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a prisoner for about a month. They questioned me because they thought I must know something about my son's escape. State Security people went to the house and packed up. Christianlouboutin The kids were at home. We were allowed to take one trunk and two sacks. I was released in time to catch the train." What was the charge?"There was no charge." I heard Kim Jong-il had come up with a new directive: "Make no inter- nal enemies."Yes, in the early 1990s there was a new law--no reprisals against the families of defectors. In reality it didn't help anyone." But you were Louboutins On Sale banished, not sent to a political prison camp."That's true. "When the three of us went to Sangnam-ri we were sent to a coop- erative farm but weren't allowed to work for fifteen days. So they didn't give us food or a house. We did have twenty kilograms of rice with us and one set of clothing. We had to carry in the trunk our portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. We moved in for one month with a family of four in a single room. Then we moved to the storage space of the same house. The roofleaked-we could see the sky. There were mice every- where, even under the blankets when we slept. In August that year, we moved to a better storage room. "We were there two years and five months, constantly being watched secretly. They'd come at Christianlouboutin night and flash a light to see if we were sleeping. We had to be careful what we said. The only freedom we had was walking within the village. We couldn't go even one step outside. Sangnam-ri traditionally has been a place of banishment. This is where families of political criminals were sent. There were a few normal people but not that many. "We didn't see any rice. We only had corn, potatoes and beans. Peo- ple Christianlouboutin living there originally, those not banished, had their own plots pro- viding such things as vegetables, but people like us didn't have land to grow them so we had to buy them. [Gets emotional.] When we lived there, because it's a farm, we only got rations once a year at harvest share-out time in October or November. We had only brought 20 kilos of rice. Because we were watched, we couldn't use money to buy food or the seller would get in trouble. There were times we had no food even though I'd brought money. Sometimes people would secretly throw corn cakes into our house because they knew we were starving. "Sometimes late at night I'd take the train to the county seat or to my mother's home in Hamhung. When they realized I was missing they thought I would escape to China. They would call my mother's house while I was on the train. She said no, I wasn't there. I'd get found and taken back.

The response of defectors I interviewed on this question was strong if anec- dotal, speculative and thus inconclusive evidence against my worst-case the- ory of the regime. (At the same time it was evidence that defectors and refugees during much o~ the decade of the 1990s did not, generally speaking, devote themselves to badmouthing the North one-sidedly, as propaganda proxies for the South Korean intelligence serwce, which quite a few o~ their predecessors had been accused of doing."Even the officialin Seoul who suspected that the Northern regime was intentionally starving some groups to death acknowledged nike air max 2011 that prison camp inmates probably were not among the tar8'eted groups-if only because of the prisoners' value in continuing productive work. "At a camp, the guy in charge is in charge of everything including self-sufficiency," that official toldme. "He must support the prisoners most of them alive to do the farming."and the guards. ���� They've got to keepMy effort to solve the mystery ofthe thirty-mne counties ended up providing additional evidence for a view of the North Korean government as being at least marginally less diabolical than might have been suggested by Kim Jong-il's election district number and my worst imaginings. It fit into a pic- ture that I had been developing since conducting some o~ my earlier defector interviews in the early and mid-1990s. In that picture, the DPRK not only proclaimed that its citizens had rights apparatus attempted some of the timeand entitlements; furthermore, the to act as if that were definitely the case. And the citizens tended to air max shoes 97 believe, until something untoward happened to make them doubt it, that they possessed some or most of the rights they were guaranteed and that officials were at least somewhat sympathetic to their needs.To put it another way, in this view North Korea was a country that func- tioned to some extent under the rule oflaw or regulations, and written pro- cedures. The wheels ofjustice normally ground exceedin81y slowly, and that afforded time for people to anticipate what was coming. They also had some opportunity for petition and appeal, and where that was the case it was not always a totally empty formality. What made the DPRK a highly repressive country, a nightmare air max 95 womens shoes by human-rights standards, mens nike air max 180 was not so much aspects of the formal system itself as the number and severity of the lapses from the of- ficially prescribed standards.

