Behind the Tyrant's Mask
By John Larkin
Far East Economic Review
Issue cover-dated May 02, 2002As Pyongyang and Seoul resume their troubled courtship, secret documents from the communist North show Kim Jong Il set in his hatred of the West and determined to preserve his ruinous regime
IT'S 1999 and the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is basking in some unusually good press. South Korea, his old enemy, is wooing him with the ardour of an unrequited lover. Japan, hated for its brutal 35-year colonization of the Korean peninsula, is sounding sympathetic. Even the United States, Pyongyang's ultimate bogeyman, is angling for face-time.
Logic would suggest Kim should respond in kind, given the fact that his economy is so bankrupt he can't even feed his people. Instead, a secret document distributed only to members of the elite Central Committee of the ruling Korean Workers' Party as a personal message from Kim Jong Il, shows the "Dear Leader" paranoid that his country might share the fate suffered by Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia that year, when it was bombed into submission by North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces.
"The intention of the United States to invade our country has never changed," he says. "But it's a big fantasy. No matter whether they invade by air, sea, or land, we are totally ready to kill the enemy."
Another document, circulated among the party's estimated four million rank-and-file members last June, shows official hostility to international goodwill. At the height of the greatest thaw in inter-Korean relations since the 1950-53 Korean War, party members were being told by Pyongyang not to trust the outside world. "At present our enemies are trying to cooperate with us and make exchanges," says the document, which surfaced briefly in South Korea last year. "But what they really want is to destroy our system from the inside. We have to be careful. Don't expect anything from our enemies."
These diatribes offer cold comfort for South Korea as it embarks on another tryst in its on-again, off-again romance with Pyongyang. Hopes are high that new exchanges following a peace mission to Pyongyang in early April by a South Korean presidential envoy will result soon in railway and road links across the border. A fresh round of reunions of families divided by the border were scheduled for late April.
But if Kim Jong Il's thinking is accurately reflected in these documents, the new thaw is unlikely to last long. Much of the verbiage is boilerplate North Korean rhetoric typical of Pyongyang's propaganda tool, the Korean Central News Agency. But what sets these documents apart is the audience for whom they were written--elite party officials who make sure Kim Jong Il's word is implemented, and the rank and file whose duty it is to obey.
Marcus Noland, a research fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, describes the content and timing of the 1999 documents as depressing. "At that time North Korea was facing relatively liberal governments in the U.S., South Korea and Japan and the worst of the famine was over. Assuming they are genuine, the documents appear to undercut the notion that Kim Jong Il is an actual or even a closet reformer."
A couple of booklets don't prove that reform will never occur in North Korea. Indeed, Kim Jong Il held a historic summit in Pyongyang with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung at around the same time.
That June 2000 meeting fostered an unprecedented flurry of cultural and economic exchanges, raising hopes of even more dramatic change inside North Korea. The then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met Kim Jong Il on a landmark trip to Pyongyang later that year.
But the rapprochement has been plagued by periodic impasses, which usually arise when Kim Jong Il feels pressure to offer something more than cosmetic concessions. The resulting uncertainty has fostered a guessing game as to his real intentions.
As Kim Jong Il makes all the big decisions in North Korea, internal documents provide the best guide to his thinking. The booklet distributed to Central Committee members in 1999 was smuggled into South Korea this year and has been seen by the REVIEW.
It is taken largely from his recorded speeches, which are then edited, checked by censors, and published by the ruling party. After an interval, say experts who monitor North Korea's official pronouncements, some of the documents appear in Pyongyang bookshops for senior party members.
The document contains a surprisingly detailed analysis of U.S. military power, which it says is being enhanced to "strangle" North Korea as it did Yugoslavia. Kim Jong Il plays down the threat posed by Washington's proposed missile-defence system, which has since been enthusiastically pushed by President George W. Bush over the objections of China and Russia. In his first known public comment on the issue, Kim dismisses missile defence as a "fantasy."
"Many experts have said it's technologically impossible to hit an ICBM flying at 6.5 kilometres per second," Kim says, referring to an intercontinental ballistic missile. "The system was supposed to be completed by 2006 but it has been delayed. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has spent $50 billion on research, development and testing. If they want to complete this project it will be a big financial burden."
With only eight months left in South Korean President Kim Dae Jung's term, time is running out for Kim Jong Il to make a concession which will prove to the sceptics in South Korea and the U.S. that he really wants to change the system that has ruined his country. But the message he's giving the party faithful, a privileged class in North Korea's strictly hierarchical society, tends to support the argument presented by conservatives who oppose President Kim's dogged attempts to engage Pyongyang. They point to Pyongyang's failure to signal a departure from party dogma as proof that engagement is propping up a regime that has no intention of internal change.
