North Korea Undercover (2 page)
Read North Korea Undercover Online
Authors: John Sweeney
John Sweeney
Contents
1In the Land of the Plastic Toad
11‘Would the Dear Leader not be offended by such a gift?’
12The Man Who Went to North Korea and Came Back Mad
17The American Who Went to North Korea and Stayed
18The Hospital that Has Patients, but Only in the Morning
Translating text from one alphabet to another is always fraught. Koreans write their names, to us, backwards, so the surname comes first. The South Koreans hyphenate the forenames, making the second name lower case; thus I would be Sweeney John-paul. But North Korean practice, according to former British ambassador John Everard, is to write ‘each syllable with a capital letter and without a hyphen between the last two. Thus I write Kim Il Sung rather than Kim Il-sung.’ I follow that advice.
Where necessary, I have disguised the identity of people on the trip and North Koreans.
NORTH KOREA UNDERCOVER
The Air Koryo jet floated down to earth, the ground below tree-less, bleak. The plane landed smoothly enough, but then we wobbled down an immensely long and bumpy runway, past banks of earth, sinister watch towers and threadbare sprigs of barbed wire, straight out of
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Down the planes steps, one small leap and on to North Korean concrete. I thought to myself: What in Pyongyang do we do now?
The longer you spend in North Korea, the less fearful you become. Fear is fuelled by ignorance. The simple goal of this book is to make the world’s most secretive state a little less unknown, to map this terra incognita that loves to tell us: Be afraid. It ain’t easy.
Understanding North Korea is like figuring out a detective story where you stumble across a corpse in the library, a smoking gun beside it, and the corpse gets up and says that’s no gun and it isn’t smoking and this isn’t a library. It is like no where elseon earth. No ads burble. No traffic dragon roars. No birds sing. Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il smile down at you from a giant diptych hoarding. No one smiles back.
Kim Il Sung is Kim the First, but in the regime’s iconography he comes across as an
über
-effeminate God-the-Mother, all mumsy and 1950s, a celestial Doris Day. Kim Jong Il, aka Kim the Second, is God-the-Lousy-Elvis-Impersonator in bouffant hairdo and
elevator heels, creepy, beyond weird. Kim Jong Un is Fat Boy Kim, threatening thermo-nuclear war against the United States one day, reportedly having his ex-girlfriend machine-gunned the next.
Our frog-green tourist coach kicks into life and our black-suited minder, Mr Hyun, breathes into the mike: ‘At the moment the situation is very tense. Nobody knows when the war will be provoked but we will be safe. Our bus has the mark of the Korean International Travel Company so the Americans won’t strike our bus. Ha ha ...’
Is the threat of nuclear war real? Has it ever been? Three words: I don’t know. What I do know is this: they took us along a vast motorway. There were no cars. They took us to a university. There were no students. They took us to a library. There were no books, at least no books worth reading and certainly no George Orwell’s
1984
– I did ask; a bottling plant, no bottles; an electricity-generating machine factory, no electricity; a children’s camp, no children; a farm, no animals;a hospital, patients, but only in the morning. Then the lights went out. The dictatorship tells lies about ordinary things.
The evidence from our eight days inside North Korea, when Kim Jong Un’s threats of thermo-nuclear war were at their most frenzied, suggests – how toput this diplomatically? – that the regime is full of dross. If North Korea launches a nuclear strike, the regime and everybody in it will die. The working hypothesis of
North Korea Undercover
is that Kim Jong Un’s talk of nuclear war is a confidence trick and that the Pyongyang bluff is blinding us to a human rights tragedy onan immense scale.
To make the confidence trick work, the regime keeps everybody – outsiders and its own people – in the dark. Understanding what happens in front of your eyes is beyond strange. You are left wondering at your own grip on reality, like themoment in
The Matrix
when Neo sees a black cat walk by, and then another black cat walks by just like the first one, causing Trinity to warn him: ‘A
déjá vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.’ During our trip we saw no cats and one dog.
