North Korea Undercover (29 page)

Kim Il Sung died before the famine turned critical in 1994, to mass mourning, apart, that is, from the embalmers in Moscow who reportedly charged the DPRK $1 million forturning him into a waxwork. But the failure of North Korean agriculture over time, created by the state’s diktat forbidding a free market, is the responsibility of Kim Il Sung. His son is to blame for following slavishly in his father’s footsteps.

How many people died? Foreign experts dispute thenumbers.

There feels something wrong, obscene even, about arguing about how many people died in a famine. Once the numbers go beyond a few thousand, that’s too many. Butthe lowest credible estimate according to one of the best, most humane and drily cynical Pyongyangologists in the world, Andrei Lankov, is around 500,000, or 2.5 per cent of the population: ‘This is roughly equal to the ratio of Chinese farmers who perished from starvation during the Great Leap Forward of the early 1960s. In other words, it was the largest humanitarian disaster East Asia had seen for decades.’
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Others say it was far, far worse than Lankov’s estimate. The most highly placed defector from the regime believes the number of dead was three million. This dispute cannot be satisfactorily resolved until the regime falls.

Big numbers dumb the mind. In Seoul, we met a defector, aman with a plastic hand. He gave me some sense of what that word ‘famine’ meant. Ji Seong Hosaw dead bodies piled up in the streets, near railway stations and in parks. Family and friends wilted under the hunger; many died.

I think I lost my mind from dizziness, sleep deprivation and hunger. My grandmother and my neighbours died of starvation. It wasn’t just where I lived. When you went into the cities, train stations, markets and alleyways, you found lots of dead bodies. I do not know the exact number but countless people died. Countless.
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He was so hungry he risked stealing coal from a train. One of the railway men pulled the wrong lever, and the train was suddenly
side-tracked, towards policemen on a platform. Ji jumped and fell between the concrete of the platform and the trains wheels. When Ji came to, his hand and leg were hanging off. They amputated both without anaesthetic.

The moment Ji told me about corpses piling up near the railway stations, I knew he was telling the truth. People dying of starvation don’t want to die on their own. They seek out a public place, perhaps in hope of some last-minute salvation. I’d heard that several times from Russian and Ukrainian survivors of Stalin’s Great Famine in 1933. Some ironic souls even dared to die infront of statues to Stalin and Lenin.
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Malcolm Muggeridge wrote of Stalin’s famine in1933: ‘One of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to believe it ever happened.’

Back then in the Soviet Union, while George Bernard Shaw proclaimed there was no famine, people were eating each other. A ninety-three-year-old Ukrainian lady remembered one of her neighbours being taken away after a child’s arm was found in her stove. Cannibalism came to North Korea in the late 1990s. This famine, like Stalin’s, is a monstrous crime people scarcely believe ever happened.

What could be worse than fear of starving to death? Why didn’t people rebel? The man with the plastic hand explained: ‘In North Korea, if you say the wrong thing you will die. You will be sent to a political prison camp. Even if one knows, sees or hears something one must pretend to be ignorant. Disagreement isn’t an option. Disagreement means death.’

Fear of the regime is greater than fear of starving to death. That is a formidable tribute to the force of the tyranny.

At no time throughout the famine did the secret police let up. One defector is quoted in Gause’s pamphlet on the Bowibu and other state organs of control, reporting on the state’s demand that each urban household had to produce 30 kilograms (66lb, or more than 4 stone) of dried human excrement mixed with soil, to help fertilize the countryside: ‘It was a battle for people to produce 30 kg of compost per family in a severe winter. People frantically scratch the floor of their conventional toilets to collect the meagre excrement there, meagre because it is the discharge of people who are nearly starving.’ If you are suffering from famine, human excrement resembles rabbit droppings. ‘All residential areas were filled with the smell of human excrement that was being dried. To make things worse, Dong [the district sub-divisions of the Bowibu secret police] offices had Inminban compete with one another by preparing “Charts of Competition for Securing Excrement”.’
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International organizations are not good at working out what is happening behind the scenes inside dictatorships. While some Westerners were saying there was no problem, North Koreans were eating one another. The famine peaked in the late 1990s, but many were starving long before that. Kim Yong was a lieutenant colonel in the North Korean National Security Agency before he was arrested in 1993, when his father’s work during the Korean war as a translator for the Americans emerged in a background check. In
Long Road Home
, he tells the story of a police investigation into the deaths of thirteen people in Kim Il Sung’s birthplace, close to Pyongyang. A doctor saw fresh meat on sale in the market at an unusually low price, and, with horror, realized
that he was looking at human flesh. The police investigated and discovered that thirteen people had been killed by the butcher and his family, and resold asmeat.
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The former officer recalls two more stories of cannibalism: of an old man going to a cemetery, digging upthe freshly buried and marinating the meat before eating it; of a grandmother, driven mad by hunger, boiling her grandchild alive. These stories seem incredible but I have heard something similar from people in the Ukraine, people with no reason whatsoever to lie.

