A YEAR IN
PYONGYANG
Andrew
Holloway
December 1988
2
Introduction: Andrew Holloway in North Korea
While this
website advertises my own work, that is by no means its only function. In fact
the immediate spur to finally get it done was a desire to publicize someone
else’s. Andrew Holloway lived for a year in Pyongyang, and it was all my fault.
He wrote a book about it, but it never got published till now. This is my
walk-on part in his tale.
It all goes back to 1986, when I
at last got into North Korea for the first time. Among many memorable
encounters, one was with what I’d once - as a veteran of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia:
they expelled me, but that’s another story - have called a Rhodie. A middle-aged
white Zimbabwean, complete with Kim Il-sung badge (meaning he worked there),
propping up a Pyongyang bar - with a look that said he’d far rather be
somewhere else.
His name was David Richardson,
and he worked as a reviser for the Foreign Languages Publishing House. If you
ever wondered how the works of the Great Leader and other North Korean
propaganda at least end up in decent English (or French, German, et al), it’s
thanks to people like David. The job is sometimes called polishing. First,
armies of locals toil to translate the Leader’s obiter dicta into what they
fondly imagine is English. But then they need a native speaker to check that
it’s right. So at any given time FLPH usually has half a dozen assorted
foreigners doing this job for the major languages.
Good for them. In this area North
Korean standards are higher than in the South, where all too often bad English
spoils the show: as recently in signs for the ’Worldcup’ (sic). A rare northern
blooper was when a hagiography of U No Hu was published in Arabic as “Kim
Il-sung Is God”: not calculated to impress devout Muslims. In English it came
out as “Kim Il-sung: A Divine Man”: not so much blasphemy as high camp.
Needless to say this is not
exciting work; nor was Pyongyang in 1987 / 1988 an exciting place. David had
done two years, and was ready to leave - but it seemed they wouldn’t let him go
without a replacement. I pledged to do my best, returned to England with a
batch of application forms, sent a notice round Leeds University, and called a
meeting. A dozen people turned up, mostly students soon to graduate. I warned
them of the rigours of life in Pyongyang - and its risks. (Ali Lameda, a
Venezuelan communist who was a reviser in the 1960s, unwisely told the North
Koreans how dire their propaganda was. He got six years’ solitary confinement
until Nicolae Ceausescu, no less, secured his release.)
I hope I repeated these warnings
to the odd straggler who missed the meeting but came to see me afterwards. One
was fortyish, not a student but a social worker. I remember wondering what
would prompt him to contemplate such an unusual change of direction. Evidently
serious, he borrowed some materials from Leeds University Korea Project’s small
library. And that was it. As far as I recall, we only met just that once.
Being but the postman, I didn’t
systematically follow up on what I’d set in chain. But I heard on the grapevine
that several people did apply for the job. Some got replies, and more than one
was messed around as regards on/off offers, date changes, etc: all par for the
course. In 1990 I was in Pyongyang again and met two young British revisers;
one of whom, Michael Harrold, was a Leeds graduate who’d come to my meeting.
Michael eventually stayed six years, which must be a record. He mentioned
others who’d been and gone - it happens, especially there - but I didn’t take
in the names and details.
Fast forward five more years, to
a spring day in 1995 when I suddenly caught up with an awful lot all at once. A
package came in the university internal mail, from someone in physics that I
didn’t know, Hugh Hubbard. It was a book-length manuscript by one Andrew
Holloway, describing his year in Pyongyang during 1997-98. He’d written it soon
after his return, but for whatever reason had taken it no further. And now
never would, for in January he’d died of stomach cancer. He wanted me to have a
copy.
Like I said, a terrible lot to
take in all at once. It still feels weird to think I was partly responsible for
a whole year in the life of someone I barely knew, and now never will. And too
sad: having read his book, there was so much I’d love to have asked him. How I
wish he’d got in touch. But he of course had other things on his mind; like
cancer. Since then, I’ve done all too little with Andrew’s book. I’ve shown it
to people with an interest in North Korea; copies have been taken here, in
America, and in (South) Korea. But I wasn’t sure if it would attract a
commercial publisher; nor did I ever find the time for the editing work that
the manuscript would require if it were to come out as a book. It stayed in my
files, and intermittently on my conscience.
