Dying for Rights

Putting North Korea's Human Rights Abuses on the Record

Sandra Fahy

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• ISBN:
  9780231548991
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

North Korea's human rights violations are unparalleled in the contemporary world. In Dying for Rights, Sandra Fahy provides the definitive account of the abuses committed by the North Korean state, domestically and internationally, from its founding to the present.

Dying for Rights scrutinizes North Korea's treatment of its own people as well as foreign nationals, how violations committed by the state spread into the international realm, and how North Korea uses its state media and presence at the United Nations. Fahy meticulously documents the extent of arbitrary detention, torture, executions, and the network of prison camps throughout the country. The book details systematic and widespread violations of freedom of speech and of movement, freedom from discrimination, and the rights to food and to life. Fahy weaves together public and private testimonies from North Koreans resettled abroad, as well as NGO reports, the stories and facts brought to light by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry into North Korea, and North Korea's own state media, to share powerful personal narratives of human rights abuses. A compassionate yet objective investigation into the factors that sustain and perpetuate the flouting of basic rights, Dying for Rights reveals the profound culpability of the North Korean state in the systematic denial of human dignity.

PART I

THE CRIMES

CHAPTER 1

THE HISTORY OF HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN NORTH KOREA

Our people, who took power into their own hands, have come to enjoy democratic rights and liberties never known at any period in the history of our country. This can be seen from the fact that the entire people take an active part in political life, and it is also graphically shown in the social composition of the people’s committees.

—Kim Il Sung, 1946

From its founding years, North Korea promoted the idea that its regime respected rights.1 This rhetoric of rights—which was actually antithetical to established international human rights norms—has continued across the Kim family dynasty. Present conditions could be seen in the past, according to historian Andrei Lankov. Through North Korea’s political transition from Stalinism to Kim Il Sungism, its earliest years had “peculiarities” in play.2 While there are many particularities to the North Korean state, from its earliest history there are clear violations of rights. The bulk of this book examines contemporary violations that each of the Kims subsequently oversaw during their individual reigns. Yet the historical context of present-day violations was seeded in the state’s founding years. Throughout the early history, the state failed to uphold socioeconomic and political rights, though it always claimed to protect these. The early history shows that the state violated physical integrity rights—and wasn’t afraid to admit as much. The latter violations were acknowledged as necessary for the protection of the state.

Colonial Legacies of Order and Disorder

In 2018 the celebration of North Korea’s seventieth founding anniversary took place in Pyongyang Square. The passage of time might seem to mark that North Koreans have had no experience with any type of democratic process for seventy years. However, it has been much longer than that. Koreans were not, strictly speaking, citizens under the Japanese occupation, when many were peasants for whom the notion of political participation was truly unusual. The conditions in which North Koreans found themselves, politically, at the founding of the DPRK, were oppressive and harsh, but at least they were under their own Korean people, not foreign hands.3 Meanwhile, in South Korea, conditions at the time of the partition were arguably much the same in terms of harsh treatment toward political opposition.4

Korea’s liberation was achieved through Soviet and American occupation of the peninsula, which ended Japanese rule in 1945. For North Korean nationalists, this was a frustrating fact. Kim Il Sung determined that Korean society was corrupted by colonialism, a feature that could only be undone through cultural purification.5 This objective would create a bloodbath over the years leading up to the Korean War, through it, and after. Most Koreans had some connection with the Japanese, according to historian Balazs Szalontai;6 there were more collaborators than active resisters between 1937 and 1945. The impact of Japanese colonialism was something that had to be thoroughly cleansed from North Korea. Kim Il Sung went about doing this and yet kept other features of colonialism in place. As the Japanese retreated, they damaged economic enterprises, but Soviet soldiers were also out of order. Even contemporary accounts from the period by those sympathetic to the Soviets reported looting and rape carried out by Soviet soldiers until they were brought under the control of commanders.7 The first “real supreme ruler” from 1945 to 1948 was Colonel-General Terentii Fomich Shtykov, and in 1947 the Soviet military was the primary management, with oversight from Moscow. After enduring thirty-five years of occupation, North Korea faced a new era of foreign presence. The desire to consolidate the nation under one Korean nationalism was strong.

Eliminating Political Plurality

Early North Korean history shows there was friction between North Korea and the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, but North Korea still modeled much of its sociopolitical features upon this template.8 On paper, early political life looked diverse. There were many democratic institutions, such as an elected parliament. Local councils were elected, but these were never contested elections. There was only ever one candidate for one seat, and he was handpicked by the party mandarins.9 Decision making occurred via the top ranks of committees, whether the Korean Workers Party committees, the committee in school or work, or the Central Committee.

The early political landscape of North Korea was complex. There were communists from the Domestic faction and from the Yan’an pro-China faction, and there were former guerrillas. The former two had little in common with the latter, and the three often spoke different languages. The Soviet Koreans spoke Russian. The Yan’an spoke Chinese, and even the guerrillas had been overseas during the occupation. The Domestic communists were mostly from the South.10 Lankov notes that Kim Il Sung was “among equals” in his first decade of rule, but through the Korean War and after he managed to eliminate or weaken factions that opposed him.

The only time that the Kim leadership was challenged, that we know of, was in August of 1956. Efforts to openly resist Kim Il Sung were made possible by a few features of the times: there was a “thaw” in communist capitals in the mid-1950s that created an atmosphere of possibility. Kim Il Sung interpreted the unfolding de-Stalinization process sweeping through the Soviet Union and other communist states as a threat to his leadership. Within North Korea the Yan’an faction shared its plans to angle for influence over Kim Il Sung with the Soviet embassy. Kim Il Sung was on an overseas trip at the time, which might have given the group time to make its plan. The attempt to change the disastrous leadership failed, and Kim Il Sung further cemented his grip. The Kim family dynasty was fixed in place and—to date—has had the longest rule in communist history.11 After the August incident, basic human rights in North Korea were further curtailed as the country became more militarized and worship of Kim Il Sung took hold.

