COVER STORY Northern Exposure
North Korea is a monolithic black box to the rest of the world, but stress cracks can be seen in the aspiring nuclear power
Twilight Time for the Sunshine Policy
Will President Kim Dae Jung's signature engagement strategy, the "Sunshine Policy," be displaced by a "Nuclear Winter Policy"?
Look Who's Got The Bomb
Confronted by the U.S., North Korea brazenly admits it's building nukes. Now what does President Bush do? (October 28, 2002)
The Hermit Kingdom's Bizarre SAR
Having failed to build a communist utopia, North Korea plans to create a capitalist one with its own elected officials and a wall to keep out the riffraff (October 7, 2002)
Accounted for, at Last
North Korea admits it abducted Japanese citizens to help train its spies and says some are still alive (September 30, 2002)
Northern Exposure — page 4
Most people are too focused on whether they can afford their next meal to worry much about life on the outside. Inside the country, faith in the Dear Leader is eroding. Traveling on business inside North Korea earlier this year, a Chinese human rights activist stayed with the family of a North Korean she had met in China. She says they were destitute, the children had no shoes and were clothed in rags. The family had no blankets and the concrete floor of the building they occupied had no mats—the family had sold everything to buy food. The activist bought them two kilos of rice and two pairs of shoes. The family told her they didn't believe the Party line that North Koreans are doing well. "What is the point of just saying we are well-off," they said, "when people are so hungry. We don't need Kim Jong Il."
None of this means revolt is imminent. Any such uprising would most likely be crushed, says Lim Young Sun, head of research at the Commission to Help North Korean Refugees, a private aid group based in Seoul. Protests against the regime are dealt with severely. A pervasive security apparatus is supplemented with informants in every town and village. North Koreans know that troublemakers disappear into the gulag, usually with their families. An example of one testament to the dangers of speaking out: an estimated 200,000 political prisoners languish in the country's prisons, according to human-rights experts. Despite the extreme risks, however, tentative public protests do occur. A former state security agent in northeastern Hamgyong province before he defected in 1998 says that every six months or so his office would find antigovernment leaflets left on the streets. Antigovernment graffiti and posters appear periodically.
Change would have to come from the élite, who cling to Kim Jong Il for their own survival. There has been discontent in the military for years according to Lim. He was a young army officer in the early 1990s when he fell in with an underground group of 30 to 40 military men and Party members opposed to Kim Jong Il. He says the group's activities consisted mainly of getting drunk and shouting brave epithets such as "Let's kill Kim Jong Il." But in 1991, the Communist Party began talking about starting a war against South Korea and the U.S. The underground group, who called themselves "The Supreme Council of National Salvation," decided to distribute antigovernment leaflets on the day when they believed Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were going to visit their ancestors' graves, a key date in the Korean calendar.
They came into possession of a Chinese typewriter. But they learned from a friend in a printer's shop that every machine had slightly different type so that it could be identified by government security agents. The group innovated, cutting characters out of rubber bicycle-tire inner tubes to make a primitive typesetting device. Then they mimeographed hundreds of leaflets reading: "The Supreme Council of National Salvation demands the execution of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. We appeal to soldiers of the People's Army and the people to join our struggle." On Sept. 23, Lim went to Pyongyang station and boarded the train for Musan near the Chinese border. He tossed leaflets out of the window. When the train stopped in one town, he bribed a truck driver to ferry him around while he threw leaflets into the street.
That quixotic uprising caused a sensation in the upper levels of the regime, according to Lim. But most of the conspirators were arrested. (Lim managed to escape to China and, later, to a sanctuary in South Korea.) Pyongyang also crushed two other known coup attempts against Kim Jong Il in the 1990s, according to a former North Korean border guard whose father was a senior military official.
North Korea watchers say rebellion—whether it is a mass revolt or a surgical strike from inside the Party or military—can only occur if people are prepared to die for it. They say it is impossible to predict when or if North Koreans will achieve the mix of desperation and bravery necessary for combustion, the same fusion that brought down other dysfunctional communist regimes more than a decade ago.
But one cannot talk to Jae Young, the 17-year-old border jumper, without wondering whether he is the explosive type. In the dumpling shop, he is discussing his village again. He remembers what it was like during the famine in 1996. He talks about the three executions he has witnessed. Villagers caught stealing corn were led up into the mountains and given a last meal of white rice and booze—all they could eat and drink. Then the soldiers shot them. Still, Jae Young won't stay in China. He misses his parents and he's frightened that border guards will murder them if they, too, try to cross the river. For now, his dream is to get enough money to take his parents to the black market. "I'll buy them some corn and corn soup so we won't be hungry," he says. Not white rice, he adds—that is too expensive. Maybe one day, when the Dear Leader's regime has finally become a distant, painful memory, he'll be able to dream bigger than of a bowl of soup.
With reporting by Kim Yeoshin/Seoul and Kim Yooseung/Yanji
