No Voice, No Choice
By John Larkin and Jay Solomon
Far East Economic Review
Issue cover-dated May 16, 2002

Two outspoken North Korean defectors have gone quiet about the tyranny of Kim Jong Il and ended a decades-old friendship. This is their story

ON A CHILLY DAY in January, Kim Dok Hong sat down to write an angry letter to his closest friend and mentor, Hwang Jang Yop. The duo had created a sensation five years earlier by risking their lives in a dramatic defection from North Korea to Seoul. Hwang was the highest-ranking defector ever to escape the cloistered socialist state.

Kim was furious at the man he respectfully calls "elder brother." Hwang, a stern 79-year-old scholar who served for nearly 20 years as a senior secretary of the North's ruling Workers' Party, had recently agreed not to voice his strident criticisms of the North Korean regime in the United States. In return, according to documents seen by the REVIEW, South Korea's intelligence agency gave him a down payment on an academic institute it had promised to build for him.

Kim, a passionately outspoken man, accused his friend of betraying their vow to work for the end of Kim Jong Il's regime in Pyongyang. "I feel bitter toward you for selling your political honour and conscience for only 20 million won ($15,400)," he told Hwang in the letter. "I'm writing in the hope you will wake from this nightmare."

Friends for 40 years, the two men have not spoken since January. They have been driven apart by a South Korean government campaign to silence their criticism of Kim Jong Il, orchestrated to safeguard the South's attempts to engage his regime and lay the groundwork for reunification.

Their story goes to the heart of the heated debate over how best to handle Pyongyang. Seoul sees the muzzling of Hwang and Kim as necessary to avoid offending North Korea and derailing engagement. Critics say that Seoul is stifling free speech, and argue that tiptoeing around North Korea's unpleasantness does more harm than good for détente.

The REVIEW has conducted exclusive interviews with both defectors, arranged in secret to sidestep a ban prohibiting them from meeting journalists. They have also been prevented from meeting with American legislators who have sought them out. Both men make it clear they despise Kim Jong Il, and they resent being silenced. "If our American friends want to find out the real situation [in North Korea], I'm willing to tell them," Hwang told the REVIEW in an interview last year.

That would be invaluable to Washington and to Seoul, with inter-Korean relations mired yet again in uncertainty. Allowing the defectors to relate their inside knowledge of Kim Jong Il's regime could foster informed decisions about whether Kim is a serious dialogue partner or not. On May 6, Pyongyang cancelled cross-border economic talks after taking umbrage at South Korean Foreign Minister Choi Sung Hong's recent claim that a "big stick" can force Pyongyang back to the table.

The defectors may have a common goal, but they have very different priorities. Kim Dok Hong defected to devote himself to exposing Kim Jong Il's tyranny. Hwang's focus is on promoting juche, the North Korean nationalist doctrine which he cherishes as his intellectual legacy but believes has been twisted by Kim Jong Il to perpetuate his cult-like rule. In the end, it is Hwang's obsession with juche that destroyed his friendship with Kim Dok Hong.

"It makes me very upset," an agitated Kim Dok Hong tells a REVIEW reporter during a recent interview in Seoul. "I came here to force change in North Korea. But Mr. Hwang came here just to study his ideology."

Hwang and Kim arrived in Seoul in April 1997 to a hero's welcome after defecting to South Korea's Beijing Embassy two months earlier. Both men were members of the elite of North Korean society. Hwang was a prominent scholar and a key architect of juche, which stresses self-reliance and the glorification of North Korea's founder, Kim Il Sung, and his son, Kim Jong Il. Kim Dok Hong was a former top administrator of the country's most prestigious college, Kim Il Sung University. Their friendship was forged in the 1960s, when Hwang was appointed president of that university.

When they first arrived in Seoul they were given the freedom to speak authoritatively on the Kim Jong Il regime. At press conferences, interviews and university lectures, their message was unequivocal: North Korea was a "living hell" and Kim Jong Il, whom Hwang had personally tutored at Kim Il Sung University, had no intention of pursuing reform. Using generous deliveries of food aid and economic exchanges to induce change was not just a waste of time and money, he said. These measures would prop up Kim's repressive regime.

"Aid resuscitated North Korea's regime," Hwang says. "Kim Jong Il was adamant to follow a path of war, even though his people were dying of starvation," he adds, referring to the period before his defection. Plying North Korea with excessive aid would only "expand the military."

In his first months in Seoul, Hwang publicly urged the "liquidation" of the Pyongyang regime. But Hwang's uncompromising message began to wear out its welcome not long after his arrival.
In December 1997, former political dissident Kim Dae Jung won the presidency and quickly embarked on a policy of aggressively engaging North Korea. Kim's "Sunshine policy" yielded the first-ever summit between the leaders of North and South Korea in June 2000, brought a flurry of political, cultural and economic exchanges--and earned Kim a Nobel Peace Prize.

