North Korea F.A.Q.

Why blog about North Korea?

North Korea’s nuclear program and the diplomacy that has attempted to end it for decades are widely covered in the media, but the media has done a poor job reporting the wider North Korea story: its people and their suffering, the society in which they live, and what these things say about the failure of the international community to respond to a grave humanitarian crisis. Those missing pieces of the story are the pieces that put the nuclear issue and every other part of the North Korean tragedy in context. They explain why Kim Jong Il’s possession of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons is such a grave threat to the peace of other nations. In other ways, those other parts of the story are even more newsworthy than the nuclear diplomacy.

Why is the  North Korean regime  so dangerous?

Because of its  extreme disregard for human life.  If  you read only one link at this site, read about its concentration camps,  look down into  them, and hear the survivors describe them.  We know what history has taught us about governments that commit mass murder:  eventually, they turn outward for new victims.  An estimated 400,000  men, women, and  children  have died in those camps.

And this is still not the worst of it.  The deaths of approximately 2.5 million North Koreans in the Great Famine of the mid-1990’s  were completely preventable.  Although the regime knew that thousands were dying, especially in the far northeast, it continued to prioritize weapons purchases over food and  directed shipments of international aid to more politically favored areas along its west coast.

Experts offer a wide range of estimates for  how many North Koreans  died in the Great Famine.  Although I’m most persuaded by the estimate of former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios — 2.5 million —  the economist Marcus Noland and the political scientist Stephan Haggard estimate the toll at between 600,000 and 1 million.  Noland and Haggard are scrupulously honest and rigorous scholars.  They’re not trying to  minimize this tragedy;  I just happen to  disagree with their use of a model based on 1950’s China, a society much less urbanized than 1990’s North Korea.  Others, including Fiona Terry of Medicins San Frontieres,  have provided estimates as high as 3.5 million, although those estimates are not as  well explained.

Regardless of the actual toll, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands certainly died prolonged, painful, and needless deaths.  There is growing acceptance that these deaths could have been prevented if North Korea had bought fewer weapons and more food during the famine’s peak.  Recently, a report commissioned by Vaclav Havel, Kjell Magne Bondevik, and Elie Wiesel called the famine “a crime against humanity.”  They have called for U.N. intervention, but the U.N. won’t intervene.

Further Reading:

• President Obama Fails to Make an Issue of Human Rights in North Korea.

Why Is North Korea so Repressive?

To a greater degree than any regime that has ever existed, the North Korean regime requires absolute obedience, crushes all hints of dissent, and requires frequent participation in propaganda and “criticism” sessions. North Korean security forces routinely conduct “home inspections” at night to check for visitors without travel permits or radios that can be tuned to receive foreign broadcasts. Neighbors are expected to spy on neighbors, co-workers on co-workers, and North Koreans are even expected to spy on members of their own families. The regime practices collective punishment; a transgression by one family member could doom the entire family to a term in a labor camp.

Though often described as a Stalinist regime, North Korea’s ideology is not traditionally Marxist.  It is strongly nationalist and on occasion, venemously racist.  North Korean ideology places a high premium on racial purity.  Escapees from North Korea report that the  regime kills the babies of refugee women to prevent the birth of half-Chinese babies.

The state ideology is also a religion ruled by the most jealous of gods.  All other religious belief is severely punished, with the exception of a few churches that are suspected shams for external consumption.To me, the most persuasive evidence of North Korea’s deification  are the leaflets you see here.  While I was serving as a soldier in South Korea in 1999, a fellow soldier found these near the fence of the Yongsan Garrison in Seoul and gave them to me.  The North Korean agents put them there to show their presence, and souvenir-hunting soldiers widely ingored the rule requiring us to put these leaflets in collection boxes.  Translation here.  North Korea even has its own nativity story in which Kim Jong Il was born on the sacred Mount Paektu  under a mystical star.