But then they invented the
Internet, and a whole new way of making things known. I’d vaguely thought about
having a website, but it was the idea of at last giving Andrew’s work the
circulation it deserved that spurred me on. Seeking family permission led me to
his son Ross - who turned out to be a web designer. Some things are meant to
be.
Ideally the book still wants
editing, and at some point will be. But after all this time I just wanted it
out there without further delay. Besides, the odd mistake hardly detracts from
a unique document. Memoirs of living in Pyongyang are rare enough, and I know
none like this. Andrew brings a fresh perspective to an area beset by clich. A
socialist of the old school, he went to North Korea without the usual
prejudice. Yet as an honest observer, he tells what he sees - and as
Yorkshiremen do, calls a spade a bloody shovel.
This was not the best year of his
life. Frank about the frustrations, he still tries to view North Korea on its
own terms: to see the mad sense it all makes. He knows the people are not the
government, and he brings them to life. There are unforgettable vignettes, but
also thoughtful reflection and a dry humour. Andrew is unsparing of himself
too, even if (as his son hints) there were a few personal adventures which he
chose to omit.
That was in the 1980s, but this
is by no means just a period piece. Today’s revisers lead a less lonely life,
thanks to the famine which since 1995 has added a hundred or so aid workers to
Pyongyang’s expatriate community. There are even weekly discos, a delight
unimaginable in Andrew’s day. But has North Korea itself changed? Not in
essence, I reckon; not really, not yet. Thus an account written over a decade
ago can still give the authentic feel of this deeply peculiar place, and what
makes it tick. And not a few of Andrew’s comments are prescient of the
disastrous decline that was yet to come.
But judge for yourself. I don’t know if Andrew Holloway
would have thanked me for his year in Pyongyang, but I can only thank him for
what he made of it. In leaving us such an unusual and insightful account, he’s
done both North Korea and himself proud. I hope he knew that; I wish I’d known
him; and I wish he were still here to see his work up on the Web for all to
read. Except in Pyongyang, needless to say. But that’ll come.
Aidan Foster-Carter
December 2002
Chapter 1
There are times
in life when even the dullest and most complacent among us feel the need to
make a change. It was at such a time in my life that a friend drew my attention
to a job she had seen advertised on a Leeds University notice board. It was an
unusual job in a little known country. The remuneration was not extravagant,
but I estimated it would be sufficient for me to meet my ongoing commitments
and save enough to tide me over on my return until I could find another job.
The country was the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea, better known in the west as North Korea. The job
entailed raising translations into English that Koreans had made of the works
of their President, Kim Il Sung, his son and heir apparent Kim Jong Il, and
sundry other propaganda.
A certain amount of kudos seemed
to attach to this job. The advert stated that the successful applicant would be
the first Briton to reside in this country since before the Second World War.
The application forms were being issued by a Leeds University lecturer named
Aidan Foster-Carter. North Korea was his special field of study. He had
recently made a visit to the country when he had been asked to try and recruit
a new English Language Reviser. Before submitting my application I took the
opportunity of asking him what I could expect to find there. What he had to say
was mostly reassuring.
Halfway through September I
received a letter from Pyongyang. It was from David Richardson, a Zimbabwean
and the present incumbent of the post. He informed me that I was likely to be
offered the job. He had been doing it for two years. He said that there were
disadvantages to living in Pyongyang, particularly “this business of the mail”,
but on the whole the advantages outweighed the disadvantages. A fortnight later
he rang me at work to confirm my appointment. He added that a formal offer
would arrive in the post shortly. I experienced a mixture of consternation and
excitement. It looked as if for the first and probably only time in my life, I
was about to do something different. I quelled my apprehensions by telling
myself that no matter what sort of an experience it was, at least it would be
an adventure. Some adventure. Being marooned on a desert island is undoubtedly
a sort of adventure, as is doing time in jail for an offence one has not
committed. But looked at from the right perspective, getting up each day, going
to work and pursuing one’s banal, petty bourgeois, provincial pleasures are
also a form of adventure, and a lot more fun as well.
At the time I applied, all I knew
about North Korea was that it was a communist state situated on a peninsula in
North East Asia bordered on the North by China and the Soviet Union and
opposite the islands of Japan; that it had a reputation for being bizarre and
isolationist, an Asian equivalent to Albania; that there had been a war on the
Korean peninsula in the early fifties in which United Nations troops,
predominantly American but including contingents from Britain and a number of
other countries, had participated against the north; that the war had ended in
a stalemate with Korea partitioned into two countries, a capitalist south and a
communist north; and most vividly I recalled that the North Korea football team
had pulled off some notable surprises in the 1966 World Cup Finals. When I
received David Richardson’s letter I thought I had better expand my knowledge.
