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Stephan Haggard's New Book Focuses on Interviews with North Korean Refugees

North Korean Refugees Highly Skeptical of Government, Support Unification with South

01/19/2011
Katharine Keenan, UCSD News

A path-breaking new book about North Korea by Stephan Haggard, a UC San Diego professor of Korea-Pacific Studies, and Marcus Noland, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, concludes that North Koreans hold their government in low regard and are far more skeptical of official explanations of their misery than is generally supposed.

In their new book, Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea, Haggard and Noland describe a variety of transformations under way in one of the most isolated, poorly understood and dictatorial countries on earth. For example, an overwhelming majority of North Korean refugees in China and South Korea who participated in the large-scale and unprecedented surveys support unification with the South, and report that their peers remaining in North Korea hold similar views.

The authors also find that North Korea faces tensions that result from rising inequality, corruption, and its citizens’ desperate quest for higher social status and income. Despite North Korea’s identity as an authoritarian state with economic activity supposedly controlled by the government, private business and corrupt and illegal activities are emerging as the dominant means of getting ahead throughout the country.

The book describes how state and party positions have become platforms for extortion as North Korean officials exploit a vast prison system for the purpose of economic predation. Disaffection documented by the authors is widespread, but dissidents are fearful of sharing their views even with each other.

As a result of multiple national catastrophes, most prominently a 1990s famine that killed as many as 1 million North Koreans (about 5 percent of the country’s population), much of the populace has found ways to exist autonomously from the government: citizens engage in transfers of money, goods, and perhaps most important, information. In an attempt to try to rein in such activities, North Korean authorities have dramatically expanded the definition of “economic crimes.”

Participants in market activities not only harbor more negative attitudes toward the regime than the general population, but they also are more willing to communicate their dissenting views to others. They are also 50 percent more likely to be arrested. Once incarcerated, they report extraordinary incidences of public executions, torture, food deprivation, withholding of medical care, and other forms of abuse in the country, which is characterized by a complete absence of standard political freedoms or civil liberties. Indeed, any sign of “political deviance,” such as inadvertently sitting on a newspaper containing the photograph of the North Korean leader, can be subject to punishment, Haggard and Noland wrote.

Most of the refugees interviewed for the book would be clinically diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Statistical analysis indicates that their psychological problems stem from their harsh experiences, including deaths of family members from starvation, imprisonment, and perceptions of unfairness in the distribution of food aid. Most respondents did not believe that they were beneficiaries of the long-standing international aid program and instead believe that aid was diverted, primarily to the military.

Haggard and Noland recommend increasing the efficiency of humanitarian aid to North Korea and using that aid and the promise of financial and technical help as leverage to try to persuade the country to undertake domestic political and economic reforms. Aid must include incentives to expand the private sector, the authors say, if it is to avoid politicizing aid projects and reinforcing the repressive state.

Click here to read the original article.

Related Links

Professor Haggard can provide commentary on current developments in the Asia-Pacific, including particularly Korea, and on the politics of economic reform and globalization.

Click here to read Professor Haggard and Marcus Noland's related blog on North Korea.

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