Travels in North Korea
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.By Andy Kershaw Daily Telegraph 20 December, 2003
It is the scariest, most dangerous, most volatile place on earth. Panmunjom, at the 38th Parallel, where North Korea meets South,
is the world's last Cold War frontier. Here the ancient tectonic plates of capitalism and communism still grind relentlessly and terrifyingly together. Concealed in the surrounding countryside, on both sides of the border, beyond the trim lawns, fragrant flowerbeds and ornamental trees, is rumoured to be the deadliest arsenal in the world - conventional, chemical, biological and nuclear - just a few hundred yards from the gift shop.
The day out at Panmunjom is the high point of any holiday in North Korea. (This was my fourth visit.) In the spirit of a school trip, we were driven to the border, 100 miles south of Pyongyang, in a bus laid on by the state tourism agency (not a terribly busy organisation) and chaperoned, as ever, by our jolly government minders.
The showpiece motorway to Panmunjom - in places six lanes wide on both sides - is, shall we say, unspoilt by traffic. Still, drivers must be on their mettle to avoid uniquely North Korean road hazards: deer grazing on the central reservation or a herd of goats being shooed along the fast lane. Giant columns of concrete, dotted along the hard shoulder, stand ready to be dynamited to block the carriageway in the event of an invasion from the South. In the paddy fields, incongruous billboards carry slogans to uplift those working up to their knees in thin mud: "Unity Is Victory", "Let Us Live In Our Own Way" and "Long Live The Great General, Comrade Kim Jong Il, The Sun Of The 21st Century."
It doesn't take long in the People's Paradise to get used to this sort of stuff. We had rattled into Pyongyang station at 3.30am, shattered after a 31-hour train ride from Beijing. Nevertheless, we were whisked immediately up to Mansundae hill to pay our respects at the 100ft-high, floodlit bronze statue of the Great Leader, Comrade Kim Il Sung, which stares out and stretches a fatherly hand to the whole city. From speakers concealed in the shrubbery a military choir sang "Peace Is On Our Bayonet". Only after these formalities were completed could we check in at the spectacular (and virtually empty) 500-room Yangakdo Hotel with its spectacular (and virtually empty) revolving bar and restaurant on the 47th floor.
Driven by juche, his home-brewed ideology of self-reliance, Kim Il Sung ruled the Democratic People's Republic of Korea - the official name - from its foundation in 1948 till his death in 1994. At which point, in the communist world's only dynastic transfer of power, his son Kim Jong Il - known as the Dear Leader - took control. Kim Snr, who was stuffed by the same taxidermists who service Chairman Mao, and now lies in a crystal case in a climate-controlled chamber in his former palace, has been elevated recently to the office of Eternal President - the world's first and, so far, only dead incumbent head of state.
Images of, and references to, father and son are pervasive. In conversation, however brief, with a North Korean they are routinely acknowledged. ("It is thanks to the wise guidance and warm benevolence of the Great/Dear Leader that we are enjoying this breakfast of cold flounder . . ." etc). A tourists' phrasebook includes these helpful ice-breakers in the section called Sightseeing of City: "Comrade Kim Il Sung was the most distinguished leader of our times"; "The death of Comrade Kim Il Sung is a great loss to the Korean revolution and the world revolution."
On a supervised stroll around the city centre one evening, I looked up at a 20-storey block of flats and saw in every apartment, with the repetition of a Warhol, the same standard-issue portraits of father and son, positioned alongside each other, staring down into the living rooms, from the same wall.
It's not only the people of North Korea who advertise their admiration and affection for the leaders Great and Dear. In the 1970s, a British Left-wing activist was invited by the government in Pyongyang to visit the country. After a few days of being bussed around the achievements of the Great Leader the visitor asked if he might do something a little different, such as visit Pyongyang zoo.
