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Freedom in the World - North Korea (2004)

Political Rights: 7
Civil Liberties: 7
Status: Not Free
Population: 22,700,000
GNI/Capita: $440
Life Expectancy: 63
Religious Groups: Buddhist, Confucian, other
Ethnic Groups: : Korean
Capital: Pyongyang

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Overview

Already isolated because of its nuclear saber rattling, North Korea's Stalinist regime further escalated what appeared to be a high-stakes game of blackmail. Having previously confessed to possessing a uranium enrichment program and having taken steps to fire up a mothballed reactor, Pyongyang in 2003 told U.S. officials that it possessed nuclear weapons and continued its bellicose rhetoric against Japan, South Korea, and the United States. It offered to scrap its nuclear weapons program in exchange for increased aid, diplomatic recognition, and a nonaggression pact with Washington.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea was established in the northern part of the Korean Peninsula in 1948 following three years of post-War Soviet occupation. At independence, North Korea's uncontested ruler was Kim Il-sung, a former Soviet army officer who claimed to be a guerrilla hero in the struggle against Japan, which had annexed Korea as a colony in 1910. North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950 in an attempt to reunify the peninsula under Communist rule. Drawing in China and the United States, the ensuing three-year conflict killed as many as two million people and ended with a ceasefire rather than a peace treaty. Since then, the two Koreas have been on a continuous war footing.

Kim Il-sung solidified his power base during the Cold War, purging rivals, throwing thousands of political prisoners into labor camps, and fostering a Stalinist personality cult that promoted him as North Korea's "Dear Leader." The end of the Cold War, however, brought North Korea's command economy to the brink of collapse, as Pyongyang lost crucial Soviet and East Bloc subsidies and preferential trade deals. By some estimates, between 1993 and 2000 economic output shrunk by half.

With the regime's survival in doubt, Kim's death in 1994 ushered in even more uncertainty. Under his son, the reclusive Kim Jong-il, the regime has maintained its rigid political control but has taken modest steps to free up North Korea's centrally planned economy. During the initial years of Kim Jong-il's rule, the situation grew even bleaker as natural disasters, economic mismanagement, and restrictions on the flow of information combined to kill, according to the U.S. State Department, an estimated 1 to 2 million North Koreans between 1995 and 1997.

While the famine threat has receded thanks in part to foreign food aid, a 2002 UN study found that more than half the population suffered malnutrition. Moreover, North Korea's state-run health system has all but collapsed, hospitals lack adequate medicine and equipment, and clean water is in short supply because of electricity and chlorine shortages.

Against this backdrop, economic reforms launched in July 2002 have made life tougher for ordinary North Koreans by igniting inflation and increasing unemployment. The regime eased price controls and promised to raise salaries to offset the higher prices. It also gave factories more autonomy. Many of the promised salary hikes, however, have not materialized, and the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review reported in March that many factories, suddenly forced to pay their own way, have shut down.

In addition to liberalizing prices, the regime recently has also allowed farmers to set up small markets in cities, something it has quietly tolerated for decades in the countryside. These markets now sell consumer goods as well as food. Prospects appear dim, though, for more far-reaching market reforms. The regime is reluctant to take any measures that would grant North Koreans significantly greater control over their daily lives for fear of undermining its tight grip on power.

The latest crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons program began in October 2002, after Washington said that Pyongyang had admitted to having a program to produce enriched uranium, a component of nuclear bombs. This program apparently violated a 1994 deal under which North Korea had pledged to abandon its separate plutonium nuclear program. In return, Japan, South Korea, and the United States agreed to provide North Korea with two light-water nuclear reactors, which cannot be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

Escalating tensions further, North Korea in December 2002 threw out international inspectors monitoring its Yongbyon reactor, which was shuttered under the 1994 agreement because it could be used to produce plutonium. In 2003, Pyongyang not only made a series of boasts about its alleged nuclear capabilities and threatened to test a nuclear weapon, but also pulled out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Washington has rebuffed Pyongyang's efforts to win concessions in return for dismantling its nuclear weapons program, insisting instead that Pyongyang disarm before any negotiated settlement, including a multilateral nonaggression commitment, is considered. For its part, China, North Korea's main patron, recently has appeared eager to reign in Kim Jong-il. Beijing fears that his brinkmanship could provoke Japan and South Korea into building nuclear weapons or even touch off a war that could send refugees streaming into China. Many analysts say, however, that the greatest threat from North Korea is its potential to sell plutonium to rogue states or terrorists for hard cash.