To understand either of the Koreas, it is important to remember that Korea was occupied by imperial Japan for 35 years prior to World War II.  North Korea has derived its own form of state religion in which its supreme leader is reinvented with mystical powers and worshipped as a deity, as Japan’s emperor was worshipped.  The scholar B.R. Myers sees infantilization in the deification of the Kims.  North Korean propaganda frequently depicts the people  as lost children who are only saved by the divine intervention and guidance of the “motherly” father and son.

The author Jasper Becker quotes high-level  defector Hwang Jang Yop as claiming that Kim Jong Il openly admired Hitler and that  North  Korea’s ideology  was influenced by  Nazi ideology.  Hwang may have motives to fabricate such a claim, but there are striking similaries between juche and fuhrerprinzip.  When Stalin’s army occupied northern Korea in 1945,  it imposed a Stalinist template and installed Kim Il Sung as leader.  But many who would become North Korea’s new ruling class had grown up in a confucianist society under the heel of Japanese fascism.  North Korea is also a highly stratified society, organized into 51 hereditary social groups determined by  the occupation or misdeeds of an individual’s ancestors.  North Korea attracts its share of leftist admirers in the West who are attracted by the “purity” of its socialism.

Yet a society in which the privileged enjoy considerable luxury and the poor starve is far from egalitarian. Closer to the mark is the Russian North Korea expert Andrei Lankov, who recently declared  “The Natural Death of North Korean  Stalinism.”

Although no one knows which personalities hold the real power in the North Korean court, the current  consensus is that Kim Jong Il is firmly in charge.  Here the palace in which he lives.  Near that palace lies what the North Korean regime claims to the be the tomb of the ancient King Tangun.  It was discovered in 1993, coincidentally just after Kim Il Sung ordered his archeologists to locate it.  The North Korean regime highly values history and makes aggressive — and often fraudulent — claims on it.  As time passes, the Kim dynasty bears an ever-stronger resemblance to one of the medieval dynasties whose legacies it claims.

Further Reading:

• Fascism, Stalinism, and North Korea’s Destiny.

Is Kim Jong Il crazy?

It’s hard to be certain, but the best guess is that he’s merely a malignant narcissist. He’s a capable of rational judgment, but prone to acting on impulse and may miscalculate risk. A very unusual upbringing — which includes seeing his brother drown in a childhood swimming accident — probably contributed to that condition.

This tendency to take extreme risks was again demonstrated by his ordering of the sinking of a South Korean warship in March 2010.  At least one purpose for this risky provocation seems to have been for domestic propaganda, most likely to distract North Koreans from their deepening economic misery and bolster the martial credentials of his son.

How is Kim Jong Il’s health these days?

For years, there have been rumors of Kim Jong Il’s ill health due to liver or kidney disease, but the reports are not consistent.  In 2007, a German medical team is said to have recently flown into North Korea to perform a medical procedure on his heart. Unfortunately, Kim Jong Il appears to have recovered from the surgery in much improved health.

The following year, Kim Jong Il appears to have had a stroke, which had a visible impact on his health.  There were coincident rumors that he had pancratic cancer.

Who would succeed Kim Jong Il if he dies?

North Korea is the world’s only heredetary dynasty to officially describe itself as Marxist, and one of Kim Jong Il’s three sons by two different women are the natural candidates. Power devolved from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il with the elder Kim’s death in 1994.

Today, there is much speculation that one of Kim Jong Il’s sons will succeed him. The problem is that each of the sons is unfit to rule for one reason or another. The oldest, Kim Jong Nam, was recently caught entering Japan on his way to Tokyo Disneyland on a fake Dominican passport. He was deported, was reportedly sidelined in the succession contest, and disowned by his father. More recently, he was spotted living in Macau, where it was rumored that he was involved in some of North Korea’s criminal enterprises. In the summer of 2007, it was reported that he had returned to Pyongyang. Jong Chol’s greatest problem may be his morbid obesity. It’s difficult to imagine that a starving population would accept him as a leader.

Second son Kim Jong Chol was educated in Switzerland and was recently spotted at an Eric Clapton concert in Europe. Jong Chol’s extremely effinate mannerisms are officially explained as being the result of a “hormonal imbalance,” and even Kim Jong Il is said to have disapproved his succession for that reason.