In 1998, at the height of the famine Kim the Father and Kim the Son had created, they did what they do best. Blame somebody else. One September day in Unification Squarea crowd of thousands saw a score of officials shot, including the minister for agriculture, So Kwan Hi. They went one better, and dug up his predecessor, long-dead, and shot the corpse of Kim Man Kum, too.
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In the Zombie state, you can’t be too careful about the dead.

The response from the West to this slow-motion tragedy was dire. For a long time, the famine was denied or down-played by some Westerners, who spouted North Korea’s official line. Kim Jong Il threatened nuclear proliferation, then offered nuclear talks, then went back to threats. In this atmosphere, the famine victims became pawns in a chess game about the nuclear threat. Andrew Natsios was, then, running World Vision, one of the biggest NGOs in the world. He wrote a piece in the
Washington Post
criticizing the Clinton administration forits overly political response to the
famine, putting Western ‘geo-strategy’over humanitarian considerations. But the great problem for people like Natsios was that the regime denied famine, and powerful evidence of the death of millions was lacking, so therefore, the fashionable logic went, it was not happening.

In his book,
The Great North Korean Famine
, Natsios quotes an NGO worker on the nightmare of working out what was what inside North Korea:

I can identify with a recent visitor to North Korea when he said he couldn’t sleep – not due to jet lag, but because of the difficulty in sorting through the ever-present and strong ideological message... A Norwegian UNICEF official told us that he had served in Uganda after Obote took over, worked in Afghanistan, and worked in Zaire, but ‘this is the most difficult location – not because of physical safety, but because of a sense of not knowing what is going on.’
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Natsios’ uncle had died in Greece due to the famine caused by the Nazi occupation of his homeland. This family tragedy must have been at the back of his mind as Natsios ignored the official denials of famine. Natsios went to Pyongyang, was stone-walled by the regime’s officials, and saw a comfortable, if eerily strange, capital city with no one starving. Not believing the non-evidence of his own eyes, he went up to the Chinese border and interviewed defectors. They told him the truth: that North Korea was gripped by a great famine. One eyewitness was twenty-seven, whose
harrowing description of a train journey to the Chinese border reminded Natsios of trains packed with Jews on the way to the Holocaust. Train carriages with 120 seats carriedseven hundred people, squeezed into every space imaginable, many of them the starving
Kochibis
or wandering swallows – the Korean term for internally displaced people.

At the height of the famine, fear of the regime weakened and much of North Korea degenerated into a state of anarchy. The rules forbidding movement inside the country were swept aside as the hungry became more and more desperate. The
Kochibis
would climb on the roof of a train, hang off the sides, hold on underneath and crowd into the toilets. As a result, people urinated where they stood. The stench was sickening. The train would stop, due to power cuts. Natsios’ eyewitness continued:

Dead bodies were taken off at train stations. Some riding on the roof top would die accidentally when they stood up and touched the electrical lines above the train. Altogether I saw 20 dead bodies during my trip... Some people riding between the train carriages were trapped [and squeezed] to death because of a sudden train stop. Some hanging over the train car entrance fell to their death.
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But this evidence of famine was dialled down by some, including a few NGO workers, who said that because it came from defectors it was suspect. The greater problem was that Kim Jong Il continued to play the nuclear chess game, leaving the West sacrificing pawn after pawn for no gain. The dismal drift of Western policy changed when Pyongyang itself admitted that yes, there was a famine, and
they needed help. In the spring of 1997, North Korean diplomats at the United Nations met with Natsios and other big NGO officials and asked for food aid. The Americans replied yes, but said that they needed a media campaign, to alert people to the famine, and that would help push the American government to act. The North Koreans pulled a face, writes Natsios: ‘Their government would never agree to any media coverage and we should forget about it. They were particularly insistent about not allowing any photographs of any kind, which is exactly what we most needed.’

