【新闻周刊 20141126】南北朝鲜的荒诞主义大对决

满仓

【中文标题】南北朝鲜的荒诞主义大对决
【原文标题】North and South Korea's Absurdist Armageddon
【登载媒体】新闻周刊
【原文链接】http://www.newsweek.com/2014/12/05/north-and-south-koreas-absurdist-armageddon-287139.html



2010年10月11日，人们在平壤市区搭乘有轨电车。

韩国1号高速公路盘绕着崇山峻岭，俯瞰着世界上最富有、最先进的城市之一——首尔。其向北延伸30英里，就回到了60年前。在朝韩边境线上，铁丝网和士兵岗楼依次排列在通往板门店的多车道高速公路两边，似乎朝鲜战争刚刚结束。在世界上大部分人看来，三年激烈的战争于1953年在和平但又紧张的环境中结束。但这仅仅是停战，严格意义上讲，战争只是处于停歇期。

所谓的非军事区分开了美国支持的繁荣资本主义南方，和中国支持的极为封闭的共产主义北方。2000多码荒凉的土地，隔开了数万名荷枪实弹的士兵，和它们身后瞬时间能让对方灰飞烟灭的大炮。几十年来，零星的枪战夺走了双方数十名士兵的性命。共产主义政权依然在派出间谍、密探和最近的无人机南下，让这场战争不能彻底冷却。海上和空中时有冲突。在非军事区以南，韩国人经常会发现大型隧道，可以让几千人在一个小时里冲过来。一位体格魁梧、举止优雅的韩国士兵在11月19日对包括《新闻周刊》在内的外国记者团说：“我们每天都与敌人面对面。”

比尔•克林顿总统曾经说朝鲜半岛是“世界上最危险的地方”，自从他在二十年前说过这句话之后，那里的局势或许变得更加危险了。这个月，联合国就苏联式的集中营和其它人权问题，对朝鲜采取了严厉的制裁方案，之后，平壤威胁要进行第四次核武器测试。

这种装腔作势的边缘姿态是这个政权的一贯作风。去年，朝鲜把它的导弹瞄准夏威夷、关岛、华盛顿（暂且不管它是否能打到那里）和韩国。在多年面对这样的威胁之后，美国决定启动末日计划。时任国防部长的莱昂•帕内塔在2012年与美军驻韩国司令官会面之后，说他有一种“强烈的感觉，该地区的战争既非杞人忧天，也非遥不可及，而是迫在眉睫、一触即发”。如果共产主义军队发动大规模进攻，美国将会“在必要时动用核武器”。

所有这些让朝鲜半岛陷入一种荒唐、停滞的冷战模式，直接开战令人难以相信，而且是自杀式的。实际上，双方都在讨论未来的某种“合并”，基础是一方压过另一方。共产主义者似乎认为他们可以震慑住南部，当然还有华盛顿，利用自己的军事力量——在美国看来不值一哂——让对方投降。而首尔的版本是，经济危机必将压垮北方，因为其夸张的军事支出，尤其是对核武器和洲际弹道导弹的投入，让农业崩溃。它已经整装待发，北方唾手可得。

但是大部分观察人士认为，中国不会允许朝鲜崩溃，部分原因在于有可能出现的数百万难民涌入境内的现象，更不用提让美韩两国站在其家门口的感觉。然而，首尔的官员近期向中国炫耀其新成立的统一部，年预算1.8亿美元，有300名员工（再加上300名政府顾问），幻想着未来“人们不会无缘无故被捕”，正如参观的记者们所看到的演示材料。而且，据韩国《中央日报》报道，政府估计，“[朝鲜的]瞬间崩溃，或者其它难以预料方式的统一”将会耗费5000亿美元。

作为回应这种不切实际的幻想，一名中国记者教训一位政府研究人员，说：“这就像是买房子，你不会为这种事情单独留出一笔预算。”

