An Occidental Tourist In The Land Of Kim

Pyongyang

10/24/1994

Eric Ellis, who recently visited North Korea, offers a rare Western insight into the world's most inscrutable society. 

THE souvenir silver tea-set from the late Lang Hancock was kitsch enough but the award for dubious diplomatic gifts easily went to Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega and his freedom fighters.

Here in the International Friendship Exhibition Centre outside Pyongyang, where 102,866 presents to North Korea's despotic Kim family are on display in a cement monstrosity supposedly of traditional Korean design, our group was transfixed by an alligator in a glass case. This was not any old man-eater but clearly a gesture of socialist goodwill the Sandinistas had thought about.

The poor beast had been stuffed and bent into a position not unlike a dog begging on its hind legs, its jaws agape as if smiling, or was it panting? Propped on its outstretched front ``paws'' was a leather tray, also made of alligator hide, supporting six leather wine goblets.

The museum is a shrine to the father and son in their ``workers' paradise'' that supposedly has no crime, no corruption, no Aids, no sexual promiscuity, no unmarried parents, no crime, just 20 million happy Koreans fulfilled in the service of socialism.

But North Korea is also a land that has no soul, no freedom, no spontaneity and the world's most repressive government.

Fifty years of a blanket personality cult has succeeded in creating little more than a nation of automatons, assailed every minute of their lives by the propaganda of the Kims.

It takes several days to wrap one's mind around the absolutism of the Kim myth.

One goes there in the assumption, admittedly conditioned by Western and South Korean reports, that this is just another repressive regime where a few fatcat ``haves'' point guns at the mass of impoverished ``have-nots'', fascists proclaiming their socialist purity.

The world's most isolated country, North Korea is a social experiment unrivalled in international politics, where virtually every aspect of one's life has a Kim or party stamp on it, even down to buying a toothbrush.

North Korea is oppressive - Amnesty International says from what little information it has been able to glean from impartial sources that ``tens of thousands of people'' may have disappeared into northern gulags - but it is also wrong to think of North Korea as one might of Pol Pot's murderous Kampuchea.

North Korea's oppression is much more scientific.

This is a nation where the vast bulk of its people have been conditioned from the day they first drew breath that they owe their very existence to the handiwork of the ``Great Leader'', the late Kim Il-sung, and, since 1973, his son the ``Dear Leader'', Kim Jong-il.

Official propaganda has it that the two Kims provide everything from the morning sun and harvest rain to world peace and the Mona Lisa.

Even the ``professional'' at North Korea's only golf course, a man who's never heard of Nicklaus, Norman or Faldo, went to great lengths to deify the Dear Leader, claiming he'd shot a 34 for the course's 18 holes, including five holes-in-one.

North Koreans know nothing of many things because no one has ever told them.

In the week this correspondent travelled in North Korea, there were numerous bizarre conversations with my minders and ``academics'', people near the uppermost rungs of the Kim hierarchy, who I believe truly believed that migratory birds had interrupted their flight patterns to weep at Kim's death, that man had not been to the Moon, that much of the world lived like North Korea and that Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il truly are the greatest men in history.

Asked if he knew what the Beatles were, my guide straight- facedly answered ``insects''. He similarly drew blanks on Schwarzenegger, Rocky, Madonna, Redford, Monroe, the Pope, fax machines, short-wave radios and surfboards.

The South Koreans are fond of predicting the imminent collapse, Eastern Europe-style, of North Korea.

That seems wishful thinking in the medium term, despite the death of the man who put it together and the obvious shortcomings of the economy.

North Korea was more prosperous than the south through the 1950s and '60s but now that is difficult to imagine.

The country has lots of chimneys and industrial smokestacks but I saw none of them blow smoke while I was there.

There is clearly a critical electricity shortage. City and apartment lights come on automatically at 6.30pm and most go off at about 10pm.

Hotel chambermaids follow guests through passages and lobbies switching off lights.

The longest lines in North Korea are for the electric trolley-buses: three hours and more because there's little power to operate them.

Cars are rare, as are bicycles, and the average Korean is said to walk at least three hours every day. As an Indian diplomat put it ``they are too tired to think about revolution.''

Unlike its former communist allies, North Korea does not have an obvious underground dissident class chipping away at the corrupt hierarchy.

There are signs North Korea is beginning to open up, not relax, but run a kind of market economy for foreigners parallel with the centrally-planned system.

More foreign firms are arriving on fact-finding missions with a view to setting up a representative office, in case changes are made, forced by the economic crisis.

Diplomats in Pyongyang say the personality cult taking shape around Kim Jong-il shows early signs of being even more outrageous than his father's, strengthened further by last week's deal with the United States on North Korea's nuclear program.

North Korean street corners have begun displaying the first art works since the old man's death, further signs, say diplomats, of Kim junior's grip on power.

In splendid social-realism, they show grief-stricken Koreans comforted by an athletic Kim Jong-il at the foot of his father's giant statue.

Another shows Kim junior astride a prancing steed rodeo-style atop a mountain overlooking the military demarcation line that separates North and South Korea. The sky on the north side is clear and sunny, on the south stormy.

New lapel badges bearing Kim Jong-il's image are in production, replacing or possibly adding to the ones all North Koreans are required to wear of his father ``close to our hearts''.

There's not much other than his age, 52, that is known about Kim Jong- il.

Much overweight and, since the death of his father, looking ill and pallid, he is said to spend his days watching Western action films and pornography and plundering blonde prostitutes flown in from Sweden.

He is reputed to have three children: one a daughter studying in Switzerland under an assumed name and another a son who hangs around the lobby of Pyongyang's Koryo Hotel, the one where most foreigners stay. Nothing is known of another son.

``We have a few problems here,'' admitted my minder Mr Hyon in a weak moment last Tuesday. ``We have had some cases of cholera, in Nampo port (near Pyongyang).''

His admission, remarkable for a North Korean official, stacked up with reports from Seoul and Beijing about an outbreak of the disease that affects the most desperate nations, and my own observations along the Nampo road, blocked by a military letting only medical teams through.

The Pyongyang diplomatic community also claimed cholera had broken out, warning against drinking tap water and eating seafood.

But four days later it was a different story.

I had gently pressed Mr Hyon for more information about the cholera epidemic he had revealed only days earlier.

Feigning shock, he denied loudly in front of two superiors that he had ever said it.

I remonstrated and he accused me of spreading lies about North Korea.

``Who told you?'' he demanded. ``Do not say we have cholera here to anyone.''

My travelling companions and I were escorted twice to the massive bronze statue of Kim Il-sung on Pyongyang's Mansu Hill to pay our respects to the Great Leader, with thousands of other North Koreans shuffling in lines of 40 to the plinth and the mourning dirge.

A large contingent of mourners were military men.

North Korea is reported to have up to two million people in uniform, putting it alongside the US and China as among the world's biggest standing armies.

That North Korea has less than a tenth of America's population, and one-sixtieth of China's, and is considerably poorer than both, puts that mobilisation into sharper focus.

It is estimated that the state spends at least a third of its revenue 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.

Power is also exercised through the ruling Worker's Party, to which as many as four 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 neighborhoods are organised by the party into small units of, for example, two floors of an average apartment building.

It is headed by a unit leader, who dispenses modest largesse and privileges.

He or she also keeps tabs on un-revolutionary behavior, in league with the resident member of the security department.

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 embarrassed Hitler's 1936 Berlin Olympics for cultish pageantry.

Five years later very little seems to have changed.