I went down to Leeds City Library but I could find virtually no material on
Korea at all, or at least not on North Korea. I contacted Aidan Foster-Carter,
who lent me a couple of books and several articles. This is the gist of what I
read.
Korea, it seems has always been weird. The Koreans are an
ancient people, established on their peninsula since time immemorial. For many
centuries they maintained their distinct national identity, culture and
independence, periodically repelling invasions from China and the Japanese
samurai across the water. Independent and inward looking to the point of
xenophobia, Korea was traditionally known as the hermit kingdom. As can happen
to inward looking societies, for example North Korea today, the hermit kingdom
began to fall behind the rest of the world in social and economic development.
In the late nineteenth century it was feudal, corrupt, backward, and an easy
prey for the Japanese who had long established informal domination over the
peninsula before formally annexing it as a colony in 1910. It remained a
Japanese colony until the end of the Second World War. When Japan fell in 1945,
the Americans came in from the South while the Soviet troops descended from the
North. They bumped into each other at the thirty-eighth parallel, about two
thirds of the way up towards the northern border. The country of Korea was now
partitioned just as Germany had been a few months earlier.
The Americans and the Russians set about installing native
governments in their respective spheres of influence. They each aspired to set
up the type of native government that would retain its territory within their
sphere of influence after they had physically withdrawn. Among the Soviet
forces was a Red Army major, a Korean who used to be called something different
but had changed his name to Kim Il Sung, literally Kim the Sun, to make himself
sound more impressive. He enjoyed a degree of popularity in Korea, particularly
in the North. He had previously conducted a brave if ineffectual guerrilla
resistance against the Japanese in the northern border areas and in South
Manchuria. He was young, only thirty-three in 1945, charismatic, and a good
orator. He already had his own little bit of communist political machinery in
place from the resistance days. The Russians had little difficulty in
installing him in power.
It was not proving so easy for the Americans down in the
South to find a comparable political figure who could be relied upon to adhere
to the ideals and policies to which they thought a good Korean should adhere
and who could command sufficient popular support to maintain stable government.
Reunification of Korea was out of the question. To the Americans it would have
meant delivering the whole peninsula on a plate to the evil forces of
communism. Kim the Sun was popular throughout Korea as a resistance hero and he
had enough organisation to impose his will on the dissenters. As it was, even
with all the resources of their military government, the American authorities
had more than enough trouble rigging elections to give a veneer of democratic
legitimacy to the puppet dictatorship on the man of their choice, Syngman Rhee.
In 1950, Kim the Sun decided that the time was ripe to
reunify the nation. The Korean War started on June 25th, 1950. Three days later
the North’s forces entered Seoul, the capital of the South and formerly of the
whole country. Syngman Rhee was not terribly popular. His troops did not fight
enthusiastically. Within a few weeks the North’s forces had nearly taken over
the whole country. The Americans manipulated the United Nations into
authorising a UN expeditionary force to drive the communists back.
Troops from sixteen nations took part in the invasion of
Korea under the aegis of the UN, but by far the bulk of the men and armour were
supplied by the USA. Confronted by better trained and infinitely better
equipped forces, the men of the Korean People’s Army were driven back North as
quickly as they had initially come South. They were driven all the way back to
the Amnok River on the Chinese border. There they were reinforced by a small
detachment of a million Chinese. Now it was the turn of the UN forces to
retreat.
The fighting came to an end three years later. An armistice
was signed. Territorially everyone was more or less where they were when they
started. The country remained divided roughly along the thirtyeighth parallel.
Demographically, the population of the North had been reduced from eleven
million to nine million. The countryside of the North had been ravaged and
napalmed. Its towns and cities had been bombed to rubble. In 1950 the
population of Pyongyang was estimated to be around 200,000. According to the
Americans’ official statistics, they dropped approximately a quarter of a
million bombs on it. The North Koreans predictably contend that this is a gross
underestimate but one and a quarter bombs per person sounds like pretty serious
warfare by anyone’s standards.
