North Korea Undercover (4 page)

Before transmission, a few students were worried about appearing in our film. We blobbed them out. We did not mention the LSE, nor did we ever intend to. But then, of course, a very public row blew up with arguments on both sides.
²⁴
The BBC Trust is examining complaints about our
Panorama.
For that reason, now is not the time and place to discuss these issues further.

More than six million viewers watched our
Panorama
: ‘North Korea Undercover’. That’s one in ten people in Britain.
²⁵
They saw the ordinary lies the regime told us and listened to defectors – testimony the regime does not want heard. It was broadcast on 15 April, the ‘holiest’ day in the North Korean calendar, it being Kim Il Sung’sbirthday, timing which left one of our defector contributors gurgling with joy.

North Korea remains the most rigidly controlled nation onearth, but some of the technological marvels of the twenty-first century are beginning to melt the ice-pack. Twomillion people have mobile phones, but they can only use them for internal calls. At the DMZ, one of the students I was travelling with switched on his iPhone and picked up a signal from phone masts just across the borderin South Korea. He tweeted: ‘At the DMZ, #JustChillin.’ I switched on, and also picked upa signal. If we could do that, so could a North Korean using a smuggled Chinese mobile phone. The regime’s icy grip on information is beginning to crack.

Yet the Kim dynasty remains in place almost a quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps the greatest mystery of this dark nation is: why haven’t the people overthrown the tyranny? Barbara Demick’s brilliant, harrowing study of the faminein the 1990s is called
Nothing to Envy
.
²⁶
But a quick survey of the states that have a stake in what happens in North Korea – South Korea, China, Japan and the United States – could be summarized as ‘nothing to gain’. South Korea may dislike the tyranny, but does it really wantto deal with 20-odd million half-starved and miserably poor compatriots? Does China want a US ally creeping right up to its border? Does Japan want a bigger, stronger all-Korea competitor? Does the United States and the rest of the world want a terrifying transition, when the nuclear-armed tyranny falls and something different takes its place? Or is stasis the lesser evil? In 1987, President Reagan went to West Berlin and told the Sovietleader: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’ Nothing like that bold command is being said today.

The threat of Armageddon cannot be lightly dismissed. Professor Brian Myers, an expert on North Korean ideology, told me: ‘We may see a thermo-nuclear war. I’m sure its not the North Koreans’ plan to unleash that kind of a thing but it might come to that as a result of a disastrous miscalculation.’ The counter argument is that in the darkness of North Korea wemay be missing something darker yet: that fear of change and in particular an over-hyped fear of thermo-nuclear war, a war which Kim Jong Un must know he would lose, very badly, very quickly, is obscuring the reality of a nation suffering immense misery. The tyrant’s threat is masking his people’s agony.

Everything here represents my own views and not those of the BBC. If you believe the press cuttings, there are times when I must seem to my colleagues a random trouble generator. I apologize to them, and to the great British public, who pay my wages, but to do difficult journalism maybe you have to be a member of the awkward squad.

But I’m a firm believer of shining light indark places. I’ve written books about four states of mind-lock not essentially dissimilar to North Korea: Ceausescu’s Romania, which I visited in 1985 and then in 1989, when the leader’s plans for Christmas ended in a firing squad;
²⁷
Saddam’s Iraq;
²⁸
Lukashenka’s Belarus;
²⁹
and the Church of Scientology, terrifying and creepy in 2007 and, at the time of writing in 2013, less so.
³⁰

To understand what is going on in North Korea now, ithelps that Romanian Communists, Baathist Iraqis and many Scientologists once assured me with grave solemnity of their undying loyalty to the powers that be, only for them to reveal a few years later that they had been brainwashed. Regimes fall; statues get smashed; the concrete of the mind crumbles to dust.

