Dear Leader (21 page)

This is also the reason why there was not a single General Meeting of the Workers’ Party for over twenty years between the sixth General Meeting of October 1980 and my crossing of the Tumen River in 2004. Kim Jong-il had so weakened the Politburo itself, which came under the authority of the Party’s General Secretary, Kim Il-sung, that it was powerless even to call meetings.

As Kim Jong-il consolidated his authority, just as the father was the public power-holder while the son was the actual power-holder, a dual structure came into being whereby real power depended on the level of trust Kim Jong-il placed in one, rather than on one’s official position. This made it impossible for outsiders to analyse the workings of North Korea, as the revealed hierarchy was a sop to the old guard and actual power was held by trusted individuals beyond public scrutiny.

In other words, supporters of Kim Il-sung might be given prestigious official posts, but actual powers were restricted to Kim Jong-il’s own associates. A cross-shaped system with two power structures emerged, whereby publicly high-ranking positions and Kim Jong-il’s delegation of actual power were never vested in a single person. For example, Park Ui-chun, the Foreign Minister, was nothing but a straw man, while First Deputy Minister Kang Sok-ju held the real power in international affairs. This discrepancy between the hidden and surface structures allowed Kim Jong-il to maintain a system of control that could not be understood or manipulated by any outsider.

In the process of consolidating his authority, Kim Jong-il did not hold back from humiliating his father, and the following incident demonstrates the Supreme Leader’s impotence in the face of his son and his son’s OGD.

As one of the eight writers of the
Annals
, I was vested with the authority to summon for interview any of the surviving official witnesses of North Korean history relevant to my area of study, including the nation’s most senior generals. Through one of them, I discovered the real reason for the revolutionary re-education of Kim Du-nam, who had been Kim Il-sung’s military adviser.

‘Revolutionary re-education’ encompasses all the Party’s warnings and penalties related to ideological sessions, forced labour, expulsion from the Party, loss of post or banishment. In fact, among North Korea’s senior cadres, there aren’t many who haven’t received such a ‘re-education’, because it is seen as a kind of vaccination against a full-blown greed for power. There are even senior cadres who are former inmates of North Korea’s infamous Yodok camp. Unlike other prison camps, where you can only leave as a corpse, going to Yodok is not the end of your life or career if you choose to endure forced labour and indoctrination obediently. It is a brutal ideological training camp, where you re-learn the only truth that matters in North Korea: that loyalty to Dear Leader buys renown, and disobedience brings death.
The person from whom I first began to understand the events relating to Kim Du-nam was a general whose father had lost his authority as a consequence of Kim Il-sung’s unseen fall from power. Although it was he who told me the story, he too seemed to fear Yodok.

‘No stranger must know this story. Don’t write it down: just know about it. Better still, hear it to understand it, and then erase it from your memory.’

This is the story he told me.

In the mid 1980s, a high-ranking military group from the USSR visited North Korea. Kim Il-sung wanted to enquire about the hospitality being offered to them, and ordered his military adviser Kim Du-nam, a four-star general, to request their schedule from the military’s Foreign Affairs Bureau. When Kim Il-sung discovered that the visitors were staying at a guesthouse belonging to the Ministry of People’s Armed Forces, he phoned his son Kim Jong-il to ask whether it might be more suitable to accord them the level of hospitality more appropriate to a head of state, suggesting the Baekhwa-won Guesthouse as a possibility.

Kim Jong-il immediately ordered the OGD to reveal who had notified Kim Il-sung’s office about the arrangements for the USSR delegation. The next day, he fired the Director of Foreign Affairs of the Ministry of People’s Armed Forces, and sentenced Kim Il-sung’s military adviser, Kim Du-nam, to ‘revolutionary re-education’ for six months.

Among many further indignities, Kim Il-sung had to offer up a personal ode of praise on his son’s fiftieth birthday, on 16 February 1992.

In this way, Kim Il-sung lived out his final years as the leading character in his own cult, which was, however, controlled by the son who had effectively usurped him and who would now succeed him.

