Gulag Diplomacy

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Il hinted last Friday that he might be willing to return to nuclear disarmament talks in July, provided that the U.S. demonstrates it no longer "looks down on" the North and is willing to "recognize and respect us as a partner." But U.S. President George W. Bush has stated in the past that he "loathes" Kim, and he risked angering the Dear Leader again last week by hosting a politically sensitive guest at the White House: Kang Chol Hwan, author of The Aquariums of Pyongyang, a first-person account of growing up inside one of North Korea's brutal prison camps.

Bush was given a copy of Kang's memoir by Henry Kissinger, and according to White House aides, he was so moved by it that he has since pushed several of his senior foreign-policy advisers to read it. First published in English in 2001, Aquariums is a coming-of-age tale of almost unimaginable misery. Kang, now a 36-year-old journalist and human-rights activist in Seoul, was incarcerated at age 9 after his wealthy grandfather ran afoul of the regime; in 1977 the family was thrown into Yodok, an isolated work camp for political prisoners, and Kang spent the next 10 years there. His book recalls occasional moments of childhood normality—Kang played in the woods, and writes of his astonishment at seeing a bear. But Aquariums is mostly grim. When two prisoners were hanged for trying to escape, guards ordered other inmates to stone the corpses—women who couldn't bear to do so were beaten. When a sister of one of Kang's close friends died of starvation in winter, she couldn't be buried deep because the ground was frozen. When the earth thawed, the decomposed body was revealed for all to see.

Despite Kim's recent statements, it's not clear whether he is ready to end the diplomatic stalemate over the North's nuclear weapons program and return to the bargaining table. In the past, he has feigned a willingness to negotiate in order to win immediate concessions such as food or fuel assistance. "Until we have a date [for negotiations], we don't have a date," said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. As for Bush, he seems heedless of any need to keep Kim sweet. According to Bush aides who sat in on the meeting, the President had Kang autograph a copy of his memoir, then asked, "If Kim Jong Il knew I met you, don't you think he'd hate this?'' Kang, Bush aides later said, smiled and replied: "The people in the concentration camps will applaud."