As 2003 ended, ordinary North Koreans faced another winter of hardship. They are among the most impoverished and tightly controlled people on earth, condemned to dehumanizing lives of extreme scarcity, subject to relentless indoctrination, and threatened with execution or incarceration in a labor camp for offenses as trivial as listening to foreign radio.

Political Rights and Civil Liberties

North Korea is one of the most tightly controlled countries in the world. The regime denies North Koreans even the most basic rights; holds tens of thousands of political prisoners under brutal conditions; and controls nearly every facet of social, political, and economic life.

Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, and a handful of elites from the Korean Worker's Party (KWP) rule by decree, although little is known about the regime's inner workings. Kim formally is general secretary of the KWP, supreme commander of North Korea's 1.1 million-strong army, and chairman of the National Defense Commission. The latter post officially is the "highest office of state" since the 1998 abolition of the presidency.

North Korea's parliament, known as the Supreme People's Assembly, meets only a few days each year and simply rubber-stamps the ruling elite's decisions. In an effort to provide a veneer of democracy, the government occasionally holds staged elections for parliament as well as for provincial, county, and city bodies.

In classic totalitarian fashion, officials subject the masses to intensive political indoctrination through the school system, the state-controlled media, and work and neighborhood associations. Radios and televisions are designed to receive only government stations.

Religious freedom is severely repressed. The government requires all prayer and religious study to be supervised by the state and severely punishes North Koreans for worshipping independently in underground churches. Officials have killed, beaten, arrested, or detained in prison camps many members of underground churches, according to foreign religious and human rights groups. Some reports suggest, however, that house churches often are tolerated if they do not openly proselytize or have contact with foreign missionaries.

The right to privacy is virtually nonexistent in North Korea. The state closely monitors North Koreans through informers as well as security checks on homes. Pyongyang also assigns to each North Korean a security rating that partly determines access to higher education, employment, and health services, as well as place of residence. By some foreign estimates, nearly half the population is considered either "wavering" or "hostile," with the rest rated "core."

North Koreans face death or long prison terms for any peaceful dissent. Some reportedly have been executed merely for criticizing the regime. Authorities have also executed some repatriated defectors, military officers accused of spying or other antigovernment offenses, and North Koreans who were forcibly returned by Chinese border guards after crossing into China.

The regime controls all trade unions and uses them to monitor workers; mobilize them to meet production targets; and provide them with health care, schooling, and welfare services. Strikes, collective bargaining, and other basic organized-labor activities are illegal. The law also bans independent civic, human rights, and social welfare groups.

North Korea's government-controlled courts serve mainly to help the regime control the population. The regime also runs a network of jails and "re-education through labor" camps that are notorious for their brutal and degrading treatment of inmates. Torture and ill-treatment reportedly are widespread in these prisons and labor camps, as well as in detention centers where refugees who have been forcibly returned from China are held for interrogation. In camps for political prisoners, inmates are kept on starvation diets, and up to three generations of a family are often imprisoned for life for the political crimes of a single member, according to an October report by the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a bipartisan, Washington-based advocacy group. In detention centers for repatriated North Koreans, pregnant women are forced to have abortions or, in cases of advanced pregnancy, their babies are killed at birth, the report said.

North Korean camps held some 200,000 political detainees in 2002, according to a U.S. State Department human rights report released in March 2003. In addition to maintaining camps for political prisoners, the regime reportedly has some 30 forced-labor camps for common criminals serving shorter terms, the report added. The number of ordinary prisoners is not known. Separately, the regime maintains special camps that detain orphaned and homeless children under inhuman conditions, according to refugees who have escaped from the camps into China.

Authorities have forcibly relocated "many tens of thousands" of North Koreans to the countryside from Pyongyang, including disabled persons and those considered politically unreliable, according to the U.S. State Department human rights report. The regime is also once again rigorously enforcing a permit system for travel outside one's home province after having relaxed it in the mid-1990s, the Far Eastern Economic Review reported in October, citing North Korean refugees in northeastern China.

Despite recent market reforms, North Korea's economy remains centrally planned. The government assigns all jobs, prohibits private property, and directs and controls nearly all economic activity. Besides being grossly mismanaged, the economy is hobbled by creaking infrastructure, shortages of energy and raw materials, and an inability to borrow on world markets or from multilateral banks because of sanctions and a past foreign debt default.

Little is known about how problems such as domestic violence or workplace discrimination may affect North Korean women. There were widespread reports of trafficking of women and girls among the tens of thousands of North Koreans who have recently crossed into China.

Topics: Human rights,