Anna Fifield, the Financial Times’
correspondent in Seoul, travels to Pyongyang to witness the huge ceremony
marking the birthday of the late Kim Il-sung, founder of communist North Korea
and father of the current president, Kim Jong-il.
Day 1: Pyongyang celebrates the late Kim Il-sung
By Anna Fifield in Pyongyang
Published: April 17 2007 02:53 | Last updated: April 17 2007 02:53
And so I return to Pyongyang. The socialist paradise founded by Great Leader and Eternal President Kim Il-sung, and now led by the Dear Leader and Sun of the 21st Century Kim Jong-il is in particularly festive spirits when I arrived at the weekend.
This is my fourth visit to the North Korean capital in 18 months and I am eager to see what, if anything, has changed.
Boarding an Air Koryo, the North Korean airline that is banned from flying in the European Union, in Beijing is like hopping into a time machine. The Ilyushin 62 aircraft, which I guess is close to four decades old, is decorated like a 1970s living room. Plush olive green seats, brown plastic trays that almost count as kitsch and air hostesses in retro purple aprons.
“Welcome to Pyongyang, the capital of Juche Korea, under the leadership of our Great General Kim Il-sung, which is well known around the world.” The hostess announces.
When I got up out of my seat during the flight, I discovered a hatch open in the galley, with one of the women carrying crates of beer bottles down the ladder into some nether region of the aircraft, much like a London pub owner carting kegs into the cellar. Except that we were in midair.
The aeroplane is packed with foreigners - all going to the most auspicious day in the North Korean calendar, Kim Il-sung’s birthday. There are large groups of adventure travellers excited about heading into the world’s most closed country, a handful of journalists from a rag bag of countries and then there are the idiosyncratic characters that North Korea tends to attract. There is certainly a touch of a Star Trek convention about this place.
Sitting next to me is Vipin Gupta, sporting a Communist star and a North Korean medal on his blue blazer. He tells me he is chairman of The Juche Philosophy Study Committee of India, a group devoted to the self-reliance theory propagated by Kim Il-sung, which is used as the excuse for keeping the country closed. Gupta’s family has a long history of association with North Korea, starting with his grandfather who taught English to North Koreans in the 1950s and he proudly carries on the tradition.
I ask him what is the appeal of Juche, which may be the world’s most shallow school of thought. After the tenet of “self reliance” and “man is the master of all things”, the theory peters out. Indeed the entry in the North Korean dictionary for the Juche Tower, a central Pyongyang monument, is twice as long as the entry for the idea itself. “Juche is so universal,” Gupta tells me. “It can be applied to all people in all countries around the world. It’s for humans”, he says.
Ah, glad we got that clear.
Upon our arrival in Pyongyang, I and a journalist colleague from Seoul are greeted by three fresh-faced guides Mr Li, Mr Kim and Miss Yoo. Our bus ? a 20-seater for the five of us ? ferries us to the Yanggakdo Hotel, known as Alcatraz among regular visitors because it is situated on an island in the river, so it is the perfect place for dangerous types such as reporters and South Koreans.
From there we are immersed in the festivities of Pyongyang, the Potemkin capital that has become even more manufactured for Kim Il-sung’s birthday celebration.
I discover that the city has been festooned with banners declaring April 14 Memorial and espousing the great leadership of Kim Il-sung.
We are given an itinerary that contrary to our hopes for a jaunt out to the Yongbyon nuclear reactor followed by green tea with Kim Jong-il, is heavy on his dad. First we are off to the Great Leader’s birthplace where lines of women in folk dress and children in army uniforms carry out their imposed duty of paying homage to the Leader.
At the Juche Tower, the Korean Workers party monument, the arc of triumph (10m taller than that in Paris), it’s all Kim Il-sung, Kim Il-sung, Kim Il-sung. Have you been here before asks Mr Kim, the guide, at each stop. Four times, four times, four times I reply.
At the scarily well-choreographed Arirang mass gymnastics festival ? which I have now seen three times ? and which was shorter and less militaristic each year ? the 100,000 people holding coloured cards repeatedly make up the face of Kim Il-sung.
On Sunday night, it is off to Kim Il-sung Square for a birthday performance that could rival an Olympic opening ceremony.
