The Marmot’s Hole

Well, this is certainly entertaining to read:

You have to give credit to Kim Jong Il for one thing — he knows the score. The North Korean leader’s subjects may be largely ignorant of the bleak situation in their country, owing to the country’s all-encompassing propaganda machine, but Kim himself clearly has no illusions. Shortly after the revolutions that toppled half-a-dozen communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe back in 1989, according to Japanese journalist and North Korea watcher Ryo Hagiwara, Kim informed members of his ruling circle that he and they could easily end up like deposed Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu if they didn’t watch their step. For a full week in early 1990, Kim forced North Korean officials to watch multiple video showings of Ceausescu’s bloody death at the hands of an angry mob and warned his colleagues of the dangers of losing control. One defector told Hagiwara that he recalled Kim obsessively repeating, “We will be killed by the people.”

OK, dubious quality of the sources aside, it still presents a rather pleasant mental picture. Ultimately, of course, Kim the Younger is probably right, as I mentioned in a post back in June that was in response to something ex-President Kim Dae-jung said in an interview with the Financial Times:

I don’t see “hardline colleagues” as the ones erecting barriers to block KJI’s apparently indomitable will to remake North Korea. On the other hand, I see as the real barriers the North Korean leader’s self-preservation instincts and his understanding that the North Korean system is held together by so much bullshit that it wouldn’t take a whole lot of contact with reality for the regime to collapse like the house of cards that it is. In the end, it’s not Deng in the back of Kim’s mind. It’s Nicolae Ceausescu.

Guest blogger Hamel also said a while back that Kim Jong-il had been scared witless by the video of Ceausescu and his wife getting their just deserts. One would certainly imagine so — Ceausescu was a friend of his dad, and you could understand how watching his Uncle Nic receive revolutionary justice might be unnerving. But why take two pajama-wearing bloggers’ word for it when you can get more defector testimony, this from October 2003:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il is becoming increasingly concerned for his personal safety and that of his family, the dictator’s former bodyguard said this week.

Lee Young-Kook told Yonhap news agency that Kim fears he could end up dead like Romania’s executed communist rulers.

“Kim knows how Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu died,” Lee said. “Kim is in a serious dilemma because if he opens the country or doesn’t open the country, he knows he could be killed.”

Life truly is a bitch — shot if you do, hung from a lamp post if you don’t. The North Korean leadership doesn’t have a whole lot of options available to choose from — the economy couldn’t keep on running as it was, but even modest reforms have not only arguably failed, but may have also created conditions ripe for revolution. From Reuters:

BEIJING, Nov 23 (Reuters) - Soaring inflation and a chronic food shortage in North Korea have pushed the price of a kg (2.2 lb) of rice on the private market to about 30 percent of a typical monthly wage, a U.N. report said on Tuesday.

The rising price of food, combined with growing but insufficient harvests and a crumbling state distribution system, meant North Koreans would need major help from abroad again next year, the World Food Programme and Food and Agriculture Organisation said.

The two U.N. agencies estimated that 6.4 million North Koreans — more than a quarter of the population — would need 500,000 tonnes of food assistance in 2005 as a food shortage that started more than a decade ago stretched into a new year.

“The continuing national shortage is still a problem,” said the report, which followed a study by the U.N. agencies during September and October.

While prices of grain distributed through the public distribution system have stayed stable through a series of economic changes in the country, the cost of rice has increased five-fold and maize has jumped three-fold in a year in the increasingly popular private markets.

“Last month, rice cost as much as 600 won a kilo in such markets — almost 30 percent of a typical monthly wage — compared to the 2003 average of 120 won,” the report said.

What grabbed me is this, however:

Price and wage reforms in July 2002 have complicated matters, spurring inflation and creating an urban poor class.

“The ability of low-income families to obtain food from the market is severely restricted due to their deteriorating purchasing power affected by under- or unemployment and sharp rises in food prices in the market,” the report said.

Inflation and the urban poor — for your average dictator running an relatively urbanized, industrialized state, these are not two great tastes that taste great together. Now, I have no doubt that the North Korean leadership will be able to muddle through this for at least a little while — propaganda can always blame the United States, Japan and South Korea for the people’s economic woes, and Kim Jong-il and crew could probably keep Pyongyang relatively well supplied while shifting the real suffering off to provincial urban centers. North Koreans have been forced to put up with a lot — declining living standards for over a decade along with a crippling famine. One has to wonder, though, how much more they can take, especially in the face of murderous inflation and a growing population of urban unemployed that could easily become the raw material of the mob.