The Root of All Evil: Money, Rice, Crime & Law in North Korea
In 1997, a Washington Post reporter was allowed into the city of Hamheung, in the mountains that ring North Korea’s east coast, to investigate reports of a famine in the isolated country. There, he interviewed the director of a local orphanage, who told him that some parents who could no longer feed their children had begun to abandon them “to nature.” Some of these children died where their parents left them. In other cases, people would bring them to the orphanage, which was “surrounded by high hills covered with graves and stone markers.” The orphanage director told the reporter that he was looking at “an old burial ground,” but the reporter also saw “many new graves.”1
Two years later, a Reuters reporter also visited an orphanage in the city, and also observed that it was “surrounded on all three sides by hills covered in graves.” Many of the 118 children who resided there looked malnourished or stunted. Others were pale or seemed to have difficulty concentrating. All their parents had either died or abandoned them.2
In 1997, Jang So-yeon lived in Hamheung. When her sister fell ill with cholera, she stayed with her in the hospital. Decades later, after her escape from North Korea, she told a reporter how the staff “laid the patients out like goods in a warehouse,” and that they “could hear people crying in the next ward, and see people dying.” Staff piled the dead outside the building. “Once a week, a truck came and took all the bodies away.” The smell of death filled the streets. The hills around the city became cemeteries. “Up in the mountains, there were graves everywhere. Some were not well covered up—it was bare, there was no soil—and the bodies were coming out.”3
Refugees from the city spoke of “apocalyptic” death rates. One estimated that a third of the city’s population of 700,000 perished. He described a city of vacant houses, of apartment buildings where entire floors were emptied by the deaths of families who once lived there.4 At the station, crowds waited for days for trains bound for Hyesan, near the border with China, to find food. Some did not survive to board them. Railroad workers who dragged away twenty bodies every morning soon gave up on the grim task of recording their names. A hellish three-day journey awaited the rest, of whom perhaps half were discarded along the way—starved, suffocated in the packed carriages, fallen from the undersides or rooftops of the cars, or electrocuted by the overhead power lines.5
Anyone with an internet connection can corroborate the most horrific part of Jang So-yeon’s story. Google Earth imagery of the eastern cities of Wonsan, Hamheung, and Heungnam published in the years after the famine shows what appear to be hundreds of thousands of makeshift graves in the hills overlooking the cities.6 Since 2000, these vast cemeteries have begun to wash downhill. Year by year, forests have risen to reclaim the dead, who now exist only in the mute memories of the bereaved, for whom the very cry for justice is a crime punishable by death—because not one of these people had to die.
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[O]ur strategy must broaden to cut the deeper political and ideological roots from which all of its destructive behaviors arise. Pyongyang must not only be denied the means to continue them. It must conclude that their continuation threatens the integrity of the state. At the same time, it must be offered a path to survival, prosperity, and peace in exchange for disarmament and a steady evolution toward reform.
The coalition’s greatest coercive power is not the threat of war, but to empower change from within North Korea. It can target the trading companies that maintain Pyongyang’s control over the civilian population and weaken the forces of the state that repress change from within. It can wage a war of ideas by broadcasting detailed and credible facts about the state’s kleptocracy, corruption, international illegitimacy, refusal of foreign assistance, and disregard for the welfare of the people.
Money, as we have seen, is the root of all evils that stalk the people of North Korea, and ultimately, the United States and its allies. Their common purpose must be to seize and freeze Pyongyang’s misspent wealth and to put the world—including the people of North Korea—on notice that this wealth may only be used for the peaceful and humane benefit of the people to whom it rightfully belongs.