His guides went into a huddle. This was not on the itinerary. Phone calls were made to superiors. Eventually, they announced that, yes, he might go to the zoo, but only under their supervision. Almost giddy with the spontaneity of his big day out, the visitor was escorted around the many impressive animal enclosures. Then they came upon a cage in which sat a large parrot on a swing. The visitor looked at the parrot. The parrot eyed up the visitor, blinked and squawked: "Long live the Great Leader, Comrade Kim Il Sung." In English.
To better appreciate his contribution we were marshalled around the feet of a huge, dazzling white statue of a seated Kim Il Sung in the entrance hall of Pyongyang's Grand People's Study House. This ornate, sprawling pagoda - more than one million square feet, 10 floors, 600 marbled rooms - is a public library "for the study of the works of Kim Il Sung", according to the guide.
In a typical reading room, and under the gaze of the ever-present portraits, dozens of Koreans of all ages sat silently at school desks, absorbed in the writings of the old man. No one looked up at us. It was the desks that most excited the guide. "When we opened the library, all desks were flat desks," she explained.
"When the Great Leader, Comrade Kim Il Sung, came to this room he personally sat at a desk and said that this kind of desk was not comfortable for the readers. So it would be better to change the older desks into desks with an adjustable, angled surface."
"And how many desks had to be modified?" I asked.
"Six thousand," she said matter-of-factly.
For students experiencing any difficulties with their work, help is at hand in Room 142, the Question-and-Answer Room. In this poky, windowless office sits a small, bespectacled man, blinking at the wall. His desk is bare except for a telephone. Those seeking elucidation on any subject - philosophy, sciences, the arts - can drop in any time for a consultation. For this is the Man Who Knows Everything.
"Please," called the guide to get our attention. We were now at the counter where books ordered from the card index are delivered. They arrive, bobsleigh fashion, down a chute. "Let me call for something from our English-language collection," she announced. Zap! Two books swept down the chute and thudded on to the desk.
The first was called "Applied Polymer Symposia. Proceedings of the 8th Cellulose Conference - Wood, Chemicals and Future Challenges, 1975. Volume 28". The other page-turner was a medical paper from Massachusetts: "Deaths and Injuries in House Fires".
Western visitors to North Korea find few common cultural reference points. At a co-operative farm near Wonsan we were invited into a family's home. This is rare. Never before, in four visits, had I been inside someone's house. The three utilitarian rooms were brightened by a big television, a map of the world along one wall, the portraits of father and son on another.
The children - two boys and a little girl - wanted to sing for us. Their mother fetched her accordion and we were treated to "The Great General, Kim Jong Il, Is Our Sun". When the song was finished, I asked the mother, "Do you know much about music from the outside world? Have you heard, for example, of the Beatles or Elvis Presley or Michael Jackson?"
"No," she smiled. "I have not heard of these. I am just a farmer."
But changes are taking place. Contacts are being made with the wider world. I noticed a striking increase - albeit from an almost zero base - in the number of cars on Pyongyang's mighty boulevards. There is now email and a mobile phone network for the party elite, charity workers, diplomats and foreign businessmen.
The last are gradually creeping in to capitalise (crikey!) on a workforce that is the most disciplined, abundant and obedient in the world. And very cheap. Over the past three years most European countries have opened embassies in Pyongyang and the euro is now the favoured foreign currency. Three months ago the first market opened in the capital and business there is flourishing. And in South Korea, president Roh Moo Hyun has maintained the reconciliation Sunshine Policy towards the north of his predecessor, Kim Dae Jung.
"There are signs that the regime wants to change things," said one European expatriate who didn't want to be named. "But it wants to do it without losing face. That's very important here. Everyone in Pyongyang is now trying to do business. It's unofficial but it's happening.
"They're learning quickly how to turn a buck and that is the best hope for a soft landing. The only worry then would be a gulf opening between a relatively rich urban population and a peasantry for whom the currency is cabbage."
