North Korea under Communism

Report of an Envoy to Paradise

Cornell Erik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135788216
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Koreanische Geschichte

After the collapse of the Soviet world, North Korea alone has continued on the rigid communist way, in spite of its economic consequences leading the state beyond ruin to famine. What are the reasons behind this peculiar choice of direction? Why did the leaders in Pyongyang pursue a policy abandoned not only by the Soviet Union, but also by China and Vietnam?
The author of this book spent three years as head of the embassy of Sweden in Pyongyang. Until a few years ago, it was the only Western embassy in North Korea. His unique experiences are related with descriptions of day-to-day life and with analyses of economic, political and ideological conditions. A picture is drawn of a society and a political order that defy both human nature and common sense.

Part I
REPORT OF AN ENVOY TO PARADISE

1
HISTORICAL REVIEW

During the last few centuries, the Kingdom of Korea could have been regarded as virtually a vassal of the Emperor of China. It had contact only with Beijing and was so isolated from other parts of the world that it came to be known as the Hermit Kingdom. Koreans were not even prepared to become involved with shipwrecked foreigners, nearly always preferring to keep them in confinement until they could be sent across the border to China. When evaluating North Korean attitudes and North Korea’s foreign policy, it is helpful if one understands that the regime in Pyongyang has still not been able to break with this tradition, but has, to a considerable degree, endeavoured to maintain its isolation from the surrounding world.

In the 1850s, the US Navy had forced Japan to open its borders to trade, and in 1866 it made an unsuccessful attempt to do the same with Korea. However, the Koreans managed to sink the warship General Sherman and kill the crew. Instead, it was Japan that successfully completed the task in 1876, and for a few decades Korea was opened up to the world. But, at the same time, Japan was gradually colonizing Korea, a process that was completed in 1910 when the peninsula was once again closed to foreign influence. It was not until Japan’s defeat in the Second World War that Korea regained its independence from Japan. While South Korea, after liberation in 1945, was progressively integrated into world society, North Korea’s isolation continued, albeit as a rather odd member of the communist world.

The victorious allies had agreed that Korea should be divided along the thirtyeighth parallel, with the northern part being liberated by the Soviet Union and the southern part by the USA. The advent of the Cold War, and the increasingly strained relations between the superpowers, meant that the free elections intended for the whole of Korea never took place. Instead, the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK; North Korea) were established in 1948. The frontline of the Cold War cut right across Korea, much as it did in Germany. However, in Korea this division led to the outbreak of war in 1950, during which the northern side rapidly captured all of the peninsula with the exception of the south-eastern corner. The Soviet Union was opposed to Taiwan representing China in the United Nations (UN) and therefore refused to take part in Security Council meetings, which meant that it was unable to use its veto. This made it possible for the USA to push through a resolution in which North Korea was branded as the aggressor. UN troops were sent in, and in a few months they not only recaptured South Korea but pushed on northwards towards the Chinese border. Then China intervened – and it may be noted here that China has put up with a number of foreign concessions (such as Hong Kong and Macao) on its territory, but on two occasions, in 1895 and 1950, it went to war to prevent foreign control of northern Korea. On this occasion, the UN troops were pushed back and the front gradually stabilized, for the most part just north of the thirty-eighth parallel, which has since been the border between the two Korean states. Between the two states lies a depopulated area several kilometres wide.

The armistice agreement was not signed until 1953 and there has never been any peace treaty. To ensure that the agreement was followed an armistice commission was appointed, and because of its combatant status the UN could not be a member. Instead, four neutral countries were chosen: Sweden and Switzerland by the UN, and Poland and Czechoslovakia by North Korea. Since that time, Sweden has always been represented in the little negotiating village of Panmunjom, which is situated on the border and the only contact point between the two states. The members of the commission have lived on their own sides of the border. Passage between North and South Korea via Panmunjom has, in effect, been limited to members of the commission in the strict sense, that is only properly accredited members and no other citizens from the commission’s member states. Following the collapse of Soviet power, North Korea sent the Polish and Czech delegations home and is now trying to have the armistice agreement annulled.

