‘Why’d you stop working and run away?’ the teacher asked when Ryu had been found and marched back to school.
To Shin’s astonishment, Ryu did not apologize.
‘I got hungry, so I went to eat,’ he said flatly.
The teacher, too, was astonished.
‘Is this son of a bitch talking back?’ the teacher asked.
He ordered the students to tie Ryu to a tree. They took off his shirt and bound him with wire.
‘Beat him until he comes to his senses,’ the teacher said.
Without a thought, Shin joined his classmates in thrashing Ryu.
3
Shin was nine years old when the North Korean caste system knocked him on the head.
It was early spring and he and about thirty of his classmates were walking towards the train station, where their teacher had sent them to pick up coal that had spilled from railroad cars during loading. The station is near the south-western corner of Camp 14, and to get there from school the students had to pass below the Bowiwon compound, which sits on a bluff above the Taedong River. The guards’ children live in the compound and attend school there.
From up above, the guards’ children shouted at Shin and his classmates as they walked by.
‘Reactionary sons of bitches are coming.’
Rocks the size of fists rained down on the prison children. With the river below and the bluff above, they had no place to hide. A rock hit Shin in the face, just below his left eye, opening up a deep cut. Shin and his classmates shrieked and cowered on the dirt road, trying to protect their heads with their arms and hands.
A second rock struck Shin on the head, knocking him to the ground and making him dizzy. When his head cleared, the stoning had stopped. Many of his classmates were moaning and bleeding. Moon, his neighbour and classmate who later lost her big toe in the mine, had been knocked out. The leader of Shin’s class, Hong Joo Hyun, who was supposed to be a kind of foreman for the day’s work mission, was also out cold.
Earlier that morning at school, their teacher had told them to hurry ahead to the train station and start work. He said he would catch up later.
When the teacher finally walked down the road and discovered his bloodied students sprawled in the road, he became angry.
‘What are you doing not getting yourselves to work?’ he shouted.
The students timidly asked what they should do with their classmates who were still unconscious.
‘Put them on your backs and carry them,’ the teacher instructed. ‘All you need to do is work hard.’
In the years ahead, when Shin spotted Bowiwon children anywhere in the camp, he walked in the opposite direction if he could.
Bowiwon children had every reason to throw stones at the likes of Shin. His blood, as the offspring of irredeemable sinners, was tainted in the worst conceivable way. Bowiwon children, however, came from families whose lineage had been sanctified by the Great Leader.
To identify and isolate his perceived political enemies, Kim Il Sung created a neofeudal, blood-based pecking order in 1957. The government classified and, to a considerable extent, segregated the entire North Korean population based on the perceived reliability of an individual’s parents and grandparents. North Korea called itself the Worker’s Paradise, but even as it professed allegiance to communist ideals of equality, it invented one of the world’s most rigidly stratified caste systems.
Three broad classes were created with fifty-one subgroups: at the top, members of the core class could obtain jobs in government, the Korean Workers’ Party, officer ranks in the military and the intelligence services. The core class included farm workers, families of soldiers killed during the Korean War, families of troops who had served with Kim Il Sung fighting against Japanese occupation and government workers.
The next level was the wavering or neutral class, which included soldiers, technicians and teachers. At the bottom was the hostile class, whose members were suspected of opposing the government. They included former property owners, relatives of Koreans who had fled to South Korea, Christians and those who worked for the Japanese colonial government that controlled the Korean Peninsula before World War II. Their descendants now work in mines and factories. They are not allowed into universities.
Besides dictating career opportunities, the system shaped geographic destiny, with the core class allowed to live in and around Pyongyang. Many members of the hostile class were resettled to distant provinces along the Chinese border. Some members of the wavering class could move up in the system by joining the Korean People’s Army, serving with distinction and, with luck and connections, securing a lower rung in the ruling party.
Rapid growth of private markets made some traders from the wavering and hostile classes wealthy, allowing them to buy and bribe their way into better living standards than some of the political elite.1
For government positions, though, family background decided nearly everything, including who had the right to throw stones at Shin.
The only North Koreans considered trustworthy enough to become guards in political prison camps were men like An Myeong Chul, the son of a North Korean intelligence officer.
He was recruited into the Bowibu at nineteen, after two years of military service. As part of the process, the loyalty of his entire extended family was checked. He was also required to sign a document saying he would never disclose the existence of the camps. Sixty per cent of the two hundred young men who were recruited with him as guards were also the sons of intelligence officers.
An worked as a guard and driver in four labour camps (not including Camp 14) for seven years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He fled to China in 1994 after his father, who supervised regional food distribution, ran afoul of his superiors and committed suicide. After finding his way to South Korea, An found work as a banker in Seoul and married a South Korean woman. They have two children. He also became a human rights activist.
After his defection he learned that his sister and brother were sent to a labour camp, where his brother later died.
When we spoke at a Chinese dinner in Seoul in 2009, An wore a dark blue suit, white shirt, striped tie and half-frame glasses. He looked prosperous and spoke in a quiet, careful way.
