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It's the mid-1990s, and North Korea is in the grips of one of the worst famines of the 20th century. The famine was a completely tragic time. Hundreds of thousands of people died, up to millions, depending on who you ask or which assessment you go with. It was a terrible time where your next-door neighbour might kill over and die. Mothers would try and give up their babies because they knew they couldn't afford to feed them. It was human tragedy on an enormous scale.
These desperate times call for desperate measures, and some are willing to risk torture and execution for the chance of food and an income. My name is Paul McGann, and welcome to Real Dictators, the series that explores the hidden lives of tyrants such as Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Joseph Stalin. In this episode, we return once more to North Korea.
To conclude the story of the man who built a volatile rogue state with nuclear missiles trained on its enemies while all the while living a life of the utmost luxury. From Noisa Podcasts, this is the story of Kim Jong Il and this is Real Dictators. This podcast features occasional scenes of a violent and or graphic nature. In the mid 90s, North Korea is starving.
The North Korean people have no choice but to develop their own illicit ways of feeding themselves. James Pearson is an award-winning journalist and author of North Korea Confidential.
So during the famine, when the state basically was unable to provide food to the people, the people resorted to person-to-person trade and capitalism, whether that be by somebody floating something across the river into China and importing food that way, or just by somebody selling their possessions because they needed to survive. What the famine did was to necessitate this system of bartering and this network of markets.
So today we have a North Korea where really you can buy more or less anything in the illegal black markets. They even have a saying in North Korea that you can get anything except for a cat's horn in a North Korean black market. The meaning being that, of course, a cat's horn doesn't exist. So if you can imagine it and it exists, you can probably buy it in the North Korean market. There are stories of
washing machines, cars, tractors, even PlayStations being available on the North Korean black market. And this is really what meets most people's needs these days. North Koreans are now some of the most capitalist people you'll ever meet. This kind of person-to-person trading the black market really now accounts for a very significant part of people's daily needs. The North Korean people adapt to survive. Jung Gwang-il is one of them. Later, he'll become a defector.
Right now, he starts off selling frozen fish and other goods to Chinese traders.
Since 1996, I had been doing my trading business while going in and out of China. Trading is supposed to earn you foreign currency, but we didn't really earn much. When I sold seafood that was produced by North Korea in China, the Chinese people would buy them dirt cheap. Not only that, they didn't pay for it with cash, but paid with what we called substitution goods, which was corn or other grains. The grains weren't even something people could eat.
They were as bad as animal feed, so we couldn't make as much money as we thought. So we tracked down where they were selling the seafood that we sold them. When we tracked it, it turned out they were selling it to South Korean people. And when they sold them, they were leaving a great profit, excessive profit. Realizing he's been taken for a ride by the Chinese middlemen, Guang decides to take his products straight to the South Korean buyers.
So I thought about it and met the South Koreans by myself. It's actually illegal. It's something that is not allowed in North Korea, the act of meeting South Korean people. So I met them and traded with them and made a more considerable profit than we'd ever thought. And as a result, we paid a lot of money to the country, which started to incur suspicion. Where is he making all this money, more than the other people? So the government appointed one of my employees and made him spy on me.
He reported that I was meeting South Koreans and getting in touch with them. While meeting South Korean people, we would have a drink and talk about normal things. When asked if there were people who were dying because of a shortage of food, of course I said there were. I said that, but then later it turned out saying these things is considered to be the crime of espionage, criticizing socialism.
the North Korean system, then a charge revealing classified information. These charges were on me." The consequences of going outside of the law to earn a living, let alone criticizing the government, are extremely severe, as Gwang is about to learn firsthand.
On July 22nd, 1999, I was called in from North Korea suddenly, and the minute I set foot on North Korean soil, I was arrested. I was arrested for national security law, dragged to the places where I was tortured in so many different ways.
I was tortured by electricity and by water, and also suffered from pigeon torture, where I was chained backwards. I weighed 75 kilograms when I was arrested, but after enduring the tortures, I became 36 kilograms. I couldn't even keep my balance. Things were like that, so I caved in and conceded that I was a spy, because the physical pain was too harsh. Then, without any legal process, no trial, they dragged me off.
They hammer a metal hoop on the wall from a height of 60cm and they hang your handcuffed hands behind your back onto the hoop so you can't even sit. You can't stand up either. The people who interrogated me, once they leave they come back after a week. Then for a week while chained this way you can't sleep or sit down and rest. You can't stand up and your body becomes paralysed.
