A Country in Veil: North Korea Unraveled

The 109th Korea Forum at Columbia University, entitled “A Country in Veil: North Korea Unraveled,” engaged panelists and audience members in a heated discussion around the little-understood country that has remained separated from South Korea — and isolated from most of the world — since the Korean War sixty years ago.

The November 15 event, hosted by the Korean Graduate Students Association as part of a semi-annual series that began in 1983, gathered scholars on North Korea, representatives from organizations that have engaged in North Korean affairs, and two North Koreans who left the country to begin new lives in South Korea and the United States.

The first session of the forum featured a panel around the life, people and society of North Korea, where one of the North Korean guest speakers, SeongMin Lee, talked about his childhood in the country. Growing up in a border town beneath China, he had been involved in cross-border smuggling that was essential to the grassroots changes taking place in North Korean society from the goods and information infiltrating through the border.

However, the second session of the forum, which focused on the politics of North Korea, highlighted the impermeable plug on information flowing out of the country. Sue Mi Terry, senior research scholar at Columbia’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute, called it “the black hole of intelligence-gathering on North Korea.” As a former CIA officer monitoring North Korea, she said, she could attest to the dearth of information on the country and noted that “North Korea is truly without an equal in this world.” Despite being the 197th-ranked economy, she said, it has an outsized influence because of its cunning foreign policy, especially in dealing with Washington and Seoul.

Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, had much to say on North Korea’s uniqueness as a regime. Drawing a passage from George Orwell’s 1984, he said “North Korea has been the most faithful practitioner of the precepts that Orwell satirized in his book.” He spoke at length of Big Brother’s constant watch over the country, the vast network of secret police, and the squashing of the last remnants of individualism.

Both Lee and Terry agreed that there was no reason for North Korea to change its policies, because the regime has been successful at maintaining power. “North Korea has been exporting insecurity, and [it has been] reaping results,” said Lee regarding the country’s strategy with the world’s powers.

Nevertheless, Alexander Ilitchev, senior officer at the United Nations Department of Political Affairs, offered a more optimistic take on the way forward with North Korea. He spoke highly of the possibilities of engaging with the country, especially given the strong underlying kinship between the North and South Koreans that could be an untapped resource for normalizing relations on the Korean peninsula.

— Doyeun Kim MIA ’14