That message underscores the deep dilemma Kim Jong Il finds himself in, even if one believes that he wants reform. South Korea's engagement of the North always presupposed that Kim Jong Il was prepared to dump the legacy of his father, North Korea's revered founder Kim Il Sung. But the one-sided nature of the inter-Korean love affair since President Kim Dae Jung took office in 1998 indicates Kim Jong Il wants to shore up his father's legacy, not dismantle it.
He's doing that because his own legitimacy may depend on it. Kim Il Sung's death in 1994 left a massive power vacuum in North Korea. Though anointed as his successor, Kim Jong Il's ascension was by no means guaranteed. Food shortages were already starting to ravage the country, a tragedy that many North Koreans attributed to the absence of Kim Il Sung's guiding hand. To consolidate his rule, Kim Jong Il drew on the power of his father's personality cult while strengthening the position of the military. He made his own rule an extension of his father's, thereby tying his fate to that of the hardline socialist system Kim Il Sung created, which is based on a doctrine of self-reliance known as juche.
"Under juche, Kim Il Sung was transformed into a kind of god," says a Seoul-based expert on North Korea. "He pronounced that capitalism was an evil. Then his son took power. Reform under Kim Jong Il is impossible because doing so would mean he has to say his father was wrong about everything, including capitalism. If he did that, there would be no legitimacy to his power."
The internal party documents reflect this obsession with maintaining the status quo, however discredited it may be outside. Kim Jong Il's main objective appears to be ensuring that cosmetic exchanges designed to attract desperately needed hard currency do not escalate into systematic reform. Rather than prepare party faithful for gradual change to the socialist system, the orders call on them to stamp out any capitalist sympathies they detect among their comrades.
BELITTLING THE U.S.
In the document distributed in 1999 to the party's decision-making Central Committee, he exaggerates the impact of Nato losses during the conflict with Yugoslavia, triggered by Belgrade's abuses against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. He says at one point that the U.S. "lost face" in Yugoslavia as one of its new Stealth bombers was shot down. "Also, the Apache helicopters are known as tank-killers, but two of them were shot down," he says. In fact no helicopters were lost in battle.
The purpose of this ill-informed précis may have been to boost the morale of his generals, some of whom serve on the Central Committee. Kim also takes aim at the next-generation F-22 fighter jet being developed by the U.S., which he says is hampered by budget overruns and lacks support in Congress.
"I think Kim Jong Il knows very well that the U.S. is the world's dominant military power," says Choi Won Ki, a reporter on North Korean issues at The Joong-Ang Ilbo newspaper. "But he's misinforming his elite group because he worries about [the loyalty of] his generals. If they start to think the U.S. is too strong they might lose morale." The fear of the U.S. military that courses through Kim's words would only have been intensified by its rapid demolition of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
A slim volume published earlier in 1999 demonstrates how paranoid secrecy is official state policy in North Korea. The booklet, entitled "Dear Leader Kim Jong Il's Remarks on Statistics," urges senior bureaucrats to guard statistics as though they were national secrets. "Workers should not discuss work matters outside, even with their wives and children," the book says. "We send newspapers overseas that may contain secrets. If you have secrets don't use the telephone too much. We should also tighten controls over use of typewriters and photocopiers."
Meanwhile, the pamphlet published last June to give party members their marching orders, offers a revealing insight into Kim Jong Il's tightrope act. Its pages contain bitter attacks on party members who flirt with capitalism, a tacit admission that the revolutionary mindset is waning among some senior party members. "Some wicked men talk silly fantasies about capitalism," it says. "But some members just remain silent without taking action! Our biggest priority is find these enemies inside our country and to utterly destroy them."
Penned less than a year ago, the paper strongly suggests Kim Jong Il remains resolutely opposed to capitalism. But its focus on dissenters is interesting as it appears to indicate that his authority is slipping in parts of the country. South Koreans with contacts in North Korea believe as much as 15% of Workers' Party members may have capitalist sympathies.
Certainly, Kim Jong Il doesn't receive the respect accorded Kim Il Sung. Then, meetings at which pamphlets like this one were discussed, or rather memorized, were attended by almost all members in any given district. "Now, only around 60% of members come," said one person familiar with North Korea. "Under Kim Il Sung the meetings occurred every month, but not now. And as they get little food, people are not as likely to turn up."
Kim Jong Il's intentions might not have changed but there are signs his country may be doing so. He can still prove the doubters wrong. But the signals he sends his people suggest true reform is not on his agenda. This is one time the outside world will hope Kim isn't as good as his word.