But his Sunshine policy has been dogged by delays, as Pyongyang refuses to reciprocate Seoul's concessions. Engagement of North Korea is now the most divisive issue in South Korea. Conservative critics accuse Kim Dae Jung of soft-pedalling on North Korea's human-rights abuses and muzzling the two defectors to prevent opposition to engagement.

While cross-border family reunions like the one held in the North in recent weeks are cheered, many South Koreans complain Kim Dae Jung has given too much away for too little return. His dilemma became even more vexing when U.S. President George W. Bush took office last year and expressed his distrust of Kim Jong Il. Nonetheless, South Korea is clinging to hopes that Kim Jong Il is sincere. "We've tried conflict for the past 50 years and it hasn't worked," says South Korea's ambassador to the U.S., Yang Sung Chul.

The defectors' troubles began just as inter-Korean détente looked to be paying dividends. As South Koreans celebrated the historic summit between Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Il in mid-2000, Hwang and Kim Dok Hong were appalled. Hwang penned a scathing opinion piece about the summit in a Seoul daily newspaper, infuriating South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS), the agency responsible for handling defectors before they settle into South Korean society.

The NIS, according to Kim, then threatened to throw the pair out of their apartments in the sprawling NIS compound in southern Seoul. In October 2000, he says, the agency shut down a monthly newsletter published by an organization of defectors headed by the two men, and the following month it told them of new restrictions on their movements. "There were to be no more meetings with the media or with politicians," says Kim, bristling at the recollection. "We had to stop working with underground pro-democracy elements in North Korea." Permission to travel to the U.S. to speak about North Korea was refused.

"Everything changed 180 degrees," recalls Kim. "I came to South Korea to save our people from dictatorship, but now I find myself fighting the government in South Korea."

A senior NIS official denies the agency threatened or stifled the defectors in any way. The newsletter folded for lack of funds, he says, and no attempt was made to banish the men from their apartments. Rather, the NIS offered to cut back their personal security detail to give them more freedom of movement. Hwang and Kim "replied that they would stay, as they were receiving so many threats," says the official.

In any case, these alleged attempts to stifle the two defectors were unsuccessful: Hwang and Kim vented their anger in another article smuggled to South Korean newspapers in late November, 2000. That earned Kim a dressing down by a senior NIS agent who, according to Kim's assistant, waved the article in his face screaming, "Do you want me to die for this? If I die, we should die together!" Kim coolly replied, "Fine, let's die together."

AMERICANS SEEK CONTACT

As news of the duo's predicament leaked out of Korea, conservative American political figures stepped up attempts to have Hwang and Kim speak in the U.S. about North Korea's nuclear and biological capabilities. Susan Scholte, president of the conservative Defence Forum Foundation, went to Seoul in December 2000 hoping to meet them. She was rebuffed by South Korean officials, and left Seoul having managed only to pass on a Bible to Hwang. On a visit to Seoul in July 2001, aides to Republican Senator Jesse Helms failed to meet Hwang despite three meetings with NIS officials. "The NIS said they couldn't rock the boat," says Chuck Downs, one of the aides.

The NIS cites security worries to justify its objections to a U.S. visit, and points out there has been no official U.S. government invitation. But there's little doubt that a visit would cause problems for the Sunshine policy. "From the day I arrived in South Korea I wanted to go to the U.S. and ask the Americans for help in overthrowing Kim Jong Il's North Korea," says Kim Dok Hong.

A rendezvous with Hwang last year illustrates just how closely he was watched. About a dozen NIS agents followed him as he attended daily meetings. Two government cars shadowed his vehicle. NIS agents were surprised to see a foreign correspondent but did nothing to stop the interview. Hwang, whose imperious manner belies a frail physique, had to turn up his hearing aid to hear questions.

Some time after Hwang's meeting with the REVIEW, the NIS found a way to persuade Hwang to drop his insistence on visiting America. The agency played on Hwang's obsession with juche. According to a copy of a formal agreement seen by the REVIEW, the NIS pledged in January to donate 300 million won to establish an institute in Seoul for "humanistic" studies. Hwang was given a 20 million-won down payment, according to the document and one of his personal secretaries.

The NIS denies striking a deal, as does Hwang. But in a December letter to Kim Dok Hong, the older defector alludes to a bargain. "Next year there will be a new government which may build my institute, but I can't be sure the new government will help me. If the U.S. invites me again I will say I am delaying my trip to the U.S." One month later, Hwang told visiting aides to Henry Hyde, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, that he was no longer interested in making the trip if its purpose was to discuss North Korea's nuclear and chemical weapons.

But Kim Dok Hong desperately wants to go. A diminutive man with a direct manner, Kim cuts a lonely figure now. He dreams of a better life if a more conservative president wins office in Seoul at December elections. He even hints he wants to live in the U.S. "If this government is making it tough to work on North Korean affairs," he says, "I'm thinking it will be good to do my work somewhere else."