For North Koreans, leaders are like idols, speaker says

In North Korea, government leaders  are treated as idols.

“Babies in the cradle are taught to point their fingers at Kim Jong Il ,” Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea , said at a talk on Tuesday night.

Scarlatoiu, who presented at an event hosted by the Korea Current Affairs Program, emphasized that North Korean citizens are "relentless[ly] brainwash[ed]" to worship the country's dictator, who is now Kim Jong Un — the son of Kim Jong Il.

The government is also structured to serve the country's dictator, Scarlatoiu said.  All four major players in the government — the inner cabinet of the Kim family, the security agencies, the Party apparatus and the army — funnel information to and receive tasks from the Kim family.

As a result of this centralized system, the North Korean government's main job has been to make sure the Kim family stays in power, Scarlatoiu said. He added that it is only because of this objective that the government cares about other issues, such as the reunification of North and South Korea, the legitimacy of North Korea's government and the end of America's alliance with South Korea. 

Human rights only factor into North Korean decisions because “North Korea cares about legitimacy," and fewer human rights violations make North Korea seem more legitimate in comparison to South Korea, Scarlatoiu said.

He said that though change is difficult, international momentum is growing for reform of North Korea’s processes. But he added that North Korea's archaic social systems, which draw from the worst aspects of Russian communism, prewar Japanese imperialism and medieval Korean feudalism, have led to social stratification. 

For instance, North Korea practices "songbun," which means that if a person's grandparent offended the state, then that person  will be looked down on for what his or her ancestor did. Through guilt by association, if a person commits a political crime then his or her family will go to jail too, Scarlatoiu said. Both practices come from the feudal era.

Likewise, the oppressive nature of the Kim dynasty’s purges and the organized system of arbitrary labor camps both date back to Stalinist Soviet Russia, Scarlatoiu said. The arbitrary nature of North Korean punishment is that “no sentence is given to those in the Gulags,” he added.

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