Then your body becomes all numb and your chest hurts as if it's going to pop out. The pain is beyond description. You relieve yourself in your pants. You become all worn out and faint. Finally, the interrogators get what they're after: a false confession. Jung Kwang-il is forced to lie and to say that he is a spy working for South Korea.
Then they come back, let you go and ask if you were a spy. Then you say you were not a spy. Then they say, "Is that so? If he is not a spy, chain him up again." They chain you up again and leave. This repeats and it was too hard on me, so I thought it would be better to admit it. So I told them that I was a spy. In prison, Quang experiences conditions no human being should.
The section I was confined in was called the Revolutionary Section, and back then there were about 400 to 500 prisoners. We were human beings, but we were treated as less than human during our lives in prison. Prisoners are forced to do 16 hours of labour. We would wake up at 4 in the morning and work until 8 in the evening. It was very hard labour.
We would go out onto a cornfield and work. We were fed with rice and beans. They give you one ball of it, but you can't really survive just with that. Because they were too hungry, they would steal the corn seeds. So the prison guards would mix the seeds with excrement and then handed them out so that we couldn't eat them. Still, because people were starving, they would wash the seeds mixed with excrement and eat them. Not even one person survived who ate them.
We would cut down trees in the winter. The slope of the mountain was over 45 degrees. Sometimes it was even 60 degrees. It was very steep. And we would chop a tree down on those steep slopes. It's really tough. We had an assignment, and if we couldn't accomplish it, they didn't give us food. So we did it as if it were a matter of life and death. However, the trees on the slope won't fall down if the wind blows. Sometimes it fell down on your side.
The tree would fall down quickly in a moment, then if you got hit, you would be killed on the spot. The prison guards would bring one kilogram worth of corn rice cakes to where we would pile up the trees underneath the mountain and then make us compete. They said they would give the rice cakes to someone who would bring the most trees.
People who were starved, they don't see their colleagues, they see the corn rice cakes. So whether or not there were people down below, they just slid their trees down the snowy mountain. When it slides down, it slides down real quick, very quickly. If it hits a person on the way, the person's life would just end. Their back would just break so easily. If it hits a person properly, there were people whose heads would fly off.
The prison guards felt pleasure seeing us dying like that. Fun, just like they were playing a game, an entertainment. Let's see how many people will die without one log. They would make a bet. Finally, Gwang has released. He is one of the lucky ones. Many more helpless inmates remain in the jail, sent there for merely expressing unhappiness during the famine.
The charges of people who were there were absurd crimes. I committed the most severe crime. At least I met people from a hostile country and had a meal and drink together. But the other people there had never done anything like that. They were caught just because they talked about their trouble, most of them because they complained. And there were people who were caught because they damaged Kim Jong-il's photo on newspapers. What I experienced when I left the camp
I still can't fall asleep without thinking of the prisoners whose eyes were looking at me, those envious eyes. With North Korea starving, Kim Jong Il, the country's dear leader, embarks on a nationwide PR exercise. He sets about portraying the famine as a collective endeavour the country must go through together. He's even got a slogan. He calls it the arduous march. Kim tours the country making sure he's seen wearing modest clothes,
reportedly surviving on just a single ball of rice a day, but it's merely crude propaganda. Paul Fisher is author of a Kim Jong Il production. The Arduous March was a propaganda term for a famine, essentially after Kim Il-sung died in 1994 and Kim Jong Il took over. Kim Jong Il kind of took over at exactly the wrong time.
because that's when everything fell apart in North Korea and it was a terrible famine that, if you trust certain accounts, killed as many as 20% of the North Korean population. And Kim Jong Il, being a propagandist, went through kind of several stages of denying reality to his people and first told them
that there was no famine and then had to give that up when people could see people around him dying, then said that the famine was a ploy from Yankee imperialist stories and kind of built through these different stages until he got to the Ardeus March. But for the sake of our dream, we have to endure and we have to go through it. He made the case that he, almost more than anyone else, was suffering from this Ardeus March. In reality, while his people starve, Kim Jong-il is living the high life.
