting complexities of songbun, which at its core divided the entire population into three main categories – “core,” ”wavering” and “hostile” classes – and subdivided those into some four dozen subcategories.



North Koreans with songbun good enough for the top jobs will still likely get minimal salaries, but perks for the elite could include a good apartment in Pyongyang, regular electricity, access to quality medical clinics and easier admission to top schools for their children. In a culture where parents have immense influence over the choice of their children’s spouses, high-songbun partners are prized.



But to be caught at the bottom, defectors say, is to be lost in a nightmare of bloodline and bureaucracy.



“My family was in the lowest of the lowest level,” said a former North Korean coal miner who fled to South Korea in 2006, hoping to give his young sons opportunities outside the mines. “Someone from the state was always watching what we were saying, watching what we were doing … The state treated us as if they were doing us a favor simply by allowing us to live.”



The man, like other North Korean refugees interviewed for this story, spoke on condition he not be named, fearing that relatives still in the North would be punished.



When he was a boy he had hoped to be a doctor, or perhaps a government official. He was a top student, he says. But when colleges kept rejecting him, his father finally told him the truth: His father, it turned out, had been born in South Korea, served in its army and been taken prisoner during the Korean War. Like thousands of other southern POWs, he disappeared into the North’s prison gulag, and then was forced into the coal mines.



With songbun like that, his choices were few. He would never become a government official. Getting into college, and perhaps eventually landing nonpolitical work, would have required impossibly large bribes. North Korea’s growing network of small informal markets, a path out of desperate poverty for some, had yet to arrive in his village, deep in the countryside.



“I couldn’t live my dreams because of my father,” said the thin, ropy man, with the biceps of someone who spent 17 years swinging a pick deep underground.



But while North Korea is often portrayed as a Soviet throwback stranded in the 1950s, a reputation it earned with decades of isolation and single-family rule, strains of change do ripple beneath its Stalinist exterior. That has created a complex and uneasy relationship between songbun and wealth.



Most North Koreans have never met a foreigner, seen the Internet, or earned more than a couple hundred dollars a month – but those in a growing economic elite now fly to Beijing and Singapore to shop. It’s a country where human rights groups say well over 100,000 political prisoners are held in a series of isolated prison camps, but where an exclusive European firm, Kempinski, hopes to be running a hotel soon.



The market economy first took hold during the rule of Kim Jong Il, the son of the nation’s founder, who ran the country from the 1990s until his death in late 2011, when his son then took control. In the mid-1990s, poor harvests and the end of Soviet assistance lead to widespread famine.



Official controls relaxed as hunger tore at the country.



Reluctantly, the government allowed the establishment of informal markets, with ordinary people setting up stalls to sell food, clothes or cheap consumer goods. Since then, the government has alternately allowed the markets to flourish and cracked down on them, leaving many people working in legally gray areas. At the same time, state-sanctioned trade has also blossomed, much of it mineral exports to China.



While many defectors and analysts say songbun remains a commanding presence in everyday life, a handful feel the growth of markets has reduced the caste system to little more than a bureaucratic shell. But to some extent, in a murky economy where nearly any major business deal requires under-the-table payments, most analysts believe it is the same songbun elite that profits in the business world. They are part of an informal club that gives them access to powerful contacts. If they need help finalizing a black market business deal, they have people to call.



“Who gets the bribes?” asked Collins, who believes the caste system remains deeply entrenched. “It’s the guys at the upper levels of songbun.”



This is also a time when songbun often has a price, even if no one bothers quoting it in North Korea’s unstable currency, the won.



“It costs five to ten pheasants to get into a good university,” said Kang Cheol Hwan, a prominent North Korean defector, using North Korean slang for 10,000-yen Japanese bills, which show two of the birds and are worth about $125 apiece. “The price goes up as the background goes down.”



While amounts like that remain unimaginable for most in North Korea, where the per capita GDP is estimated at $1,800 per year, the small consumer class is growing – and looking for ways to get ahead, no matter their songbun. While high-level government jobs remain restricted to those with excellent songbun, the low-caste also now have ways to get ahead. If they can afford it.



“Increasingly, there are ways to buy your way into jobs,” said the former soldier and businessman, a short man with thick shoulders, huge hands and an expression frozen in a scowl.



Today, it’s possible to make serious money in North Korea. There are Mercedes for the tiny population of truly rich, and Chinese-made sedans for the aspiring-to-be-rich. North Korean arrivistes can buy toddler-sized battery-powered cars for their children.



The ex-soldier lives in a tiny two-room apartment on the fifth floor of yet another Seoul high-rise, set amid a cluster of near-identical buildings, a concrete forest of middle-class anonymity. He doesn’t want to talk about his songbun – though it becomes clear it was closer to the bottom than the top – but he says he eventually got a government job importing raw materials from China, then reselling them in North Korea. “You can’t get the jobs at the very top, but you can buy your way into the lower end of the top jobs,” he said.



Before he was arrested and sent to prison for helping smuggle someone into China, he says he could make up to $5,000 a month – a fortune for a man raised in a mining village in the rugged, poverty-savaged northeast.



But is this changing system, with the ever-increasing power of money, any fairer than one based purely on songbun? Certainly it is no gentler.



Getting rich in North Korea isn’t easy, with the bribes, the thugs and the risk of getting handed over to the authorities. The people who succeed are often like the former soldier, with his air of menace and his run-ins with the law. What he describes as the ideological brutality of his youth has given way to something else, a hard-to-define tangle where it’s often impossible to separate songbun from corruption and the Darwinian brutality of the market economy.



More than five years after he moved to Seoul, in some ways he still lives with that brutality. You can see it in the three locks he has on his front door. And you can hear it when you leave, and all three quickly click shut behind you.



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