The crimes of the “Dear Leader”

Jasper Becker’s Rogue Regime is given a long review in this week’s New Yorker. It is actually a double review, but the author, Ian Buruma, calls Becker’s work the “more intelligent” and “more incisive” of the two.

Here are two of the more disturbing sections of Buruma’s article:

After the Korean War ended in the ruin of his country, Kim Il Sung, to deflect the blame, had tens of thousands of people purged, sending many to prison or hard-labor camps. Christians and Buddhists who had not already fled to the South were persecuted in large numbers, and many were killed. To cleanse his own ranks of possible rivals, Kim had many of his most intimate and loyal associates arrested and tortured. As Jasper Becker notes in “Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea” (Oxford; $28), four hundred and fifty thousand out of six hundred thousand Party members were investigated and punished for “violating Party rules.” The Great Leader’s policy, to be memorized by prison guards, was that anyone who opposed, or could conceivably be opposed to, Kim’s absolute rule would be singled out for “eradication.”

By the time Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader, took over from his father as the absolute ruler of North Korea, the country was a slave society, where only the most trusted caste of people were allowed to live in sullen obedience in Pyongyang, while vast numbers of potential class enemies were worked to death in mines and hard-labor camps. After Kim Il Sung’s death, in 1994, the regime suspended executions for a month, and throughout the following year it committed relatively few killings. Since this was at the height of a famine, largely brought on by disastrous agricultural policies, hundreds of thousands were already dying from hunger. Then word spread that Kim Jong Il wished to “hear the sound of gunshots again.” Starving people were shot for stealing a couple of eggs.

LINK to the full New Yorker article.