The Soviet Union installed a communist regime under Kim Il Sung, who had apparently spent the Second World War in Siberia and advanced to the rank of captain, or possibly major. The historical isolation of the northern area was thus reinforced. Following the immense destruction wreaked during the Korean War, an extraordinary reconstruction programme was embarked upon in the north, resulting in what seemed to be a remarkably successful industrialization programme, plus the development of agriculture. The communist countries rather looked down on their exotic ‘poor relation’, and wanted to force the country to become a part of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) cooperation, primarily as a supplier of raw materials. But North Korea refused, because it wanted to develop an all-round economic base with modern industry. In as far as the shifting conditions allowed, North Korea complained about the way in which advantage was taken of the country’s isolation, particularly by the Soviet Union, in order to sell at a high price and buy at a low price regardless of world market prices. The antagonism between the Soviet Union and China, which became all the more marked during the 1950s, gave Pyongyang greater freedom to manoeuvre. Furthermore, the Cultural Revolution in China – during which Red Guards were allowed to call North Korea’s head of state, Kim Il Sung, ‘the fat revisionist’ – also made Pyongyang somewhat wary of its dominant Chinese neighbour, which for centuries had been the Koreans’ model, gauge and only known part of the outside world, in other words their entire frame of reference.

The time was ripe and the occasion suitable for an attempt to end their isolation through their own efforts. The North Koreans decided to embark upon a major programme of rapid industrial development by importing the most modern technical equipment that the advanced industrial nations in the West could deliver – why pay high prices for poor quality in the East, when cheaper and better products were available in the West? North Korean buyers flocked to Western Europe and Japan in the early 1970s, and signed contracts for enormous sums. From Sweden alone, North Korea committed itself to import contracts worth about one thousand million Swedish krona (SEK) in the currency value of the time. Soon, the hotels in Pyongyang were filled with salesmen and suppliers from virtually every European country and Japan. Trade relations with countries in the communist bloc had, in general, been established long before the socialist takeovers had occurred and this had, if anything, improved their reputations in the West as reliable trading partners. The North Korean newcomer was therefore welcomed to world trade, the rules of which were assumed to be well known. But what little the Hermit Kingdom knew of the ways of the rest of the world, or the world economy, had been gleaned from Marxist textbooks.

North Korea had overspent. The equipment that had been ordered had hardly started being delivered before it became clear that there were delays in payment. The North Koreans had been blinded by twenty years of undeniable success, having picked themselves up by establishing a diversified industrial base, achieving selfsufficiency in agriculture and rebuilding towns and the countryside after the dreadful destruction wrought by the Korean War. A large part of the population that had been forced to seek shelter in earth dwellings had been rehoused and Pyongyang had already been transformed into a modern city, where visitors were shown the three houses that had survived the war undamaged. Their justifiable pride in what had been achieved obscured their sense of proportion on account of the total isolation of the country from the rest of the world, resulting in a complete ignorance of both Western society and the history of industrial development. The North Koreans were convinced that they were on the point of catching up with the developed industrial nations. Their ideology of self-reliance, Juche, dominated their minds with the power of religion, and there were neither the conditions nor the space for a sober appraisal of their own capabilities. Expensive machinery was left to rust away in harbour warehouses because its delivery had not been coordinated with the construction of factory buildings, and fully equipped factories could not start production because of lack of planning for energy resources. Similarly, great sums were squandered on flamboyant effects, such as luxurious cars for the nomenklatura and fantastic electrical equipment for theatres and museums, while resources out of all proportion were devoted to prestigious monuments glorifying the leader and the ideology. In order to demonstrate a high level of technological attainment, expensive prototypes of technically advanced products were constructed and exhibited as symbols of the country’s industrial capacity.

Companies in the West financed their deliveries, to a great extent, with export credits, and payment was to be based on the production that North Korea’s new mining and manufacturing industries were to generate. But nothing was produced; meanwhile the payment deadlines passed, and the debts mounted with interest upon interest. No help could be expected from other communist states, as they were of the opinion that Pyongyang was learning a well-deserved lesson as a result of its disloyal attempt to turn its back on the COMECON countries. But in the early 1970s, the rest of the world was blissfully ignorant of these circumstances. Nor could anyone in the West have any idea that the North Koreans had a tendency to believe that their new trading partners had ‘seen the light’, i.e. gained an insight into what was right and wrong, and now were going to help North Korea fulfil its destiny as a frontline state in the struggle against US imperialism. Under such circumstances, it must surely be regarded as somewhat petty to fuss about the repayment of debts.

Rarely indeed have trading relations been established, and contracts and agreements of this scale and magnitude entered into, between parties wallowing in such monumental delusions with regard to each other’s principles, intentions, priorities, production capacity and social mores.

The West’s trading relations with North Korea thus came to a sudden halt, more or less immediately, and were transformed into debt negotiations, which were as long drawn out as they were fruitless. North Korea was forced to go back to bartering goods with the communist countries, with strict requirements in the form of punctual deliveries of goods in return. But it was also, not least for the Soviet Union, a matter of pride to protect the reputation of the communist bloc by preventing the nature of the backward momentum of the North Korean economy from becoming too obvious to the rest of the world. The magnitude of Soviet Russian aid is naturally unknown, but it must have been of crucial importance, for, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it came to an end, and that was the start of North Korea’s rapid downhill slide into the acute crisis of the 1990s.