Soviet Union were deemed to have been influenced by the anti-Kim Jong-il organization even if they were not soldiers. These people were not allowed to travel overseas, and anyone found to have the slightest connection to the anti-Kim Jong-il organization was executed, resulting in the rleath of almost all the students who had studied in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. I used to supervise the Juche Science Institute, lowest price nike shoes where I met a Russian literature grad- uate of Kazan University in the USSR. The professor who had supervised his graduation thesis was the dean in charge of foreigners, and such profes- sors usually had connections with the Security Bureau of the Soviet Union. Based on this flimsy reasoning, the People's Army arrested the graduate and had him shot."2 Choe Joo-whal, a former People's Army lieutenant colonel who de- fected, said the purged officers' of~enses included giving military information to Russian intelligence. The internal spy who discovered the plot was Won Eung-hui, said Choe, who put the number purged. by Won on Kim Jong-il's orders at around three hundred. Kim Jong-il, he added, was going all out to build support among other military ofFicers. In 1992, Kim had women air max nike shoes a "very fancy" apartment building constructed on the Taedong River in Pyongyang so that he could give the apartments to influential generals. In 1995, he gave twenty generals new Mercedes Benz automobiles as presents, Choe said.3In his December 7, 1996, speech, Kim stated that "currently, there are no anti-revolutionaries within the party," althou8h there was mens nike air max shoes grey "huge chaos due to the poor performance ofthe party in constructing socialism," and those party workers who had "stood by with folded arms during this hard time will have to account for their actions in the future." In the event, after the three-year period of mourning for his father ended and he made good his threat, he seems to have found some officials to accuse of being outright nike air max 2011 shoes oppositionists.From 1997, according to reports that filtered out of the country, North Korea publicly executed over fifty high ofHcials. According to South Korean intelligence chief Lee Jong-chan, one of them was Ri Bong-won, a four-star general who supervised KPA personnel decisions and was accused of spying for South Korea.4There were rumors, reported abroad, of a coup attempt by elements of the Sixth Army Corps in North Hamgyong Province. Kim Jong-il told someethnic Koreans from Japan in April 1998 that the rumors were "a baseless lie.

kept him from risking needed changes in the system. But then, having found somewhere a new decisiveness, he had become the apparent sponsor of re- form efforts. Sale of mens nike air max his regime's weapons of mass destruction to other enemy nations could cause the United States, both at home and in its role as global policeman, immense problems -but for a price he appeared willing to relin- quish at least his capacity to make and sell them.North Korea's human rights situation truly piled atrocity upon atrocity, as readers of chapters 14, 16 and 34 know. The system in which secret police fed political prisoners to the gulag was his father's creation, but Kim Jong-il had either actively or passively preserved it. There was precious little on the positive side of the ledger page to balance the horrors of the camps. After complaints by human rights groups, the regime had closed some of those. But the prisoners had been transferred to locations that were more remote, where the eyes of the outside world could not penetrate. The most favorable inference from that incident was that Kim could be moved by outside opin- ion. Then there were his moderating instructions to "avoid creating internal enemies" and mens nike air max store his encouragement of more attention to legality. In the end,still, there was no sign that he had come the oppressive system of survealance.close to phasing out the camps andI wondered what Kim might be persuaded to do now that he was chang-ing his country's ideoloey. In my most optimistic daydream I imagined a very high-level envoy from a U.S. president or presidential nominee meeting Kim,perhaps in the early autumn of an election year, and saying, "Mr. Chairman,I know air max shoes 2011 cheap nike that you would like to meet with the man I represent. With your per- mission I will speak ~rankly on that point. In view of what we have learned about treatment of North Korean citizens who are deemed to have deviated politically from the official line, it would be hard for him to agree to meet with you. There is growing public concern mens nike air max 180 in the United States regarding that situation. "You and I have discussed measures that mi8ht begin to resolve our other mutual problems. But you are asking that we not insist upon your country's immediate nuclear disarmament. You ask that we accept simply a freeze ofyour capacity to make such weapons during a period of watching and waiting, while the two sides develop mutual trust. Without a break- through on human rights, I have to tellyou, it would be politically difficult to justify a deal that offered no more than the Agreed Framework of 1994 had provided-a deal, moreover, that would hinge on trust. Let me also suggest that it would be difficult for you to trust our professions of non- hostility in such circumstances. After all, you might think, whenever Amer- ican public opinion became seriously aroused by news of the human rights situation here, a policy reversal in Washington could lead to renewed hos- tility. So let's talk about how we might fast-fonvard the development of trust."