It came as a considerable shock
to me to discover the extent of the destruction that had been inflicted on the
North of Korea. I always considered myself a reasonably well-informed sort of
person but I had no idea, and I doubt that was atypical in this, that the
carnage in Korea had been on a scale comparable to Vietnam. Shortly after my
arrival in Pyongyang, a British film crew came over to make a television series
about the war and so perhaps people are now better informed. I hope so because
the Korean War should take its rightful place alongside the war in Vietnam as a
permanent symbol and reminder of the hideous excesses of post-war US foreign
policy and the dangers of irresponsible militarism. Also it is impossible to
understand why North Korea has developed as it has over the past thirty-five
years without a true appreciation of the
holocaust that
swept the country between 1950 and 1953. And the developments in North Korea
and the Korean peninsula generally ought to be better understood, because the
thirty-eighth parallel is one of the world’s most sensitive potential trigger
points for global disaster.
Of course it could be argued that
the North Koreans were lucky to have got off so lightly. If MacArthur had had
his way and not been recalled by Eisenhower, he would have dropped the atom
bomb on them and their Chinese allies.
Incredibly, the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea did emerge phoenix-like from the ashes of war with
Kim Il Sung still in power. In the twenty years after the war it achieved what
was by all accounts a miraculous economic recovery. The towns and cities were
rebuilt. The countryside was revived. Industries were restored and expanded.
The transport network was repaired. By the early seventies the DPRK had a very
healthy economy by the standards of developing countries. It had achieved
remarkable success, not only in terms of living standards but in creating an
economy that was independent and to an extent immunised against the effects of
first world recessions, unlike many developing countries, including quite
prosperous ones, whose economies still depended on a few primary commodities to
pay for imported goods, and whose industries were substantially owned by first
world capital. The DPRK chose to minimise oil imports by exploiting its natural
coal and water resources to generate power. It made its own cement. It made its
own steel to make its own trains, trucks, and tractors. In spite of the fact
that its terrain is predominantly mountainous and arable land scarce, it became
virtually self-sufficient in food. It even managed to clothe its own population
by inventing an anthracite-based synthetic fibre called vindon.
The reason this economic recovery
has been described as miraculous is that it was accomplished from scratch with
limited foreign aid and technical assistance. As well as being decimated by the
war, the country had been subject for thirty-five of the previous forty years
to Japanese colonial rule. Although there had been development during this
period in line with Japanese interests, the bulk of the administration and
technical expertise had been supplied by Japanese personnel. At the time of
liberation in 1945, there was not a single institution of higher education in
the North of Korea. So in 1953 there was a chronic shortage of professional and
technical expertise to go with a ravaged countryside and a bombed-out
industrial base.
Financial and technical
assistance was forthcoming from the Chinese and the Soviets. There is no way
that the North Koreans could have managed without it. However, the scale of
assistance was limited due to Kim Il Sung’s obstinate refusal to accept political
conditions in return for aid. There were even times when his independent
attitude led to a withdrawal of aid. From the outset of liberation from the
Japanese, Kim Il Sung was determined that his country was going to be fully
independent and not a Soviet satellite like the Warsaw Pact countries, nor for
that matter a client state of China either.
Another factor that must be taken
into account in assessing the DPRK’s achievement is that ever since the war it
has felt it necessary to invest an extremely high proportion of its budget in
military expenditure. If the Americans and the South Korean authorities are
sincere in their expressed anxiety about possible aggression from the North,
then the North is equally apprehensive about them. Technically the war is still
in progress. No peace agreement has ever been signed, only an armistice.
I learned that the North Koreans
had shown considerable ingenuity in accomplishing their economic miracle in the
face of such daunting odds. I read how their scientists would, for example,
take an imported tractor to pieces and reassemble it, identifying each part and
working out how the parts linked together, until they were able to manufacture
a tractor by themselves and to progress from there to the mass production of
tractors and a fully fledged indigenous tractor industry.
