Rogue Regime
Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea
by Jasper Becker
Oxford, 300 pp., $28
NORTH KOREA IS DIFFERENT. When I visited in 1992 I found a Potemkin country, an airport without airplanes, streets without cars, and roads without street signs. Today it is a bit more open to the West, but far poorer. Alas, the so-called Democratic People's Republic of Korea is far worse than a foreign holiday gone bad, and the DPRK is different in a terribly unpleasant way. Journalist Jasper Becker, who wrote about mass famine in Maoist China, has produced a depressing but important read.
Pyongyang may pose America's greatest international challenge. Becker worries that "possession of WMD could free a despot from all restraints," and believes that "the world cannot stand by and let nothing be done." But precisely what "the world" should do isn't obvious.
Becker is at his best reporting on the human cost of an artificial famine that killed as many as three million people. The winter of 1997-98 was the worst, he writes, when "people have described how they would wake up each day and immediately check with their neighbors to see who was still alive." Becker visited China's border with North Korea. Contrary to what many of us might expect, "there was no Iron Curtain of wooden guard towers, minefields, and prowling Alsatian watchdogs." None is needed, since China is complicit in the North's crimes, returning refugees, fining anyone who aids them, and rewarding snitches.
Moreover, reports Becker, Chinese officials "even allowed North Korean agents to operate freely inside China. There they carried out a campaign of murder, intimidation, and abduction both against North Koreans and those who tried to help them."
Becker was interrogated by Chinese police after interviewing desperate and starving refugees.
Becker contends that Kim Jong Il has been lucky to maintain power. After the death of his father, Kim Il Sung, in 1994, he writes, "the internal machinery of terror remained intact and he continued to deter external enemies by claiming North Korea possessed weapons of mass destruction and was ready to use them. He obtained enough foreign aid to continue food and goods distribution and maintain the loyalty of core followers."
Becker reviews claims of resistance, mutinies, assassination attempts, and planned coups d'etat, which are fascinating but impossible to verify. The lack of solid sources and corroboration may be the book's most significant flaw, though the fault is North Korea's totalitarian isolation rather than Becker's research.
The most interesting parts may be Becker's discussion of how Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il created a bizarre system of monarchical communism, with power passing within the family. No little attention was devoted to selling the Kims' beatific attributes and manifold accomplishments to the North Korean people. Explains Becker: "The brainwashing starts at two when all children are put in state nurseries" and are taught to "think, speak, and act as Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il."
When I visited 13 years ago, no room was complete without photos of both Kims. The senior Kim was everywhere pictured "giving guidance"--to doctors in the hospital, workers in the factory, and farmers in the countryside. Slogans sat above elevators, adorned buildings, stretched across streets, and even sprouted in fields.
Yet, contends Becker, despite the public image of unity, near the end of Kim Il Sung's life his son isolated the god-king, seeking to preserve his father's position and forestall détente with South Korea. Indeed, Becker alleges that Kim Jong Il may have been responsible for, or contributed to, his father's death. In any case, the many wives, concubines, children, and stepchildren provide a mix more combustible than anything found in the Ottoman Empire. The decadence of Kim Jong Il's court is exceeded only by its thuggishness.
Writes Becker: It is "profoundly wrong that no one can recall the name of a single one of his victims. There are no prisoners of conscience in North Korea. No pictures of graves or executions. No equivalent of Nelson Mandela, no Aung San Suu Kyi. No voice other than that of the ruling party's escapes from behind its impenetrable walls. Even the mere idea of internal opposition to Kim's rule is ridiculed as preposterous."
That North Korea is a tyranny is not news. But this account details a level of brutality and venality that cannot help but shock. North Korea truly is a "slave state," in Becker's words. Camp inmates are beaten and starved. Entire families are punished, often for trivial offenses. Death is the common consequence of disloyalty, incompetence, and noncompliance. No one is immune. After top-level aide Hwang Jang Yop defected, writes Becker, "rumors trickled out . . . that Kim Jong Il had ordered a purge of 2,000 people connected to Hwang, including his family members. His daughter is said to have killed herself by jumping off a bridge as she was being transported to the Korean Gulag."
Many accounts of the North come from defectors, who often are unreliable, or rumors circulating among refugees, journalists, and analysts. But the thrust of the allegations is consistent, and consistently ugly.
Rogue Regime's most challenging contention may be that Kim is a barrier to reform, rather than a proponent. The conventional wisdom long has held that Kim Jong Il led a passel of technocrats in a struggle against old-line militarists. The 1994 nuclear deal and consequent influx of foreign visitors, the 2000 summit with South Korean president Kim Dae Jung, and the hesitant loosening of economic controls all support this thesis. But Becker points to brutal political repression, retreats from reform, and emphasis on ideological education as contrary evidence.
The truth is impossible to discern. The possibility that Kim Jong Il might have slowed rather than accelerated reforms started by his father undercuts the basis for Kim Dae Jung's "Sunshine Policy" of engagement with the North. Accordingly, Becker devotes a chapter to South Korean policy. There's nothing wrong with the theory behind the Sunshine Policy, Becker relates: "Kim Dae Jung's hope was that they could open up North Korea's sealed economy by offering to create an export-oriented industrial base--a transitional stage on the way to deeper social and political change."
And, for a time, the strategy appeared to work. The 2000 summit opened a new era of inter-Korean relations; North Korean relations with the United States also warmed. But many of the hopes for greater economic enterprises, and all of the hopes for political movement, went aglimmering.
On the nuclear issue, many Americans, and most South Koreans, cherish hopes for negotiated settlements, such as the one that just emerged from the six-party talks. But no realist should assume a positive, long-term outcome. Writing of Kim Jong Il, Becker contends that "it is hard to imagine that he would ever get a payoff large enough to make it worthwhile giving up his weapons of mass destruction," a source of military security and international prestige.
If he won't, then what? Becker's answer is unsatisfactory. "Foremost," he complains, "the North poses a moral question," and he finds "something abhorrent about the thought that engagement could leave Kim Jong Il and his family in power."
Sanctions are unlikely to win the support of North Korea's neighbors, and might not change North Korean policy in any case. Military strikes risk plunging the peninsula into war, leading to the destruction of Seoul, South Korea's population and industrial heart. If no military preemption, no sanctions, and no engagement, then what? Becker concludes: "With the right political will, the world could quickly agree on remedies to disarm a criminal state clearly unable to feed its own population and which tries to hold its own people as hostages and to take its neighbors hostage with nuclear weapons." But he sounds hopelessly unrealistic--exhibiting the same "willing suspension of disbelief" that he attributes to South Korean policies.
In short, we all can agree that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a criminal state, and that Kim Jong Il is loathsome. But it is far more difficult to decide what to do about his awful regime. Jasper Becker helps diagnose the problem. Unfortunately, he offers far less towards a solution.
Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Reagan, is coauthor (with Ted Galen Carpenter) of The Korean Conundrum: America's Troubled Relations with North and South Korea.