朝鲜很早以前就放弃了把韩国描绘成贫穷困苦形象的宣传手法，从90年代开始，那些饿得经常会吃树皮和草根的朝鲜人，只会对这样的信息苦涩地耸耸肩。在过去二十年里，大约有2.7万人逃离朝鲜，大部分通过中国，他们的信件和电话让数百万朝鲜人知道，韩国无论从哪个方面讲，都比朝鲜富有得太多。当地的警察早就不再封锁这些流亡者夹杂着现金的信件，他们现在只是从中抽取油水。

三名朝鲜“叛徒”——这是首尔对普通难民和变节高官的统一称呼——近期明确指出，首尔繁荣的经济与他们叛逃的决定无关。关键因素是令人崩溃的压迫、残忍和饥饿。47岁的李舜熙对外国记者团说：“我在十年前就有叛逃的念头，每次跑到中国都被遣返回来。最后我（还是通过中国）跑到蒙古沙漠。”她通过翻译说，我们一共8个人，“有时候不得不喝尿才生存下来。”


2012年，朝鲜农民在平壤干活。

李擦了擦眼泪，说她在朝鲜人民军做护士，退役后一贫如洗，不得不乞讨垃圾为食。男人欺辱她，她在街上生下她的女儿。

在一次叛逃失败后，她被遣返回国，她遭到了殴打、折磨、沸水烫。她微微敞开上衣，露出伤疤。“这都发生在我两岁女儿的面前。只要她一哭，他们连她都打。”第9次逃跑终于成功，中国蛇头卖掉了她的女儿“给人贩子，我只得到了3美元。今天我还不知道她在哪里。”

李就像是一只垂死的麻雀，坐在她旁边的24岁的崔汝珍也讲述了同样恐怖的故事。她在2008年高中毕业，被派往劳役机构修建高速公路。崔通过翻译轻声地说：“我在2011年试图逃跑。我有个姨妈，建议我们一起去中国，我们可以挣钱，还可以寄回家……她欺骗了我……我被卖给一家人被迫成婚。他的年龄和我父亲一般大，我想到了死……后来他解除了婚约，把我卖给另外一个人。”

崔说，她一共被贩卖了11次，从一个中国男人到另一个中国男人。去年，他在一个基督教活动人士的帮助下逃出中国。她用低得听不见的声音说：“我无法把所有的细节告诉你们，我有精神恐惧症。”她现在的愿望是什么？她边擦拭眼泪边说：“我唯一的愿望是再见一见我的家人，与他们吃一顿饭。”

从朝鲜逃出来的人中有70％是女性。实际上，非军事区两边的朝鲜女人都承载了巨大的伤痛，从日本人在1910年占领朝鲜半岛，直到1945年二战后日本人投降。大约20万名朝鲜女人被迫为皇军部队充当性奴隶。目前，仅剩的几位幸存者严厉控诉日本拒绝赔偿、拒绝正式道歉的姿态。每个星期三的中午，她们和一些支持者都会在日本驻首尔大使馆外抗议。

第三个难民要求姓名保密，她说，1995年的洪水横扫全国，大饥荒导致数百万人死亡。“我的父亲也死于那个时候。”她控制不住地哭起来。仅有的食物成为军队的给养，“其他人只能靠草根和树皮为生……分到的一点点食物也会被军队抢走。”2011年，她因意识形态“冒犯罪”被送往一个劳改营，之后她决定逃跑。她说，走了几天几夜进入中国，在基督教地下组织的帮助下，她进入泰国，在那里投靠韩国大使馆。

她说，适应韩国的生活“很难”，“我一直生活在一个封闭的社会中，向金正恩效忠。”金正恩的祖父、“伟大领袖”金日成自1945年被苏联人扶上位之后，一直统治朝鲜，直到1994年去世。之后，他的儿子金正日接管了共产主义的宝座。她说：“在一个资本主义社会中生活需要适应很长时间。”

首尔有太多的高端娱乐场所，豪车频现，四星级酒店和昂贵的餐厅鳞次栉比，时髦的年轻男女携带着新型科技设备在市中心的高楼大厦中穿梭。这对于一个来自偏僻、贫穷的北方人来说，无疑是难以接受的。韩国政府给她们提供了一个小房间、仅够日常支出的补贴和一些职业培训。