This image of austerity he was trying to give to his people. He had one outfit, he worked all the time, he ate such little amounts that he had no need to defecate to go to the bathroom anymore. His body had adapted to not needing fuel. That was a propaganda line. When in fact, he still had 24 villas and the dancing girls and 600,000 pounds of Hennessy Cognac every year, several wives and concubines. That was his lifestyle, but to North Koreans that was completely unknown and talking about it was treason.
Paul French is an East Asia analyst and author of North Korea: State of Paranoia It's certainly true that Kim Jong Il did appear to live fairly high on the hog I mean, he was a large consumer of cognac, he had imported Rothman cigarettes He himself had a lot of private high-end cars Didn't spend it on clothes, one has to say He was also a great gourmand
and brought over a German chef to cook German food, an Italian chef to cook pizza, and most famously a Japanese sushi chef who stayed there for a long time. There was also talk of women being flown in from Scandinavia and so on. Some of this is probably rumour, some of it's probably true. Lurid rumours emerge about how the leader spends his downtime. Everywhere Kim goes, his entourage of delight follows.
They're a group of entertainers devoted to providing their leader with amusement and gaiety. A harem of five female dancers are kept on standby. Often these women have been kidnapped from their families. They're forced to perform for Kim, sometimes naked, whenever he desires. Envoys fly around the world, sourcing for him the finest of foods. Black caviar is flown in from Iran, craft beer from Czechoslovakia, seafood from Japan, fresh fruit from Malaysia.
Mike Breen is a journalist and author of the book Kim Jong Il: North Korea's Dear Leader. It's absolutely disgusting. You know, I hesitate to use the word evil, or if we use it, we have to explain what we mean. It's not sort of horns on the head evil, and it's not Saddam Hussein pulling the wings off butterflies evil. It's the kind of evil where there is no feeling, there is no concern, there is no care, there's just emptiness.
The new millennium arrives, with no change. In 2001, on a trip to Moscow, a Russian envoy traveling with Kim claims fresh lobsters and donkeys are flown to the train every day. Kim eats these delicacies with silver chopsticks, washing them down with champagne. As far as the nation goes, Kim refuses to relent on his absolute commitment to communism. Simple market reforms, like those introduced by China and Russia, might have guaranteed a food supply.
Mass starvation might well have been alleviated. But any capitulation to capitalism is out of the question. James Pearson: "Kim Jong Il is essentially in a position of comfort during this time. He has very little personal incentive to actually change his system.
North Korea is such an all-controlling, all-encompassing state that if you were the leader of it, you might feel that any significant changes or reforms that recognize any outside ideology could threaten the state's very existence. So in order to hang on to your power, it makes sense, at least in a tyrant like Kim Jong-il's mind, that you wouldn't necessarily want to reform anything. As long as you stayed comfortable and you stayed in power, then that's really all you need to do. Kim's token attempt to feed his starving population of farcical,
German media report that Kim attempts to solve the famine by breeding giant rabbits for eating. The story goes that a German farmer who breeds rabbits the size of dogs is asked by the North Korean regime to help set up a farm to alleviate food shortages. Twelve giant rabbits are sent to North Korea to get the ball rolling. The farmer is shocked to hear that they've been eaten at Kim's birthday banquet.
This regime is organized less like a national government and more like a mafia-style criminal enterprise. So what he did from the mid-1970s is everything in North Korea that could make hard foreign cash
he set into one economy that supported him and his cronies and his lifestyle. Kim managed to use the state infrastructure to build a criminal empire. So he started using agricultural lands to grow where he needed to make drugs and then use the state's ships to take them abroad, where then his ambassadors would be tasked with selling it. And so over three decades, North Korea became very good at selling drugs.
trafficking people in ivory and later nuclear secrets and weapons. There was talk of their involvement in various illicit activities, everything from ivory trading through to being one of the largest producers of methamphetamine. They created shadow banking operations in Macau and other various tricky jurisdictions for us to track.