In the West, North Korea has acquired a certain notoriety but it remains a comparatively unknown country. It has probably only ever been visited by a few thousand Westerners, mainly businessmen, technicians and debt negotiators. A small group of Western countries established diplomatic relations with the country in the 1970s and their Beijing ambassador was also accredited to Pyongyang. Sweden, alone, opened an embassy there in 1975, and Finland and Austria opened trading offices. These had few staff and the accumulated number of resident employees can hardly, family members included, have exceeded 100 in twentyfive years. Towards the end of the 1980s, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) opened an office in Pyongyang and during the crisis years of the 1990s, it was joined by a number of other permanent, as well as temporary, delegations from international aid organisations.

One difficulty in judging North Korean conditions is that literature on the country is, in comparison with virtually all other countries, in very short supply. Reliable statistics are even more difficult to come by. Specialists on East Asia and communism have published a number of basic and often detailed studies, but the very character of the Hermit Kingdom has meant that the authors, particularly in the early years, have seldom had the opportunity to even visit the country, let alone live there. The dissolution of the Soviet Union, the reunion of East and West Germany, and North Korea’s increasingly serious problem of feeding its population, have all led to a renewed interest in the country and developments generally on the Korean peninsula. The number of articles, papers and books about the North Korean question has become almost too many to cope with in just a few years. Scenarios have been presented, debated and criticized, there has been speculation over North Korea’s intentions and, not least, discussion about how the rest of the world should react in the face of what would appear to be North Korea’s death rattle. It has now been realized that the much criticized and despised country must be given a helping hand in order to avoid its collapse, which would force the world to more or less suddenly assume responsibility, and foot the bill, for feeding twenty million people and reorganizing its society. Confronted with these problems, writers have been unable to refrain from complaining about the meagre availability of factual information, of which I can cite a typical example: ‘The DPRK’s totalitarian features have limited the availability of data and analysis so beloved of social scientists. Despite these handicaps, however, conference participants were able to shed light on one of the world’s most closed societies’¹ International aid in the form of emergency supplies to North Korea has led to increased access to, and knowledge of, existing conditions; yet it is unavoidably characterized by the secretiveness and antagonistic attitude adopted by the local authorities towards those from whom they have requested assistance. Although it is now possible to gradually build up a stock of information, the problem of how to comprehend the North Koreans remains.

An in-depth sociological study on North Korea has only recently been published. It is written by a former US intelligence officer, and systematizes all the information on aspects on daily life that has been acquired over the years. This author also underlines the inevitable fact that the study is based on second-hand information.²

With this background in mind, perhaps an account written by somebody who has lived in Pyongyang for a couple of years might be of interest. I opened the Swedish Embassy in 1975 and was stationed there until mid-1977, returning for a short period in 1988. This work consists of what is probably a vain attempt to clarify the essence of North Korea and the reasons for the state’s rapid rise and predictable fall. The book begins with a description of the human, material and cultural environment with the object of creating an impression of the worldview within which North Koreans thought and acted. What follows immediately is a treatment of the ideological aspects that left their mark upon the North Koreans’ inherited attitudes and values, primarily the background of East Asian civilisation. An Appendix contains a concise presentation of the development of Marxist ideas, from Marx to Gorbachev, as a background to the basic ideological principles within the framework of which Kim Il Sung was trained and which characterized his choice of path for the industrialization and modernization of Korea. The values and economic principles of this ideology bear the responsibility for the failure of North Korea’s misguided projects, whereas nationalism and a lack of knowledge of the rest of the world can be blamed for the fact that the chosen path was never subject to question.

2
TO PYONGYANG

In the autumn of 1974, the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked me to open an embassy in Pyongyang, which was to be under the auspices of the ambassador in Beijing. At that time, I had spent the previous half-dozen years occupied with matters concerning development cooperation – half of the time in Africa, the other half within the UN system. During these years the revolutionary left-wing ideas, which had fuelled the violent student demonstrations across Western Europe in 1968, became all the more prevalent within the foreign aid establishment, and many embraced the thesis that ‘the freedom of the free world was the freedom to starve’. This led to an increased interest in the socialist state of North Korea, which in only two decades seemed to have managed to guarantee its food supply and build up an industrial nation from what had been a colony that supplied raw materials, and one that had also been bombed to destruction and twice over-run by the armies of the Korean War. It was thus with certain expectations that I prepared myself for the move to Pyongyang.

