North Korea uses poverty, myth to keep nation ready for war

BEIJING — Faced with a starving population, an economy in a shambles and longtime communist allies tripping over themselves to embrace capitalism, North Korea's leadership long ago turned weakness into strength by steeling its population for permanent war.

The effort has paid off, experts said. With tighter restrictions on imports of oil, food and other goods a near-certainty after Monday's announced nuclear test, North Korea seems confident its long-suffering people — battered by famine, floods and economic mismanagement — will continue to suffer in silence. This is an important assumption in the government's decision to detonate an apparent nuclear device, a major gamble.

Many of the intimidation tactics employed in North Korea to keep its population in line are common to totalitarian regimes elsewhere. But North Korea has taken them to the extreme, analysts said, maintaining a tighter lid on society than East Germany in its darkest days.

For decades, North Korea has subjected its population to a propaganda assault centered on juche, roughly translated as "self-reliance." In recent years, scholars said, the term also has come to connote unquestioned trust in the "living-god" leadership of national founder Kim Il Sung and his son, current ruler Kim Jong Il.

This linking of sacrifice, national glory and near-divine leadership is evident in the smallest details. During a tour of Pyongyang's Tower of the Juche Idea last year, guide Park Gyong Nam explained that the 560-foot-high monument was built in 1982, the year of the 70th birthday of Kim Il Sung, using 25,500 granite blocks. Do the math, and that works out to one block for every day of Kim's life, he said.

A central lie

The truth is that socialist North Korea has never been self-reliant, depending since its formation on the Soviet Union, then China, the United Nations and other donors to feed itself. But this myth is part of the glue that binds North Koreans to the regime.

"This has a huge impact on people's ability to withstand hardship," said Cui Yingjiu, honorary director of Peking University's Institute for Korean Culture Studies. "For most of the past 100 years, North Koreans haven't had enough to eat or wear. This gives them enormous tolerance for hardship."

Cui attended university with Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang in the early 1960s.

The idea that North Korea has joined the club of seven nations that are declared nuclear powers is also a source of honor and confidence for the average North Korean.

"If I were still in North Korea, like ordinary citizens, I would be proud to hear that the nation succeeded in conducting a nuclear test," said Seo Young Seok, 26, a university student living in South Korea who defected in 1999 with his mother and two older sisters.

North Korea has no opinion polls, making it difficult to gauge how deeply North Koreans believe their government's propaganda. But a recent project involving North Korean refugees in China provides a clue.

Interviews with 1,300 North Korean expatriates, many of whom had been living in China for months or years, found nearly 20 percent believed North Korea was better off than South Korea, a key claim of the government. In reality, North Korea's economy is less than one-thirtieth the size of its southern cousin's.

"This gives you some sense of the degree of the socialization in place," said a senior fellow with Washington's Institute for International Economics, Marcus Noland, who was involved in the study. "People may be angry, and there's lots of anecdotal evidence to suggest they are, but that doesn't translate into political action."

Nor do the disaffected have much internal or external support, even if they dare speak out. The state's iron grip on society means there is no domestic institution that might serve as a focal point akin to the role played by the Solidarity labor movement in Poland or the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines, analysts said.

2 classes

The North's neighbors, China and South Korea, don't welcome use of their territory as a base for anti-government activities that might ultimately give voice to the suffering of ordinary citizens. Far from working against the North, both neighbors have helped prop up the regime, fearful of the refugees and social problems that would flood their countries if Kim fell.

Both dispense unmonitored food they know goes mostly to the military rather than average people, fearful of the cost of an implosion. China arrests and harasses North Korean refugees, sending many back. And while in theory any North Korean is entitled to South Korean citizenship, Seoul sets up huge hurdles to control the numbers and has shut down anti-North radio stations after Pyongyang complained.

Adding to North Korea's isolation are U.S. financial sanctions in place designed to punish Pyongyang for weapons proliferation, money laundering and counterfeiting. These have been surprisingly effective, analysts said, not so much because of the relatively small amount of money frozen at Macau's Banco Delta Asia, much of which is reportedly linked to the North's military, but because of the signal it has sent to banks worldwide.

"It's been a huge shot across the bow for any bank doing business with North Korea," said Stephan Haggard, director of the Korea-Pacific Program at the University of California, San Diego. "With the sanctions already in place starting to have an effect and talk of further tightening, the North Korean economy is on an incredibly bad path."

Analysts speak of two economic classes in North Korea: the relatively well-off military and party elite and Pyongyang residents, and the average citizens elsewhere. Widening the wealth gap further, elites have more access to black-market luxury goods than 15 years ago now that the government's distribution system has started to break down.

The North's economy is about $23.5 billion, or about half of Microsoft's annual sales, ranking it among the poorest nations in the world.

Self-reliance is particularly attractive for a small, insecure country with just 22 million people and giants Russia and China sitting to its north.

"If you listen to North Korean history, China didn't even have a role in the Korean War," said Banning Garrett, Asia programs director at the Atlantic Council in Washington. "Now of course they're making self-reliance a reality. They've made everyone angry and will be left to eat dirt all by themselves."

Bolstering the propaganda is the fact that the government is not afraid to use force against the slightest sign of dissent. North Korean refugees detail the existence of detention camps with 150,000 to 200,000 inmates subject to torture, starvation, rape, killing and forced labor, according to the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, an independent civic group. Human Rights Watch in its annual report ranks the North among the world's most repressive regimes.

Propaganda machine

Informants are numerous and every five families "share" one official responsible for ensuring adherence to ruling-party ideology. Propaganda efforts are overseen nationally by the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Central Committee of the Korean Workers' Party. This department is headed by Central Committee Secretary Kim Gi Nam, who has close ties to Kim Jong Il.

Officially, everyone in the nation spends two hours a day in political classes, and all state enterprises and offices are required to devote Saturdays to political education, according to the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif.

Schools spend most of their time on the teachings of the two Kims, their biographies and ruling-party history. Feature movies and documentaries about the two leaders make up 20 percent of the broadcasting time on television and radio.

"If you inculcate juche and other beliefs over decades, you start to have a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Andrew O'Neil, a senior lecturer in international studies at Australia's Flinders University. "From what you hear, a lot of people really believe the U.S. is going to invade tomorrow and their best defense is nuclear weapons."

Los Angeles Times reporters Jinna Park and Yin Lijin contributed to this report.