The other ingredients for the economic miracle were
discipline, organisation, frugal living and hard toil, which were guaranteed
not by terror but by outstanding totalitarian organisation and ideological
motivation supplied by the Workers’ Party of Korea, under the apparently highly
autocratic leadership of Kim Il Sung. It was known that there were purges of
opposition factions, particularly in the fifties, but unlikely that they were
carried out on a large scale, being confined to prominent public figures and
not involving sections of the general public. Even in recent times it has not
been unknown for recalcitrant ministers to be reported seriously injured or
killed in road traffic accidents, which is odd because the DPRK has an
extremely low volume of road traffic and, moreover, most of the roads in and
around the capital tend to be very wide, having been planned in anticipation of
an age of glorious prosperity that was expected to follow the rapid
industrialisation of the fifties and sixties. I read that Kim Il Sung had
secured his authority by gaining the unquestioning loyalty of the masses
through a personality cult that exceeded those of Mao or Stalin, that he was
always referred to as the Great Leader, and that he was about to establish the
world’s first communist dynasty by preparing for his son, Kim Jong Il, known as
the Dear Leader, to succeed him.
I also read that since the great leap forward of the early
post-war years, the rate of economic growth in the DPRK had slumped
dramatically. If the economy was not totally stagnant it was lagging far behind
the leading developing countries, which include South Korea. Although the DPRK
had succeeded in building an independent national economy on its own heavy
industrial base, further development was impeded by an acute shortage of hard
currency. North Korea was able to supply its own population with all the basic
necessities without relying on imports, but it was not producing quality goods
to compete in the export market. Without adequate income from exports, it
lacked the hard currency to import consumer luxuries and, more important, to
buy access to the sophisticated new technology that has in recent years
revolutionised industrial processes in the rest of the world, and without which
their industry must become increasingly obsolete and their exports even less
competitive. The country cut itself off from the normal channels of
international monetary assistance by adopting a policy in the seventies of
refusing to pay debts in time of difficulty instead of requesting reschedules.
I gathered that the dilemma facing North Korea in the late nineteen eighties was
how to gain access to the new technology to improve its economic performance
without compromising its economic or political independence, and that the
dilemma was all the more acute because the other Korea’s economy, developed
with American and Japanese capital, is booming.
Armed with such sketchy information, when I eventually
arrived in Pyongyang, I found myself immeasurably better informed that the
average North Korean citizen, who has been conditioned to believe that the
Japanese capitulation in World War Two was precipitated not by what happened at
Hiroshima but by the unstoppable advance of the Korean People’s Revolutionary
Army under its brilliant, iron-willed, ever-victorious commander, General Kim
Il Sung, sun of the nation and lodestar of liberation, and that in 1950 they
were not driven headlong to the northern border by the UN forces. They were
merely making a temporary strategic retreat as a result of which they quickly
recovered the lost ground again, thanks to the outstanding military genius of
the aforesaid commander. Certainly a number of Chinese volunteers did cross the
border to lend comradely assistance, but this figure of one million must
clearly be dismissed as US imperialist propaganda designed to cover up the
ignominy of the mighty imperialist military machine being unequal to the
confrontation with the valiant Korean people under the inspired leadership of
Great General Comrade Kim Il Sung. As for South Korea today, everyone knows
about the distressed living conditions of the working masses who long for the
great leader’s fatherly embrace, but are brutally suppressed by the US
imperialists and the military fascist puppet dictatorship.
While I was reading up on North Korea and deciding that I
would defer my appointment until after Christmas, I was in daily expectation of
some official written communication regarding terms of contract, visas, and
transport arrangements. Days turned into weeks and nothing happened. I began to
think that I would never hear from North Korea again. Then one day came a phone
call at work. “When are you coming to my country?” asked a funny little voice.
“Why do you not come?” I explained that I did not have wings and if they wanted
me to fly to their country, they had better send me an airline ticket and a
visa. This was the start of a confusing and inconclusive conversation. There
were two major barriers to communication. First of all, the person I was
speaking to did not have a good command of English . The other barrier was that
he was evidently incapable of understanding what my problem was. If he had ever
heard of airline tickets, he had no idea that they might be quite expensive. He
certainly did not know what a visa was. This was the first in a long series of
ludicrous telephone calls I was to receive over the months to come.
I took the next initiative myself
by writing to the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Pyongyang, my
prospective employer, and explaining to them what arrangements they needed to
make. I suggested that they make the arrangements through their embassy in
Copenhagen. Among western capitalist countries, North Korea only had diplomatic
relations with the Scandinavian countries and with Austria. There are no formal
links at all with Britain. Shortly afterwards the little men from Pyongyang
rang me again at work, while I was out. They left a message that it would not
be possible to make arrangements through their Copenhagen embassy, but that I
should contact their consulate in Paris. Typically it never occurred to them
that it might be helpful to let me have the Paris address or telephone number.