But Kim Jong-il was careful to keep up the pretence that father and son got along well. In 1994, after Kim Il-sung’s death, the
North Korean state publicised artefacts associated with the Supreme Leader’s office. Among them was a speech handwritten by Kim Il-sung before his death, in which he proposed a summit to discuss unification with South Korea. This manuscript was even publicly displayed in the Mount Keumsu Memorial Palace for propaganda purposes in support of the ideology of federal unification of the two Koreas.

It seemed that Kim Jong-il supported his father’s pursuit of peaceful unification. But in reality and behind the scenes, he fiercely opposed it. In 1994, alarmed by the threat of pre-emptive strikes made by the US, Kim Jong-il permitted former US president Jimmy Carter to visit Pyongyang. Kim Il-sung took the opportunity to declare publicly his approval for an inter-Korean summit, and many in the international community noted optimistically that North Korea’s leader had reached out to the world. They perhaps did not realise that Kim Il-sung was no longer in control, nor that Kim Jong-il – who did hold power – was pitted against his father.

Among the source materials I saw during the course of my work on the
Annals of the Kim Dynasty
, there was one document in particular that illustrated the contrast between what Kim Jong-il projected through propaganda and his actual intentions. The document in question is the minutes of a Party meeting that took place in early July 1994, organised by Kim Jong-il himself. According to these minutes, the meeting was titled ‘Today’s climate calls for practical developmental policies for protecting Socialism, not policies for unification of the homeland’. It called on cadres to discredit all thoughts of unification associated with the inter-Korean summit that his father had proposed, going so far as to state that his suggestions were indicators of senility. In fact, the conversation records a meeting that was held among Kim Jong-il’s closest associates not only to criticise Kim Il-sung’s proposal, but to obstruct it.

Why then did Kim Il-sung stubbornly pursue the summit in the
face of Kim Jong-il’s opposition? Authority to talk to the outside world, which he had as the apparent leader of North Korea, was the last remaining power he held. Putting unification on an agenda that was so publicly and irrevocably in view of the world was perhaps a final attempt to have his say on the future of Korea in a way that his son could not merely ignore and recast.

Kim Jong-il refused to fulfil even one of his father’s simplest last requests. Kim Il-sung had said that when he died, he wanted to be buried alongside his fallen comrades at the Mount Daesung Revolutionary Martyrs’ Memorial. After his death, his ex-guerrilla comrades even signed a group petition for this wish to be carried out. But Kim Jong-il thought that if Kim Il-sung’s body were laid to rest at this location, the authority of his father’s revolutionary comrades would be seen to be reasserted, which might in turn threaten his own power because he had once taken away theirs.

As if to reflect his anxiety over this divisive and delicate balance, at the same time as he refused the Mount Daesung burial, he announced to the world through the Workers’ Party newspaper
Rodong Sinmun
that ‘It is the most righteous and moral thing to respect the first generation of revolutionaries’, referring to the very group who were his enemies. Meanwhile, Kim Il-sung, denied his last wish of being buried next to his supporters, was mummified in the Mount Keumsu Memorial Palace – spending his afterlife as a propaganda icon used to legitimise Kim Jong-il’s hereditary succession.

Given the subterfuge and machinations performed by Kim Jong-il against his father, it was no easy task for me and my seven colleagues at the UFD to write the
Annals of the Kim Dynasty
, between 1999 and 2000. That said, they continue to be broadcast daily on North Korean state television under the title
Uncovering the Revolutionary Annals of Comrade Kim Il-sung
.

THOSE WHO SIMPLY
cross the river out of hunger are punished relatively leniently for their defection, spending a few months in a hard labour camp. But the higher one’s position, the more treacherous the defection is considered to be, and the punishment is correspondingly greater. The knowledge of this and our fear of the possible consequences for our loved ones weighed heavily on our hearts.

In the hope that it would get a little warmer on the mountain after the sun rose, Young-min and I stayed up all night talking. But a stronger blizzard came just before dawn. Weak after shivering all night and unable to stretch my legs, I thought I would pass out. I felt as if we had come to a cliff’s edge, confronting the reality that we must spend another twenty-four hours in these freezing conditions. At least we still had the thermos of warm tea and the bread that Chang-yong had given us, which afforded us a little consolation.