By January 2010, it was evident that third son Kim Jong Eun had been chosen to succeed Kim Jong Il, though it still seemed most likely Jong Eun would be a figurehead, with the real power held by the generals and senior party officials from behind the scenes.  Less is known about Jong Eun than his siblings.  His  succession would violate a strong Confucian tradition of primogeniture.  Like his siblings, he lacks the gravitas, charisma, or experience to rule.  The very fact of his succession, which seems premature, suggests that Kim Jong Il’s health is deteriorating quickly.  Because Kim Jong Eun is unready to wield absolute power, Kim Jong Il’s sudden death could set off a ferocious contest among generals and apparatchiks to grab the strings of power.

What is the U.N. doing about North Korea?

On human rights, as little as possible.  The U.N. has done almost nothing about  North Korea’s humanitarian crises — the mass starvation,  repression, murder,  and refugee flows.  The High Commission for Human Rights and  the High Commission for Refugees deserve particular recognition for being almost completely  ineffective.  The membership of the new U.N. Human Rights Council includes some of the world’s most repressive regimes, including China, Saudi Arabia, Cuba.  This isn’t promising for anyone expecting the U.N. to articulate a high standard.

The U.N. Development Program operated for years in North Korea without knowing how the cash it freely handed out to North Korean government employees was spent.  The exposure of the program’s  lack of accountability  recently caused a minor scandal.  The U.N. promised a full investigation.  Instead, it fired the whistleblower who reported it.

U.N. food aid  may have  saved thousands of lives, but the aid program’s timid approach to North Korean restrictions and manipulations has meant that  far fewer lives were saved than could have been.  By 2005, the World Food Program claimed to be providing the marginal subsistence to 6.5 million North Koreans, a third of the total population.   But diversion of food aid was high, estimated at between 30 to 50%, and clandestine video showed  some of the aid for sale in markets.  Under pressure from donors to gain access to more “closed” areas and insure a fairer and more equal distribution of aid, the World Food Program tried to negotiate a more transparent program.  Instead, North Korea ordered the World Food Program to be out of North Korea by the end of 2005.  The following spring, it partially reversed itself.  The much-reduced program was supposed to feed just 1.9 million pregnant woman and children, but weary donors have not fully funded the program.  Serious floods in 2006 and even more severe floods in 2007 now threaten a dramatic deterioration in North Korea’s already critical food supply.  North Korea has again appealed for aid, but it’s too early to tell if it will allow more transparent distribution this time.

Can we be hopeful that things will be better under the leadership of Ban Ki-Moon?  Not likely.  Ban was one of the few career diplomats in South Korea’s  Foreign Ministry to survive a purge that followed the election of the leftist Roh Moo Hyun in 2002.  Ban reinvented himself as a leading advocate of South Korea’s Sunshine Policy.  Some of the defining acts of his tenure as Foreign Minister were a series of South Korean absentions on U.N. General Assembly votes to condemn North Korea’s human rights record.  Insiders view Ban as a timid consensus-builder who shies from controversy and defers to China.

Further Reading:  

• May Day Greetings from the Head of the World Health Organization!
• How President Obama and the U.N. Failed to Respond to North Korea’s Attack on the South Korean Warship Cheonan.

What have other nations done or said about North Korea?

Recently, other nations have taken a greater interest in the North Korean human rights issue.  Despite high initial hopes, the U.S. State Department quietly blocked implementation of most key provisions of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004.  The Bush Administration’s high rhetoric has not been matched by its actions.

The European Parliament has recently been more vocal in criticizing North Korea, but European businesses continue trading with North Korea under morally dubious circumstances.  For example, a British company sells gold that may well come from mines in  two North Korean concentration camps — Camp 15 and Camp 77.  Recently, Europe recoiled at the revelation that North Korean women  working in conditions tantamount to slavery were sewing BMW headrests in the Czech Republic.  Although North Korea is reputed to earn much of its foreign exchange from the sale of counterfeit cigarettes, a leader of Britain’s Conservative Party was embarrassed by the revelation that British-American Tobacco, on whose executive board he sat, was producing cigarettes in North Korea.  It seems difficult to explain why a nation that can’t feed itself uses its scarce land to grow tobacco.