As someone now well-accustomed to the unique characteristics of Pyongyang, the bizarreness of this personality cult is lost on me. Instead I am interested in Koreans’ lives and whether they are getting any better. Sadly, that is difficult information to gather.
Certainly there are many people on the streets eating ice cream at roadside stalls, sitting in parks and the sun is shining brightly. Previously, children had run away from me or burst into tears when I said hello in Korean to them. They are taught to be afraid of Americans, Imperialist aggressors with big noses and I might just be one, but this time kids even call out Hi! Hi! to me.
However I can’t discern whether they are really happy out in the sun enjoying the holiday with their families, or whether Potemkin smiles are instructed to be worn for the foreigners. In this most repressive of countries, I want to believe it is the former.
Day 2: At the front line of ideology
By Anna Fifield in Pyongyang
Published: April 17 2007 10:26 | Last updated: April 17 2007 10:26
When North Koreans refer to Americans, they’re never just Americans. They are usually “mijenom” or “American imperialist bastards” but also sometimes “cunning American wolves” or simply “imperialist aggressors”.
So when I set off into the demilitarised zone from the northern side on Monday, I wondered just how much I would be hearing about the mijenom and their insidious deeds. After all, according to Kim Jong-il’s regime, the imperialist aggressors are responsible not just for the division but the continued separation of the Korean peninsula.
The DMZ, a 4km strip separating the two Koreas that is often referred to as the world’s most heavily fortified area, remains the front line in the battle of ideologies.
Despite the current hiccups in implementing the February 13 denuclearisation agreement, there has been something of a sea change in relations between Washington and Pyongyang recently, with George W. Bush’s administration giving diplomacy a serious shot.
So, I wondered as we hurtled down the bumpy road south from Pyongyang whether North Korea’s regime had toned down its rhetoric. Its colourful bluster also offers an insight into the regime’s thinking.
But the news of the Bush administration’s new mood does not seem to have filtered down to Panmunjom, where fighting talk is still de rigeur.
“The mijenom are threatening to use strong arms against us so we cannot just sit idle,” says Lieutenant Colonel Ri Kwang-chol, a senior officer in the joint security area in the middle of the DMZ.
The Korean People’s Army ? the fifth-largest military force in the world, despite the tiny size of the North Korean economy ? remains on a permanent war footing because the Korean War ended in 1953 with a ceasefire rather than a peace treaty. Indeed, the economic problems are also blamed on US sanctions, rather than the more obvious culprit ? decades of economic mismanagement.
Kim Jong-il’s regime drums up the threat of American attack to try to keep the populace united against a common enemy, a ploy that has proved powerful for more than five decades.
“We have to protect ourselves against the Americans,” Lt Col Ri says as we walk down the path to the line that separates the two Koreas. “If someone threatens to hit you, to attack you, then you have to do something. You can’t just stand there and be hit, can you?”
When asked about the new tack in Washington, where pro-negotiation types are now in the ascendancy, Lt Col Ri cites recent joint South Korean-US military exercises in the South as evidence that the hostile policy has not been abandoned.
“The Americans say it is their intention to improve relations with our country but if that is their plan then they should stop military exercises with South Korea,” he says.
Likewise, on board the USS Pueblo, the American naval ship that was captured by North Korea in 1968 and accused of being a spy vessel, Ryu Ok-hui, a tour guide dressed in military uniform, says the US has “a double-sided attitude”.
“At the negotiating table they say one thing but when they return to their country they do something different. They have to follow through on their agreement,” she says as we walk across the deck of the ship, which is moored in the Daedong river that runs through Pyongyang as a reminder of “American aggression”.
Indeed, the people in Pyongyang that I am allowed to talk to all lambast the US in almost identical language, underlining the intensive training that they are all given before being let loose on the foreigners.
While this is all part of the North Korean propaganda, the internal message does not appear to be changing either. Brian Myers, a North Korea propaganda expert who lives in South Korea, says the domestic propaganda is still highly hostile to Americans and is showing no signs of softening.
