In the mid-1990s,
North Korea was engulfed in a ruinous famine. It was a period during which millions may have died. Certainly, the World Food
Program (WFP) and UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) – to whom
the North appealed for food aid – estimate
that hundreds of thousands of people perished as a result of food shortages. Hwang
Jang Yop, a former Chosun Workers’ Party secretary – and
highest ranking official ever to defect to the South – stated
that according to internal North Korean documents, around 3 million people died as a result of
starvation.
At the same time, following
the death of Kim Il Sung in July 1994, the founding leader’s office complex was
transformed into what is now called Kumsusan Suns’ Palace. The transformation
came at an estimated cost of $800 million, a figure high enough to supply the entire
North Korean population with minimum corn needs for three years. This was the sacrifice made by
the North Korean people for the dead Kim Il Sung. At the same time, Kim Jong Il’s
personal lifestyle – and that of his family –
continued to be one of extravagance.
In South Korea, the pro-North Korean Juche faction was able to ignore these
facts in the beginning. Instead, they continued to praise North Korea for its resolute
commitment to “Our-style Socialism” and declared simply, “It’s raining in
Moscow, why do the North Koreans need an umbrella?” In other words, the collapse
of the socialist camp was nothing to do with North Korea.
However, because of the famine, thousands of North Koreans began to migrate back and
forth to China, and some even reached South Korea. Through these people, a
wealth of fresh information about the North became available. The actual state
of the country and the lives of its people became clear for all to see, meaning
that claims of exaggeration or fabrication on the part of the international
community lost all their persuasive power.
Eventually, the pro-North forces in South Korea bowed to the inevitable and began to change. The leader of
the National Democratic Revolutionary Party (Minhyukdang) and a man who had twice met Kim Il Sung in secret, Kim Yong
Hwan began the process of disbanding his organisation. Others,
like Ha Yong Ok, did not give up their lingering attachment to the North,
instead opting to reconstitute Minhyukdang.
One of the reasons for the devotion of activists in
the 1980s was that they had little more than North Korea’s own propaganda to
go on; there was very little information available on the country, except from
official South Korean sources, which they could not trust. The result was that
they looked upon North Korea with the naive eyes of a child, whilst the fact
that the country was seen as such a taboo domestically made it all the more
interesting. North Korean ideas, first among them Juche itself, were extolled
as those of an ideologically great country. That the country was
unapologetic in its anti-Americanism made it even more appealing to these young
idealists, for whom America was nothing more than an occupying power in South Korea.
To them, North Korea
was a country not without imperfections, but nonetheless victorious, a state organized
according to great ideas. But as the 1990s passed and the 2000s begun, the
internal situation in the country could no longer be seen through the prism of seemingly
lofty ideals. North Korean refugees and aid workers had confirmed the ugly
truth.
