General Rebukes Kim Jong Il

Former three-star North Korean General Yoo Sung Kim discussed his time in and escape from a concentration camp yesterday in Emerson Hall, strongly rebuking the government of Kim Jong Il and those states that provide North Korea with foreign aid.

General Kim, who was detained for a year and a half before fleeing, argued that the state intercepts a large portion of foreign aid intended for private recipients. As a result, countries providing aid are inhibiting the emergence of government-independent market activity.

This activity, General Kim said, began during the severe famine in the mid-1990s and grew due to popular recognition that citizens could not rely on the government to sustain them.

The North Korean state closed the nation’s largest non-governmental market hub — Pyongsong, on the outskirts of Pyongyang — in June of this year, and in January, it placed broad restrictions of the operation of such marketplaces.

However, independent commerce continues “making North Korean citizens richer and freer from the government, and making the government weaker,” Kim said through a translator.

The current regime, Kim argued, is swallowing goods delivered as foreign aid and reselling it to its intended recipients, hurting its efficacy in fighting poverty.

As a member of the governing class, Kim said that he, like many others in power, did not realize the extent to which North Korea laborers were impoverished until he was imprisoned.

“In prison, I saw people starving and the hardship they faced,” Kim said.

Incarcerated in 1999 for involvement in an attempted military coup, Kim bribed officials after six months’ imprisonment and was released two months later. He fled with his family, making his way to South Korea in March 2001, where he worked for that country’s National Intelligence Service (NIS).

The former general argued that few in North Korea can understand how economically weak the country is until they escape to other nations.

When 400,000 people fled North Korea in 2000, “the government lost the means through which they were controlling the population” into thinking that the country’s economic state was satisfactory, Kim said.

Harvard Undergraduates for Human Rights in North Korea (HRiNK) invited Kim to speak as part of the organization’s “North Korean Awareness Week,” according to organization member Ja-Yoon “Uni” Choe ’12.

Margaret L. Park, a first-year student at the Graduate School of Education, noted that the talk focused more on the problems with the North Korean aid regime, rather than possible solutions.

“I left with the feeling of a little hopelessness,” Park said.