The camp was divided into two parts. Prisoners in one part never get out. Kim Hyon-hui's family is there. In the other part are people who may get out some day. In the center of that part are individual political prisoners, and around them are the prisoners who have their families with them. The rations are the same in both parts of the camp." Tell me about conditions at the camp."I got 120 grams of corn three times a day, the same as in prison, plus salt and a weed called 4l-nregL That's all. They worked us tremendously hard in the mines or timbering. I talked with some other defectors and even they don't believe all I went through. Nowadays when I go to give speeches, I tell my audiences there is nothing on earth you can't eat. You can eat any grass that grows, mice, snakes, anything crawling on the floor. Many people die ~rom lack of vitamins. I'm 175 centimeters tall[5 feet 7 inches] and weighed 38 kilograms [84 pounds] when I came out of the camp in 1989. My parents had prepared two boxes of ginseng to help me recover. Now I weigh louis vuitton mens wallet 68 kilograms [150 pounds]. "It still hurts me to this day to talk about my life louis vuitton monogram vernis handbags there. I was very lucky. Grandfather wrote letters and I got out after one year and four months."I buried so many people there who died of malnutrition. The pitiful thing is that when someone died, everyone rushed to get the dead per- son's clothes to wear them. "They hit you with an iron pole for talking without permission. My~ront teeth are all fake -the originals were smashed in prison. My lower teeth were broken, too, in camp. One day we were working and I was too hungry to go on. I looked on the ground and found the bone of a pig - someone had left it. So I crushed it and put it in a pot to make some soup. The guards saw it and said, 'You aren't supposed to eat food mens louis vuitton wallet cheap thrown away by regular people.' I was tied to a stake and beaten. That's when suede black over the knee boots my lower jaw was smashed. I've invested so much in my teeth since I came to South Korea. "Once we were so hungry that about twenty of us went to the pigsty and started eating the pigs' feed. When I think ofit it's so disgusting. The pig keeper reported us. He complained that the pigs would get thinner because we were eating their feed. They sent us to the river and made us put our heads in the water. The first to put his head up would be beaten brutally. We had to do this until we drank enough water to urinate in our pants. "The prison guards used to shoot birds that came into the camp. There were so many gunshots, the birds got to the point they weren't frightened and wouldn't move. So the guards sent prisoners to climb to

me to write, including Iris Collins, Imogene Keck, Christine Hutcheson and Clara Nolen. A passion for history came over me after I arrived at Prince- ton, where I studied under such great pro~essors as David Herbert Donald, Eric F Goldman, James M. McPherson and-my initial guide to Asia- Frederick W Mote. (Two decades later, thanks to the Professional Journal- ism Fellowships-now John S. Knight Fellowships-program, I had the opportunity to study with outstanding Asia experts on the Stanford faculty including Masahiko Aoki, Peter Duus, Harry Harding, John W Lewis, Melinda Takeuchi and Robert Ward.) Finally, Angsana Saengsawang rates special mention for her unflag- ging support and for putting up with my many absences from our home in Bangkok. And to my son Alexander K. T. Martin go my congratulations that he has turned out to be such a fine young man, even though the booksoaked up too much of the parenting black patent platform pumps that should have gone to his boyhood.e I have overlooked someone I should be singling out for public thanks. I apologize for that. Of course neither the people named nor the louis vuitton mens wallet many other benefactors who go unnamed -the latter group including North Korean and Chongryon officials to whom I am grateful for help with infor- mation or arrangements -are not to blame for shortcomings in the book. For those I am totally responsible. Asia shows other examples of worship of the ruler. In Thailand, for exam- ple, lese majesty is among the most serious of crimes. The cult of Mao Zedong in China was an obvious prototype for Kim's cult, although most observers believe it was a case in which the student, Kim, outdid his teacher, Mao, in carrying things to an extreme. The most direct inspiration for both the Chinese and the North Korean leader cults was the cult of Stalin. For an excellent discussion highlighting Stalinism's contributions to the cheap louis vuitton mens wallet system that Kim Il-sung built, see Adrian Buzo, The Gtieritla Dynadhj: Politicd ana Leaaer4bip in Nortb Korea (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1999), pp. 28-56. important and welcome new resource. Nonetheless, in an attempt to produce a truthful account for presentation in the present work, I have found it necessary even with these relatively forthright memoirs to hack through embellishments, anecdotes that do not ring true and out-and-out prevarications that LV damier Azur range from minor fibs to Big Lies in which Kim claims that he defeated the Japanese to lib- erate Korea, and that the Americans and South Koreans started and then lost the Korean War. Part of the winnowing process involved comparing Kim's latest claims with his earlier ones and with the findings of outside scholars, whose works are cited at appropriate points.