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The North Korean regime has sustained a hereditary dictatorship for over half a century thanks to a rule of terror and its success in completely blocking communication with the outside world. People who read foreign books or view foreign videos or circulate them in the North as well as those who listen to foreign radio face harsh punishment.
South Korea¡¯s so-called Sunshine Policy earned support from some quarters in the beginning because it was hoped this could help open the North¡¯s closed society. But proponents failed to grasp the essence of the regime.
China and East European communist countries ushered in an era of major transformation through reform and opening on account of limited democracy within the communist parties. Countries operating the so-called normal system, in which policies are discussed by the politburo and enforced upon approval by the party boss, did not suffer from starvation, poor though they were. The exceptions were the Soviet Union under Stalin and China under Mao, when power was concentrated in the hands of a despot.
"It's wrong to compare the Kim Jong-il regime with Stalin. Stalin killed people at random but didn't block party debate,¡± says Hwang Jang-yup, a former secretary of the North Korean Worker's Party who fled to the South in 1997. ¡°Even Mao never thought of passing the leadership to his children." He defined the current North Korean system "a pseudo-feudalist state," impossible to find in the history of communist parties. The Sunshine Policy had to fail because it mistook North Korea for a normal communist country. The cash and food West Germany provided to East Germany were used to improve the quality of life of East Germans thanks to a structure that did not permit the party to monopolize them. But South Korean aid to the North flowed straight to Kim Jong-il himself and the military propping up his rule.
East Germans even before unification could watch West German television and listen to its radio at will; North Koreans caught listening to South Korean radio are sent to concentration camps like political criminals. Tens of thousands of South Koreans have visited the North in the past decade. All of them have met North Korean cadres assigned to inter-Koran affairs; none of them have managed to communicate with ordinary North Koreans. At the recent inter-Korean military talks, the North Koreans expressed anger about the distribution of propaganda leaflets in the North by South Korean civic groups. That was because the mosquito-net strategy, enforced by the Ministry of Unification and Propaganda, is crumbling helplessly in the face of these pamphlets.
The leaflets tell the truth about Kim Jong-il and appeal particularly to North Korean soldiers deployed near the Demilitarized Zone, and Hwanghae Province farmers, who are said to be most ignorant of the outside world.
What the regime fears most about is dissemination of the truth among the North Korean public. But North Koreans have a right to know the truth. The success or failure of any inter-Korean relationship that transcends the Cold War and Sunshine Policy hinges on communication with North Koreans.
The government, instead of urging civic organizations to refrain from sending propaganda leaflets to the North, should make a demand that the North Korean regime grant its people the basic freedom of listening to the radio. The North freely makes any number of impudent remarks about President Lee Myung-bak in its official media; the South must demand that it recognizes the freedom of communication that is the only way to becoming one nation.
The column was contributed by North Korean defector and Chosun Ilbo journalist Kang Chol-hwan.
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