The nation that has turned the coldest shoulder to Kim Jong Il is Japan.   At one time, remittances from Korean-Japanese were a  major source of income for North Korea.   Since the launching of a Rodong missile over Japan in 1998 and the revelation that North Korea had  kidnapped dozens of Japanese — including children — from Japan, the political climate in Japan has become intensely hostile toward North Korea.  Japan has since virtually ended trade with North Korea and moved to dismantle the North Korean fifth column organization in Japan known as Chosen Soren or Chongryon.

Most of the Southeast Asian countries have been hostile to treacherous as havens for North Koreans.  The least hospitable are Burma and Laos.  Vietnam has repatriated North Koreas at times; at others, it has allowed them to leave for South Korea.  Thailand had briefly  allowed itself to become a haven, but after the Thai military took power, it announced plans to start cooperating with the Chinese police to intercept and round up North Korean refugees.

What role does South Korea play?

Recently, South Korea has done as much as possible to keep Kim Jong Il in power.  South Korea’s political climate has  recently turned  anti-American and relatively sympathetic to the North Korean regime.  A succession of elected leftist governments have begun a massive program of direct aid and  transfer payments to Kim Jong Il’s regime, amounting to an estimated $7 billion since 1997.  Most of this aid is unmonitored, and according to the  highly respected economist and Korea expert Marcus Noland,  some of it may have been diverted into North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

Despite having the protection of 29,500 U.S. military personnel on its soil, South Korea  has effectively declared itself  a neutral nation in checking China’s regional ambitions.  It claims to want to disarm North Korea of nuclear weapons, but has done little to pressure North Korea into making that choice.   South Korea is actually cutting its own military, leaving American taxpayers to take up the slack.  There doesn’t seem to be much South Korean gratitude for this expensive commitment, either, judging by displays like these, or polls that consistently show South Korea to be one of the most anti-American countries in Asia.

Why can’t China solve this problem?

China doesn’t want to.  It prefers to keep Kim Jong Il in place to frustrate America and Japan and keep Korea divided.  China has provided considerable support to North Korea’s regime, although there are no publicly available estimates of the amount.  China hunts down and arrests any North Korean refugees it finds on its soil and sends them back to North Korea.  This is in direct violation of the U.N. Convention on Refugees, which China signed.  Chinese police use brutal methods against the refugees, including electric cattle prods, the offering of bounties, and stringing cables through the refugees’ wrists or noses.  One group of refugees in a Chinese detention camp went on a hunger strike, but the Chinese sent them back anyway.  Those returned to North Korea may be sent to concentration camps, shot, or given relatively brief terms of austere detention, depending the reason they fled and  who they are suspected of contacting on the outside.  Most North Korean women hiding in China are sexually exploited and  sold into involuntary  marriages or to brothels.  The conditions they endure have drawn comparisons to the “comfort women” of World War II.

Further Reading:  

• How China Helped North Korea Nuke Up.

Why would North Korea attack us?  Surely they know that this would be the end of them.

It’s unlikely that North Korea would attack the United States directly.  Instead, North Korea is a promiscuous proliferator of weapons of mass destruction:

