- From his balcony, Kim Jong-il surveyed the city. It was
a rare public appearance by the chubby dictator who rules the world's most
isolated state, but he maintained a godlike silence as he gazed out imperiously
at the surreal celebration below.
-
- As soon as he came into view, a choreographed display
of ecstasy erupted from the 20,000 soldiers and spectators standing in
precisely ordered rows in Pyongyang's central square. Wave after wave of
frenzied cheers and hurrahs rolled across the square. Thousands of balloons
soared into the sky. A brass band played a triumphant martial song, while
soldiers screamed, "Long life, long life!"
-
- Just as the orchestrated hysteria reached its peak, the
crowds marched across the square in military-style formation with bouquets
of artificial flowers, pledging their loyalty and waving frantically to
the man they call their Dear Leader. Many of the people were sobbing rapturously
as they turned their faces up toward him. Thousands of soldiers goose-stepped
across the square with machine guns in their hands.
-
- It was the 55th anniversary of the founding of North
Korea, and the Dear Leader (a title bestowed by his father, Kim Il-sung,
the self-proclaimed Great Leader, who died in 1994) watched the two-hour
parade with satisfaction.
-
- At 61, he wears a bouffant hairstyle and elevator shoes
to add to his potbellied 5-foot-3-inch frame. In public, he tries to appear
majestic, but in private he is said to be a man of carnal appetites, famed
for his love of Italian cuisine, rock lobster, French wine and cognac.
He once brought in two chefs from Milan to make pizza in Italian-made ovens,
and is rumoured to be the world's single biggest buyer of his favourite
cognac, Hennessy Paradis, which costs $630 a bottle.
-
- But as his cameras recorded the anniversary spectacle
for broadcast that night, an uglier scene was unfolding in many other places
across the capital.
-
- At a highway median near a luxury hotel, an old man and
a tiny girl were on their hands and knees, foraging for edible grass and
herbs to supplement their meagre diets. The painfully thin girl, who seemed
about five years old, was wearing a flowered dress as she toiled to gather
the grass in a large bag.
-
- On the outskirts of Pyongyang, men and women were trudging
out of the city with empty bags on their backs, while others were walking
back from the countryside, laden with grass, leaves, herbs, tree bark and
other "wild food" that has become a staple of daily survival
in this impoverished nation.
-
- I witnessed scenes such as this on each of the eight
days I spent in North Korea this month. An Orwellian society, it remains
gripped in a personality cult of Stalinist proportions, with its dwindling
resources diverted to pay for a massive army and a nuclear-weapons program
that terrifies its neighbours.
-
- Meanwhile, the vast majority of ordinary North Koreans
live in hunger and misery. For most of the 23 million people in the world's
last totalitarian state, the national holiday last week was little more
than an added opportunity to scavenge. Millions of malnourished people
here are dependent on "wild food." They mix it with ground wheat
or corn husks in a gruel or soup, even though it causes painful digestive
disorders.
-
- I came across dozens of people foraging. A relief worker
from the World Food Program, who travelled across North Korea for several
weeks this summer, said he saw hundreds. As many as three million people
have died from starvation since the mid-1990s, according to relief-agency
estimates.
-
- Journalists rarely get to visit North Korea, especially
since the nuclear crisis began last year, but I gained entry as part of
a tour group from China. It was an extraordinary opportunity to travel
across several regions, including provincial cities and rural districts
that journalists seldom see at the best of times.
-
- Pyongyang is a 90-minute flight from Beijing aboard a
shabby Russian-made Ilyushin jet flown by the state-owned Air Koryo. The
link between the two socialist capitals is one of North Korea's few with
the outside world, and yet the route supports only two flights a week.
Most passengers are diplomats, government officials and visiting delegations
such as a Shanghai ballet troupe. The sense of crossing an iron curtain
into an isolated land was reinforced by the stern-faced flight attendants
and the martial music emitted by the overhead speakers as our plane readied
for takeoff.