Outside No Animal Farm, there was a giant statue to Kim the First, surrounded by happy peasants loaded with bushels of corn. Our minders suggested we bow – the seventh time that day – and we did. Two weeks later, in South Korea, I asked a defector and the leader of a brave organization with a Monty Pythonesque name, the North Korean People’s Liberation Front, if he had ever seen any graffiti. He said no at first but then he grew animated, remembering seeing one graffito in his whole time in the North. It was in a town in the north-east of the country, on the wall of a university hospital, and at six o’clock in the morning. Someone had scrawled: ‘Down with Kim Jong If. The defector drew the ideograms in my notebook, showing how the phrase in Korean is written ‘Kim Jong Il – down with’ and that the name was clear and bold and the last part hurried, as if it had been dashed out. Half an hour later a crowd of about thirty had gathered, the defector said. Then the police arrived, and painted it out.

One day I shall return to North Korea. The regime is notas strong as it looks. One day the statues of the two mass-murderers will come crashing down. I will find that graffito artist. And I shall bow before him or her – and this time I shall mean it.

¹
Andrei Lankov:
From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea 1945-1960,
Hurst, London, 2002, p70.

²
Peter Carlson: ‘Sins of the Son’,
Washington Post
, 11 May 2003, quoting defector Hwang Jang Yop.

³
Victor Cha:
The Impossible State
, Bodley Head, London, 2012, p89.

⁴
Jasper Becker:
Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Rooming Threat of North Korea
, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, pl38.

⁵
Shin Sang Ok, Choi Un Hee,
The Kingdom of Kim,
Tonga Ilbosa, Seoul, 1988.

⁶
http://www.bigstory.ap.org/article/un-more-14-nkorean-children-malnourished

⁷
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/UnspeakableatrocitiesreportbyColinNorthKorea.aspx

⁸
Becker gives high numbers for the famine's death toll in
Rogue Regime
, p209. Lankov gives low numbers in
The Real North Korea
, Oxford University Press, 2013, p80.

⁹
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSWN6Qj98Iw

¹⁰
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/17/us-korea-north-crimes-idUSBRE98G0B920130917

¹¹
Watch at 8 mins, 45 secs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzerbXJqzZc

¹²
UN Outer Space Treaty: http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/SpaceLaw/outerspt.html

¹³
Robert Jay Lifton: Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China, Norton, New York, 1961.

¹⁴
Donald Kirk: ‘The AP Plays Defense on North Korea’,
38 North
, 22 March 2013, http://38north.org/2013/03/dkirk032213/

¹⁵
Michael Breen:
Kim Jong Il: North Korea's Dear Leader
, John Wiley, Singapore, 2012, pl45.

¹⁶
http://thediplomat.eom/2013/04/25/debunking-panorama-paranoia-north-korea-tour-leader-simon-cockerell/?all=true

¹⁷
See
Chapter 17
: ‘The American Who Went to North Korea and Stayed’.

¹⁸
One travel writer was asked, prior to being let into North Korea by a tour company, to promise not to ‘write about North Korea's human rights record or in any way insult the Dear Leader’. Carole Cadwalladr: ‘The strange innocence of the “axis of evil”’,
Observer
, 14 February 2010.

¹⁹
John Everard:
Only Beautiful, Please: A British Diplomat in North Korea
, Stanford University, Stanford, 2012, pl39.

²⁰
Tim Hume, ‘His dear leader: Meet North Korea's secret weapon – an IT consultant from Spain’,
Independent
, 21 January 2012, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/his-dear-leader-meet-north-koreas-secret-weapon--an-it-consultant-from-spain-6291303.html

²¹
Inside North Korea: “It's a mad, sad and bad place”’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22003715

²²
Craig Calhoun: Director, LSE, Beijing, 20 March 2013: ‘What Threatens Global Capitalism Now?’, LSE China Lecture Series, http://www.lse.ac.uk/intranet/LSEServices/ERD/LSEChina/LSE-China-Lecture-Series/LSE-China-Lecture-Series.aspx

    These days my old university gets money from China in return for teaching Chinese senior government officials. LSE-China: ‘Executive Public Policy Training Programme for high level Chinese Government officials has been developed and delivered by LSE and PKU’. This sets out: ‘contributions from alumni, friends, trusts and corporations in and from China have supported scholarships, innovative learning and research programmes and developed teaching facilities on campus at LSE.’ The scale of funds from the Chinese state entities is not clear. The issue has worried one LSE professor.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/intranet/LSEServices/ERD/LSEChina/pdf/LSE%20and%20China%20brochure.pdf

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1363222/The-day-LSE-sold-soul-Libya-BP-chief-makes-oil-deal-Gaddafi-drags-prestigious-university-disrepute.html

²³
Lankov,
From Stalin to Kim Il Sung
, pviii.

