The Collateral Victims of Kim Jong Un’s About-Face on Korean Unification

At the annual Workers’ Party Plenum last December, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un announced that he was abandoning the long-standing goal of peaceful reunification with the South. Kim declared, “It is not suitable to the prestige and position of the DPRK to discuss the issue of reunification with the strange clan, who is no more than a colonial stooge of the U.S.” (DPRK is an abbreviation of North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.) In the same speech, Kim also referred to South Korea as a “hemiplegic malformation.”

This startling announcement set off a flurry of speculation, beginning with an article in 38 North by veteran North Korea analysts Siegfried Hecker and Robert Carlin provocatively titled “Is Kim Jong Un Preparing for War?” Like most developments that thrust North Korea briefly onto the front pages, speculation whirled for about a week – but when no war was forthcoming, the news cycle quickly moved on.

But Kim’s announcement was not the usual forgettable bluster. Most Western media failed to appreciate what a massive paradigm shift this was for the North Korean state and its sympathizers. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that it marked a rejection of the central tenet of North Korean propaganda since the state’s founding in 1948.

Until last December, “unification” infused every aspect of North Korean state semiotics, and scrubbing it out was a non-trivial task. The Pyongyang subway’s Unification Station was abruptly and pithily renamed “Station.” The massive Unification Arch that decorated the road to the southern border, said to have been designed by Kim Jong Il himself, was summarily demolished.

The part of the national anthem that referred to “3000 ri” – the full length of the peninsula from north to south – was changed. The phrase “by our people amongst ourselves” (uriminjokkiri), a much-used slogan implying that unification should be achieved by Koreans working together without foreign interference, was similarly excised. All of the Korean-language websites and YouTube channels promoting North Korean propaganda and culture, which had expanded greatly in content if not sophistication over the last decade, went down overnight.

To use an American analogy, it would be as if the U.S. president suddenly proclaimed that “freedom” was no longer an American value – and consequently, the Statue of Liberty will be demolished and the national anthem lyrics will be changed to “O’er the land of the reasonably priced.”

What a change from just a few years ago when Kim feted South Korean President Moon Jae-in in Pyongyang, and North Korean media streamed triumphant images of the pair chummily slicing into a unification-themed cake as they hatched grand plans for cross-border rail transit and energy cooperation. What a disappointment for the North Korean people, at a time when they badly needed some good news.

How did ordinary North Korean citizens react to this bewildering about-face? With crossings still choked off by North Korea’s COVID-era border crackdown, it is hard to know. But a good hint came from Ri Il-gyu, a diplomat who defected from the North Korean embassy in Cuba last November. In his first post-defection interview, published in Chosun Ilbo last month, Ri claimed that “North Koreans are more eager for reunification than South Koreans” and that this feeling had been sharpened by the illegal but unstoppable diffusion of South Korean popular culture. Ri believes the recent policy shift was a final desperate attempt “to block the people’s longing for reunification.”

The change also had dire implications for an oft-overlooked group: the ethnic Korean “Zainichi” community in Japan, particularly the dwindling membership of the pro-North General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, a.k.a. Chosen Soren. For decades, this group had provided a vital source of hard currency as well as human capital in the form of patriotic “returnees,” while also educating generations of Zainichi children at special Korean-language schools operating within Japan.

Chosen Soren’s membership has dwindled drastically from its heyday in the 1970s, but the remaining holdouts had proven incredibly loyal in the face of external shocks. Time and again, they dutifully parroted North Korean denials of various atrocities, only to see them disproven by overwhelming evidence or the regime’s own confessions. Younger generations were already leaving in droves, disaffected by the anachronistic dogma and social stigma of membership.

But one core message still resonated: uriminjokkiri, Koreans working toward unification together against a corrupt and oppressive Western order. Yes, they said, South Korea may be richer and freer and have better music, but it is still enslaved to the U.S. forces that occupy it and corrupt its youth. By promoting uriminjokkiri unification, the regime still inspired some diasporic Koreans with a messianic drive to save their southern brethren from their comfortable prison.

Now that that last compelling ideal has been abandoned, Japan’s pro-North Korean community is in turmoil. The Chosen Soren leadership reflexively expressed support for the new policy and released a 10-point list of instructions to its members. This included a prohibition on “any activities promoting the ideas of ‘North and South Koreans as one homogenous people,’ ‘uriminjokkiri,’ or ‘peaceful unification.’” There were orders to “cut off relations with all organizations and personnel from the Republic of Korea” and to “remove from offices and schools all remaining words, slogans, propaganda posters, and artworks that misleadingly suggest that the puppets [South Koreans] are the same people as us.”

Most shockingly, members are now prohibited from “referring to words of the Great Leader [Kim Il Sung] or the General [Kim Jong Il] that can be considered expressions of ethnic unity.” The words of North Korea’s late leaders are revered as scripture, memorized by schoolchildren, pasted on the walls of workplaces, and quoted incessantly – and they abound with references to “unification” and “uriminjokkiri.”

Park Hyangsu, who was educated in a Chosen Soren-run school and is now a human rights activist, spoke of the traumatic impact of this change. “It seems there was a lot of confusion within Soren. ‘Unification’ was their most important keyword, but now they have rejected it,” Park said. “It was also the central value in their school curriculum, so it will be interesting to see how the textbooks change from next year. I think more and more students will leave.

“My friend who was a Soren member said the most ardent supporters are like members of a cult, brainwashed since childhood by the beautiful words ‘ethnic education.’ However unreasonable the instructions from above are, they keep twisting their logic to justify it, out of habit. Of course, we have to consider that their family members are being held hostage [in North Korea], but that factor is fading with time.”

Park believes that former members of Chosen Soren have valuable knowledge and should be given a voice. That is part of the mission of “Free to Move” (F2M), a Japan-based NGO that Park co-founded with fellow ex-Soren member Hong Kyung-eui. Championing the core ideal that “freedom to move is a basic human right,” this group advocates the free return of Chosen Soren family members and Japanese abductees still trapped inside North Korea.

According to Park, “As more people leave Soren, testimonies from former members will reveal new information on the history of its ties with North Korea. Soren members were closer to North Korea than anyone else. If they change their minds and become active on North Korean human rights issues, their passion and drive will be stronger than anyone else’s. I would like to help them get involved in that, and this can also be F2M’s role.”

Outsiders often marvel at how the North Korea people remain supportive of a government that spends massively on missiles and nuclear weapons while they lack basic food and medicine. The answer was simpler when those weapons were (in theory) intended to “liberate” fellow Koreans in the South, rather than simply slaughter them. Kim Jong Un’s new rhetoric may not have presaged the sort of war that makes for explosive footage and splashy headlines, but the war it set off within the hearts and minds of the regime’s last loyal supporters is no less real.