• Exhibit A, North Korean technical assistance to the Iranian nuclear program since the 1990s.
• Exhibit B, a report that Iran recently sold Russian-made cruise missiles to North Korea.
• Exhibit C, North Korean missiles intercepted on the way to Yemen in 2002.
• Exhibit D, a New York Times report that North Korea and Pakistan jointly tested a nuclear weapon in Pakistan in 1998.
• Exhibit E, consensus that North Korea was the source of Syria’s SCUD-C missiles and a report that North Korea has traded dual-use equipment with Syria that could be used for biological weapons.
• Exhibit F, Saddam’s plan to buy North Korean SCUDs with a range exceeding U.N. limits, stopped only when the invasion was imminent and North Korea opted to keep Saddam’s down payment.
• Exhibit G, a complete North Korean missile factory intercepted on the way to Libya.
• Exhibit H, uranium hexafluoride made in North Korea, found in Libya. Ad nauseum.
• Exhibit I, North Korea caught smuggling weapons, including man-portable surface-to-air missiles and ballistic missile components, to Iran.
• Most distressing of all, however, was the September 2007 revelation that North Korea was building a nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert.  Later, Der Spiegel reported that the reactor was financed by Iran.

All of these states have been or are sponsors of terrorism.  It’s not fanciful to worry that North Korean nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons will eventually be transferred to terrorists.  It’s unlikely that we’d ever know for certain who supplied those weapons even after they’re used, and North Korea knows that.

Further Reading:

• President Obama fails to restore North Korea to the list of state sponsors of terrorism,
• even after it tests a nuclear weapon and sinks a South Korean warship.

Isn’t  the current diplomatic process showing progress?

Not really.   The North Koreans shut down their reactor at Yongbyon, which was probably near the  end of its useful life anyway.  Still, Kim Jong Il could restart the reactor at any time.  They did not dismantle it or irreversibly give up any nuclear capabilities, and they  probably never will.  There’s a much larger, half-finished reactor near Yongbyon.   Kim Jong Il will  play for time until the political paralysis of an election year and a new administration.  Then, they’ll kick out the inspectors and restart any facilities that are still of use to them.

North Korea almost certainly has a uranium enrichment program, although the location and scale aren’t known publicly. They North Koreans admitted this in 2002, but now they’re back to denying it again.  No matter.  We have evidence of the purchase from the Pakistani laboratories that sold the centrifuges to Kim Jong Il.

Finally, North Korea has given mixed signals about when and whether it will give up its existing weapons.  And given North Korea’s track record, how would we know they’ve disclosed everything?  The Bush Administration seems very interested in racking up a record of diplomatic accomplishment before it leaves office; thus, the administration may well be willing to overlook gaps in inspection, verification, and North Korean credibility to claim success.

In exchange for  these limited concessions, North Korea has gained some very significant  benefits.  It managed to blunt the effects of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 1695 and 1718, which followed its missile and nuclear tests  in 2006.

More importantly,  North Korea  talked its way out  of a U.S. Treasury enforcement action against North Korea’s laundering of criminal proceeds, chiefly from drug dealing and counterfeiting, as well as from arms sales that would now be in violation of UNSCR 1718.  Treasury’s action was devastating to the part of the North Korean economy Kim Jong Il cares about — the one that sustains his lifestyle, his military, and the patronage system of his ruling elite class.  In a move that shocked many observers, the Federal Reserve quite literally laundered $25 million — much or most of it criminal proceeds  — for North Korea.  This move will weaken future enforcement efforts by opening them to charges of  inconsistency and political motivation.

Further Reading:  

• Chris Hill, George W. Bush, and the Failure of Agreed Framework II
• The Evidence of North Korea’s Uranium Program Overwhelms Its Critics.

So what do you propose we do?

An approach that combines economic, political, military, and diplomatic pressure aimed at accelerating what is probably inevitable anyway:  the end of the Kim Jong Il regime.

Although North Korea frequently engages in overheated  rhetoric and undiplomatic behavior and often overplays its hand, it has proven very skillful at getting its way diplomatically, always to the  eventual disadvantage of everyone who deals with it.  North  Korea has signed deal after deal with the United States, South Korea, and the U.N.  It has broken every one of them eventually.  The countries that deal with North Korea diplomatically all have very different interests and mutual antagonisms and are incapable of  forming a united front against  North Korea’s behavior.  North Korea has divided its neighbors with exceptional skill and taken advantage of all of them — especially South Korea —  through separate dealings.  In fact, the inherent disunity of  democracies  means they can  seldom compete with dictatorships at the negotiating table.   So a purely diplomatic approach  only  pits our weaknesses against North Korea’s strengths.

