Getting the Lie of the Land in Kim's Kingdon

10/17/1994

AFR Correspondent ERIC ELLIS, one of the few Western journalists to get inside North Korea, reports from Pyongyang on the remarkable power structure within the world's most sealed-off society.

 AMAZING facts you may not be aware of:

* The CIA was responsible for the Tiananmen Square massacre. * Man has not been to the Moon.

* Australia is under American military domination, as is much of Asia.

* Migratory birds have taken a year off from their crossborder flight patterns to stop and mourn the death in July of the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung

The reason you may not know these facts is that you are not among the 20 million people who suffer the misfortune of being North Korean, living on a diet of bad kimchee and worse propaganda in a vacuum where nearly every aspect of their lives has been stained by the all-seeing, all-knowing Stalinist State.

This correspondent had a taste in a surreal "conversation" with my guide cum spook-minder, Mr Hyon, last week as 500,000 people "paid their deepest condolences" at the huge bronze statue of the Great Leader in central Pyongyang.

It may have been Mr Hyon's own way of expressing grief, but he was humming the Theme from Love Story as endless lines of fellow Pyongyangers laid reusable bouquets at the foot of the plinth around us.

I asked him how he knew this tune. He said that watching the movie was part of his English-language tuition. Had he seen any other Western movies? No, he said.

So do you know who Arnold Schwarzenegger is, Sly Stallone, Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable? No, no, no, no, the only Western actor he knew was "Lewis" who played Americans in home-grown epics.

(Lewis is a 50-ish Geordie and Kim Il-sung "true believer" resident in Pyongyang for the past 20 years. He gets by, editing Englishlanguage propaganda and acting at Dear Leader Kim Jong-il's film studio). His career highlight was playing an American officer on the receiving end of North Korean valour in Unsung Heroes, a film about the defeat of the imperialists in the Korean war.

How about Madonna, Mickey Mouse, the Pope? None. What about big news events, the Gulf War, Man on the Moon? Mr Hyon's knowledge of the Gulf War was hazy, something about US imperialism and Iraq's victory. The moon shot drew a total blank. "What do you mean that a man has stood on the moon? When?" he demanded.

A quick explanation failed to illuminate. Mr Hyon got increasingly agitated, eventually accusing me of trying to spread propaganda in North Korea and of trying to brainwash him.

What makes this all the more remarkable is that my guide would be in the top .01 of a per cent of North Koreans trusted with affairs of State, in his case to sell North Korea's image to foreign visitors.

That Pyongyang is willing to allow in a few Western visitors, notably capitalists is revealing of North Korea's so far modest efforts to open up, as well as the desperate straits the country is in.

It's a desperation which has it threatening the stability of Asia by developing nuclear weapons in a dangerous stand-off with the United States and its ally in Seoul.

According to the few diplomats in Pyongyang, it is a stand-off that in June- days before Jimmy Carter's defusing meeting with Kim Il-sung - put North Korea on full war alert. Mr Hyon disclosed that the Korean People's Army has some 500,000 soldiers in its ranks but the "US provocation has so enraged the Korean people" that its numbers have more than doubled.

That would put it up there with the US and China as among the world's biggest standing armies.

That North Korea has less than a 10th of America's population, and a 60th of China's puts that mobilisation into sharper focus.

The military is everywhere in North Korea, clearly an enormous drain on State resources.

It is estimated that the State spends at least a third of its revenues maintaining the military, suggesting the cheaper nuclear program may be more an attempted remedy for the contracting economy than an arms escalation on the Korean peninsula.

Pyongyang neighbourhoods seem to have at least one barracks and soldiers run roadblock checks on cars at all points of entry to the capital, in many cases checking on their own as the few cars driving on the city's wide streets tend to be black Mercedes with military registration.

For a nation with few private cars, North Korea has some impressive roads, none more so than the 200km six-lane freeway south from Pyongyang to Panmunjon, the heavily defended border with South Korea. This is a near dead-straight road through paddy fields with no petrol station, no access roads and no wayside stop.

This correspondent was driven for two hours to Panmunjon and saw only three cars, two of them black Mercedes.

Complete with a helpful signpost indicating the 60-odd kilometres to Seoul near the border, this is a road designed for military use, equally by southern forces in the invasion Pyongyang propaganda has told North Korean to expect.

But even here the North has taken precautions. The only place to stop, an hour from the border, is a hard-currency teahouse built bridge-like across the road, or a detonated roadblock if Pentagon battle-wagons should ever push north.

Power is also exercised through the ruling Worker's Party, to which as many as 4 million North Koreans belong, nearly a fifth of the population and a higher proportion still after accounting for non-members among the too young, too old and too infirm.

Korean neighbourhoods are organised by the party into small units of, say, two floors of an average apartment building. A unit leader dispenses modest largesse and privileges. He or she also keeps a tab on unrevolutionary behaviour, in league with the resident member of the security department.

The Kim regime thinks of itself as the true custodians of Korean culture, building an elaborate revision of Korean history to suit the personality cult of the two leader, the late Kim Il-sung and his son and likely successor Kim Jong-il.

This entails the sudden "discovery" on northern soil of the tomb of great Korean kings, whose exploits mirror those manufactured by Kim Il-sung.

The Government claims North Korea is a secular State where people are free to practise whatever religion they use. The countryside is dotted with"Buddhist temples" where "monks" in Western dress beneath their robes with full heads of hair and the gnarled hands of a peasant don't know who the Buddhist deity Prince Gautama is and don't mind if you touch their heads, considered the height of disrespect in true Buddhist societies.

Another lie is represented by Pyongyang's $US5 billion sports village, built from 1985 for the 1988 Olympic Games the Government told the people it would host.

When it was impossible to avoid the truth that Seoul had the games, the Government invited the world to the Festival of Youth and Students the following year.

Those that showed up, mainly from then communist bloc States, witnessed a display that from all reports would have have embarrassed Hitler's 1936 Berlin Olympics for cultish pageantry.

North Korea is at last making efforts to enter the international community

It seems keen to broker a nuclear deal with the US, particularly one involving money and diplomatic recognition. It has unofficially asked Australia's help to enter economic dialogue with ASEAN and APEC and this week, as Kim Jong-il prepares to take the throne vacated by his despotic father, Pyongyang has asked to join the Asian Development Bank for development aid.

All of this suggests Pyongyang is finally realising the world has changed and so too must it. If it doesn't, this ridiculous country will not survive the decade.