I rang International Directory Enquiries but they had no listing for a North
Korean consulate in Paris. I contacted Aidan Foster-Carter again and through
him obtained the address of their permanent mission to UNESCO in Paris. I duly
sent off another letter to Paris. This initiated a series of frustrating phone
calls in French, a language of which I have only the flimsiest command, a fact
which must have been instantly obvious to whoever I was speaking to.
By the time they had the sense to
put me in communication with someone from Paris who spoke English, almost five
months had elapsed since my initial contact from David Richardson. The original
motivation for applying for such a ridiculous job had diminished and I was
having serious doubts about the wisdom of going to this strange, remote,
possibly sinister little country, which seemed to be administered by crazed and
incompetent officials, in the unlikely event that they ever proved capable of
arranging my passage. Consequently when the English speaker asked me if I would
be willing to pay my own fare as far as Moscow on the understanding that I
would be reimbursed on my arrival in Pyongyang, I told him that not only was
this unacceptable but that too much time had now been wasted and I had no
further interest in the post. He either failed to understand what I had said or
for some obscure reason chose not to, and so the phone calls from Paris and
Pyongyang continued. I played along with them, although I no longer entertained
any serious intention of going, partly because they were a source of mild
amusement, partly because against all common sense and better judgement I was
still tempted by the prospect of doing something so extraordinarily unusual as
going to work in North Korea. It was in this same spirit of keeping the game
open and seeing what transpired that I filled in the visa application form
which they finally sent me at the beginning of June.
A couple of weeks later a
situation in my personal life altered my mood so that I was in a receptive
frame of mind when I picked up the phone one day and heard on the other end of
the line a sane English voice. The voice belonged to Keith Bennett, political
editor of the Asian Times. He was ringing to say that the Koreans in Paris had
authorised him to buy me an airline ticket to Pyongyang, and did I still want
to go. They had asked Keith to undertake the task of buying my ticket because
he knew how to go about obtaining cheap air fares and could thus save the
nation a few hundred precious dollars. This sort of thing is absolutely typical
of the way this country of over twenty million people is run. It turned out
that as well as being an authority on bucket shops, Keith was also a person who
had been four times to North Korea. His answers to my questions about the place
were on the whole encouraging. Before I knew where I was, I had handed in my
notice at work.
I left Heathrow on the 11.30am
Aeroflot flight to Moscow on Sunday 23rd August, 1987. I picked up a connecting
flight at Moscow and within twenty-four hours I was in Pyongyang. I arrived in
Pyongyang in the early afternoon, Pyongyang time, on Monday 24th August. It was
almost exactly a year to the day since I had submitted my application.
Chapter 2
It is axiomatic
that perceptions and judgements are influenced by mood and preconceptions. I
once met a couple of British sociologists in Pyongyang’s Koryo Hotel who were
over for a conference. That day they had been taken on a visit to a
co-operative farm. They conceded that it had been a nice outing. The peasants
had been friendly and appeared happy and prosperous. The farm was modern and
mechanised. They remained stubbornly unimpressed. They made the comments: You
wonder what the rest of the farms are like. These people only let you see what
they want you to see.
There is no questioning the
validity of their observations. It certainly would have been a model farm they
were taken to see. No country makes a point of displaying anything but its more
favourable facets to its foreign visitors, but very few are as keen to keep
foreigners on as tight a leash, or are as wary about what they might see and
hear, as North Korea. It is a natural consequence that many foreign visitors
tend to imagine that the underlying realities are very much worse than they
actually are.
The fact remains, however, that
those visitors came to North Korea with unfavourable preconceptions and were
inclined to perceive everything they saw and experienced in a negative light. I
saw the same process at work in another British visitor some weeks later. This
one, however, was obliged to stay for a couple of months and was exposed to
quite a lot of the life of the country. He finished up with a more respectful
attitude to it, although being a normal, sensible, hedonistic western
bourgeois, he vowed that it would take a million dollars for him to ever think
of going back again.