Time and again a glitch in the North Korean matrix has you scratching your head. Did I see that? Is that for real? It is, of course, deliberately crepuscular, an exquisitely constructed fog machine. North Korea feels like Kafka written in an alphabet no one can read. But in the murk, the regime hides its cunning.
Kim the Third’s hysterical threat of nuclear war is part of a bleak but clever logic that has kept the dynasty in power long past its two great benefactors – Soviet Russia and Communist China – are dead and gone or mutated beyond all recognition.
The madness shines so bright it’s hard to makeout the survivalist logic lurking in the dark. Go see Kim Il Sung. The Great Leader, the Sun of the Nation, the Iron All-Victorious General, the Marshal of the Mighty Republic, the Eternal President is the subject of total love from his nation of 23 million people – or is it three million less? – and grants them an audience, every day of the year.
1
Accessible, yes, but you can’t talk to the nation’s head of state because Kim the First has not been alive these past nineteen years. This makes the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea the world’s only necrocracy. That is: government by zombie.
The living-dead god lies in warmth and light in a glassbox, a waxwork. The hideous goitre or growth the size of a grapefruit on his neck so artfully airbrushed out of all photographs in later life has been, in death, surgically removed. But be wary of mocking the zombie-god too much: in1945 this thing in the glass box created the most successful tyranny in modern times, a hereditary gangsterism whose lock on power is still strong.
In life, Kim Il Sung was a thug, hand-picked byStalin’s gang to
take over the half-nation which emerged from Japanese occupation in the wake of the second world war. In 1950 Kim One, convinced that the people of the South would flock to his banner, started the Korean Civil War in which around three million died. Three years later the boundaries of his state were back to where they had been when he started the killing. At the De-Militarized Zone or DMZ, the colonel in charge told us that the Americans had started the war, a lie so big every North Korean appears to believe it. Kim the First created a personality cult that has brainwashed his people for three generations, and a gulag system for anyone who questions that brainwashing. At Pyongyang’s Kumsusan Memorial Palace our minders – good people, zombie master – made it clear that we must bow to Kim the First, and we did, three times.
In a second chamber, the Great Leaders son, the Dear Leader, lies in a second glass box. The story goes that the son had the father murdered after a bitter row in which the ailing and flatulent old man finally woke up to the starvation afflicting his people.
2
Funnily enough, they whisper, all the doctors and security agents attending the dying Father of the Nation died mysteriously or vanished into the gulag.
3
True? False? Who knows? The best book about North Korea, someone said, was written in 1592 and it is called
Richard III
.
Kim Jong Il in death still looks like Bad Elvis. Hisimage to the rest of the world was nailed by
South Parfk's
brilliant puppet show film,
Team America
, in which he sings:
I’m So Ronery
So ronery
So ronery and sadry arone.
I dared to sing that in North Korea while no one was listening, and even so it scared the pants off me. The puppet-masters appear to have got the
roneriness
wrong. Kim Two reportedly pleasured a human bed of hand-picked North Korean beauties and when he got bored with them, busty whores from Sweden and Bavaria were flown in for his entertainment.
4
For a longtime, the West wondered whether he was a monosyllabic halfwit with only one sentence ever uttered in public: ‘Gloryto the peoples heroic military!’ But the real man was smarter than that. Defectors report that K2 was a sly, thoughtful Bond-villain-without-the-white-pussy-cat, a man of some charm and a self-deprecating wit. At one of his lavish parties for the elite, he told the beautiful South Korean actress whom he’d had kidnapped, Choi Un Hee: ‘I’m as small as a midget’s turd, aren’t I?’
When a group of dancing girls started screaming:‘Long live the Great Leader!’ Kim Two told Choi’s husband, the South Korean film director Shin Sang Ok, also kidnapped, ‘All that is bogus. It’s just apretence.’
5
He could say that, but no one else would dare.
