However,
Kim is said to have cautioned,
“That is only fine for the domestic audience.” Internationally, he urged,
“Chosun must be wrapped in a fog.”
Kim’s
point, one echoed in policy throughout the late ruler’s years in power, was
that it is to North Korea’s advantage for the international community to be
unable to understand, preferably not even to know, what is going on inside the
country and by what principles it is being run.
One
aspect of this approach has to do with what is not said. North
Korea pursues the goal of perfectly controlling inflows
and outflows of information. This is obviously impossible, as all attempts at
perfection are; nevertheless, the ambitious extent of the effort can be witnessed
in events including, though by no means limited to:
(1) ongoing crackdowns the length and breadth of the Sino-North Korea border against defection and smuggling;
(2) the way those media companies that operate on the ground in North Korea are restricted and impeded in their efforts to report on the country;
(3) the way information on key political events is either selectively reported or not reported at all by the state media; and
(4) the way top Party leaders are removed, rotated and replaced without so much as a press advisory.
Meanwhile, the
other aspect of the strategy has more to do with what is said and how. Nowhere is this concept better illustrated than in the recent case of
the ‘nuclear constitution’.
In
the annual session of the DPRK Supreme People’s Assembly in April, the gathered
members of the country’s rubberstamp parliament rubberstamped an amended
version of the Socialist Constitution of the Democratic People’s Republic of
Korea. The amendments in question were predominantly in the preamble to the
document, and were universally and unapologetically related to the herculean task of
inserting the name “Kim Jong Il” into as many clauses as humanly possible.
For
example, as I reported here
for Daily NK when the amended document appeared on North Korean portal site Naenara, this led to a new
opening clause, “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the socialist
motherland of Juche which has applied the idea and leadership of great leader
comrade Kim Il Sung and great leader comrade Kim Jong Il,” where the
pre-existing sentence in the amended version from late 2009 (published 2010)
had ended on the words "Kim Il Sung."
However,
there was one clause that went beyond constitutional housekeeping of this sort.
It was entirely new, and it enshrined the country's nuclear status.
In the midst of the collapse of world socialism and the wicked attacks of the imperialist alliance, Kim Jong Il gloriously defended the noble socialist inheritance of comrade Kim Il Sung with military-first politics, turning our nation into an invincible political ideological state, nuclear-possessing state and undefeatable militarily strong state, and paving the glorious way to the construction of the strong and prosperous state. (Translation by Destination Pyongyang)
As can be seen in the translation, and as was noted here by Stephan
Haggard, the clause does not “declare” or “announce” the nuclear weapons status
of North Korea, instead stating that Kim Jong Il was the one who achieved the
transformation of North Korea into a country that possesses nuclear weapons
(actually, the more indistinct “nuclear-possessing state”, a fudge that is no
doubt designed to come back and haunt the international community in the fullness of time).
This, Haggard went on to suggest, “looks like a classic commitment
technology to us: the regime raises the bribe price of negotiating over the
nuclear program by writing it into a constitution with both Dear and Great
Leaders’ names on it.”
But irrespective of educated guesses as to North Korea's intent, anyone reading should have started
to ask a different set of questions by now. For is it not the case that the
constitution of a given state should be reflected in what goes on in that state, rather than vice versa? To put it another way, the way of Merriam-Webster;
con·sti·tu·tion noun \ˌkän(t)-stə-ˈtü-shən, -ˈtyü-\
The basic principles and laws of a nation, state, or social group that determine the powers and duties of the government and guarantee certain rights to the people in it.
For while it is fair to say that amendments to constitutions and other fundamental
governing documents do occur relatively frequently in other places around the
world all the time, and it is no less fair to say that the North Korean constitution does (at
least nominally) set out the distribution of powers in the state as per the above definition, it is not really appropriate to call it a constitution in the strictest sense. All
North Korea has done here is post-facto reflect in the preamble to
its constitution the supposed greatness of Kim Jong Il and his achievements (notably in a nuclear sense).
Therefore,
when Professor Choi Jong Kun of Yonsei University told CNN
that “North Korea previously announced its nuclear
capability through its state-run broadcaster and newspapers, ‘but no expression
can be stronger than including it in their constitution,’” he was, in my view,
doing a grave disservice to CNN's readership, for we would be closer to the mark regarding this "constitution" as an "advertisement", and treating it with the same circumspection as we treat all other advertisements that we come across.
What is particularly baffling is that someone of Professor Choi’s standing would still be making
this kind of erroneous claim so many years after former Workers’ Party Secretary
Hwang Jang Yop explained in very simple terms what the real governing document
of Kim Jong Il's, and probably Kim Jong Eun's, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea actually is; namely, the Ten
Principles for the Establishment of the One-Ideology System (hereafter “Ten
Principles”).
Upon his arrival in Seoul, Hwang commented that he was very impressed with the quantity of books on North Korea that were
available. However, he was less impressed when he started to read some of them,
and he found it particularly disturbing that nobody seemed to know anything
about the Ten Principles. This was because, he said, nothing could be more important. According to John Cha's new book ‘Exit Emperor
Kim Jong Il’;
Young and old, everyone has to memorize and recite the principles at Party meetings, schools, farms, factories and offices across the country. This practice has gone on for the last forty years, and this doctrine supercedes any other form of rules or laws, such as North Korea’s Socialist Constitution or the JuChe Philosophy.
Hwang made it perfectly clear that the Ten
Principles have been the key to understanding the North Korean system since
their creation in the first half of the 70s by Kim Jong Il as he worked to seize the reins of power. In essence, if the preamble to the constitution reflects society, then society reflects the Ten Principles. Hwang therefore asserted that any scholar who failed to pay heed to the presence of the Ten Principles would be unable to reach many valuable conclusions about North
Korea as a whole.
As I noted in a review of Cha’s book last week
here,
it is wholly unclear why a number of the things Hwang said during his 13 years in
South Korea have seemingly slipped under the radar with the passing of time. Regardless, as a result of this shortsightedness there are many North
Korea experts and students who have seemingly now forgotten that looking at North
Korea only through the materials officially disseminated by the North Korean
authorities will not provide all, or indeed most, of the answers. This includes the
Socialist ‘Constitution’ of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, for the country only has one constitution, and it is the Ten Principles.
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