For my part, I arrived in Pyongyang with a very positive
attitude. I felt in need of a change in my life. I had never had an opportunity
to live abroad before. I was looking forward to the experience of living in
North Korea in terms of a personal challenge and an adventure, and I was keen
to observe life in a socialist country. I had never been to one before. I have
always inclined politically to the left. I was a member of the Labour Party,
albeit a totally inert one. For more than ten years I had been earning my
living as a local authority social worker. For the last eight of these years
this had been in the context of Mrs Thatcher’s savagely reactionary Tory
government. Most of my work had involved me with the miseries and alienation of
the people at the bottom of the capitalist heap, the lumpenproletariat, the
social sub-class organically generated by the capitalist system to constitute a
reserve labour pool and a stratum of poverty against which the labouring masses
can measure themselves as affluent, even though their remuneration must always
remain less than the value of their labour, while a privileged minority within
the same society luxuriates on the profits the workers create. For most of my
lifetime there had been a broad political consensus in my country that this
innately unfair economic system should be persevered with because it was
proving successful in generating prosperity and permitted a high degree of
individual freedom; and besides, the process of drastic, fundamental change
would incur more aggravation than it was worth. But it was the responsibility
of government to mediate the excesses of the capitalist system by placing
limits on exploitation, and redistributing the nation’s wealth through
progressive taxation and the maintenance of what we call the welfare state.
Under Thatcherism the policy has been to deliberately exacerbate the excesses
of capitalism, to swell the ranks of the lumpenproletariat and reduce the
living standards of this sub-class in order to depress wages, and to weaken the
collective power of the working classes that has traditionally been expressed
through the trade union movement, while eroding traditional notions about the
responsibilities of privilege. I had not liked what I had seen of the results
of this policy. Although by no means widely travelled, I had visited my share
of the world’s countries as a tourist, including a few developing ones. I had
caught glimpses of what life was like for the dispossessed in economies of
scarcity as well as in economies of affluence. I had come to the conclusion
that the first essential goal for any society must be the rational exploitation
and equitable distribution of its material resources. I considered, and still
do, that such values as freedom of speech and movement may be very important
but are still of secondary importance. I had read that in North Korea people
had to have permits to travel even within the country. I was instinctively
appalled by this, but I was aware that such a restriction would not have had
much impact on the lives of quite a few people I had been visiting as a social
worker. They had the right to go anywhere they pleased. They just did not have
the money to exercise that right. All in all, my mood, values and
preconceptions were going to incline me to be sympathetic in my perceptions of
socialism in action in the third world.
It was hot and sticky the day I first set foot on North
Korean tarmac. Summer temperatures in Pyongyang are no higher than England
enjoys in a rare good year but humidity levels can verge on tropical. I was
lucky it was not raining. The rain ignores Korea for the rest of the year but
makes ample amends in the monsoon months of July and August.
Pyongyang’s international airport is tiny. There is not a
lot of air traffic to the DPRK: two scheduled flights a week from Moscow and
Beijing respectively, and one from Khabarossk. At the time of writing a new
airport is under construction to be ready to receive an anticipated 20,000
participants in the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students due to be held in
Pyongyang in July 1989, the first time the festival will have been staged in
Asia, but a poor consolation prize in the prestige stakes in comparison to the
Olympic Games.
There was nothing in the customs procedure to suggest I was
about to be assimilated into a harsh, repressive, authoritarian regime. There
was none of the three-minute glare you always get at passport control at Moscow
Airport. The staff here seemed cheerful and relaxed. Nobody ransacked my
luggage looking for seditious literature.
 |
Mr Ming, the head of protocol from the publishing house, was at the airport
with an interpreter to greet me. As we set off for my new home, I looked
eagerly out of the car window. The picture that unfolded was of a bright,
clean, attractive modern city. This was clearly not one of the world’s chronic
disaster areas. There were no crumbling slums like the ones I had seen a few
months earlier on the drive from the airport into Alexandria. This was a world
removed from the sights that shock on the road from Palam into Delhi or from
Dum Dum into Calcutta. The roads were wide and lined with trees. There were
interminable modern concrete apartment blocks but the balconies had been faced
with pastel coloured tiles to make them more attractive, and it seemed that three-quarters
of the inhabitants had decided to make their environment more cheerful by
cultivating potted plants and flowers on their balconies. In the city centre
were imposing public buildings of bright granite surrounded by statuary and
fountains. Traffic was scarce but the people on the streets looked clean and
well turned out in smart, attractive, western style clothes. Pyongyang in
August did not present a grim scene of drab austerity, faceless people
uniformly dressed. It was not Asia, seething, colourful, startling. It was
mostly evocative of a nineteen fifties planner’s idea of a model high rise
council estate for the respectable working classes, except that here the people
seemed to be behaving as the planners intended. No evidence of vandalism or graffiti
in Pyongyang.