李舜熙说，生活很艰难，“在韩国做护士的工作太难了”。她最终成为一名颇受欢迎的电视节目主持人，节目名称是《我来与你见面》，内容主要关注朝鲜的人权状况。她通过翻译说：“我学习英语的过程异常艰难。我不能只顾追求梦想，必须努力工作让自己活下去。”

崔汝珍说：“语言是最大的障碍。”她正在学习计算机课程。她通过翻译说，不仅仅是英语，“韩语也像一门外语，其实本来是同样的语言，但又不完全一样。只要南北继续分裂，我们不通过翻译就不能直接与对方交谈。”

这些幸运的少数人知道他们已经逃离了地狱，但是很快发现他们并未进入天堂。韩国飞速的经济发展需要支付残酷的成本，这些成本甚至来源于土生土长的年轻人。在韩国10到30岁的人群中，自杀是死亡的首要因素。对他们来说，学校中一次考试的失利就等于职业和社交生活的死刑。根据政府提供的数据，2012年，1.4万名年轻人结束了自己的生命，平均每天39人。在40岁人群中，自杀是第二大死亡因素，仅次于癌症。退休后收入微薄的老人被自己的儿女抛弃，其自杀人数也呈上升趋势。

《我有权毁灭自己》一书的作者金英涵去年4月在《纽约时报》上写到：“自杀随处可见。”似乎每个人都知道，有人跳入半英里宽的汉江结束自己的生命。这条江横贯首尔，向北进入非军事区，最终流入黄海。

与曼哈顿、洛杉矶，甚至不苟言笑的东京不同，心理关爱在自负傲慢的韩国被广泛认为是禁忌话题。金写到：“很多人认为，如果一个人自杀，那么他仅仅是缺少活下去的勇气，他很脆弱。没有人会表示同情，也没有人会尝试深入探索原因。”他还提到，韩国第二大城市釜山当局已经开始采取了一些小规模的行动，但是那里只有300万人口，而首尔有2200万人口。

还有更糟糕的消息。《韩国日报》在11月24日援引国民大会预算办公室的数据，报道了出生率下降的问题：“原因是这个国家越来越多的年轻人推迟或者放弃婚姻和生育，因为缺乏政府的支持以及财务窘迫。所以，在低出生率和人口老年化的情况下，经济必然会衰退。”

这些因素或许会让政府官员无暇顾及北方即将崩溃的问题，而且会夸大共产主义强硬派的力量，制造南方对武力恐吓和直截了当的军事征服既脆弱又敏感的假象。

所以，冷战还在继续。在非军事区，双方整装待发的军队在迫击炮射程之内操练、演习。荷枪实弹的哨兵隔着所谓的“停战村”——一片位于共同警备区中心的小房屋——相互监视，双方在那里经常会交换永无止息，有时是形式大于内容的需求。

秋日的阳光让非军事区沐浴在一片金黄色中。在边境线的两天，朝鲜和韩国的旅游纪念品商店都在出售T恤衫和帽子，上面都有同样的一句口号：“只有一个朝鲜。”




原文：

“The most dangerous place on Earth,” President Bill Clinton once called the Korean Peninsula, and it’s probably gotten more dangerous since he said that two decades ago. Following a searing U.N. condemnation this month of its Soviet-style gulags and other human rights outrages, Pyongyang threatened a fourth nuclear weapon test.

Such grandiose brinksmanship is typical of the regime. Last year, North Korea rattled its missiles at Hawaii, Guam and Washington, D.C. (no matter that it can’t yet reach them) as well as South Korea. Faced with such threats over the years, the U.S. has embraced its own doomsday scenario. After meeting with the U.S. commander in South Korea when he was defense secretary in 2012, Leon Panetta said he had a “powerful sense that war in that region was neither hypothetical nor remote, but ever-present and imminent,” he recalls in his memoir. If the Communists invaded en masse, he wrote, the U.S. would use “nuclear weapons, if necessary.”