And very alarming to many people was weapons trafficking. That arguably was starting to turn up just about everywhere that you could name that the West didn't like at that time. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran. And the other thing that they were extremely good at, and is well documented,
is that they were probably the world's finest ever forges of hundred dollar bills, American hundred dollar bills, to the point that even the Federal Reserve in America was openly willing to admit that these were the absolute best quality fakes. And yet they could not grow enough food to feed their people. And I think this is one of the great contradictions of the time of Kim Jong Il. In banks in Switzerland, China, Russia, Austria, Liechtenstein and Singapore,
Money siphoned off from the North Korean state, lands and the accounts of elite members of North Korean society. The money was being used
to parcel out goodies, presents among the elite in order to keep them on side. A lot of it did go into building housing for the elite, to buy it, to allowing the elite to have Mercedes cars, decent watches, the little luxuries of life. So in a sense, it was sort of money that came in almost as tribute to the Kim family and then was doled out to the worthy and those deemed
fit to receive it. And in return, those people give their loyalty and their fealty, in a Confucian sense, if you like, to the Kim family. And it's part of how you manage regime survival. The worst of the famine, the worst of the economic meltdown didn't affect this core group of supporters. Because if it did, of course, centers of resistance, centers of opposition could build up. And that's what they don't want. Regime survival was Kim Jong-il's ultimate game.
Kim sits front and center of a royal court economy, a feudal system of tribute and fealty. It's more reminiscent of the Middle Ages than the 21st century. The elite live by a completely different set of rules to men and women on the street. By the early 2000s, life in North Korea is, for most people, unspeakably grim. The obvious question is, why don't people simply leave? If you do make a run for it, chances are your neighbors will denounce you.
Paul French explains.
Children are encouraged to denounce parents at schools. Work colleagues are encouraged to denounce themselves. Within the party, there is a whole internal system of self-criticism, as they call it, as well as showing on television people who have escaped to China, who have been returned by the Chinese, being punished, often executed, sent into camps. And this punishment goes down through all of the families. So if you're a father and you leave and you're returned, it's not just you that goes to prison, it's your entire family that goes to prison. Your children can forget having any future.
There'll be a black mark against you. As more people have left, they've not been able to execute everybody. They'd wipe out half the population. But your daughter will almost become an unmarriageable product. There is no one to defend you. You're a black sheep in the family of North Korea. You're outside. You'll never go to university. You'll never get a good job. You'll never get extra food rations. None of this will ever happen to you. And so people hunker down.
Unfortunately, the exiled community has often been plagued by suicides, by severe depression, by alcoholism and drug use and so on, because it is such a tough burden to carry with you once you're outside of North Korea. It's actually technically not that difficult to leave North Korea. To walk across the Yalu River into China and then to find your way into a third country like Mongolia or Thailand or somewhere, and eventually to South Korea or somewhere else, is not overly difficult if you're fairly young, fairly fit, and the weather's not too bad.
It's a porous border. And yet very few people do leave. And for a country that's been in this economic decline with starvation and so on, and such a regime, the fact that more people have not left is always surprising. From a distance, it's difficult to grasp. But on the ground, this culture of collective guilt remains, even today, an extremely powerful phenomenon. Escaping without a trace, in a way that doesn't leave your family in the firing line, requires painstaking planning.
I know a North Korean lady in South Korea who made exquisite preparations for her departure. She went to the local government and said she was moving to another city. She got the documents that said she was no longer living in her current city. But she never went
to the other city to register. But she had a friend who was a hospital director in that other city, and she went to him and she bribed him to issue her death certificate. Anyone investigating going to where she lived, they would say, "Oh, she moved." They wouldn't be able to find her registration. Now, if they really looked, they'd probably eventually find, "Oh, she died somewhere. Here's a death certificate." Then she crossed the border and made her way to South Korea.
And she's here under a different name. In her case, nobody's going to twig. Now there's a lot of people in North Korea who've kind of disappeared and there's a suspicion that, "Oh, I wonder where they've gone." But a lot of them cover their tracks in that sort of way. Kim Jong-il lives within a fortified compound called the Ryongsong Residence on the northern outskirts of Pyongyang. The walls are protected with iron rods and concrete covered with lead, just in case war with the South or with America breaks out again.
Around the perimeter, beyond an electric fence, is a series of minefields. Underground is Kim's private train station, complete with his own luxury train. As far as the facilities go, there's a shooting range, a horse racing track, a spa and a swimming pool. Even holed up in a house like this, Kim can't ignore forever the reality facing his people.
