The Boy Who Cried “Sheep!”: One Man’s Mass Murderer Is Selig Harrison’s Reformer

For someone who judged the evidence of North Korea’s uranium enrichment program so skeptically, Selig Harrison sure doesn’t set a very high bar to perceive evidence of “reform” in North Korea. But Harrison’s latest op-ed in the Boston Globe is in equal parts breathless and baseless, and might just extend his dismal predictive record into the next decade. In his desperation to find some sign that North Korea’s new Inner Party is a hothouse of reforms, Harrison pounds the square peg of deiocratic totalitarianism into the round hole of post-Brezhnev perestroika. In doing so, he selectively disregards layers of nepotism, brutal statism, and octogenarian homogeneity, and seizes on points that are open to interpretation at best, and quite possibly inventions at worst.

Harrison first tries to base his hopes on the elevation of Kang Sok Ju to Deputy Prime Minister. Harrison credits Kang as the “architect” of the 1994 Agreed Framework (Robert Gallucci was not available for comment). But whatever Kang’s role in the AF 1.0 was, this is a dubious basis for optimism. The agreement was a spectacular failure at checking North Korea’s nuclear ambitions — North Korea was probably cheating from almost the moment it signed AF 1.0 — but AF 1.0 won North Korea valuable time, aid, and diplomatic concessions. All the while, North Korea’s domestic propaganda machine harrumphed that it had cheated and bullied the Yankees into recognizing it as a nuclear power. Today, North Korea is back to admitting that it’s enriching uranium, the Obama Administration has long since acknowledged it, and even David Albright warns that North Korea’s uranium enrichment program has “progressed at a rapid pace and reached a very alarming level.” In the intervening years, of course, North Korea has reneged on a whole new Agreed Framework.

Harrison also claims, again, without any of the detail that a skeptical reader might demand, that Jang Song Thaek was once purged for leading what Harrison characterizes as a “reformist” youth league in North Korea. Of course, it’s impossible to confirm that Jang was ever purged at all, although this is the majority view among practitioners of this black art. I can’t really say that Jang wasn’t purged for reformist tendencies any more than Harrison can say he was, but Harrison’s theory is a novel one among North Korea watchers. According to Michael Madden of North Korea Leadership watch, Jang was purged for an excess of ambition during North Korea’s palace intrigues:

One account has Mr. Jang facing a formal charge for factionalization, which is to say that his influence (power base) among KWP cadres threatened to eclipse Kim Jong il’s influence, thus undermining the power of the Suryong. In this account, Mr. Jang is alleged to have disputed Kim Jong il’s dying wife, Ko Yong Hee, over matters of succession with Ms. Ko favoring one of her sons (with the support of OGD Vice Directors Ri Jeh Gang and Ri Ja Il) to succeed General Kim, and Mr. Jang supporting Kim Jong Nam. There is also a story, which seems highly unlikely, that Mr. Jang’s wife Kim Kyong Hui was disowned by her brother, and the possible target of an assassination-by-auto-accident. In the second account of Mr. Jang’s sabbatical, Mr. Jang was found to be residing in a newly constructed palatial home (on par with those of the Suryongs), and that he was removed from office because the grandiosity of the house made him appear to have equal standing with General Kim. Under either scenario, Mr. Jang seems to have been punished for the North Korean version of the sin of pride.

The Washington Post’s Chico Harlan also notes the prevailing speculation, that Jang’s temporary disappearance was a function of his ambition. But whatever the reason, a less selective examination of Jang’s history suggests that he is no more a reformer than Heinrich Himmler or Lavrenti Beria:

For the bulk of his career, Jang was the head of North Korea’s internal security — a de facto enforcer. As senior deputy director for the Organization and Guidance Department, he oversaw not just public safety but also surveillance. He sentenced top-ranking officials to prison camps, experts said. [Chico Harlan, Washington Post]

The same positions would also have given him oversight over North Korea’s political prison camps, and under Jang, the capacity and ferocity of the camps expanded greatly at the county and local levels as the system became a means for anjeonbu and bowibu officers to shake down anyone with something to extort.

If Harrison means to cabin his optimism only with respect to economic reform, the evidence is equally unpersuasive. First, no one in the leadership of the North Korean regime deserves credit for the marketization of the North Korean economy. As Marcus Noland and Stephen Haggard have explained in exhaustive detail, marketization came from below as people developed their own strategies to survive the Great Famine. The regime simply found it impossible to enforce rules against trading in those times, and the people have been dependent on the markets ever since. The regime’s most determined effort to reverse marketization came in 2009, as Jang approached the peak of his influence and was frequently mentioned as the second- or third-most most powerful man in North Korea. That year, the regime systematically shut down markets, banned many foreign goods, and eventually launched the Great Confiscation, a retrograde measure that caused immense hardship for the North Korean people. If this is what passes for reformist in Harrison’s eyes, I’d like to know what good he thinks will ever come of it.