The last time I was in Pyongyang, in October 2000, the future looked bright. Kim Dae Jung had made an historic visit to the North. Kim Jong Il met him at the foot of the aircraft steps. (In his self-designed, utilitarian brown outfit he was taken by the South Korean president's security men for some bloke who'd been sent to refuel the plane). Madeleine Albright made an equally courageous trip to have talks with the Dear Leader.
Jimmy Carter was another hands-across-the-ocean guest of Pyongyang, after which the North Koreans agreed to put aside any nuclear naughtiness in exchange for fuel oil, food aid and benign nuclear reactors.
Foreign embassies were opening across town. And, unbelievably, the US dollar was the currency of business and tourism. Then George Bush came into office.
Bush has gone on the record to declare his intention to topple the Dear Leader. "I loathe that man," he has said, describing him as "a pygmy" and "an evil-doer".
"Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz have no understanding of the North Korean character," another nameless European told me in Pyongyang. "Koreans feel personally insulted to be included in the Axis of Evil. And, post Iraq, they feel very threatened by the United States but very defiant."
Nick Bonner, an Englishman who runs Beijing-based Koryo Tours, has been taking tour parties into the North since 1993. He believes Pyongyang needs only kindness and assistance in its fumblings towards liberalisation. "Dialogue is the only way ahead. If people just said, 'Look, what can we do to help? What do you need?', as opposed to, 'How can we stop you doing this, that and the other?' and stopped telling them what to do, I think big changes would happen quickly.
"The attitude we pick up from them in the West is a very aggressive one but, in fact, they are defensive. They don't have ambitions to head off to South Korea or any incentive to do so."
Ten days ago, Pyongyang tossed out another olive branch, offering to freeze its nuclear weapons programme in return for energy aid, lifting of economic sanctions and removal from the United States' list of countries that sponsor terrorism. George W Bush said it wasn't enough: the programme has to be scrapped, not frozen. (Odd how he never makes such demands of Pakistan or Israel.)
Meanwhile, Donald Rumsfeld has recently had revised Operations Plan 5030, the Pentagon's war strategy for North Korea. Should its initial objective fail - to destabilise the military, who would then overthrow Kim Jong Il - the fallback is a huge number of nuclear strikes across the country. By the Pentagon's own estimation, casualties during the first hour of a conflict between the North and the US/South Korea would number a million or more.
With that in mind, a tour of Pyongyang's war museum only reinforces an understanding of North Korea's siege mentality. In one room is a shocking black- and-white 360-degree photograph of Pyongyang at the end of the Korean War in 1953. Not a single building was left standing. It is a panorama of rubble.
This might also explain the depth of the Metro, Pyongyang's underground railway, more than 330ft below the surface. In 1995, I met an Austrian businessman in the Koryo Hotel, in the capital. He was setting up a joint venture with the government to recycle plastics. He asked whether I had travelled yet on the Metro. "As a matter of fact," I told him, "I was down there this afternoon."
"Did you notice," he asked, "a lot of heavy, unmarked, steel doors?"
"Yes, I did. What's behind those?"
"Stairs," he said. "They go down as deep again. And they've got factories down there."
"What?" I said, suggesting to him a few women sitting at sewing machines.
"No," he laughed. "They're driving trucks around down there."
Back at Panmunjom, I lingered for as long as possible at the Demarcation Line. And that's all it is: a line of concrete, standing proud of the asphalt by less than an inch. If they wish to do so, North Korean and South Korean or American soldiers can put the toes of their boots to the line and stand, literally, eyeball to eyeball. From 20 yards south of the line, two South Korean soldiers photographed my every movement. The only sound in what is, potentially, the world's most explosive flashpoint was birdsong.
It was time to get back on the bus for our short drive to the gift shop. On the way, I chatted to one of our guides about the threat from the 37,000 American troops south of the border. Never mind the one million-strong North Korean army, I said; how would the North Korean population react to an American invasion?
"We would fight to every last man and woman," he replied. "And if the Americans arrived at my apartment block I would give out hand grenades to my children."
"And how old are your children?" I asked.
"Two and four."
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