Suppressing capitalism while trading on international black markets is hardly a recipe for prosperity. If he's not careful, Kim will push his people too far. They'll have no choice but to throw caution to the wind and rise up against him. So Kim devises a way of getting someone else to pay to keep the North Korean people alive. He is going to blackmail the West into giving them food. Kim is building the world's fourth largest army.
is also developing nuclear weapons in secret. The Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union had fallen away and he was getting no fraternal aid, no cheap oil, no cheap energy, no cheap armaments anymore. China was moving towards a market orientation and was not sending fraternal aid anymore. This was a terrible situation and it looked like it was getting bad.
Kim Jong Il had one card that he could play, which meant that people had to sit up and listen to him, and that was the nuclear card. To develop nuclear weapons, the despot will need a reactor. So Kim builds one, under the guise that it will power civilian homes and industry.
Given their energy shortages in terms of oil, coal and other things, the idea that you could have a civilian use nuclear reactor was not necessarily a bad idea. It was a cheap way of generating power for a country that didn't have many other ways of doing it and didn't have foreign currency to buy oil and has really no natural reserves of most of these things.
So the International Energy Agency and the atomic authorities had worked with the North Koreans to ensure that. The concern was whether or not it would be safe and we wouldn't want another Chernobyl accident right on the Chinese border and with the possibilities of that. But before long, the truth gets out. The world has to come to terms with a new nuclear-armed power.
What then happened was around 2002, it became apparent from American intelligence and elsewhere and eventually admitted by the North Koreans that the reactor that they had developed was in no way connected to the civilian grid.
that it was purely producing material that could be used for weapons. In a sense, Kim Jong-il played it extremely well. All of a sudden, once this had become apparent, he was front and center in the news. All of a sudden, there had to be an engagement process between the North and America. Kim Jong-il in North Korea, of course, played it to show, "Look, here come the Americans to deal with me. I'm the big guy."
On the other hand, of course, we can see that this really shows Kim Jong Il's dictatorial disregard for his people. They're starving, they're hungry, they're dying due to lack of hospitals. Operations can't take place because the lights can't be switched on. Yet here comes the nuclear weapon. Even army generals are unsure about this new nuclear development.
And this arguably would change his relationship with the army as well. Because once you have a nuclear weapon, all of a sudden the defence of your country is not so much based on boots on the ground and tanks and soldiers and all the rest of it. It's about if you attack us, if you do anything to us that we don't like, we'll fire a nuclear missile at you. Game over. And maybe, just maybe, I'm unstable enough and mad enough and enough of a nut
to do it, because I'm going nowhere. I'm in power in this country. This is about regime survival. I've got nowhere to go and I will never give up and I might just fire this thing. Kim makes sure the West knows exactly what he's up to. He leaks information about the nuclear program. He conducts visible missile tests. Sometimes he instructs his soldiers to start minor shootouts in the vicinity of the demilitarized zone, just to raise the level of tension.
News outlets around the world respond with panicked headlines: North Korea is on the brink of war. Then Kim defuses the situation he himself has created. He stands his soldiers down, he pauses missile tests. The world sighs in relief and agrees to grant Kim the concessions he's after. Through this nuclear brinkmanship, Kim Jong-il is able to get even his most hated enemies to bail him out.
So once Kim Jong-il has the nuclear weapon, and once he's shown it to everyone, and once he's got himself audiences with the Americans and the South Koreans and the Japanese and the Chinese and the Russians, he is then able to trade his nuclear card, if you like, for aid. And so the upsurge of aid into the country, which is not just food,
but is also medical supplies, is also oil, is also fertilizer to try and get agriculture restarted. It's also many of these things, plus more little goodies for the leadership as well. And cash, cold hard cash. Once this starts coming back into the country, he is able to create the economy which still exists in North Korea today, which is often referred to as a drip feed economy,
which is there is enough aid going into the country now to just sort of keep everybody above starvation level, to just about keep a health service ticking over, to just about keep the lights on and the heat on. And it's all coming from outside. The propaganda machine in North Korea spins it, of course, the
No aid is coming into the country. And when American aid comes into the country, sacks of rice, sacks of corn that have stars and stripes flag on them that say a gift of the American people, which is standard for U.S. aid, they are taken out of those sacks and put into other sacks and distributed. And the people of North Korea are told that these are reparations from the Americans for their attack, their imperialistic attack on North Korea in the Korean War.
and that Kim Jong Il, the dear leader, through making the country strong, through bolstering the country and through forcing the Americans to talk to him,
has got these reparations from the Americans and they should pay them because they're the imperialists. It was extremely well played. It does not mean a greater life for the North Korean people. It does not mean that the economy is able to be self-sufficient in the way that Kim Il-sung always wanted it to do. But it has ultimately ensured regime survival for the 20 years since then. Kim Jong-il seems more secure than ever. But behind the scenes, the luxury armoured train is running out of steam.
