Posted on 10/29/2003 7:14:46 AM PST by TigerLikesRooster
Armies of the North
Philip Gourevitch talks about North Korea, and its President, Kim Jong Il.
Posted 2003-09-01
This week in the magazine, Philip Gourevitch writes about the North Korean dictatorship and its role in the world’s political order. Here he discusses with The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson the unparalleled cult of personality around North Korea’s President, Kim Jong Il, and the threat that the country poses to international peace.
AMY DAVIDSON: How brutal is the North Korean government?
PHILIP GOUREVITCH: It’s one of the most brutal governments on earth. One of the difficulties in assessing the nature of existence inside North Korea is that it’s so sealed off and insular. And the regime is masterful at preventing anybody who comes in from seeing what’s really going on. So, in the end, one has to rely to a large extent on the word of people who come out. The testimonies of such refugees and defectors have been available only since the mid-nineties, when more and more people, driven by extreme hunger, started to flee North Korea. The picture that has emerged from their accounts certainly confirms everything that one had suspected. It’s a place where the level of sheer physical brutality is extreme and the psychic violence is constant. There is no such thing as individual rights of any kind. The state is ubiquitous and all-pervasive. There is no idea of privacy or of independent thought. To get a sense of how perfectly oppressive it is, it’s worth realizing that there are no dissidents. They simply disappear—they’re sent to camps or executed. The system of social control is based on the idea that an entire family can be held accountable for any perceived slight by any single member of that family. So if you happen to be listening to a South Korean radio broadcast, or you say something like “Gee, I hear North Korea started the Korean War,” your entire family can be purged—taken off to camps, and never heard from again.
Did you try to get into North Korea?
I made some inquiries, but it’s difficult. Obviously, it would be fascinating to take a look around, but the problem with going to North Korea is that you are not able to take a single step that isn’t carefully guarded. You are under the control of handlers at all times; you can’t even ask your driver to stop at a given spot so you can look around on the road. You cannot talk to individuals; they run from you, because it’s a crime to speak to a foreigner without authorization. So you get to see only what they want you to see. And it’s a very set tour. You get to see the Kim Il Sung monuments and the Kim Il Sung museum, but you don’t get to see the places where people live, much less the places where they suffer, and starve, and die. What you get to see is the sort of comic weirdness of the place, but, for all its bizarreness, life in North Korea is no joke. I was much more interested in trying to find North Koreans who had gotten out than in getting myself in. And that’s what I did.
You spoke to several defectors for your article. Some of them had horrifying accounts, not just about political repression but about extreme situations like cannibalism induced by famine. What did you make of their stories?
Well, one never knows a hundred per cent with things like that. The cannibalism story is perhaps the most extreme, but it’s certainly not unique. There are many reports among the people who have fled North Korea, persistent reports, of cannibalism. What interested me is that these stories are believed by North Koreans. It’s a measure of the devastation they experienced. Even if these stories occasionally have a little bit of the quality of urban legend, it seems to me that we are inclined to disbelieve them, because we’d prefer not to credit them and because they sound far-fetched. But cannibalism isn’t all that strange an idea, given the level of starvation there. What these stories are saying, it seems to me, is that the desperation is so extreme that it’s totally credible that that would be going on—that the level of hunger is that great. And it’s true: the estimates are that two to three million people starved to death in the course of the past decade. Starving to death doesn’t happen overnight. Starving to death isn’t even a matter of having insufficient food for a couple of months. It’s total starvation over a long period of time, a complete breakdown of bodies.
(Excerpt) Read more at newyorker.com ...
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