And how can you satirize this? That during the 1990s Kim Jong Il presided over a man-made famine in which as many as three million people died. Zeros dull the mind. A North Korean defector told me the story of why he got out. The decision was forced on him, he said, after histhree-year-old niece, at the height of the famine, gorged herself on dried corn, and then her stomach burst. They call the famine the ‘Arduous March’. Orwell’s great insight into the totalitarian mind-set was to point out how Big Brother took over language and rendered it his servant, and that people
with free minds had to push back against this insidious linguistic trick. North Korean Newspeak may call the March Arduous but it was also wholly unnecessary, an indictment of the regimes failure to feed its own people. This malfunction is even more dark when you consider that just onthe other side of the DMZ lies one of the most successful societies on earth. South Korea is rich and, these days, democratically handsome. (It has its own troubles too. South Korea has one of the highest suiciderates in the world, with it being the most common cause of death for those under forty.) Part of North Korea’s tragedy is that it cannot evolve into a tyranny less harsh. All it can do is stay the same, or die and be swallowed up by its southern twin, which is, according to some estimates, around thirty-eight times richer, its citizenson average three inches taller than their northern brothers and sisters. As regime death is not an option for the Kim dynasty and the Pyongyang elite, the nation lurches on, zombie-like, pitiable, blackly comic and scaryin equal measure.
The United Nations estimates that one in four of the country’s children is currently suffering from hunger and malnutrition – and 4 per cent areseverely malnourished.
6
These figures may well understate the true horror. Faking statistics in a country with no journalism is easy. But even if we take these figures at face value, it’s likely severalthousand infants and children, in the poorest parts of the land, far away from the Pyongyang Belt, are starving to death asyou read this book. Had we seen them out of our tourist coach, our minders would have said: ‘Nophotos.’
And then there is the suffering of the invisibles in the gulag. The North Korean regime runs a system of concentration camps in the burning cold of the mountains in which the best estimate is one
million people have died over the three generations the Kimdynasty has been in power.
Prisoners inside the gulag suffer ‘unspeakable atrocities’, according to a preliminary report by a United Nations Commission of Inquiry (COI) into Human Rightsin the DPRK. North Korea blanked an invitation to take part, but once hearings in Seoul began, the DPRK’s official news agency, KCNA, described them as slanderous and labelled the hearing participants as ‘human scum’.
The head of the inquiry, Australian judge Michael Kirkby, said: ‘Truth is a defence against “slander”. If any of the testimony the COI has heard on political prison camps, international abductions, torture, starvation, inter-generationalpunishment and so forth can be shown to be untrue, the Commission invites the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to produce evidence to that effect. An ounce of evidence is worth far more than many pounds of insults and baseless attacks. So far, however, the evidence that the COI has heard has largely pointed in one direction – and evidence to the contrary is lacking.’
7
Do the maths: three million dead in the war Kim Il Sung started; add three million dead from the famine under Kim Jong Il; add one million dead in the gulag and other fatal consequences of political and economic oppression and that equals: seven million people.
8
Kill seven million people and you would think everyone in North Korea lives in gibbering fear. But Zombie and Sons are adored. People are happy, joking, witty, full of fun. I’ve been to a dozen or so dictatorships, more often than not undercover: Communist Romania, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Iran, Iraq under
Saddam, Libya under Gaddafi, Syria, Chechnya, Zimbabwe, Serbia under Milosevic, Cuba, Belarus and North Korea. The latter was the tyranny in which I felt the least sense of personal threat. You can get mugged in Cuba.
Ordinary tyrants demand devotion. In North Korea, the devotion comes pre-programmed. Our minders suggested we bow to Kim Jong Il, too, and we did, three times. On the wayout of the Mausoleum, two women were weeping. Nothing compared to the mass mourning which took place after he was announced dead in 2011. Watch it on YouTube. It is a terrifying exhibition of mass grief for a man who must be judged by rational minds as a monster. Do they mean it? Or is this mass fakery in the twenty-first century?
9