In 2008, Kim disappears for 10 months without explanation. The world waits. Kim is a notorious party animal. He's a heavy drinker and smoker. Is his lifestyle finally catching up with him? It seems so. When he reappears into society, he looks frail and bewildered. For the next three years, Kim spends most of his time holed up in his luxury fortified compound, the Ryongsong Residence.
Here, in private, far from the prying eyes of the international media, his health declines. Then, on December 17th, 2011, a surprising announcement is made. Kim Jong Il, North Korea's dear leader, has died. The outpouring of grief seems just as great as when Kim's father died 17 years earlier. The state funeral takes place in the freezing cold, as snow falls on Pyongyang.
Lines of onlookers wail uncontrollably. Narrating the scene, the newsreader's voice wavers. She can barely contain her emotions. Kim's third son, Kim Jong-un, walks at the head of the funeral convoy, his hand resting on the bonnet of the trembling hearse that carries his father's body. Many in the West hope this funeral is a turning point in North Korea's history. After 63 years of brutal dictatorship, will the North finally open up
Hopes grow when it's announced that the third son, Kim Jong-un, will take over. He has been educated in the West. At just 28 years of age, Kim Jong-un becomes the dynasty's third dictator. It certainly was not
as smooth a transfer of power from Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un as it was from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il. That's for sure. There were other brothers in the mix, though most of them had managed to rule themselves out of the running. Kim Jong Un is a thick-set man with a bull's neck. Physically, he draws quite a contrast with his diminutive, bespectacled father. The new man at the top needs to prove his credentials as a hard man and fast.
On top of that, he needs to reassure a nation that seems permanently on the precipice of economic ruin. Now more than ever, North Korea's propaganda machine is needed. And so as his cult of personality has started to be crafted, we've started to see both of these sides come out. So lots of visits to children's homes, lots of visits to hospitals, lots of pictures with him with people. And again, though, lots of pictures with the army, lots of pictures with senior generals and so on.
We have had the traditional purging, the removal of enemies up to and including his uncle. We've also had the slightly bizarre aspects of things, particularly the relationship with Dennis Rodman, which seems to be quite odd. And again, rumours have swirled around Kim Jong-un just as they did around Kim Jong-il, particularly with women. Rumours that once he married, he had his former girlfriend shot, so there was no conflict there.
Rumors that he fed his uncle to the wolves. Rumors swell around the grandson, if you like, as much as they did around his father, Kim Jong-il, and to an extent, Kim Il-sung.
Pretty soon it's clear that life in North Korea isn't going to improve in a hurry. The economy is still in a mess. It is nowhere near self-sufficiency. They cannot feed themselves. Industry is down and out. They are still involved in the business of methamphetamine and fake dollar bills and things like that. None of that has gone away. The situation with South Korea is no closer to unification than it ever has.
There's a part of me that feels Kim Jong-un is almost worse than his father or grandfather because he's been raised abroad, he's very aware of the rest of the world as it is, he's been exposed to other things that Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il haven't. Kim Il-sung was the one sort of hero who achieved something for the North Koreans even if he kind of exaggerated it later and Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un are kind of trying to make that charisma trickle down to them.
And so Kim Jong-un, who's very young, never done anything, never achieved anything, is trying to create this image that he deserves it just as much as his grandfather did. And the existence of the country is completely tied into that Kim family, in the same way that the existence of a kingdom is completely dependent on its king. In some ways, Kim Jong-un seems even madder than his father and grandfather. He announces that the nation must follow new rules regarding haircuts.
Women can have one of 18 cuts. For men, there are just 10 approved styles. It's a rule the leader himself pointedly ignores. But there is a far darker side to the new Kim. On the 12th of December 2013, he orders that his own uncle be put to death for treachery. As Kim Jong Il's former second in command, it seems more likely that the uncle's crime is being a rival for the position of supreme leader.
It's clear it's going to be more of the same, if not worse. Jung Kwang-il is a defector from the North Korean regime. He remembers the transition from one Kim to the next.
