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A North Korean at the White
House
By Gavan McCormack
(Republished with permission from Japan Focus)
On June 13, the doors of the White House
Oval Office opened to admit a 37-year-old named
Kang Chol-hwan, a refugee from North Korea and
perhaps the first person from the isolationist
state to meet the US president. Kang was slightly
overwhelmed by the warmth of his welcome, not only
from President George W Bush but also Vice
President Dick Cheney and National Security
Adviser Stephen Hadley. Just three days earlier in
the same room, Bush had hosted a visit by South
Korean president Roh Moo-hyun. The welcome for
Kang was by all accounts much warmer than that for
the head of state, and at 40 minutes about as long
as Roh's visit.
Kang may have been
virtually unknown outside Korea prior to his White
House reception, but in South Korea he has become
a representative of the community of Dappokusha,
or "those who have fled the North". He was invited
to the White House because Bush had just read his
book, co-authored with Pierre Rigoulet, The
Aquariums of Pyongyang - Ten Years in the North
Korean Gulag (New York, Basic Books, 2001). He
so much liked it that he had not only recommended
it to his close advisers, but told Kang he wanted
"all Americans" to read it.
Appearing on
Japanese television some weeks after meeting the
president, Kang recounted Bush's question: what,
if the two were to change places, would Kang adopt
as basic US policy on North Korea? Kang replied
that he thought priority should be given to human
rights over nuclear matters since, he said, that
was what the people of North Korea most cared
about. Bush, he said, responded with enthusiastic
agreement. About a month after the White House
visit, Kang's call for a hardline approach to
North Korea was featured in the Wall Street
Journal and a major conference on the subject of
North Korean human rights opened in Washington
just one week before the scheduled re-convening of
the Beijing conference, which starts on July 26.
It was in itself a trivial episode, but it
suggested that when the Beijing six-party talks on
North Korea resume, any simple "deal" to exchange
North Korean nuclear weapons for guarantees of
security and diplomatic and economic normalization
will be difficult to negotiate. The president's
enthusiasm for Kang's message suggests he wants
not merely to disarm North Korea, but to transform
it by the introduction of democracy and human
rights; in short his ultimate goal, as he put it
in his state of the union address in February, is
"ending tyranny in our world".
Kang's
long journey
Kang was born into a
well-to-do "Korean-in-Japan" family in Kyoto
headed by his grandmother, a committed communist,
and grandfather, a successful capitalist with some
gangster connections who had grown rich in postwar
Japan on running something described as a gambling
saloon, presumably a pachinko parlor,
opposite the main railway station. Despite having
bartered some of that wealth into education and
improved social status, the family was
nevertheless insecure. Japanese citizens during
the imperial period from 1910, Koreans had been
deprived of that citizenship in the wake of the
war, suddenly becoming foreigners. Deprived of
various rights, they were subjected to complex
discrimination.
During the 1960s, North
Korea looked a more attractive option to some, and
a steady flow of such "Koreans in Japan" decided
to return to the North, despite the family origin
for almost all being South Korea. They returned to
a country they did not know, to join in
construction of the North Korean "fatherland",
which they imagined as a socialist paradise, free
of the misery and discrimination they experienced
in Japan. The Kang family packed everything, even
their late model Volvo (that at the time indicated
extraordinary wealth) and sailed for North Korea
as part of this movement.
In North Korea,
Kang's grandmother became a deputy to the Supreme
People's Assembly. For a time the family retained
a great deal of privilege, as well as their Volvo,
and lived near the embassy quarters. Kang was born
in Pyongyang about 1968. His childhood and early
boyhood seem to have been happy enough and he
writes warmly of his primary school teachers at
"The School of the People" in the Pyongyang of the
early 1970s. In 1977, however, his capitalist
grandfather disappeared, apparently arrested for
treason, and shortly afterwards the whole family
(with the exception of grandmother) was sent to
the countryside. Kang was then nine. Yodok was to
be his home for 10 years.
It was, he said
a little guiltily, "by no means the toughest
camp". Mostly, it accommodated returnees from
Japan, while other camps housed "members of
landowning families, capitalists, US or South
Korean agents, Christians and purged party members
deemed noxious to the state". It was estimated
there were as many as 200,000 in the camp.
Kang spent his boyhood at Yodok, first in
a school, though one that seemed to practice
routine brutality and have few pretences to
education, then in various work gangs. His
energies were devoted to surviving: stealing food
from the camp kitchens or fields, searching out
wild berries or hunting and catching snakes, fish,
frogs or rabbits, as well as raising rats to
supplement the starvation rations. It was a hard
and unrelenting life, occasionally terrifying - he
recalls witnessing 15 public executions.
However, there were also times that
uplifted his boyish spirit: the encounter with a
bear in the mountains, his shared feast with
friends on a snake, his joy at the wondrous
scenery. In his teenage years in the camp, he
found himself at various times the camp custodian
of rabbits, bees or sheep, and a hunter for wild
ginseng. His uncle became manager of the camp
distillery and seems to have wielded considerable
power. Eventually, inexplicably, the family was
released, and after some years surviving on his
wits, trading on the black market and on moneys
sent him from Japan, he escaped, first to China
and then to South Korea.
The story is
scarcely a classic, but written more than a decade
after his escape, it was one of the first North
Korean refugee biographies to be published in the
West (first in French, then English), and it
offers a plain, grim, moving story of prison camp
life through the eyes of a child and boy. Kang's
co-author, Frenchman Pierre Rigoulet, had been a
contributing editor to the Black Book of Communism
(first published in France in 1997), and it was
perhaps his contribution to tailor Kang's story so
North Korea is presented as one more example of
the atrocity of communism, a monstrous perversion.
Kang and Rigoulet make no attempt to locate North
Korea in the context of the trauma and tragedy of
Korean history, the half century of Japanese
colonialism, the externally imposed division, the
terrible civil war turned by external intervention
into a catastrophe, and the prolonged Cold War
that continues on the peninsula to this day.
Another side of the story
Kang
has become a prominent member of the South Korea
community of North Korean refugees and a strong
critic of the South Korean government policy of
accommodation ("Sunshine") toward the North. Late
in 2004, he was one of the organizers of an
exhibition in Seoul under the title "North Korean
Holocaust". By hosting him just days after his
meeting with South Korean president Roh, Bush was
sending an unmistakable signal to the government
in South Korea. For both Kang and Bush, the
Pyongyang regime is evil, there can be no
compromise with it, and "Sunshine" is tantamount
to appeasement.
By coincidence, in the
same year of publication of Kang's book, 2001,
another Korean gulag story was published, also in
New York. By an even stranger coincidence it, too,
tells the story of a Korean-in-Japan family, also
from Kyoto. Its author, however, Suh Sung, endured
not 10 but 19 years of horror, in South rather
than North Korea, under even worse conditions,
including torture, before being released in 1990,
just a little after Kang (Suh Sung, Unbroken
Spirits: Nineteen Years in South Korea's
Gulag, New York, Rowman and Littlefield,
2001). Suh, now a professor at Ritsumeikan
University in Kyoto, was convicted on apparently
trumped-up political charges in 1971, tortured and
not released from prison until 1990. His book was
written a decade later, published first in
Japanese and Korean, then English.
The
Kang and Suh families in postwar Kyoto were on
opposite sides of a Cold War fence that divided
communities in Japan, as well as internationally,
Kang's with North Korea and Suh's with South
Korea. When Kang arrived in Seoul, which seemed to
him the epitome of freedom, Suh was still in his
gulag, gaining his release only after the
US-supported military regime there was brought to
an end by massive popular protest.
The
picture presented by Suh of his long imprisonment
in South Korea is almost the reverse image of
Kang's picture of North Korea. Where Kang
attributed the brutality and oppression of his
gulag to communism, Suh attributes his to
anti-communism. One is blind to the gulags of the
South, the other is blind to those of the North;
both illuminate the horrors of daily life in their
respective gulags, but tell us little of the
structure in which both systems evolved.
When Kang got to Seoul about 1989, he
found freedom, Coca-Cola - his first swallow was
so wonderful that it cured his cold - and a job.
South Korea had just gone through a huge
transformation (1987), tantamount to a democratic
revolution that brought the succession of military
dictatorships to an end, yet he seems to have been
unaware of it. Suh Sung was still in prison, not
released until the following year. Freedom was a
fresh shoot in South Korea, but for Kang, enjoying
his Coke, simply being anti-communist meant being
free.
It is unlikely that Suh's story will
find its way on to the presidential bookshelves,
and doubtful anyway that Bush would want to read
much of it. Kang's simplistic tale of good and
evil, freedom and communism, much better suits his
preconceptions than any complex historical insight
into the Korean division. Suh's book would be much
more difficult for him to understand, not only
because it tells of political prisons and immense
suffering under a US-installed "free world"
regime, but also because the repression described
there is now a thing of the past. With the
presidential blessing, publishers will no doubt
take steps to make Kang's book available to "all
Americans".
Bush's understanding of Korea
is probably widely shared in Washington. When both
houses of Congress unanimously adopted the North
Korean Human Rights Law in July 2004, they were
thinking along those lines. Under the banner of
human rights and democracy, US propaganda against
the North Korean regime is now being stepped up,
with radio receivers secretly infiltrating the
country and funding substantially increased for
organizations - many of them of a fundamentalist
religious hue to work with refugees spreading the
gospel (creating 10,000 underground churches is
the ambition of one influential group) - and
undermining the regime.
Kang's book
focuses necessary attention on the North Korean
refugee problem. There are basically two
approaches to it. The one favored by Kang assumes
the impossibility of human-rights concerns being
addressed under the existing regime, and therefore
calls for steps designed to maximize the flow of
refugees with a view to precipitating an East
German-type regime collapse. This is essentially
the view held by the prominent defector, Hwang
Jang-Yop, formerly right-hand man of former North
leader Kim Il-sung and architect of the North
Korean juche or self-reliance ideology.
Hwang defected to South Korea in 1997 and was
welcomed in Washington in 2003 (though not by the
White House).
For most who live in the
surrounding region, however, especially the
governments in Seoul, Beijing and Moscow, such a
collapse offers the nightmare prospect of millions
fleeing on foot or by boat from a disaster zone or
becoming dependent on international relief
organizations as the economy and society spirals
into chaos and die-hard North Korean military
groups engage in violent resistance - with or
without nuclear or other weapons of mass
destruction.
The alternative is to strive
to "normalize" North Korea, negotiating to address
its security concerns and persuade it to renounce
its nuclear ambitions in exchange for diplomatic,
political and economic recognition and assistance
packages aimed at integrating it within a booming
northeast Asian region.
The refugee
problem is large, but not of massive proportions:
about 6,000 Dappokusha in South Korea (where they
have proved extremely difficult to assimilate and
live mostly on welfare), and somewhere between
300,000 and 500,000 in China, especially in the
northeast China, which is just a river crossing
away and where they are treated as illegal
immigrants, extremely insecure and subject to
arrest and repatriation. Most of these have fled
from severe economic conditions, especially famine
that has prevailed in parts of the country for a
decade, and only a small proportion for political
rather than economic reasons (two out of a sample
of 63 in a 2004 study by Refugee International).
The North Korean economic collapse of the
1990s occurred for a complex of political,
economic and ecological conditions, only some of
which the regime could be held directly
responsible, and despite the severe sanctions
under which the country still labors, the reforms
adopted in the past few years seem to have
arrested the decline. Most observers believe the
transition to market mechanisms is now probably
irreversible, though a real revival of the country
is impossible as long as sanctions, isolation, and
military confrontation with the US persist
The preferred solution in this view is
precisely the opposite of the Kang, Bush and
Congressional view. It is to depoliticize the
humanitarian crisis, persuade the Chinese
government to guarantee the rights of refugees,
including by granting provisional residence
status, and get North Korea to guarantee
non-punishment of those who wish to return (along
the lines of the Orderly Repatriation Program
under which 72,000 refugees returned to Vietnam
between 1990 and 1995) all within the frame of a
comprehensive settlement of the many North
Korea-related problems on the table at the Beijing
six-party talks.
This discussion benefits
from reading an unpublished paper by Chung
Byung-ho of Hanyang University. South Korea would,
in this view, play the key role, and the aim would
be a "soft landing" for North Korea.
Reconstruction of the country through the ending
of sanctions against it and its admission to
international financial and economic cooperation
institutions would open the way, first, to solve
the basic problem of physical survival, then those
of political and social rights. The Koreans
themselves will have to play the central role in
this process.
It is good that Bush has
read at least one book on Korea, by a Korean, even
if one cannot help wishing he had read Suh's also.
The one he read can only confirm his simplistic
view of the Korean problem, while the one he did
not read might have helped him to realize that
human-rights abuses on the Korean peninsula are
rooted at a deeper level than the confrontation
between communism and anti-communism, and that the
original sin from which half a century and more of
militarization, confrontation and denial of human
rights has flowed is none other than division
itself.
Rather than more intervention to
bring about regime change, what Korea needs is to
be left alone to redress the long-continuing
trauma caused by the massive interventions of a
former generation. Since the South-North summit of
June 2000, the Korean people have been making
substantial progress in precisely this direction.
Gavan McCormack is professor of
social science at International Christian
University, Tokyo, the author of Target North
Korea: Pushing North Korea to the Brink and a
Japan Focus coordinator.
(Republished
with permission from Japan Focus) |
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