A former tutor of North Korean autocrat Kim Jong-Il has written a tell-all account of how a shy, innocent boy was transformed into a 'monster' who murdered the author's family, writes David McNeill
AT THE TIME, it seemed a very ordinary moment, repeated in thousands of schools around the world. On one side, a shy boy "with puffy, red cheeks" who blushed and stammered through a translation test in the principal's office; on the other, a tutor hired by the boy's strict father to put him through his paces.
But the school was in North Korea, the father was its legendary founder Kim Il-Sung and the teenager was his son Kim Jong-Il, the stack-heeled autocrat who rules the isolated Stalinist state today. And the relationship would climax in a horrific denouement: the boy grew up to order the execution of the teacher's entire family in an act of revenge for betraying his country.
Those are among the milder allegations made by the teacher, Kim Hyun Sik, now 76, exiled, and a research professor at George Mason University in Virginia, who admits to nursing murderous feelings for his former student. "So many times, I've imagined killing him and then killing myself," he writes in a powerful new essay in Foreign Policy magazine, released this week, which pulls back the curtain on the Supreme Leader's background.
The Secret History of Kim Jong-Il, published in one of America's most influential publications, is likely to fuel criticism of the recently nuclear-armed state and embolden US conservatives, who demand military intervention there. But Prof Kim claims he has just one wish: that the North Korean leader open the country's doors to the freedom and abundance enjoyed by the rest of the world.
Until then, he says, he is determined to let everyone know what he has seen: "A young, innocent boy who turned into a monster, and a country so full of promise transformed into a concentration camp."
The story begins in 1959 when the professor, who had been hand-picked by the North Korean leader to tutor his family in Russian, summoned the 17-year-old Kim Junior to an oral test at the elite Namsan Senior High School. Flustered and "with beads of sweat on his forehead", the boy who would grow into what Prof Kim calls "a cruel and mercurial dictator" patiently endured the exam "without ever boasting that he was the son of the Great Leader". Among the simple phrases he translated from Korean to Russian were "I love and respect my father more than anyone else," and "I enjoy watching films more than playing sports."
Years later after he had inherited his father's exclusive powers, the student would order his alma mater blown up to eliminate potential rivals to his own children, alleges Prof Kim. He recalls a "rather ordinary student" who excelled at nothing and made few friends. Just months after his test, Kim Jong-Il's nervous, diffident demeanour had already disappeared as he showed off his Russian skills in front of the school's teachers. "As an educator, I was quite gratified," recalls his tutor. But that pride eventually turned into rage.
In 1991, while visiting Moscow, Prof Kim was approached by a South Korean agent who said he could arrange a meeting with his older sister. Like thousands of other Korean families, the Kims had been split apart by the 1950-53 war that divided the peninsula into two bitterly hostile camps. Long believed dead, the sister was living in Chicago and wanted her brother to join her there. "I was overcome with emotion," he writes.
A day after the Moscow meeting, however, the professor was ordered back to Pyongyang after being sold out by a North Korean double agent. As a trusted insider with intimate knowledge of the ruling family who had been caught talking to the hated South, he knew returning meant one thing. "I would be killed as a traitor." He defected to Seoul and never saw his home, his university or his family again.
The Korean leader exacted a terrible price for that betrayal. Prof Kim's wife, daughters and son, their spouses and "even our dear grandchildren" were apparently sent to state gulags and murdered. "To this day, I know nothing of the details of their deaths, of whether they blamed me as they perished." Today, up to 200,000 people are still being held in North Korea's gulags, according to the US state department.
Revenge against the families of traitors, long known to occur in North Korea, pales, however, in comparison to the rest of Prof Kim's memoir, which includes allegations of bizarre Nazi-style "cleansing" of the physically disabled and the "substandard".
In one episode, he describes how Pyongyang was "purified" of all disabled residents in the run up to the 1989 World Festival of Youth and Students, a showcase designed to one-up the Olympics, which had taken place the year before in the rival South. The majority were "clockmakers, engravers, locksmiths and cobblers" who vanished overnight.
Even short people were not safe from the purification, he says, explaining how the government distributed pamphlets to thousands in Pyongyang bringing news of a wonder drug that would raise their height.
Instead "they were sent away to different uninhabited islands in an attempt to end their 'substandard' genes from repeating in a new generation. Left for dead, none of the people made it back home."
KOREAN OBSERVERS HAVE long alleged that Pyongyang citizens appear noticeably taller and healthier than those elsewhere in North Korea, but Prof Kim appears to throw more light on government policies behind the showcase capital. "It's true that you don't find handicapped people in Pyongyang," says Bradley K Martin, author of Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader and a veteran reporter of North Korean issues. "If you want to see short people who are suffering from malnutrition you have to go outside the capital. I've no reason to doubt this allegation."
Prof Kim's explosive account, extracted from a book published last year in South Korea, A 21st Century Ideological Nomad, comes at a sensitive time in Pyongyang's always strained ties with the US and the rest of the world. After seven years of sabre-rattling, the administration of president George Bush last month removed the North from its list of "terrorist sponsors", an apparent acknowledgment that negotiation, not confrontation, has a better chance of luring its leaders in from the cold.
In return, Pyongyang has submitted an inventory of its nuclear programme and pledged to dismantle its weapons. Despite setbacks, relations with Seoul are also slowly improving. About 70 South Korean companies have set up shop north of the border in the Kaesong Industrial Region, an experimental capitalist project that could bring China-style prosperity to the impoverished nation.
But Prof Kim suggests that the US about-turn is a triumph for the Dear Leader, who concluded in the 1990s that his country, further isolated by the collapse of its sponsor, the Soviet Union, could box above its weight internationally if it prioritised military power.
"Today, just as he hoped, Kim Jong-Il's vision has been realised," he writes. "Kim has managed to extract resources from wealthier and stronger states by manufacturing crises and generating international instability. His brand of nuclear blackmail is a virtual guarantor of bottomless international aid for the world's most militarised society."
The Foreign Policy article also details a secretive wing of North Korea's state apparatus called Bureau 3, charged with planning operations against Seoul including, he claims, the planned assassination of the South Korean president and his entire entourage during a visit to Burma in 1983. The bombing killed 17 South Korean cabinet members, including its deputy prime minister, and injured 15 more, but failed to kill the president.
Throughout the account, a familiar picture emerges of an Orwellian Shangri La ruled by a paranoid ruler who surrounds himself with sycophants. Children of the party elite are sent to exclusive schools and fed rice, meat, fish and eggs while ordinary children make do with cornmeal and soybean soup.
The privileged young do just a few days mandatory farm work a year, unlike their poorer counterparts, who average 60-90 days. Kim refuses to allow graduates from his old school into his inner circle. "After all," says his old professor, "those who have known Kim Jong-Il since youth are bound to see him as human - not the centre of a god-like cult of personality."
The allegations by someone who until now was one of North Korea's less well-known defectors will come under intense scrutiny in the coming months. In the meantime, Prof Kim says he remains optimistic that North Korea will change and would love to meet his former student one last time and give him a final lesson: "I, who became a university professor thanks to his father; I, who travelled to Russia, Seoul, and now Washington. I no longer loathe him. I pity him. Even though he killed my family, I have already forgiven him."
• The Secret History of Kim Jong-Il appears in the September/October issue of Foreign Policy magazine