-
- One of the few dignitaries sent to help mark the national
holiday was on my flight: a vice-president of another repressive state,
Zimbabwe, who was greeted in Pyongyang with full military honours, including
a army brass band. It seemed to be a symbol of solidarity between the two
pariahs.
-
- We landed at a near-empty airport, where most of Air
Koryo's tiny fleet of passenger jets had been grounded long ago. My cellphone
was tagged and confiscated as soon as I arrived. Known for its extreme
xenophobia and paranoia, the regime goes to enormous lengths to prohibit
any independent contacts ó including cellphone calls ó between
North Korea and the outside world.
-
- A government minder bundled us into a van. Our first
glimpse of Pyongyang revealed a city of wide avenues and grandiose Stalinist
high-rises, which, on closer inspection, often seemed to be crumbling.
Few cars were on the streets. Long lines of ordinary people were trekking
along the main roads, averting their eyes, afraid of arrest if they made
any contact with foreigners. Sometimes they stole quick glances at us with
a mixture of fear and fascination in their eyes.
-
- Our seven-member group merited three minders. They monitored
our movements, accompanied us everywhere and guarded our hotel exits at
night. When our vehicle halted at highway rest stops, they shooed away
any North Koreans who happened to be there. If we wandered off on our own,
they would chase us back. But their vigilance wasn't perfect. By dodging
them from time to time and staying ever alert to the passing scene between
tour stops, I got a clear sense of what happens to a country that sacrifices
the health of its people for the sake of military might.
-
- Half a century after the end of the Korean War, the North
is still operating on a constant war footing. All of its scarce resources
are focused on military power. Even its rank-and-file soldiers are suffering
hardships because their human needs are less important than Kim Jong-il's
relentless ambition for ever-greater missiles and nuclear weapons.
-
- With more than one million troops, North Korea's army
is the fifth largest in the world. There were hundreds of soldiers on every
major highway ó but almost always on foot, trudging endlessly along
the side of the road. Sometimes they begged for rides from passing cars.
If they were lucky, they travelled on bicycles or tractor-pulled wagons
or open-backed trucks.
-
- Many of the soldiers were short and thin. Some looked
like 14-year-old boys, although in fact they are 20 or older. Because of
widespread stunting caused by malnutrition, the North Korean military has
lowered the minimum height requirement for new recruits to a mere 4-foot-10.
-
- Even at official highway checkpoints, the soldiers and
police rarely had more than a bicycle. They gratefully accepted gifts of
cigarettes and chewing gum from the Chinese tourists.
-
- While the soldiers are subsisting precariously, the situation
for civilians is much more dangerous. The economy has collapsed since the
fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the World Food Program estimates
that 51 per cent of the population is acutely or chronically malnourished.
The rate of stunting ó caused by lack of food ó is "very
high," according to United Nations criteria.
-
- I saw few signs of economic activity anywhere. Most factories
are closed and there were only two or three sites of construction activity,
including the repairs a military crew was making to a giant 12-metre-high
tank barricade on the main highway between Pyongyang and the South Korean
border.
-
- The skyline of Pyongyang is dominated by a massive 105-storey
pyramid-shaped hotel, abandoned in the early 1990s after years of construction.
A rusting crane still sits on the top of the pyramid, a symbol of failed
ambitions.
-
- Fuel shortages are so severe that vehicles are banned
from main arteries of Pyongyang on Sundays. Gasoline prices have reached
$4 (U.S.) per litre, compared with less than 40 cents in neighbouring China.
This has prompted some Koreans to convert to the use of firewood as fuel.
I could see thick smoke pouring from the burners on the backs of their
decrepit trucks.
-
- Buses and trams were jammed. People waited in huge queues
at every bus stop in Pyongyang. Yet the major intercity highways, up to
10 lanes wide, were virtually empty. On most roads, more cars were broken
down than functioning. I saw flames leaping from the engine of one stalled
truck as its passengers dashed around frantically.