When comparing Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un, people might think it will change, but nothing can ever be changed. You might think that he thinks a lot about welfare of the North Korean people. Recently, he went to a cosmetic company and told them to upgrade the quality, but it's merely just to show the people that he's the leader. He's the dear, loving leader. It's not like he actually thought of them from his heart.
If he thinks about the starving people, why would he launch a missile? It costs you a lot. If you have that much money, you should feed the people. They are still suffering from the lack of food. There are still people who are dying. So I think it's better not to keep your hopes up about Kim Jong-un. Kim Jong-nam is the new leader's half-brother. There was a time when it looked like he might take over the country.
But Kim Jong-nam fell out of favor with his father in 2001 when he got caught trying to visit Tokyo Disneyland on a fake passport. That episode saw him swiftly removed from consideration for the succession. But 16 years later, he's brought back into the limelight. On February 13th, 2017, Kim Jong-nam walks into Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia. He's porky, bald, and wearing cream linen trousers and jacket.
A hold-all sports bag is slung over his shoulder. In the packed hall, as he surveys the departures board, two women rush up behind him. Before he can react, they rub a wet cloth over his face before hurrying off. Kim Jong-nam heads straight to the airport police desk. He's feeling dizzy. The cops usher him into a glass-fronted medical room. Moments later, he has a seizure. Fellow travelers watch on through the glass windows. The emergency services arrive.
But Kim Jong-nam dies en route to hospital. As it turns out, the substance on the wet cloth was VX nerve agent. It's categorized as a weapon of mass destruction and is banned under international law. Two women from Indonesia and Vietnam respectively are charged with murder. They claim they had no idea what was on the cloth. They believed they were taking part in a TV prank. Both have since been released from prison.
Kim Jong-nam's death bears all the hallmarks of an assassination. Now who could that have been? Kim Jong-un ratchets up his father's nuclear weapons program, conducting multiple missile tests, often right in the faces of South Korea, Japan and the United States. For much of 2017 it looks like the Korean peninsula is on the brink of nuclear war.
Lambasting each other over Twitter and TV interviews, Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump engage in a war of words that has the international community holding its breath. But then, through 2018, Kim Jong-un appears to launch a charm offensive. He holds unprecedented summits with South Korea and the US. He shakes their president's hands, beaming, in full view of the watching international media. His is a rollercoaster approach.
Not only is it remarkable that North Korea has managed to maintain itself through a drip feed of international aid, which it denies it even receives, but it is actually belligerent towards the people that offer it aid. And not just America, and not just Europe, and not just Japan, they're old enemies.
but also towards their old friends in Russia and China and elsewhere. I mean, China is the largest supplier of aid to North Korea and they are constantly insulting the Chinese. Their diplomatic presence is extremely belligerent. This is part of how North Korea has created itself. And this really, although it's carried on under Kim Jong-un, is really the playbook that is created by Kim Jong-un. Now as the 2020s begin, what does the future hold for North Korea?
there are some signs of change. So in theory, North Korea is a state where one party controls everything. The school you go to, the job you do is decided for you from a very young age. But the reality of that is slightly different. Things have changed over the years, especially in the wake of the famine. The challenge for the North Korean government is to accommodate these grassroots markets, capitalist changes.
and allow them to grow in a way which doesn't threaten their own control over the country. So the challenge for the government is really how do they stay in power, but how do they appease the people too? If they can derive their legitimacy by accommodating these economic changes, then it'll probably keep going for a long time. But the interesting thing too is when you speak to defectors, when you speak to North Koreans still working in the country, most of them say that what they really want is just a little bit more economic freedom. They're waiting for the government to catch up with the capitalist reality that exists in North Korea today.
But a degree of economic change doesn't necessarily lead to a life of greater liberty. Things have changed recently, so if you have money you can bribe your way in and out of trouble. But for example with the existence of prison camps, which everybody knows are there, there is a certain fear which would perhaps make people think very, very carefully about voicing any kind of criticism. It's also one of the reasons why we'll probably never see an Arab Spring-type movement in North Korea.
North and South Korea remain at loggerheads, two countries with a shared heritage disrupted by 75 years of high-stakes tension. The two Koreas are competing to be the real Korea. When you think about it, a unified country for 1300 years and their historical sense of unity goes back another thousand years before that.