All of which makes Korea a kind of Cold War theater of the absurd, frozen in amber. Outright war is unthinkable, suicidal. Yet both sides talk about a future “reunification” based on the triumph of one side over the other. The Communists seem to think they can frighten the South, not to mention Washington, into capitulation, with their military might—puny by U.S. standards. And in Seoul’s version, an economic collapse looms in the North, due to its profligate military spending, particularly on nuclear weapons and ICBMs, as its agricultural industry implodes. It’s planning to step up and take over.

But most observers think China will never permit a North Korean collapse, in part because it would propel millions of refugees into its territory, not to mention open the gates to a U.S -South Korean advance to its doorstep. Nevertheless, officials in Seoul recently showed off its Ministry of Unification, which has an annual budget of about $180 million and 300 staffers (augmented by 300 government advisers) dreaming about the future, “so people won’t be caught off guard when it actually happens,” as a slideshow there instructed the visiting reporters. Plus, according to South Korea’s JoongAng Daily, the government estimates that "a possible sudden collapse of [the North Korean] government or another kind of rapid and unexpected reunification” could cost as much as $500 billion.

In response to such magical thinking, a reporter from China lectured a ministry researcher, “This isn’t like buying a house, you know. You can’t plan a budget for something like that.”

North Korea long ago gave up churning out propaganda portraying the South as poverty-stricken, a message that would have been greeted with bitter shrugs from the 1990s on by people so hungry they were periodically reduced to eating bark and roots. Thanks in part to letters and calls back home from the approximately 27,000 people who have managed to escape, mostly through China, over the past two decades, millions of North Koreans now know the South is far, far better off, in so many ways. The local gendarmes long ago stopped trying to block the incoming mail from such refugees, which often includes some cash. Now they just take a cut.

Three North Korean “defectors,” as Seoul calls ordinary refugees and high-ranking turncoats alike, made it clear recently that Seoul’s booming economy had little to do with their decisions to flee. It was their lives of unrivaled oppression, cruelty and frequent starvation. “I tried to defect for about 10 years,” Lee Sung-sili, 47, told the assembled foreign journalists. “Every time I got to China, I was repatriated. I finally got out [by continuing through China] to the Mongolian desert” in a group of eight, she said through an interpreter. “We had to drink our own urine to preserve ourselves.”

North Koreans work in the field in Pyongyang in 2012.

Dabbing at tears, Lee recounted how she had served as a nurse in the Korean People’s Army but was impoverished when she was discharged and had to beg and scavenge for food. Men took advantage of her. Living on the street, she gave birth to a daughter.

When she was returned from China after one of her failed escapes, she was beaten and tortured with scalding water, she said, opening her blouse slightly and showing the scars. “This all happened in front of my 2-year-old daughter. When she cried, they hit her, too.” On her ninth and successful escape, her Chinese go-between sold her daughter “into human trafficking, for about $3. Today I don’t know where she is.”

Sitting beside Lee and looking as frail as a dying sparrow, 24-year-old Choi Yoo-jin told an equally harrowing story. In 2008 she graduated from high school and was dispatched to a hard-labor unit doing highway construction. “In 2011 I tried to defect,” Choi said softly through an interpreter. “I had an aunt who suggested we go to China together. We could earn money and send it back home.… She betrayed me.… I was sold into a forced marriage. He was the age of my father, in his 50s. I wanted to die.… Later he dissolved the marriage and sold me to someone else.”

Eleven times, Choi said, she was sold from one Chinese man to another, before she escaped and made her way out of China last year with the help of Christian activists. “I can’t tell you everything,” she said in a near whisper. “I have deep psychological scars.” What does she hope for now? “My only wish is to see my family again and have a meal with them,” she said, wiping away a tear.

Some 70 percent of the escapees from North Korea are female. Indeed, Korea’s women on both sides of the DMZ carry outsized burdens, some dating back to the Japanese occupation of the peninsula from 1910 until its defeat in World War II in 1945. About 200,000 Korean women were forced into sex slavery to service the Imperial Army’s troops. The few remaining survivors of that horror complain bitterly that Japan refuses to offer restitution and a full apology. Every Wednesday at noon, they and their supporters demonstrate outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.