Kim Il Sung held show trials in 1953 and 1955 where associates from political factions were accused and executed for ridiculous crimes such as being a spy for the Japanese secret police or the United States or South Korean government.12 The trials were followed by the elimination of communists with connections to these factions. Kim Il Sung blamed the disaster of the Korean War on leading individuals in the factions. The Korean War destroyed the country economically, but it was a political boon for Kim Il Sung.

The Korean War led to greater intensification of political repression in North Korea. In December 1950 Kim Il Sung attributed setbacks of the Korean People’s Army and the occupation of North Korea by U.S. and South Korean forces to the failures of his subordinates. They were expelled from the party. Whereas in 1948 there had been a demotion of Domestic communist leaders, after the Korean War the purge involved groups of party leaders from both the Soviet and Domestic communist factions.13 Top-level members were purged as well as ordinary Korean Workers Party members who were identified as behaving passively under enemy occupation—up to five hundred thousand party members were disciplined between 1950 and 1951.14 Szalontai observes that this tendency to question the loyalty of subjects is not unique to North Korea.15 The Japanese military viewed soldiers captured by the enemy as traitors; Stalin sent 23 percent of returned Soviet prisoners of war and citizens deported by the Nazis to the gulag or to battalions for reeducation.16

After the Korean War, South Korean communists who had gone north were purged from the leadership—the whole faction destroyed. The 1953 trial of South Korean Workers Party members resembled the show trials of the Soviet Union and East Europe.17 Southerners were deemed second-class citizens in North Korea—though they had gone north to enjoy communism, they were part of the South Korean communist movement that didn’t survive Syngman Rhee. Kim Il Sung noted to a Hungarian delegation in May of 1959 that one hundred thousand South Koreans in North Korea were receiving reeducation.18

North Korean politics from 1945 to 1948 saw some support for the indigenous religious Chondogyo Party and the Democratic Party. However, by the 1950s these were co-opted into use by the regime to present a sense of diverse political participation for overseas propaganda.19 On August 27, 1957, the first postwar elections to North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly took place. The elections had little meaning. Lankov reports that “the predictable result was 99.92 percent support for the party” and the same participation rate. The subsequent election in 1962 resulted in 100 percent participation and support for Kim Il Sung.20 The opposition’s demands were published in party propaganda material in early 1958. “Some factionalists who had managed to sneak into the law enforcement and judiciary bodies even used deceptively good-looking pretexts of ‘human rights protection’ to release [from prisons] not a small number of hostile elements.” The same collection of propaganda material stated that the “antiparty counterrevolutionary factionalist elements … created unprincipled slogans of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ in order to break the steel-like unity of our party.”21

The first wave of defections from North Korea occurred from 1945 to 1951 and was largely made up of those who supported opposition to Kim Il Sung—privileged individuals such as former landowners, business owners, traders, and former petty officers in colonial office under the Japanese. Also among this wave of refugees were Christian activists. Estimates place the number at 580,000 people, and another million during the war itself.22

By 1964, in addition to obvious targets like merchants or collaborators with the Japanese, North Korea viewed those of South Korean origin as politically unreliable.23 After the Korean War, North Korea also wanted to eliminate anyone who might have been injected into North Korea by U.S. intelligence or South Korean forces. Interior Minister Pang Hak Se issued a decree that spies would be given amnesty if they gave themselves up. Additionally, anyone who helped capture spies would be rewarded with the personal property and real estate of the culprit. Security forces were not paid, so it is likely this decree led to abuses.24

Kim’s Personality Cult

North Korean government representatives shared their frustration about Kim Il Sung’s dictatorship over country and party with foreign allies. Yan’an faction member Yi P’il-gyu wrote: “Kim Il Song’s personality cult has become quite intolerable. Kim Il Song’s word is law. He is intolerant and does not seek advice. He has gathered sycophants and lackeys all around him in the Central Committee and the cabinet.”25 Concern over Kim Il Sung’s personality cult and the poor living standards of the ordinary people were the main critiques that opposition members shared every time they met with their foreign counterparts. These areas of critique connected with the failure of the state to grant basic socioeconomic and political rights as promised. In 1957 the North Korean government passed Resolution 102, which prohibited the selling of cereals. Cooperatives could only sell surplus grain to the state, not through private commerce. By 1958 private selling ceased to exist, and vendors were compelled to join cooperatives or they would not be entitled to ration coupons for food and other necessities.26

Starting around 1959 state-sanctioned history books contributed to a sense of North Korean historical self-sufficiency through reduced reference to the participation of the Soviet Army and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in the liberation of Korea. This era also saw the widespread distribution of the book Memoirs of the Anti-Japanese Guerrillas, a book that, to this day, must be read by all adults so they are able to discuss it at indoctrination sessions. Between 1957 and 1960, 95.8 million copies of this book were printed.27 This contributed to the sense that, from the 1930s, Kim Il Sung led his guerrillas, as the only true communists, toward salvation of the country. The state constructed special rooms dedicated to the study of Kim Il Sung’s work, for which they claimed that all North Koreans should be grateful.

The cult of personality surrounding Kim Il Sung bears some resemblance to Japan’s emperor worship, but it is also unique. Kim Il Sung was hyperactive, while the Japanese tenno was passive; Kim Il Sung used purges to remove those who threatened to oppose him, whereas the Japanese military regime did not. The leadership cult emerged rapidly in North Korea. In 1946 the first university was established and named a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Descent
• Part I. The Crimes
• Part II. The Denials
• Conclusion: Ascent
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List