When he was training to be a guard, he studied the Korean martial art of tae kwon do, learned riot-suppression techniques and was instructed not to worry if his treatment of prisoners caused injury or death. In the camps, he became accustomed to hitting prisoners who did not meet work quotas. He remembers beating up a hunchbacked prisoner.
‘It was normal to beat prisoners,’ he said, explaining that his instructors taught him never to smile and to think of inmates as ‘dogs and pigs’.
‘We were taught not to think of them as human beings,’ he said. ‘The instructors told us not to show pity. They said, “If you do, you will become a prisoner.”’
Although pity was forbidden, there were few other guidelines for treatment of prisoners. As a result, An said, guards were free to indulge their appetites and eccentricities, often preying on attractive young female prisoners who would usually consent to sex in exchange for better treatment.
‘If this resulted in babies, women and their babies were killed,’ An said, noting that he had personally seen newborns clubbed to death with iron rods. ‘The theory behind the camps was to cleanse unto three generations the families of incorrect thinkers. So it was inconsistent to allow another generation to be born.’
Guards could win admission to college if they caught an inmate trying to escape – an incentive system that ambitious guards seized upon. Sometimes they would enable prisoners to make an escape attempt, An said, and shoot them before they reached the fences that surround the camps.
Most often, though, prisoners were beaten, sometimes to death, simply because guards were bored or in a sour mood.
Although prison guards and their legitimate children belong by blood to the core class, they are fringe functionaries locked away for most of th
eir working lives in the freezing hinterlands.
The core of the core live in Pyongyang in large apartments or single-family homes located in gated neighbourhoods. Outsiders do not know with any certainty how many of these elite there are in North Korea, but South Korean and American scholars believe they are a tiny fraction of the country’s population, numbering between one and two hundred thousand out of twenty-three million.
Trusted and talented members of the elite are periodically allowed outside the country, where they serve as diplomats and traders for state-owned companies. In the past decade, the United States government and law enforcement agencies around the world have documented that some of these North Koreans are involved in criminal enterprises that funnel hard currency to Pyongyang.
They have been linked to counterfeiting hundred-dollar bills, cyberterrorism, trafficking drugs ranging from heroin to Viagra, and marketing high-quality brand-name (but counterfeit) cigarettes. According to UN officials, and in violation of United Nations resolutions, North Koreans have also sold rockets and nuclear weapons technology to countries including Iran and Syria.
One well-travelled member of the North Korean elite told me how he earned his keep while securing the support and affections of Kim Jong Il. His name is Kim Kwang Jin and he grew up in Pyongyang as a member of the blue-blood elite. He studied British literature at Kim Il Sung University, which is reserved for children of top officials. His professional expertise, before defecting to South Korea in 2003, was managing a state-run global insurance fraud. It collected hundreds of millions of dollars from some of the world’s largest insurance companies on falsified claims for industrial accidents and natural disasters inside North Korea, and it funnelled most of the money to the Dear Leader.
The festive annual highlight of this scheme took place in the week before Kim Jong Il’s birthday on 16 February. Foreign-based executives of the Korean National Insurance Corporation, the state monopoly that orchestrated the fraud, prepared a special birthday gift.
From his office in Singapore, Kim Kwang Jin watched in early February 2003 as his colleagues stuffed twenty million dollars in cash into two heavy-duty bags and sent them, via Beijing, to Pyongyang. This was money that had been paid by international insurance companies, and it was not a one-time offering. Kim said that in the five years he was based in Pyongyang for the state insurance corporation, bags of cash always arrived in time for his leader’s birthday. He said they came from Switzerland, France and Austria, as well as from Singapore.
The money, he said, was delivered to Office 39 of the Korean Workers’ Party Central Committee. This infamous office or bureau was created by Kim Jong Il in the 1970s to collect hard currency and to give him a power base independent of his father, who was then still running the country. According to Kim (and scores of other defectors and published accounts), Office 39 buys luxury goods to secure the loyalty of the North Korean elite. It also funds the purchase of foreign-made components for missiles and other weapons programmes.
As Kim explained it to me, his country’s insurance scam worked like this: Pyongyang-based managers for the state insurance monopoly would write policies that covered costly but common North Korean disasters such as mining accidents, train crashes and crop losses resulting from floods. ‘The major point of the reinsurance operation is that they are banking on disaster,’ he said. ‘Whenever there is a disaster, it becomes a source of hard currency’ for the government.
Kim and other foreign-based operatives of the North Korean insurance company were dispatched around the globe to find insurance brokers who would accept seductively high insurance premiums to compensate North Korea for the cost of these disasters.
Reinsurance is a multibillion-dollar industry that spreads the risk assumed by one insurance company to a number of companies around the world. Each year, Kim said, North Korea would do its best to shuffle its offerings among the major reinsurance players.
‘We pass it around,’ he told me. ‘One year it might be Lloyd’s [of London]. The next year it might be Swiss Re.’
By spreading relatively moderate losses among many big companies, North Korea concealed how bad a risk it was. Its government prepared meticulously documented claims, rushed them through its puppet court, and demanded immediate payment. But it often restricted the ability of reinsurers to dispatch investigators to verify claims. According to a London-based expert on the insurance industry, North Korea also exploited the geographical ignorance and political naïveté of some reinsurers and their brokers. Many of them thought they were dealing with a firm from South Korea, the expert said, while others were unaware that North Korea is a closed totalitarian state with sham courts and no international accountability.