A third refugee on the panel, who asked that her name not be revealed, said millions were dying of starvation in 1995, when biblical-level floods swept the country. “My father was one of them,” she said, breaking down and weeping. The scarce food went to the army. “The rest of the people had to live off bark and the roots of plants.… Even small portions of food we were given were stolen by the army.” In 2011, after being sent to a work camp for ideological “offenders,” she decided to escape, walking days and nights into China, she said. From there she made her way via the Christian underground to Thailand and thence to the South Korean Embassy.

Adjusting to South Korea was “difficult,” she said. “I had lived in a very isolated society, dedicated to Kim Jong Un,” the grandson of Kim Il Sung, the “Great Leader” who ruled the North from 1945, when he was installed by the Soviet Union, until his death in 1994, after which his son Kim Jong Il assumed the Communist throne. “It was a big adjustment to live in a capitalist society,” she said.

Seoul, with its high-tempo entertainment districts, its swarms of luxury cars, its four-star hotels and expensive restaurants, and its fashionable young men and women toting cutting-edge technology around the downtown’s architecturally striking skyscrapers, must come as a shock to someone from the bleak and destitute North. The South Korean government offers them a small room, a modest stipend and vocational training.

It’s a hard go. “It was very hard for me to work as a nurse in South Korea,” said Lee Sung-sili, who eventually became a prosperous host of a TV program, focusing on North Korea’s human rights record, called I Am Coming to Meet You. “I learned a very different kind of English,” she said through an interpreter. “Instead of following my dream, I had to work very hard to survive.”

“The biggest challenge was language,” echoed Choi Yoo-jin, who is now taking computer courses. It wasn’t just her lack of English. “South Korean has the feel of a foreign language,” she said through her interpreter. “It’s basically the same language, but yet another. If the division continues, [North and South] won’t be able to talk to each other without an interpreter.”

These fortunate few know they have escaped hell, but soon learn they have not landed in paradise. South Korea’s frenetic economy is exacting a cruel toll even on young people who grew up there. Suicide is the leading cause of death for South Koreans between the ages of 10 and 30, for whom failing a school examination is a professional and social death sentence. In 2012, over 14,000 young people took their lives, an average of 39 per day, according to government figures. Suicide ranks second as a cause of death for people in their 40s, behind cancer. Old people, retired with little or no pensions and abandoned by children they expected to care for them, are killing themselves in record numbers, too.

“Suicide is everywhere,” Kim Young-ha, author of the novel I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, wrote in The New York Times last April. Everyone seems to have known someone who gave up and leapt to their death, he and others say, often into the swift, half-mile-wide waters of the Han River, which cuts through Seoul on its way north to the DMZ, where it empties into the Yellow Sea.

Unlike in Manhattan, L.A. or even stiff-lipped Tokyo, psychiatric care is widely considered taboo in proudly self-sufficient South Korea. “Many think that when someone is suicidal he simply lacks a strong will to live; he’s weak,” Kim wrote. “There’s little sympathy or interest in probing below the surface. Small steps, he noted, are being taken by local authorities in Busan, South Korea’s second largest city, to monitor depression among its citizens, but it has a population of just 3 million, compared with Seoul’s 22 million.

More bad news is on the way: Birthrates are falling “because the country’s young people are increasingly delaying or giving up on marriage and having children due to a lack of government support and financial means,” said a November 24 report in The Korea Times, citing figures from the National Assembly’s Budget Office. “As a result, the economy could fall...due to the low birthrate and the aging population.”

All of which might temper the hopes of government officials that the end is near in the North, and fuel the delusion of Communist hard-liners that the South is vulnerable to intimidation, if not outright military conquest.

And so the cold war continues. Along the DMZ, battle-ready troops from both armies practice maneuvers within a mortar shot of each other. Armed sentries stare at each other across the so-called “Truce Village,” the collection of huts at the exact center of the Joint Security Area, where both sides meet to exchange unending, sometimes bombastic demands.

Late on a recent day, the autumn sun bathed the DMZ in amber. On each side of the border, North Korean and South Korean gift shops were selling T-shirts and hats to visitors with exactly the same slogan: “Korea Is One.”

每天的晨吟

采撷些许晨曦，点缀出全日的清新。LZ早安！