No photos, as Mr Hyun would put it.

Eventually, in the late 1990s, food aid from the United States, China and Europe arrived in abundance. The regime took it, gave it to the army, the secret police and the Party cadres, and the hungry carried on dying.

Natsios is scathing about the West’s failure to act effectively when the evidence of famine was overwhelming:

The clash of these geostrategic interests with the humanitarian imperative to stop the famine caused the worst paralysis I have witnessed in any major relief effort since the close of the Cold War. Although food aid was pledged in the summer of 1997, and did arrive, it was two years too late, was sent to the wrong regions of the country, and had no rigorous controls on its internal distribution to prevent the elites from stealing it.
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Not everyone starved, of course.

The phone call came in the middle of the night. For Ermanno Furlanis, Italian pizza chef, raconteur and lover of life, it was the
start of the most surreal adventure of his life. Two weeks later, in the summer of 1997, Furlanis, his wife, another chef from the southern Italian city of Bari, Antonio Macchia, and his wife, flew to Berlin. At Tegel airport the two couples were given tickets for a flight to Pyongyang that did not exist. Leastways, there was no mention of it on the departures board. The Air Koryo jet was all but empty when it took off, destination North Korea.

On arrival the two chefs were hurried through the city toa brand new clinic, entirely empty of patients. And then the tests started: blood and urine samples were taken, X-rays, an electrocardiogram and, thanks to a large magnetic resonance imaging machine, a brain scan. ‘I was by now worried out of my mind,’ said Furlanis. ‘Here was proof that we were completelyin their power, and they could do with us as they pleased.’
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They had goneout of curiosity, forgetting what it had once done to the cat.

The Italians waited for the results of the medical tests, and waited and waited. Bored to distraction in their empty, gilded cage – they were put in a luxury villa, but deprived of contact with ordinary North Koreans – they begged their minder, Mr Om, could they goto a club and dance. Mr Om went away and came back. The answer was yes. But they didn’t exactly end up ina nightclub. The Italians were taken to Kim Il Sung Square, where they found themselves in front of a sea of 30,000 people. After the master of ceremonies gave a signal, the crowd began to dance in uncannily precise formations. First, the mass formed thirty perfect squares, and as the music picked up tempo the squares became stars, then circles. It was dancing for robots.

They were witnessing the anniversary celebrations for the end of the Korean war. But Ermanno and his wife wanted to dance, not merely play the audience in yet another North Korean propaganda show. ‘Join them,’ said Mr Om. Furlanis and his missus took to the floor and began whirling around with the North Koreans, who joked with them when they got their steps wrong. It meant a break from the boredom, but it wasn’t what they had been hoping for.

Suddenly, the test results came through – all clear – and they were on the road. The Italians were shocked by the poverty they glimpsed as their motorcade sped through the countryside. They saw people washing their clothes in the river and then waiting around naked for them to dry: ‘It was like the Middle Ages,’ said Furlanis.

The further they travelled, the more they realized that the country was strictly parcelled up, with frequent military checkpoints blocking people from travelling from one district to another. The couple witnessed scenes of mass desperation, with people screaming and begging the soldiers to let them through on either side of the checkpoints, with little or no chance of success. Travel was only allowed with a special permit issued by the Korean Workers’ Party. As day turned into night, they drove on, coming across people appearing to sleep on the road itself. One man with a bicycle seemed to have nodded off on the tarmac, but with his legs either side of the bike frame, as though he was still riding it in his sleep. 1997 was the worst year of the famine, and it’s possible that what the Italian couples were actually seeing was people so worn down by hunger they had collapsed on the road. Furlanis said: ‘We were scared a number of times. We thought we would end up running someone over.’