If the regime was to seriously embark on denuclearisation it would need to explain ? through the propaganda ? why the US was no longer a threat and why that nuclear technology it tried so hard to get is now longer needed. It would also force North Korea to find a new scapegoat for both its economic hardship and the ongoing division of the peninsula.
History suggests any change will be a long time coming. North Korea’s internal accounts of the inter-Korean summit in 2000 between Kim Jong-il and then Southern president Kim Dae-jung, which led to the marked thawing in relations between the two, portray Kim Dae-jung as a doddery old fool who is mocked in his home country, Mr Myers says.
Indeed, further along the DMZ from the Panmunjom joint security area, a very chatty Colonel Kang Ho-sup tells us that South Korea, egged on by the US, is still hostile.
He takes us to see what he says is an 8m-high concrete wall that South Korea built across the width of the Korean peninsula, with the encouragement of the US. The wall cannot be viewed from the South because the American puppets have concealed it, Col Kang tells us. And because it is in the middle of the DMZ we cannot visit it, he says, but must view it through binoculars from 1km away.
There is some sort of structure out there but it is impossible to tell what it really is. It certainly does not run for more than 1km, much less several hundred of them.
“This wall was built by the South Koreans to permanently divide the Korean peninsula,” says Col Kang, who is animated and enthusiastic as we look through the binoculars he has trained on the wall.
“This concrete wall is like a tight belt around my middle,” he exclaims, suddenly lurching forward in his peaked green hat to grab a startled guy in our group around the waist. “It’s very tight and it hurts and we can’t undo it by ourselves,” apparently because it was the US that tied it around Korea’s waist.
I can’t help but wonder if the increasing number of foreigners coming into the country ? it has gone from a drip to a trickle ? will start to change people’s minds, even if the propaganda doesn’t tell them so.
Maybe it already has.
I was once in Pyongyang with a very tall American who went around introducing himself as a mijenom, to the Koreans’ great amusement, and I asked several North Korean guides if they had met Americans.
“Oh yes ? many,” one said. “I like American people, I just don’t like their government.”
Day 3: The wackiness and misery
By Anna Fifield in Pyongyang
Published: April 18 2007 06:58 | Last updated: April 18 2007 06:58
People often ask me what North Korea is like. It’s a difficult question to answer.
How do you describe a place that is weirder than anywhere else on earth? Where the people face constant monitoring and restrictions in their daily lives? Where one-third of the population is malnourished but the regime chooses to spend its money on fireworks and mass performances for a dictatorial dead president rather than food for its citizens?
North Korea is a place that you simply must see to get even a glimmer of an idea of what it is like.
Last year I went to Turkmenistan, the ”North Korea of central Asia”, but it seemed like a liberal democracy compared with North Korea. Turkmen people approached me and chatted, invited me out to dinner and for walks around the capital.
”What do you think of our city,” one guy in Ashgabat asked me. ”It’s quite weird isn’t it, with all these statues?” I responded, and was shocked to hear him whisper back, ”Yes, our president is a bit strange.”
This is unimaginable in North Korea. First, people are taught to be afraid of foreigners, or ”big noses” as Caucasians are called, and the system of secret police and informants is so pervasive that exchanging even a few words with an outsider could see you reported to the police.
Humanitarian workers who have been to Burma likewise say that country seems ”free” compared with North Korea.
Certainly, Kim Jong-il’s socialist paradise is in a dubious league of its own. North Korea is known for its rampant personality cult and micromanaged isolation, and particularly for the idiosyncracies of its podgy, bouffant-haired leader who is renowned for his extravagant tastes in food, wine and women.
This wackiness has been parodied in films such as Team America, and the Economist magazine once had a great cover showing Kim Jong-il with his arm in the air, under the headline ”Greetings, earthlings”.
This week, during the celebrations for Eternal President Kim Il-sung, who now lies in state in an ostentatious mausoleum bigger than Buckingham Palace, it seemed as if the regime was trying to play up their oddness for the foreign visitors who had been permitted in for the April 15 events.
North Korea’s communist forebears could hardly have planned this week’s celebrations better. Cherry blossoms bloomed along the wide, carefully mapped out streets of Pyongyang and the sun shone over the unusually haze-free showcase capital, a picture of centrally-planned perfection.