The proposal to establish an embassy in Pyongyang had come from Swedish export companies that had suddenly found themselves in a situation in which they were about to sign contracts with North Korea for the delivery of primarily factory equipment for hundreds of millions of SEK. This also included 1,000 motorcars, which made their mark on the street scene, and heavy lorries, which were never seen because they were allocated to the military. My preparations before departure were mainly devoted to the Swedish Export Council, which was in the process of organizing a large industrial exhibition in Pyongyang, and to visits to companies. A number of company representatives had recently visited North Korea to sign contracts and examine the living conditions for the installation technicians who were to be sent out. They were all both fascinated and somewhat shaken by their impressions, which had evidently been highly contradictory, the essence of which was that they had never experienced anything similar in any other country. I soon grew accustomed to this: each and every person who visited North Korea or had contact with North Koreans could only provide me with the same sort of decidedly unhelpful information. The express interest of the business world to see an embassy in place was in itself a sort of warning signal – embassies are indeed useful to have around, but they are not normally regarded as essential for doing business.

The Swedish National Property Board had already made a journey to reconnoitre the situation and had rented office premises and staff accommodation. Its staff was now occupied with a certain degree of urgency in purchasing furniture, kitchen equipment and other goods necessary in a distant country with poor communications where there was no possibility of buying locally. I was personally responsible for ordering everything that an embassy office could possibly need. All the goods were to be packed along with the industrial exhibition material, and within a few weeks it was all sent via the Trans-Siberian railway.

Pyongyang’s transport communications with the rest of the world were restricted, to say the least: two train departures and two flights a week to and from Beijing, and one of each to and from Moscow. In addition, there were two flights a week between Pyongyang and Khabarovsk in eastern Siberia, where one could change to the Soviet Russian domestic network or fly to Niigata in Japan.

As the embassy in Pyongyang was subordinate to the embassy in China, it seemed natural to make the outward journey via Beijing. There we were able to soak up Chinese culture in the Forbidden City, at the Ming graves and the T’ien T’an, the Temple of Heaven, as well as in museums and antique shops. We were later to discover that the North Korean equivalents were almost systematically hidden away. In the company of Dr Torbjörn Lodén, the embassy sinologist, we gained a glimpse of everyday China at a popular restaurant where city dwellers in their eternal blue clothes sat preparing piles of sliced meat in Mongolian pots – a memory of the transitional period between the Cultural Revolution and the ‘Gang of Four’ which, during the years in North Korea, I came to regard all the more clearly as a symbol of both relative affluence and individual consumer freedom.

Impressed and replenished by Chinese civilization, exotic in our eyes, we got on the train a week later, which took twenty-four hours to transport us via Shenyang, the former Mukden, and across the Jalu river into North Korea. Little did we then realize that in the future, from a Pyongyang horizon, we would come to realize that we were back in the West when we crossed the Jalu river and returned to China. The very force of this – by definition – unreasonable impression bears witness to the doubt surrounding all evaluations of North Korea.

The night train on the Manchurian railway was an agreeable experience, with its roomy and comfortable compartments. The pleasant restaurant car was completely furnished in a classical style from the turn of the twentieth century, with little table lamps and silk curtains. The food was excellent. When we later journeyed westward, we noticed that all the Pyongyang foreigners rushed to it as soon as the carriage was joined to the train after arriving at Shenyang. It is said that the kitchen was run by one of China’s best chefs. That would not surprise me, because the Chinese are masters when it comes to demonstrating their superiority and finesse by subtle means. The Chinese passport police officer at the border – whom we gradually got to know a little – was exceedingly polite, helpful and approachable. One time, he welcomed us back to China with the words, ‘How is it over there?’ He spoke at least three European languages, English, French and Spanish, the last presumably on account of the Cuban Embassy in Pyongyang. The station also had a pleasant little souvenir shop with a surprisingly wide range of products.

Early next morning, the train slowly crossed the bridge over the Jalu river, close to the foundations of the previous bridge that had been bombed to destruction during the war. On the Korean side, the station was very spacious but deserted. A number of large steam locomotives were standing beside the platforms letting off steam, or puffing back and forth – a dream for railway enthusiasts. The passport police were armed, reserved, stern, taciturn and painstaking – from the very first, the traveller was to be instructed that he had entered a country in a state of war. This lesson in the difference between the Chinese and Korean attitudes was continued in the restaurant car. It comprised a kitchen section and a part of the carriage without any fittings, in which some chairs and tables wi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copryright Page
• Part I: REPORT OF AN ENVOY TO PARADISE
• PART II: MARXISM–LENINISM RELEVANT TO NORTH KOREA
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY