Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH: Human rights and the revisionists

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	December 25, 1999	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH: Human rights and the revisionists
By Bradley Martin

As South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported not long ago, ''more and more intellectuals and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) at home and abroad are joining campaigns to make an issue of North Korea's hellish human rights situation''.

Indeed they are. Certainly there has been this year more concern in Japan, Europe and North America, as well as South Korea, for oppressed North Koreans - especially the many thousands of refugees who are in hiding across the border in China, in fear of being deported and returned to a country whose ruler has shown himself willing to let ordinary people starve if only the civilian elite and the military could be fed.

If you're looking for a single point to characterize North Korea's 1999, this increased foreign interest in the human rights situation may be as good as any. There are other, more obvious contenders for issue or trend of the year, of course. For example, historians may look back on 1999 first and foremost as the year Pyongyang really started to open up to the outside world. But, then again, they may not. After all, there have been stirrings every few years suggesting such a change of course - and each time the hopes thus aroused have been dashed, sooner rather than later.

But why did it take the outside world decades to resume paying serious attention to the North Korean regime as a massive violator of human rights? A big reason was reluctance to credit the accounts of North Koreans who defected to the South.

That reluctance used to be little more than normal, healthy skepticism, back in the immediate post-Korean War period. But it became a strong bias - all but a taboo - by the mid-1970s, thanks to the efforts of revisionist, anti-South Korean scholars, who dismissed the defectors as propaganda tools of Seoul's Korean Central Intelligence Agency. Take away the defectors' testimony and there was almost no first-hand information available, since the Pyongyang regime tightly controlled people and information going out and coming in (restricting foreign visitors to itineraries that gave new meaning to the term ''guided tour''). Without reliable first-hand information it was unfair to judge North Korea, argued the revisionists - whose views became very influential.

In recent months the credibility of the defectors in Seoul has received an enormous boost from the availability of a new crop of first-hand stories about the realities of North Korea - this time told by refugees who crossed into China. What they are telling interviewers corroborates, in spades, the main points of what the all-but-ignored Seoul-based defectors had been saying for years.

Serious Pyongyang watchers of course knew all along that Pyongyang had given the fullest expression yet to the theory and practice of totalitarianism. As late as 1972, when Robert A Scalapino and Chong-sik Lee published their landmark two-volume work on Korean communism, this was said freely, in strong terms. But pointed criticisms largely went out of fashion later in the '70s after the revisionist movement arose among young Korea specialists in the United States, scholar-activists who were influenced by the anti-Vietnam War movement to view Korea through a Vietnam lens.

The parallels between the wars in Korea and Vietnam, wrote one of those revisionists, Robert W Simmons, ''are numerous. In both cases the United States backed corrupt and unpopular governments, preferring to believe that 'international order' was more important than the legitimate nationalism of the peoples involved.'' Simmons argued that in Korea, from an American standpoint, ''non-intervention would have brought welcome consequences. First, the Chinese civil war would have ended with the liberation of Taiwan. And then, in all probablity, Washington and Peking would have reached a working relationship . . .'' Instead, ''the political price that Koreans have paid for the American intervention has been autocracy throughout the peninsula based upon the mutual fears of the two governments.''

Some readers may find it odd today to learn of Simmons's suggestion that Beijing's ''liberation'' of Taiwan coupled with the absorption of South Korea into North Korea would have been positive outcomes. But recall that he wrote this before their rapid economic development made South Korea and Taiwan the biggest and second biggest, respectively, of Asia's ''Four Tigers'' - which in turn became the inspiration for China's shift toward a market economy.

Simmons seemed to suggest that Kim Il-sung would not have been an autocratic ruler if only he had been permitted to absorb South Korea. The sum of available information about Kim indicates that this was wishful thinking. Modeling his rule on Stalin's, Kim had already shown, before the invasion, many signs of developing into the complete autocrat he was to become.

In another Vietnam-era analysis, Frank Baldwin asked: ''What would have happened in Korea if the United States had not intervened?'' His answer: ''The war would have been over in two or three weeks with total casualties of perhaps less than 50,000. Several million people opposed to communism would have come under communist rule and probably, but not certainly, there would have been reprisals. A single communist Korean state would have been established, the unity of a millennium restored, and national energies immediately directed to urgent economic and social reconstruction.''

Baldwin listed negative consequences of the Korean War for Americans, including: ''a very costly commitment to South Korea's security, reversal of the tentative policy of accommodation with the People's Republic of China and the subsequent twenty years of hostility to China, domestic mobilization and the creation of a garrison economy (Pentagon capitalism) . . . The United States intervention prolonged the war by more than three years, bringing an estimated 4.5 million Korean, Chinese and American casualties. The United States achieved its objective of keeping the southern half of the peninsula non-communist, but the Koreans remain divided almost three decades later.''

Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings carried the comparison of the two wars so far as to observe that, ''whereas the Vietnamese and Ho Chi Minh inspired considerable sympathy in the West, the nature and credentials of the Korean revolution were completely ignored . . . No students charged through the streets of Berkeley shouting, 'Kim, Kim, Kim Il-sung'. ''

Vietnam-era critics had little but contempt for Washington's claim that its support for South Korea equated to defending freedom in a society evolving toward democracy. Baldwin saw the Park Chung-hee regime (1961-1979) as ''a police state with but a few trappings - the 'formal institutions' of constitutional government - to avoid foreign criticism''. As for the economic gains that were becoming apparent in the South even in the early '70s, they were distributed unevenly, Baldwin wrote. ''In a mixed capitalist system, without pressure from below, the chances of Korean workers and farmers getting a fair share of the increased wealth appear remote. It is more probable that they will be caught in a police state vise, working long hours for low wages, while the profits go to foreign capitalists and a small ruling elite in South Korea.''

In the late 1960s, several younger-generation Korea scholars of like mind helped to form the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, challenging more conservative academic colleagues to drop their support - active or passive - for ''an Asian policy committed to ensuring American domination of much of Asia''. A leading spirit in that group was Baldwin, who taught Korean history, language and politics at Columbia University during the tumultuous years of campus protest from 1968 to 1972.

In his introduction to a book of essays, several of them contributed by fellow members of the committee, Baldwin issued a blanket dismissal of the fruits of North Korea studies in the United States as of the early 1970s. ''On the one hand, career anti-communists dominate the field,'' he wrote - a clear slap at Scalapino, the revisionists' bete noir. On the other hand, ''the independent, objective, Korean-born researcher'' would fear to tell the whole truth because of pressure from the South's KCIA, ''including pressure on relatives in South Korea''. For such researchers, Baldwin asserted sweepingly, ''self-censorship prevented unbiased or sympathetic research on North Korea''.

A number of the ''concerned'' scholars believed the United States must abandon South Korea. As Baldwin wrote: ''The risk of being involved in another phase of the Korean civil war, the endless cost of providing weapons and military aid to South Korea and of keeping US forces there, and the embarrassing dictatorial methods of the Park government all argue for an end to US involvement.'' Starting as they often did from a romantic, very '60s and '70s view of revolution and socialist egalitarianism (some revisionists identified themselves with the ''New Left'') such arguments had resonance, particularly among anti-establishment young people.

Baldwin himself hedged his analysis by noting that ''the apparently totalitarian controls and the personality cult of Kim Il-sung left even empathetic foreign observers puzzled and ambivalent about North Korea''. But some others among the Vietnam-era critics who harbored extremely negative views of South Korea adopted the logic that, since the South was so horrible, the North must be wonderful - or at least better than the South.

Revisionist ideas appealed not only to the radical fringe. Influential establishment news media organizations that came to take critical stances against the Vietnam War also eventually adopted some of the revisionists' biases on Korea - including the bias against crediting the testimony of North Koreans who had defected to the South.

Now that the former trickle of defectors has turned into a flood, in large part due to the famine that has afflicted North Korea for several years, there are thousands of North Koreans testifying or ready to testify - not all of them in South Korea or under South Korean government control. Thus, in the year 2000 and for the foreseeable future, even the most skeptical researcher will be hard-pressed to cite ''lack of reliable information'' in dismissing wholesale the many accounts of how North Koreans are systematically oppressed.

(Special to Asia Times Online)

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