²⁴
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2308876/BBC-crew-used-students-university-human-shields-film-undercover-North-Korea.html Josh Halliday:
Guardian
, ‘Students say LSE has placed them at “more risk” from North Korea’, 17 April 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/apr/17/north-korea-students-criticise-lse

²⁵
5.4 million watched
Panorama
‘North Korea Undercover’ on BBC1 and an additional 800,000 watched it on BBC iPlayer. On YouTube, the two most watched sites showing the documentary have had more than 500,000 viewers at the time of writing. The film has also been broadcast around the world by other networks. Our film, with 6.7 million viewers, may be the most watched documentary on North Korea ever.

²⁶
Barbara Demick:
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
, Spiegel and Grau, New York, 2009.

²⁷
John Sweeney:
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu
, Hutchinson, London, 1990.

²⁸
John Sweeney:
Trading with the Enemy
, Pan, London, 1993.

²⁹
John Sweeney:
Big Daddy – Lukashenka, Tyrant of Belarus
, Silvertail Books, London, 2012 (Kindle e-book).

³⁰
John Sweeney:
The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology,
Silvertail Books, London, 2013.

1

In the Land of the Plastic Toad

Of the five most creepy buildings in the world – the squat grey toad of the KGB/FSB head office in Lubyanka Square, Moscow; the alien spaceship-like Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang; the Church of Scientology’s blue concrete angel on L Ron Hubbard Way in LA; Enver Hoxha’s marble pyramid mausoleum in Tirana, Albania; and the Pyongyang Planetarium – the latter is the creepiest. A giant disco-ball of a Saturn lookalike with ferro-concrete ring, it stands proud on the plain en route between the airport’s cattle-shed arrivals hall and the Big Zombie, Pyongyang itself, visible from the mainroad through a sickly copse.

There’s something of the coelacanth about the futurology of the recent past, back then when men wore big specs and women had big hair. The Pyongyang Saturn was supposed to project just what an essential part of the future the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea would be. And the present-day reality, briefly glimpsed through the windows of our coach? The planet’s surface is decorated with mirror squares, so that you half expect to see John

Travolta in white suit strut his stuff beneath it. But the Bee Gees aren’t big in North Korea and the mirrors have long since lost their shine. Across the Pyongyang basin a high mist or low cloud clung to the surface of the earth – nothing like as acrid as the pollution in Beijing, but gloomy nevertheless – and the effect of the great planet not shining was of a future gone to the grave.

You feel like a time-traveller, or that you are locked inside the set of a bad science fiction movie, one that goes on for 45,000 square miles. The obverse is also truefor North Koreans making the opposite journey, leaving their world and travelling through the looking glass to encounter what feels like another planet. ‘I felt like a frog that had just come out of its pit, from which it had contemplated the circle of sky outlined by the rim, and taken it for the whole of the world. I had passed through to the other side of the mirror,’ writes the defector Hyok Kang in his book
This is Paradise!
¹

The ‘bad sci-fi’ trope echoes intravellers’ tales from North Korea like an over-familiar nightmare. The wonderful Italian writer Tiziano Terzani first came to North Korea in 1980. He wrote that the plane that twice a week brings the rare travellers from Beijing to Pyongyang is ‘una macehina del tempo’ – a time machine.
²
Bradley K. Martin, an American journalist, made the same trip one year before, and opens his book with a quote from
The Time Machine
by H. G. Wells: ‘The shop, the advertisement, traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world, was gone.’
³
Christopher Hitchens, who, journalists being largely
banned, also visited North Korea in the guise of a university lecturer, found it so extraterrestrial he called his piece: ‘Visit to a Small Planet’.
⁴