Children at a North Korean orphanage. Photo: Glyn Ford
Both of these books are required reading for anyone interested in the Korean peninsula. The first represents the good, the bad and the ugly; three books in one. It is a stunning account of the unfolding of the famine in the mid to late 1990s that swept through North Korea and killed millions. Normally, the horror gets lost in the numbers. But here we have the stories of individual families from the north eastern port of Chongjin and how they suffered and died during this period.
Until the 1990s basic foodstuffs were collected fortnightly from the People’s Public Distribution Service for the whole family, but by then the system was on the verge of collapse. As one witness put it September 9 1993 was the first day she did not eat a single thing for 24 hours. Barbara Demick tracks this slow motion famine across the years as it literally decimated the country and the families described here. Few actually starved to death, instead they succumbed to a cocktail of other illnesses that ran amok among a tragically weakened population.
This is great reportage by a Los Angeles Times journalist. The problem is it’s jumbled together with two other intertwined elements, a history of North Korea and the plight of the economic migrants who travelled to China and South Korea. And the history is full of schoolgirl howlers. Early on she writes: “It was as though the war had never ended.” Well, it actually hasn’t, and one of Pyongyang’s current demands is for Washington to finally sign a peace treaty. One little acknowledged factor that makes this unlikely is the Pentagon will lose its rights to use a number of Japanese military bases if it does.
Certainly the North Koreans bear some responsibility for the famine, yet there is no mention of the fact that the CIA were well aware of what was happening and said nothing, maintaining a silence even when Pyongyang appealed for assistance in 1996 to an initially sceptical world. And there is lots more where that comes from.
She also writes about the “defectors” all of whom left the country for non-ideological reasons and none of whom, with their histories as sub-Saharan Africans, would have had a prayer of getting refugee status in the European Union. One family left to inform their South Korean relatives of the death of their father, a doctor fled because she learnt she would not be allowed to join the Korean Workers Party and a third fled after early release 20 months into a three year sentence for black marketing.
Nor is there any explicit mention of the refugee industry praying and preying on them, run through cash, con and church. But, of course, there’s none as blind as those that will not see. Once one family member is out Seoul’s $20,000 bounty just siphons more out as the money is recycled. One example here has an initial migrant joined by six other family members – a total of $140,000. Now all four of the women are busy working in the sex industry.
Business class “defection” at around $10,000 involves a chauffeur-driven car to the border, being carried across the Tumen River by a soldier from the Korean People’s Army, a false passport and a plane direct to Seoul. Economy class, in contrast, can be ten hours a day of reciting and copying the Bible for months on end as the further shores of Korea’s evangelicals try to brainwash one cult for another with, in conclusion, a dangerous trip to Seoul via Laos, Cambodia or Thailand. Once in Korea fools and their money are soon parted with pyramid selling scams and fruitless searches for relatives.
I took a journalist to North Korea some years ago who wrote that, on arrival, her mobile phone was confiscated. As I was with her when she arrived I inquired why she wrote something that was clearly a lie. The response was that she had been told it normally happened. Now no one should have North Korea as a poster boy for human rights. The little evidence available suggests it’s grim, but nevertheless Demick is of the same school of journalism. On page 231 she tells readers Oak-hee, one of her female protagonists, is sent to a detention camp where “obviously pregnant women are sent off for abortions, no matter how advanced the pregnancy”. Buried in the footnotes on page 311, Oak-hee is actually quoted as saying infanticide didn’t happen while she was there. But why let the facts get in the way of a good story?
Who Demick is travelling with is illustrated by her undiluted enthusiasm for the “noted North Korean scholar Nicholas Eberstadt”. Yet this Washington based neo-con was insightful enough to publish an op-ed piece in 1990 entitled: “The Coming Collapse of North Korea”.
In contrast, Cry Korea (Reginald Thompson, Reportage Press, £8.99) explains to a degree how we’ve got to where we are now. It’s a new edition of a book written by a journalist who was embedded with UN forces during the civil war – actually the US, UK and a coalition of the willing – when they razed the cities of the North to the ground and pioneered the napalm bombing of the population. A conflict still unresolved and whose wounds have yet to heal. As Barbara Castle wrote in her review in Tribune nearly 60 years ago: “No one who cares about the good name of the United Nations can read this book without shame.”