When Chang-yong finally returned, he brought with him a new blanket and a hatchet. Our old blanket was like corrugated iron, frozen stiff, so Chang-yong had to carry it on his head down the hill. Before he left, he grumbled that Pyongyang boys might have money, but they didn’t know how to survive; he chopped small logs and gathered branches from nearby to make us a shelter. Inside, we were shielded from the worst of the bone-chilling wind.

But the respite didn’t last long. As the sunlight couldn’t penetrate it, the shelter was like a freezer and the air inside was bitterly cold. It felt as though I had my feet in iced water, in spite of my wearing
rubber shoes. In an effort to keep warm, we ran to the top of the hill and back down several times during the day.

At night, the blizzard worsened. Farmer Chang-yong had given us two bottles of wine, and when I put one down to drink from the other, the bottle frosted during the few moments it was resting on the ground. Yet, even if misery was all that there was left to look forward to, every second I survived in that mountainside shelter reminded me of the preciousness of human life.

The morning promised by Chang-yong finally arrived. After the sun had passed its midday mark, he reappeared with a man of about our own age. The young man was wearing blue jeans and an expensive-looking beige leather jacket. He was fit and agile, and our first impression was that he did indeed seem like someone who might have connections with South Korea’s spy agency. His eyes were small and gave the impression that he did not trust anyone easily, yet he was full of quiet confidence. He was the kind of man who only spoke when absolutely necessary, and his greeting was as short as he could make it. But his slight smile did not leave his face throughout our meeting.

‘My name is Shin Gwang-ho,’ he said.

He was certainly Chang-yong’s nephew in that he shared his heavy northern accent, reminiscent of North Hamgyong Province. He looked us up and down, pausing as he noticed our rubber shoes. When he finally offered his hand for us to shake, it was soft and warm. But after shaking our hands, he furtively wiped his own on his jeans.

He asked us for our identification documents, saying it was just a routine precaution. I noted his professionalism in recognising and checking the dates, stamps and quality of our papers, and I felt somehow that I could trust this man. Although Chang-yong was on edge, fidgeting at the sound of barking dogs in the distance, Mr Shin didn’t seem to notice and focused on his task.

Apparently satisfied, he looked up at us. ‘Would you please wait a moment?’

This time, I wondered if he was speaking in South Korean. This was because he said ‘Would you please’ before the request. I had learned at the UFD that there were three types of politeness markers in South Korean. The first was to refer to oneself in a lower register than the listener; the second was to add something like ‘would you’ (requests ending with
yo
) as a general marker of respect; and the third was similar to a military manner of speaking: ‘Sir, would you please’ (requests ending with
sipnika
). In North Korea, there exist the first and third types of politeness markers, but not the second. Instead of subtleties of distinction for different situations, there were only two distinctions, the one for ordering and the other for complying, so the senior person in this sort of scenario would say ‘Wait!’ and the junior party would comply.

However, in North Korea, there was another politeness marker that not even the most senior cadres could use, which was the marker reserved only for the ruling Kim. This works most typically in a
siut
addition to the verb conjugation. For example, the people are said to have ‘done’ something (
hada
), but the Supreme Leader ‘did do’ something (
ha-
siut
-da
). This distinction was strictly observed not only in everyday life, but also in all forms of the written word. In this way, although Mr Shin spoke to us in a standard polite register (a request ending with
yo
), he had added the
siut
conjugation reserved only for Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il in North Korea. This seemed to us at the time to be a significant marker of respect. He turned away to make a call on his mobile phone. After speaking quietly for a few moments, he hung up and we stood waiting in the snow, hunched against the cold. A short while later, a four-wheel drive appeared and stopped halfway up the slope. As Chang-yong had implied, his nephew’s resourcefulness was at a very different level from that of his farmer uncle, for whom the greatest imaginable excitement was the
prospect of buying a new cultivator. When Mr Shin told us to hurry, we quickly hugged Chang-yong, who was waiting for our embrace with his arms open wide, and said goodbye. Not only did he not ask for more money, but as we clasped each other he whispered into my ear that I should not tell his nephew about the $700 we had given him. As we climbed into the Jeep, we thanked him once again and promised to come back and visit him after we’d made it to South Korea.