Over time, reinsurance companies got wise to frequent and costly claims for train crashes and ferry sinkings that were all but impossible to investigate. Lawyers for German insurance giant Allianz Global Investors, Lloyd’s of London and several other reinsurers filed a suit in a London court against the Korean National Insurance Corporation. They contested its claim for a 2005 helicopter crash into a government-owned warehouse in Pyongyang. In court documents, the companies alleged that the crash was staged, that the North Korean court’s decision to uphold the claim had been rigged and that North Korea routinely used insurance fraud to raise money for the personal use of Kim Jong Il.
The reinsurance companies, however, dropped their claims and agreed to a settlement that was a near-complete victory for North Korea. They did so, legal analysts said, because they had foolishly signed contracts in which they agreed to be bound by North Korean law. After the settlement, North Korea’s lawyers said it was ‘staggeringly unfair’ to suggest that the country engaged in insurance fraud. But publicity generated by the case alerted the world’s reinsurance industry to avoid North Korea, and so the fraud wound down.
When Kim Kwang Jin helped send the twenty-million-dollar bags of cash from Singapore to Pyongyang, he said that Kim Jong Il was delighted.
‘We received a letter of thanks and it was a great celebration,’ he said, noting that Kim Jong Il arranged for him and his colleagues to receive gifts that included oranges, apples, DVD players and blankets.
Fruit, home electronics and blankets.
This meagre display of dictatorial gratitude is telling. In Pyongyang, living standards for the core class are luxurious only by the standards of a country where a third of the population is chronically hungry.
Elites have relatively large apartments and access to rice. They are also granted first dibs on imported luxuries such as fruit and alcohol. But for residents of Pyongyang, electricity is intermittent at best, hot water is rarely available and travel outside the country is difficult except for diplomats and state-sponsored businessmen.
‘An elite family in Pyongyang does not live nearly as well – in terms of material possessions, creature comforts and entertainment options – as the family of an average salary man in Seoul,’ Andrei Lankov, a Russian-born political scientist who attended college in Pyongyang and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul, told me. Average per capita income in South Korea is fifteen times as high as in the North ($1,900 in 2009). Countries with higher per capita incomes than North Korea include Sudan, Congo and Laos.
The exception, of course, is the Kim family dynasty. Satellite images of the family’s residences stand out like sable-clad thumbs in the mangy landscape of North Korea. The family maintains at least eight country houses, according to books by his former chef and a former bodyguard. Nearly all of them have cinemas, basketball courts and shooting ranges. Several have indoor swimming pools, along with entertainment centres for bowling and rollerskating. Satellite pictures show a full-size horseracing track, a private train station and a water park.
A private yacht, which has a fifty-metre pool with two waterslides, was photographed near the family’s house in Wonsan, which is located on a peninsula with white sandy beaches and is believed to be a family favourite. The former bodyguard said Kim Jong Il
often went there to hunt roe deer, pheasants and wild geese. All his houses have been furnished with imports from Japan and Europe. The family’s beef is raised by bodyguards on a special cattle ranch and their apples come from an organic orchard where sugar, a rare and costly commodity in the North, is added to the soil to sweeten the fruit.2
The privileges of blood are uniquely rich in the Kim family. Kim Jong Il inherited his dictatorial control of North Korea from his father in 1994 – the first hereditary succession in the communist world. The second such succession occurred in December 2011, after Kim’s death at age sixty-nine. His youngest son, Kim Jong Eun, was promptly hailed as the ‘supreme leader’ of the party, state and army. Although it was unclear if he, his older relatives, or the generals would wield real power, propagandists worked overtime manufacturing a new cult of personality. Kim Jong Eun was described in the party daily, Rodong Sinmun, as ‘the spiritual pillar and lighthouse of hope’ for the military and the people. The state news agency noted that the new leader is ‘a prominent thinker-theoretician and peerlessly illustrious commander’ who will be a ‘solid foundation for the prosperity of the country.’
Other than having the right blood, the son’s qualifications were meagre. He attended a German-language school in Leibefeld, Switzerland, where he played point guard on the basketball team and spent hours making pencil drawings of Chicago Bulls great Michael Jordan.3 He returned to Pyongyang at seventeen to attend Kim Il Sung University. Little is known about what he studied there.
Preparations for a second father-to-son transfer of power became apparent in Pyongyang shortly after Kim Jong Il suffered a stroke in 2008. It left the Dear Leader with a noticeable limp and signalled the emergence of Kim Jong Eun from obscurity.
In lectures delivered to select audiences in Pyongyang in 2009, Kim Jong Eun was described as a ‘genius of the literary arts’ and a patriot who ‘is working without sleep or rest’ to promote North Korea as a nuclear superpower. A propaganda song, ‘Footsteps’, was circulated at military bases to prepare the cadre for the coming of a dynamic ‘Young General’. He was indeed young, in his late twenties, born in either 1983 or 1984.