The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [226]
The passage of Hwang Jang Yop was the most sensational-and one of the most complex-defections from one side to the other in the half-century history of struggle between the two Koreas. Hwang was the first high-level insider ever to take refuge in the other side. His defection was a political blow to North Korea and a potential political bonanza for the South since he brought to the South a lifetime of experience in rarified circles in the North. However, what he had to say was complicated by his messianic belief that his mission was to prevent a devastating war on the peninsula, to liberate the North from feudalism, and to pave the way for the reunification of Korea.
Born in 1922, Hwang studied in Japan during World War II and majored in philosophy at Moscow University during the Korean War. After returning home, he was professor of philosophy at Kim 11 Sung University, where he had special responsibility for the education of Kim Jong Il. In 1965, the year after the Dear Leader graduated, Hwang was appointed president of the prestigious university. About the same time he began to assist Kim Il Sung in elaborating the juche philosophy, which Kim had mentioned a decade earlier but did not emphasize until the mid-1960s, after the deepening of the Sino-Soviet dispute between his two important sponsors.
Based on his close relationship with the Great Leader, Hwang became an important-and unusual-figure in Pyongyang. From 1972 until 1984 he was speaker of the Supreme People's Assembly, the country's compliant parliament, and after that secretary of the Workers Party for international affairs and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the parliament. His most important position, however, was that of principal authority on juche, which became the official credo of the DPRK in the 1972 constitution. In his dual capacity as a chief philosopher for the regime and an international affairs official, Hwang was freer than others to travel abroad, to have lengthy discussions and close relationships with foreign scholars, and to express opinions that were often less militant than those of others.
When Selig Harrison, the American scholar, was in Pyongyang in 1987, Hwang told him that a communist revolution in the South was "completely out of the question" and that "we must find a way for North and South to co-exist peacefully under different social and economic systems." The same year, Hwang met surreptitiously in Japan with Samuel Lee, a South Korean philosophy professor, who found him "a very reasonable thinker, and quite free from indoctrinated communist and North Korean ideology." Young C. Kim, of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., a political scientist who often visited Pyongyang, found Hwang far more interested in philosophy than in international affairs-and his philosophy abstract and difficult to fathom.
Following the death of Kim Il Sung in July 1994, Hwang helped to establish a trading company in Beijing under the aegis of the International Peace Foundation, to collect foreign currency in support of, juche teachings and other activities in Pyongyang. The company was headed by Kim Duk Hong, who had been Hwang's senior aide at Kim 11 Sung University and later in the Workers Party. Hwang and Kim had many contacts with South Korean businessmen, clergy, and others in appealing for funds or other material support in exchange for access and appreciation in Pyongyang. These activities were authorized and encouraged, at least in general terms, by North Korean authorities.
In 1995 Hwang told an ROK contact in Beijing that despite the long-standing North Korean demand to the contrary, it was vital that U.S. military forces remain on the Korean peninsula. When I asked a senior American official about this information, he expressed shock that I had heard about it and urged me not to repeat it, saying that it "could cost [Hwang] his life" if it became widely known. (However, by that time North Korean diplomats and