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Policy
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B&E
The Secret History of Kim Jong II
Few people have the chance to watch a shy young man grow into a ruthless dictator – and live to talk about it. But, for one North Korean professor, Kim Jong Il is much more than the man holding his country hostage. He’s a former student. By Kim Hyun Sik
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 “What’s troubling you? You look very distressed,” I said to my friend.
“Well, I’m OK, I guess . . . but I’ve done a terrible thing. An abhorrent thing.”
“What do you mean? You aren’t a bad person.” His eyes welled with tears.
“I have made cripples out of normal, healthy people and sent them away for good,” he said. “It is inhumane, what I have done. I shall never be able to hold my head up again.”
My friend, a well-connected physician at the time, told me that he had been ordered by the Communist Party to pick out the shortest residents of Pyongyang and South Pyongan province. Against his conscience, he went out to those areas and had local party representatives distribute propaganda pamphlets. They claimed that the state had developed a drug that could raise a person’s height and was recruiting people to receive the new treatment. In just two days, thousands gathered to take the new drug.
My friend explained how he picked out the shortest among the large group. He told the crowd that the drug would best take effect when consumed regularly in an environment with clean air. The people willingly, and without the slightest suspicion, hopped aboard two ships – women in one, men in the other. Separately, 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. They were forced to spend the rest of their lives separated from their families and far from civilization.
“I can hardly believe that I’ve done such a terrible thing,” he told me.
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My friend, who still lives in North Korea, will spend the rest of his days tormented with guilt. At the same time, he did not forget to beg me over and over that this incident was a state secret and that I was not to tell a soul, not even my wife. I kept his secret for some 16 years. There seems little point now in protecting a party, a government, and a leader that failed to do the same for its people.
witness to history
In late June, the US took the dramatic and highly symbolic step of removing North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. As one component of the ongoing six-party talks to encourage North Korea to give up its nuclear programme, the trade-off doesn’t seem so bad. But a lack of hard evidence doesn’t mean something isn’t true. Although the current chatter revolves around Kim Jong Il’s possible ties to a nascent Syrian nuclear programme, one episode from 25 years ago reminds me of the very real dangers the North Korean regime poses to international stability.
A bright former student of mine had risen to become a high-ranking official in the Central Party’s Department of Propaganda and Agitation. One day in October 1983, he invited me and two other professors to his home for dinner. He lived in a luxury apartment complex for officials of the Central Party with the rank of director or above, where he shared a unit with his son, himself a special reporter for the official North Korean news agency. All of a sudden, as we were in the middle of dinner, our host’s son ran into the room out of breath.
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