The Rights of the Masses

Jiyoung Song’s important study, however, argues that in fact, seen from within, the position of the DPRK, no matter how much outsiders in the US, UK and elsewhere may dislike it, has an internal logic. It has developed this way for specific reasons. This is not to say that Dr Song’s book is apologetics for the DPRK. Its final conclusions are, in fact, devastating. Even in its own terms, the country’s rulers have failed in their Confucian duty to protect and provide for their people. But the most powerful condemnation comes only after accepting and then exploring the terms of the debate as the DPRK government have set them out. The bottom line is that there is a version of human rights in the DPRK, and this book is an account of it.

That there is an internal logic can be seen from books like US journalist Barbara Demick’s powerful account of daily life inside contemporary North Korea.[ii] Like Dr Song, she interviewed a wide range of migrants who had made it mostly to South Korea. Their life stories were eerily similar in their account of the great hardship in the country. Even more powerful, however, was the very firm belief that the suffering people were undergoing was not the fault of the DPRK government, but brought on by the victimisation of the imperialist powers, and in particular the USA. Utterly remorseless control of all sources of information meant that, for the overwhelming majority of people, this dominant narrative was uncontested. The DPRK are still in a war, and the sacrifice was worth it for hope of a final victory, one day in the future.

Song’s book shows that in fact the DPRK has enthusiastically signed almost every human rights convention going. Its laws guarantee rights for equal treatment between citizens, between different genders, allow freedom of religious belief, and guarantee rights for ethnic minorities. Constitutionally, the DPRK declares, much as that of the People’s Republic of China just across the border, that the people are sovereign and their will is paramount. They are the masters in their own house, and have the highest kinds of rights protections – the right to self-determination, sovereignty and non-interference by others.

Kim Jong Il, indeed, has sponsored a whole new vision of looking at rights since his succession to his father in 1994. Analysis of this takes up the heart of this book. Named from 1995, `Our Style’ human rights, it is a unique contribution to DPRK ideology. Kim’s own definition of it is that only in following the country’s belief in self-reliance (juche) and showing total loyalty to the Korean Worker’s Party can `the greatest rights and true human rights … be granted.’ The main characteristic of this, Song comments `are citizen’s duties and loyalty to the party and the leader, in return for the protection of basis subsistence rights and security.’

There are a number of influences feeding into this, all of which Song explains. There is, first and foremost, the impact of the country’s traumatic recent history, with the devastating war from 1950 to 1953, a war that is still dominating the mindset of the country, and which is referred to almost obsessively by the government in films, newspapers, literature and the spaces in which they live. Pyongyang is a city dominated by immense monuments and pictures which constantly refer to the war. That this war is unfinished, and that it has created an enormous memory stain is something that every visitor to the country is struck by. The DPRK remains a militarised country, dominated by the readiness to restart this conflict, and living with the profound impact that it has had on people’s lives and their world view.

Added to this is the patriarchal, hierarchical influence of Confucianism. In a chapter on the development of Confucianism through the Chosun period, Song shows that despite the influences of modernity, Confucianism `remains a central part of Korean cultural identity.’ In this system, the ruler has `heavenly-appointed duties.’ Celebrating the collective, Confucianism aims to see humans as `essentially a social being, giving primacy to the duties of the people for the common good of the community.’ The ruler’s prime responsibility is to provide basic subsistence and security from outside attack. For all the DPRK’s disdain for traditional Confucianism, through the more modernising Sirhak school of late Chosun period neo-Confucian reformist scholars, ideas of linking Confucian ethics with the need to care for and feed the growing population, and to strive for technical and scientific modernisation in order to create a strong and prosperous nation, were ones that attracted the ideologues in the DPRK.

Finally, there is the impact of Marxism, which after all had been the guiding inspiration at least for the early part of the revolution instigated by Kim Il Sung in the late 1940s and into the 1950s. Song’s fascinating description of Marx’s relatively low regard for talk of rights (which he viewed as a snare by the bourgeoisie to continue to manipulate the proletariat) illuminates how it was possible for Marxism to became so closely linked to strong nationalist agendas. Marx’s demand that the individual finally be subsumed within the collective meant that, constitutionally, the rights of citizens were always trumped by the definition given to the rights of the masses, and that the firmest definition of these was to be found in the worker’s party. Via this route, both in Korea and in China, the ruling parties were able to close down any aggressive moves on their legitimacy and monopoly on power, by invoking the primacy of collective over individual.

That the DPRK has a powerful nationalist agenda, and that it derives almost all its legitimacy from this, is clear. That Kim Jong Il failed in his duty to protect citizen’s subsistence rights is dealt with head on in the final chapter of the book. Since the great famines of late 1990, society has become, from what little access outsiders are granted it, and from what refugees say, more unequal, and modest signs of discontent have appeared. Citizen’s duties are stressed over their rights. The final card of the party is the constant emphasis on it being the guardian of national self determination and integrity. As a partial admission of the need to change and reform, in the last few years Kim Jong Il has even admitted some rights violations. While what Song calls the `military first’-thinking still dominates, the legislation at least has seen some attempts to clarify and strengthen legal protections for citizens. The government has also been allowing sporadic access to UN fact finding bodies and responding to criticisms levelled at it. Politically this is perhaps no more than concessions made to maintain the Kim regime. But it is a change from the past.

Dr Song shows, through the extensive work she has done on Korean language source material and her field research, that there is a DPRK discourse of human rights. Her great achievement is to show the system from within, in ways that at least make it comprehensible, even if it remains morally repugnant. It was perhaps this that provoked Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, who accompanied former US president Jimmy Carter to the DPRK in May 2011, to express her revulsion for a system which was able to see its own people starve and blame the failure of the US to ship food aid to it. Former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee famously said that if you scratched a communist, you found a nationalist underneath. The DPRK doesn’t disappoint in this respect, and the value of this book is to show how, in the end, a powerfully nationalist rationale, supported by a narrative of history and resentment, remains Kim regime’s strongest, and perhaps its only card. The sole right of the people it is interested in is that of supporting it in this campaign to define, control and manipulate the destiny of the DPRK into the 21st century as a unified, independent and autonomous entity. Its greatest fear, perhaps, is that more and more within the country may be wondering in secret whether this is worth the suffering they have been through, and one day might speak this in the open.

[i] For the full report, see http://www.scribd.com/doc/51589504/Democratic-People%E2%80%99s-Republic-of-Korea, accessed 14th May 2011

[ii] Demick, B. 2009. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. New York: Spiegel & Grau