Thousands of children danced with scary synchronicity in mass gymnastics displays while thousands of adults performed dancing tributes to the Fatherly Leader. The streets were adorned with posters and lights for his 95th birthday and slogans chanted by unseen troupes of people wafted through the air from dawn until well after dusk.
Even outside the manufactured environs of Pyongyang, the situation in the countryside seemed to be improving. Although it remains very primitive ? fields are tilled by hand and an ox and cart are considered high-tech agricultural equipment ? the maize fields were planted and the rice paddies were awash with water.
But it is still North Korea. The average salary in North Korea is between one and two euros a month, and although the food situation has improved, between one-third and one-half of people still struggle to get enough to eat each day.
I asked a cute North Korean girl that I saw in the hotel lobby, who looked about seven, her age. ”Twelve,” she timidly replied before turning back to her grandmother.
Medical workers who visit hospitals in provincial areas say they don’t have the most basic of supplies such as bandages, so a simple problem like a broken leg can quickly led to necrosis and then amputation.
”The manpower is good but their infrastructure and equipment is really lacking,” Tej Walia, head of the World Health Organisation’s office in Pyongyang, told me. ”They perform operations without anaesthetic and in winter it is zero degrees inside the operating threatres.”
Sure, Asia and Africa are full of desperately poor places. When I visited Pyongyang a year ago with some Rotary Club members who live in Shanghai, I remarked on how heart-breaking I found the situation in North Korea.
”I’ve seen worse in China,” one of the Rotarians responded.
But I do not compare North Korea with China. I compare it with South Korea, where I live. Look at what South Korea has achieved since the Korean war ? it is a bustling, high-tech country, the world’s 10th largest economy, where Koreans are constantly trying to improve themselves even further.
Then I look at the situation to which five decades of mismanagement has relegated North Korea. How can one half of a country be so buzzing and the other so backwards? It is hard to think of a more extreme contrast. Imagine if Moldova shared a border with Manhattan or Laos next to London, except that the people were the same ethnicity and spoke the same language.
Then there is the repression. Their general introspection, which sharply contrasts to the curious Koreans I meet in the South, the way they are forced to continually visit ostentatious monuments to Kim Il-sung and the way they robotically recount the events of his life with glazed ｅxpressions.
This presents a rather un-human image of North Koreans. But the people I have been allowed to speak to and build up something of a rapport with show the side the regime does not want you to see.
They say they are proud of the achievements of South Korean companies such as Samsung Electronics and Hyundai Motor, and of Ban Ki-moon, a South Korean, becoming the secretary general of the United Nations.
They make fun of my technological naivete when I say I don’t know how to use Photoshop software or that I have never heard of an MP4 player.
And they display the candidness which I love about South Koreans. ”You look quite fat in this photo,” one of my young guides tells me, puffing out his cheeks, when I give him the mugshot that is required for my ”foreign press man” application form.
Another man tells me after a particularly jokey conversation: ”If you were Korean I would propose to you.”
As Mr Ri, the urbane diplomat who was my guide during my first trip to Pyongyang and who I was hoping to bump into this time, told me 18 months ago: ”People are people”.
Day 4: Journalists and N Korea - oil and water
By Anna Fifield in Pyongyang
Published: April 19 2007 06:14 | Last updated: April 19 2007 06:14
Journalists and North Korea go together like oil and water.
To journalists, a trip to North Korea represents a rare chance to write about one of the world’s least known countries, and the prospect of finding out something that is truly new in this age of abundant information.
For North Korea, journalists are more dangerous and less predictable than a Taepodong missile. Even with our ever-present minders, we are liable to shoot off in any direction at any time and we ask endless questions and make difficult demands.
Why can’t we stop on the side of the road to take photos? Why can’t we go to the market? Can we go to a person’s house? How about the Yongbyon nuclear plant? How much rice does your family receive from the state? Do you know where your Dear Leader lives? How about where his office is? Who’s going to take over when he dies?
I have been told on several occasions that I am probably a spy because I have visited Pyongyang frequently and ask many questions, a suspicion heightened by the fact that I now know my way around Pyongyang well and could probably write a restaurant guide to the capital.
Such is the buzz of getting into North Korea that we journalists go into overdrive, trying to collect as much information as possible in the time available.