-
- The 10-lane Youth Hero motorway between Pyongyang and
the western city of Nampo was built by an army of 50,000 labourers in the
late 1990s as a showcase project. It had perhaps two or three cars travelling
anywhere on its 50-kilometre span. But in a stunning waste of manpower,
dozens of people were trying to tidy up the empty highway, sweeping away
the dead leaves that had fallen on the shoulder.
-
- On the sides of the highways, many people were desperately
flagging for rides from the occasional passing car. They waved packs of
cigarettes as bribes.
-
- Some highways consist of little more than concrete slabs.
Road repairs are performed by labourers with few modern tools. I saw one
road gang in which an old woman was struggling to lift a heavy rock.
-
- In the rural regions, there were few tractors and little
mechanization. Everything seemed to be done by hand. Labourers manage most
farm work on foot, sometimes with wooden carts and plows pulled by oxen
or themselves. In five days of travelling outside Pyongyang, I saw only
three or four tractors and a few trucks. Some farmers led a single sheep
or pig on a leash. On rivers and lakes, no motorized boats were visible
ó almost every boat seemed to be powered by rowing.
-
- After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, North
Korea lost its major source of external support. Severe isolation and a
stubborn insistence on self-reliance (known as the Juche philosophy) have
worsened the stagnation. Per-capita incomes in North Korea are one-12th
of the level in South Korea. Electricity production has plunged to one-third
of the level of a decade ago.
-
- "The vicious cycle of inherited hunger is being
reinforced," Gerald Bourke, a spokesman for the WFP's operation in
North Korea, wrote in a recent commentary. "Moderately malnourished
children are becoming severely malnourished, and therefore more susceptible
to sickness and disease. Underfed women are giving birth to smaller babies,
and are less able to breast-feed them."
-
- While the farm crisis today is not as severe as during
the 1996-98 famine, the situation is exacerbated by a decline in foreign
food aid. Donor fatigue and political disputes have led to a sharp plunge
in food contributions from traditional donors such as Japan. More than
two-thirds of North Koreans depend on government food rations, which provide
less than 300 grams a day per person ó barely half of the international
standard for survival.
-
- Desperation is visible everywhere. Because of the danger
of theft by hungry villagers, elevated huts have been built in cornfields,
just big enough to shelter a guard who can protect the corn from theft
at night.
-
- Across the countryside, people wash their clothes outside
in cold rivers and carry heaps of twigs or branches for firewood. Deforestation
is becoming a serious problem as trees are chopped down for fuel or sale.
Crops are planted on every available space, including the steep sides of
mountains ó but not a single fence is visible, since private property
is illegal.
-
- In every town and village, the newest and shiniest object
is always a propaganda billboard or a 20-metre-high obelisk bearing a patriotic
slogan engraved in large red characters. They tower overhead, dominating
the landscape and creating the impression that ordinary dwellings are huddling
at the feet of the Dear Leader.
-
- Pyongyang, with 2.5 million residents, is supposed to
be a privileged place, somewhere people need special permission to live,
where most residents are loyal to the state. Yet even here the poverty
and scarcity are obvious.
-
- After sunset, the capital is pitch black, aside from
a handful of brightly floodlit propaganda billboards and monuments. The
few streetlights are too dim to penetrate the darkness. The city at night
is deadly quiet, except for occasional propaganda announcements from loudspeakers.
-
- The regime endlessly boasts that North Korea is a "people's
paradise." But when I walked through the city at midnight one night,
I saw homeless people sleeping outdoors on the streets and park benches.
During daytime, I saw people wearily pulling carts or hauling heavy bags
by hand. Taxis are almost non-existent. Apartment buildings are shabby
and grimy. There are shortages of hot water and running water. Electricity
supplies are tightly rationed in the winter especially.