You know, this is not Germany or Italy just got reunified 100 years ago or so. This is a very, very long history and the division is a blip. It's possible these countries may end up peacefully coexisting under separate rule and have some sort of nod to Korean nationalism and unify in some way. If suddenly South Koreans and Americans cease to be the enemy,
The North Korean regime is going to have to scramble to explain the gulag and the propaganda and all the horrors. And they won't be able to. You know, they'll be thrown out or they'll be strung up on the nearest telegraph poles, these guys. The change that we're seeing in North Korea is a kind of a creeping, deniable change that could be reversed. North Korea has not formally turned a corner yet, whereby it does what it should do, which is devote its energies to its domestic economy,
and put defense secondary in its place. The day will come when you can jump in your car in Seoul and drive up to Pyongyang for the weekend. That'll be effectively the day of unification. That day will come. But the Kims have got to go first. The problem is, with fundamental change to come, it would be extremely difficult to manage. And it would be extraordinarily expensive.
I think there's a dirty little secret about North Korea that the world has that most people don't realize, which is if North Korea collapses completely, no one wants to have to pick up the pieces. The example that's used is Germany and East and West German reunification. The cost of North-South Korean reunification is many multiples what it was in Germany.
The isolation and lack of skills and training of the North Koreans is far greater than it ever was for the East Germans trying to enter the West German economy.
The South Korean economy has become strong, it has become a global economy, but it is still reasonably fragile. Young people in South Korea are interested in getting jobs, getting careers, buying houses, buying cars, going on holiday, playing golf. They're not interested in paying 60% tax to fund North Korea.
Japan remains mired in recession. China is using all of its ability to lift its own people out of poverty. Russia has its own set of problems. Europe isn't particularly interested in doing it. And America isn't interested in coming in and paying the cost.
So none of us really at the end of the day want reunification. What we want is the status quo with Kim Jong-un not firing off any missiles and hopefully not hacking too many of our websites. That is good news for Kim Jong-un, the Kim clan and the continuation of North Korea is of course bad news for 22 million Koreans. But that is the realpolitik of the Korean peninsula at the moment.
When real, lasting change does come to North Korea, we may not be expecting it. But for now, North Korea and the Kim dynasty remain a fascinating, unpredictable, nerve-jangling relic of the Cold War. A state where 16 million of its 24 million people are malnourished, according to UN estimates. Where there are approximately 200,000 political prisoners. Where it's thought $800 million a year is spent on nuclear weapons.
of which 200 million comes from UN food aid. Essentially, North Korea remains locked in 1955 and the armistice of the Korean War. And that's a very clever thing, in a sense, for Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il and now Kim Jong-un to have done, to have people on a constant war alert footing, to maintain that America is still ready to attack,
Japan is still ready to come back, that you are surrounded by enemies, even people that they would consider fraternal, like China and Russia, who they now see as having fallen away from the fold of the communist nations. The Cold War has ended, communism has largely collapsed, and North Korea has carried on. The man responsible for much of the country's mess, Kim Jong-il, lies embalmed in Pyongyang's mausoleum.
quietly watching over his son's reign and the continuing suffering of the North Korean people. Kim Il-sung was someone who was a megalomaniac and very much a tyrant, but he was also someone who believed that the state he was building would be sustainable. Kim Jong-il was the one who realized the state was not sustainable.
He was the one who built this Truman Show theater stage that would have no reason for existing, but would go on pretending it had a reason to exist. So North Korea today has existed for 20 more years for the sole reason of sustaining the Kims and sustaining that leadership. And that's built on the pain and labor and heartbreak and tragedy of all the people who live there. Next time on Real Dictators...
In 1903, a young man from Georgia on the edge of the Russian Empire arrives in Siberia. He's been exiled to this wintry wasteland for three years. It's hellish, freezing cold, food and alcohol are scarce, wolves prowl around his hut at night. The world has forgotten him. But this man is Joseph Stalin. He will become the most powerful man on the planet, one of the most feared dictators in all of history. How did he do it?
That's next time on Real Dictators. Real Dictators is presented by me, Paul McGann. The show was created by Pascal Hughes, produced by Joel Doddow, edited by James Tindale and Katrina Hughes. The music was composed or assembled by Oliver Baines from Flight Brigade. The strings were recorded by Dori McCauley. The sound recordist is Robbie Stamp. The sound mixer is Tom Pink. Real Dictators is a Noisa and World Media Rights co-production.
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