Defectors: Grief not genuine

December 22, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

BEIJING

Chu Sung-ha says he knows for sure that some of the people shown sobbing on television over the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il are faking it.

Once, he was one of them. As a 20-year-old student at Pyongyang’s prestigious Kim Il Sung University in 1994, when North Korea’s founder and the school’s namesake died, Chu and his fellow students were used to illustrate the nation’s grief.

Television cameras were rolling when the students were ushered into an auditorium to be told the news. And though most were genuinely overcome, those who weren’t knew enough to sob on cue.

“I just bowed my head so nobody could see I wasn’t crying,” recalled Chu, who now lives in Seoul and works as a journalist. “There were cameras on campus, and I knew I would be caught on television.”

If anything, this time around there will be more faking, more crocodile tears and perhaps some well-concealed smiles. Kim Il Sung was by most accounts genuinely beloved; “uri abogi,” he was called, the same Korean honorific used to indicate “our father” or “our lord.” His son, whose death was announced Monday, was a more problematic figure who presided over years of famine and hardship.

“There aren’t the same tears for Kim Jong Il after all the deaths and all the refugees. The people abandoned him in their hearts long ago,” said Yoo Sang-jun, 48, a defector from North Hamgyong province whose wife and young son were among an estimated 2 million North Koreans to die of hunger.

Now, as in 1994, there is a 10-day mourning period in which a demonstration of grief is a patriotic obligation. In the case of Kim Il Sung’s death, the rituals took place in front of the tens of thousands of statues of him erected around the country. People lined up for hours to kneel and bring flowers.