Purely military options also pit our political weakness against North Korea’s greatest strengths.  I don’t know of any serious suggestion  that we should  invade North Korea.  Doing so would be incalculably bloody.  Some Republicans and Democrats have recently suggested air strikes against North Korea.   Such a  course  could easily escalate into a disastrous war that would kill millions.

Instead, we should focus our efforts where Kim Jong Il’s rule is weak:  his economy and the disillusioned and weary North Korean people.

First, we should set a firm deadline for a full disclosure of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and programs, and for the allowance of  complete and open access by inspectors from the  five nations negotiating with  North Korea, including the United States.  North  Korea will miss that deadline, but it’s politically important that North Korea be allowed to miss it.

Second,  the Treasury Department must be allowed to go after North  Korea’s mostly illicit sources of income and freeze them.  Those measure were devastating to the regime’s palace economy during the brief period — just 16 months — when it was tried.  We have other financial weapons we have never even tried, but should:

• We should declare the entire North Korean government — not just one of its favored shady banks — to be an entity of concern for money laundering under Section 311 of the USA PATRIOT  Act.   This alone would virtually destroy North Korea’s economy overnight.
• We should invoke Executive Order 13,382 more broadly to shut off sources of income for North Korea’s WMD programs.  Two of the largest sources of that income  may be  South Korea’s Kaesong Industrial Park and the Kumgang Tourist Project.  The loss of the income from those two projects would be a severe and possibly fatal  shock to North Korea’s palace economy.  We should also let China’s leaders know that their banks and businesses are not immune from those measures.
• We should inform the South Korean government that our military commitment to the defense of South Korea is not unconditional,  and we will  sharply reduce that commitment  if it continues to  provide billions in aid to prop up Kim Jong Il’s regime.
• We should explore other creative options, including the use RICO statutes, “private attorney general” provisions,  and  civil litigation by slave labor victims to pursue North Korean industries that use slave labor.  Two  targets are particularly attractive.  One is North Korea’s sale of gold, much of it mined in concentration camps, on the international market.  Another is its bulk rental of labor  abroad or at the Kaesong Industrial Park,  on terms in which the  government receives the workers’ “wages” while the workers receive some unknown —  but probably much smaller —  amount.  The proceeds should be put aside to bear interest until they can be used to compensate the victims and reconstruct North Korea.

Third, we should actively support the continuation of food aid to North Korea, because North Korea’s people did not elect Kim Jong Il are not responsible for his behavior.  They are his victims.  Because of widespread diversion of that aid, however, we should discontinue our support for any aid program that distributes food through North Korea’s own corrupt and inefficient distribution system.  Instead, we should insist on the establishment of independent distribution networks.  Ordinary North Koreans should see compassionate foreign faces providing the food that sustains them.  Then, the falsity of North Korean “self reliance” will be exposed.

Fourth, we should  seek to accelerate popular discontent with the regime.  Although it’s not possible to poll North Koreans about their political beliefs, the regime can’t be popular if as many as  300,000 of them have fled their homeland.  There are some survey data to support the idea that discontent is widespread, and videos smuggled out of North Korea, reports of mass defections by border guards, and numerous acts of anti-government resistance provide further  support.

Our role can be to give that discontent a host, a voice, unity, and direction.  For years, we have talked of increasing the smuggling of radios, cell phones, videocassettes, books, and pamphlets into North Korea.  We know that North Koreans who are exposed to the reality of how their neighbors live realize that the propaganda they have been fed is false.  We could also help to plant a network of clandestine journalists inside North Korea to give the North Korean people and people everywhere an authentic source of news about what is happening there.  This network could be the first  step toward  transforming scattered acts of discontent into a nationwide, clandestine resistance movement.

Further reading:

• Ten Effective, Non-Military Options We Can Use Against Kim Jong Il.
• North Korea’s Great Confiscation, and The Ajumma Rebellion that followed.
• Overthrowing Kim – A Capitalist Manifesto.  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4