The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [16]
But although the Dear Leader remained popular, the economy was collapsing, and taking internal security down with it. Outside Pyongyang, social discipline had already broken down. Many citizens stayed away from work for weeks on end, re-appearing only to plunder their factories. This decline in the authority of the workplace was all the more significant because for the average citizen it had been the center of political life as well.4 Soldiers roamed the countryside in search of food, robbing civilians and sometimes engaging in armed clashes with the police. Corpses lay on the steps of train stations. Refugees have provided credible testimony of widespread cannibalism.5 Foreign experts now estimate that about a million people—roughly 5 percent of the population—died from hunger-related causes during the worst period of the famine, from 1995 to 1997.6
By the late 1990s the DPRK’s northern border was very loosely or corruptly policed, and tens of thousands of citizens from the northeast crossed the Tumen River into China. Though there were far fewer migrants than might have been expected, and those who left the country did so only to return with smuggled goods, the influx of South Korean videos and reports of Chinese prosperity greatly eroded the information cordon that had once sealed the DPRK off from the outside world.
To the world’s surprise, this development did not significantly undermine support for the regime. Refugees claim that people were just too hungry to think of politics. An equally obvious explanation is that people do not easily toss aside a worldview dinned into them since childhood. But also important is the nature of that worldview. By the mid-1990s the North Koreans had ceased paying even lip service to Marxism-Leninism.7 Socialism or “our style of socialism” had come to mean only “how we do things,” capitalism a catchword for “how Yankees enslave the southern brethren.”8 It was because the regime no longer derived its legitimacy from a commitment to improve material conditions that it did not have to deny there was an economic crisis, something the Soviet and Chinese parties had destroyed their own credibility by doing.
Needless to say, the regime neither acknowledged the full extent of the food shortage—the word famine was never used—nor accepted any responsibility for it. Instead one spoke of economic “difficulties” while blaming them on bad weather, Yankee sanctions and lazy mid-level bureaucrats. All this, it must be noted, was at least partially true. If anything, the famine may have strengthened support for the regime by renewing the sense of ethnic victimhood from which the official worldview derived its passion. Many migrants remember a widespread yearning for war with America during the famine.9
THE SUNSHINE YEARS, 1998-2008
By 1998 the worst of the food shortage was over, and the official media had begun to cheer Kim Jong Il for dashing the Yankees’ dreams of regime change. Tasteless though these congratulations may have been, they were well-deserved, for the DPRK had survived a crisis far worse than the mere malaise that had seen off the communist bloc a decade earlier. In a new flurry of confidence the regime announced the forward-looking slogan “A Great Country, Strong and Prosperous” (kangsŏng taeguk), and agreed to a meeting between Kim Jong Il and the South Korean president Kim Dae Jung, the advocate of a new “Sunshine Policy” of reconciliation with the North. The summit took place in June 2000 in Pyongyang and ended in the so-called June 15 Declaration, in which both sides pledged to work peacefully “among ourselves” towards the goal of unification. There ensued massive infusions of unconditional aid from Seoul, much of it in the form of cash.
For all its help in financing his military and nuclear program, the Sunshine Policy put Kim Jong Il in a difficult position. He could hardly admit that the ROK wanted friendlier relations, because this would mean it was no Yankee puppet after all. Neither could he endanger the flow