After four trips to Pyongyang, I think I have identified the mood cycle of a western journalist in North Korea.
First, there is excitement and relief at just getting into the country, which views foreign correspondents from organisations other than China’s official Xinhua news agency as highly dangerous.
Then there is disappointment when you realise that your itinerary is full of visits to bizarre monuments to a personality cult, and does not involve anything that could possibly generate news in any other country.
Third is the extreme frustration when everything that is not on the itinerary is banned. on this trip, that has included walking down the street, visiting foreign residents of Pyongyang, interviewing even the tourist guides who have been extensively prepped for our questions.
Fortunately, these stages pass quite quickly and you soon settle back into a kind of delirium brought on by the restrictions placed on you, and the surreal nature of simply being here.
Then you move into the final stage, resigning yourself to go with the flow and try to make the most of it.
To help myself adjust to the reporting life in North Korea, I meant to bring my copy of “Kim Jong-il ? Great Teacher of Journalists” with me. It’s a relatively thick collection of advice from the Dear Leader on how to go about reporting in the Hermit Kingdom.
I also once asked to go on a journalistic exchange to Rodong Shinmun, the mouthpiece of the Korean Workers’ Party, but I was told it would happen approximately never. I guess they didn’t want me discussing interviewing, fact-checking, getting the other side of the story or just generally being sceptical with my North Korean counterparts.
However, I forgot the book and wasn’t allowed to visit the newspaper. Luckily, there are plenty of locals on hand to remind me of the tricks of the trade.
“You mustn’t write things just from listening,” instructs Col Kang Ho-sup, the Korean People’s Army officer who took us to see ? through binoculars ? the wall the North Korea says the South built to divide the peninsula but which the South says is fake.
“You must check the facts with your own eyes, write what you see, write the truth,” he says.
However, the advice to journalists only goes this far.
When we lob tricky questions to Lt Col Ri Kwang-chol, who explains the division of the peninsula in the middle of the demilitarised zone between the two Koreas, he responds with a twinkle in his eye: “If you were coming here from England I would answer your question, but you are coming here from South Korea, so you know the situation here well.”
Then comes the payback. “I know that it is your responsibility to ask these questions but it is my personal opinion that journalists from western countries are not reliable.”
If only I had done that Rodong Shinmun exchange.
Indeed, the media world in North Korea is a long way from the environment in which I operate. The Rodong Shinmun is 100 per cent devoted to stories on Kim Il-sung or his son Kim Jong-il ? to their feats, to the international acclaim that they inspire, or to imperialist efforts to detract from their feats.
When I was here in Pyongyang a year ago, I went to an English class at Kim Il-sung University and found a booklet at the back of the classroom entitled “Britain Today”. It could more correctly have been called “Britain quite a long time ago but things move slowly here in the People’s Paradise”.
From this I learned that “a paper printed in London around midnight can be at any breakfast table in England the next morning, except in remote country districts” and that The Sun is a “a tabloid with plenty of nudity and less serious content than the Daily Mirror”.
So far, basically true.
I found the venerable paper for which I write at the end of the chapter, with the introduction: “To complete the list, we should mention the Communist Party’s Morning Star and the Financial Times.”
“The name of the Financial Times indicates its character. Its political attitude is inevitably conservative, though it does not necessarily follow the party line,” the 20-year-old booklet said. “That such a paper should have had the largest percentage increase in circulation of any national daily is an indication of the current development of ownership of capital in Britain.”
(Incidentally, the “Character and manners” had this to say: “To other Europeans, the best known quality of the British, and in particular the English, is their reserve. A reserved person is one who does not talk very much to strangers, does not show much emotion, and seldom gets excited.”)
The divide between what journalists write about North Korea and what North Korea’s regime thinks journalists should write about North Korea apparently became too great. Close to midnight on our third evening in Pyongyang, our guides approached us with long faces, saying that we were leaving on the 9am flight in the morning. It wasn’t anything we’d specifically done, they said. Kim Jong-il’s regime had apparently had enough of pesky reporters and their endless questions.
So I boarded the Air Koryo plane back to Beijing and capitalism, and began drawing up a list of stories to write next time.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007