-
- In Pyongyang and other major cities, most shop shelves
seem to be half-empty. Supplies are meagre, and there are never any display
windows. Outside their apartment buildings, people squat behind small boxes,
trying to make money by selling such wares as cigarette packs and homegrown
vegetables to passers-by. These are apparently the first signs of private
enterprise in North Korea, although the government minders prohibited us
from taking a closer look.
-
- If this country is a paradise, it seems to be a paradise
only for those with high-level connections. Even the minders admitted that
there is a big gap between rich and poor. Only a tiny privileged elite
with links to the regime are allowed to have cellphones or Internet access,
for example. One of our minders told me that he hopes to get an e-mail
address next year for the first time, but he acknowledged that "technical
problems" are still delaying the moment when ordinary North Koreans
might finally have access to the Internet.
-
- Foreign tourists are provided with much more generous
food allocations than ordinary North Koreans. The tour group enjoyed lavish
nine-course banquets ó something of an obscenity in a country where
people are eating grass.
-
- In an effort to attract Chinese tourists, who are emerging
as a key source of hard currency revenue for the North Korean regime, the
government has opened a cluster of luxury services in the 47-storey Yanggakdo
hotel in Pyongyang ó including a casino, an expensive Chinese restaurant
and a sauna. Ordinary North Koreans are allowed to enter none of these.
-
- One day, I caught a glimpse of North Korea's affluent
elite on the eastern sea coast near the port of Wonsan. Two government
Mercedes-Benz limousines stopped at a beach resort and several pudgy officials
ó accompanied by a jewellery-clad woman ó marched into the
resort. They ordered a meal of fresh crab. After eating their fill, they
sauntered into the sea for a swim, while their chauffeurs waited outside.
-
- Aside from the Great Leader himself, they were the only
fat people I saw in my entire visit.
-
- To finance its crab meals, cognac and pizza chefs ó
and to pay for its nuclear program ó the regime is desperately seeking
hard currency, in the process exhibiting a belligerence that has jeopardized
the world's stability.
-
- With few other products to sell, it has turned increasingly
to the export of contraband such as missiles and drugs. The regime earns
hundreds of millions of dollars every year by selling missiles and other
military hardware to repressive countries such as Iran, Libya, Pakistan
and Syria. And in April, officials in Australia seized a massive shipment
of heroin ó 125 kilograms ó from a North Korean vessel.
-
- Another destabilizing factor is the danger of a potential
flood of refugees. China has announced that it will deploy its military
to guard its border with North Korea, but an estimated 300,000 refugees
have already slipped across the border into northeastern China. (My own
apartment compound in Beijing is surrounded by a barbed-wire fence because
of China's fear that North Korean refugees will seek asylum in the diplomatic
missions it contains.)
-
- Yet despite the widespread hunger and malnutrition, the
totalitarian system is showing no signs of cracking. I saw no evidence
of any dissent or protest among ordinary people. Foreign politicians often
assume that the regime of Kim Jong-il must inevitably collapse soon, but
in reality the brainwashing and the domestic propaganda system are so extensive
that most North Koreans simply cannot imagine any alternative to the existing
system.
-
- "Few countries in the history of mankind have collapsed
simply because of the deprivation of people's basic needs," said the
University of Georgia political scientist Han Park, who has travelled to
North Korea many times in the past 20 years.
-
- "In North Korea, economic hardships for the people
will not undermine the regime itself," he wrote in a recent book.
"The overwhelmingly submissive and compliant attitude displayed by
the people at all levels of society has resulted from a consistent and
carefully engineered process of lifelong political socialization."
-
- As if to prove his prediction, on the eve of the national
holiday, I saw hundreds of North Koreans shuffling obediently through the
darkness of a Pyongyang evening to lay bouquets of flowers at the foot
of a giant propaganda billboard of Kim Il-sung. The floodlit billboard
was like a lurid beacon, one of the few sources of light in a shrouded
city. Below the portrait, the ordinary people were briefly illuminated.
Then they placed their bouquets and shuffled off into the darkness, accepting
their fate.
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- © 2003 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights
Reserved.
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