Pyongyang, October 13, 1994
THE first hole at the Pyongyang Golf Club is a 340-metre dogleg par four, a severe test of skill even for Normans and Nicklauses.
But it was a mere cakewalk for North Korea’s “Dear Leader”, Kim Jong-il, when he gave “on-the-spot guidance” at the country’s only golf club recently.
“Dear Leader Comrade General Kim Jong-il, who I respect from the bottom of my heart, scored two on this hole,” said course “professional” Mr Park Young-man.
Clearly, the mysterious 52-year-old son of the late “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung, and the man the world expects to be anointed soon as President of the Stalinist “Hermit Kingdom”, is a hero of the golf course as well as of the North Korean people.
Hole by hole, Mr Park, who has never heard of Arnold Palmer, explains that the Dear Leader shot a 34, including five holes-in-one, and no hole worse than a birdie – one under par.
“He is an excellent golfer,” Mr Park said.
If North Korea is in the dire economic straits the world suspects it to be- and anecdotal evidence suggests it clearly is – the solution is obvious: launch the Dear Leader on the pro tour.
Just this golf outing illustrates the lengths North Koreans will go to deify the family that has ruled this country in the service of socialism for five decades.
Indeed, in the week this correspondent spent travelling with tour guides-cum-secret police, this was one of the milder feats they were responsible for.
Official propaganda has it that the two Kims are responsible for everything from the morning sun and harvest rain to world peace and the Mona Lisa. He is not responsible for the Moon landing. But nobody in North Korea yet believes there has been a landing on the Moon.
This is a land of roads without cars, restaurants without diners, chimneys without smoke, where every aspect of individual choice has been taken away by the state, or more correctly the Worker’s Party of Korea. Even the purchase of a toothbrush requires approval from a party cadre.
It is a regime where the Bo-Wee-Bu, the “security department”, is probably not necessary, because the notion of dissent seems superfluous in a land where even the dawn is the creation of the omniscient Great and Dear Leaders.
“THIS is the world’s last great arbitrage opportunity,” says Mr Paul Pheby, Seoul-based director of investment bank Peregrine, scouting Pyongyang for joint ventures.
We are speaking in the billiard room of Pyongyang’s Koryo Hotel, the main if not the only social focus for the few foreigners who venture to North Korea.
“This is a country of undervalued assets, 20 million cheap workers who will do what they are told, and everything separated from the world by an artificial line,” Mr Pheby says.
Peregrine, which likes its regimes rigid, is the latest of a lengthening line of hated capitalists scouting North Korea for joint ventures midst murky signs that it may at last be opening for foreign business.
Korean-speaking Briton Mr Steve Cox, one of the few Westerners resident in Pyongyang, claims that his Euro-Asian Business Consultancy represents 10 Fortune 500 companies sniffing around for opportunities.
Multinationals such as Royal Dutch Shell, DHL, Unilever, Ciba-Geigy and Asea Brown Boveri have recently sent delegations, mostly to study the prospects for the United Nations-backed special economic development zone to be fenced off in in the far north-east of North Korea, near the Chinese and Russian borders.
Australian diplomat Mr Ian Davies, who administers North Korea for the UN’s Industrial Development Organisation, believes “reformers” are pushing to the fore of the Worker’s Party and that an opening-up is necessary for the maintenance of the regime.
“They are watching very carefully what is happening in China,” he says. “It is early days, but they are looking to virtually copy the Chinese experience.
But China looks positively liberal compared to North Korea, where the economy has contracted by 4-5 per cent a year since 1990 and the country has an appalling history of welshing on its debts – including a $US1 billion syndicate headed by the ANZ Bank for a wheat deal. Australia’s TNT stationed an agent in Pyongyang for a year in 1992-93 for a $US200,000 state contract. The agency relocated to Beijing, the contract officially “dormant”.
Not least of the problems is North Korea’s monetary system. The economy has three currencies – green won for hard-currency use; a little-used red won for trade with communist brethren; and the brown won used by average Koreans the few times they venture to poorly stocked, rarely open state shops.
There is little obvious foreign influence in North Korea. Because of Kim’s doctrine of Juche, or self-reliance, Koreans have been encouraged to do it themselves.
The result is the shoddy output that communism specialised in, and not much of it.
The few North Koreans who know of the export successes of the booming southern economy – Daewoo, Hyundai, Samsung – describe Seoul as prostituting the Korean people, the “puppet regime” reliant on foreign trade to feed its people.
There are no foreign goods in average stores and even the privileged hard-currency stores, where foreigners and party potentates shop, Chinese goods are considered luxury items.
There is little obvious economic activity in North Korea, even in Pyongyang, the geometrically planned exhibition capital.
There is clearly a severe energy shortage. At 6.30pm, the lights of city apartments come on automatically, illuminating the portraits of the two Kims every household and public building is obliged to display. At 10pm, they go off.
Even in the dim Koryo Hotel, chambermaids switch off hallway lights after guests have moved through them. Pyongyang is a city without noise, without activity.