As I tried to familiarise myself
with the image of Pyongyang, I inevitably found myself at the same time
becoming very familiar with the image of its sponsor. I first saw him as I
stepped out of the plane. There is a mural on the fa¸cade of the airport building
depicting his countenance as it was twenty years ago, looking rather sombre. I
noticed that my two hosts displayed the same image on badges pinned to their
chests, and then I noticed that all the rest of the population were wearing
those badges too. I saw an enormous bronze statue of him on top of a hill, his
right arm outstretched to indicate the path of the Korean revolution. Where we
in the West would expect to see hoardings advertising cars and cigarettes and
all the other consumer products we need to make us happy, in Pyongyang one sees
posters and murals, but there is only one product on offer. There he is, always
a head higher than everyone around him, receiving floral tributes from his
adoring subjects, or on an inspection tour of a factory or, in homely vein,
standing in a grocer’s shop examining a large, exquisitely oval egg while the
shop assistants and customers look up with misty eyes at the great father
leader. And when we arrive at my new home, my little suite of rooms at the
Ansan Chodasso, the Ansan Guest House, there he is on the wall of my
study-bedroom watching over my rest and labours as he does for all his subjects
with his customary warm solicitude, and there he is again in my living room.
Considerations of modesty presumably inhibit him from intruding into my
bathroom.
My arrival had been so long
delayed that I had lost the distinction of being the first Briton in half a
century to live in North Korea. Michael, a young graduate from Leeds
University, had already been in residence at the Ansan Chodasso since March. He
had heard about the job in the same way and at the same time as I had, but for
some reason the Koreans had shown more efficiency in arranging his passage than
they had mine.
I spent my first afternoon in
Korea sleeping off the effects of jet-lag. I forced myself to get up again for
dinner and afterwards Michael and I set out for our local, the nearby
Potanggang Hotel, to celebrate my arrival. When we stepped out of the Ansan
Chodasso that first evening, I was momentarily disorientated by the darkness.
Our street, like most streets in Pyongyang, was equipped with street lights.
However, for reasons of economy, they hardly ever switch them on. No sooner had
my eyes become accustomed to the unfamiliar lack of light than I found myself
stumbling in Michael’s footsteps across a dusty construction site. Throughout
my time in Pyongyang a major road bridge was under construction across a loop
in the Potang River. The beginning of the bridge lay between our guest house
and the Potanggang Hotel. They never cordoned off the construction site and
there was always a path somewhere for pedestrians to get across it, but the
route changed as the work advanced, sometimes from day to day. For the last few
months of my stay the route led under the structure of the bridge. This was the
first of many occasions that I was to pick my way, often in pitch darkness,
sometimes blind drunk, across that construction site. Sometimes I fell over but
I always made it. That night the Potanggang Hotel became my first stage on what
was over the months to come to prove an increasingly sad little social circuit.
bmitted my application.
Chapter 3
On the whole the
Koreans are a physically attractive people, slightly built and graceful. The
women have sweet faces and melodious voices. Some of the men used to look a bit
dour. I sometimes used to have the feeling that the women were more at home in
their bizarre culture than the men. This is surprising because, although
everyone in North Korea leads an incredibly hard-working and monotonous life,
it is a culture in which the women have the tougher time. Politically he women
have equal rights and have done since 1946. The Sex Equality Law promulgated in
that year was one of the president’s first major reforms. At work, in the
factories and one the construction sites, the women work alongside the men,
sharing all but the most back-breaking physical toil. In the home it is a
different story. From the moment the woman gets up half an hour before the
husband to boil the rice for breakfast, she has everything to do. The typical
Korean male does not lift a finger to help.
My guess is that the men suffer
more than the women from the lack of good, unwholesome, irresponsible fun.
There are hardly any outlets for unorganised social activity away from the
workplace - a picnic perhaps with friends on a fine day, for the better-off an
occasional visit to a restaurant. There is no night life for the local
population at all. Korean men love to drink and their ladies are not averse to
the occasional indulgence, but the supply of alcohol in the shops is limited to
weekends and public holidays. The government does not want people waking up
with hangovers when there are revolution and construction to be made. Nor does
it wish to encourage too much informal conviviality. Throughout history bars
and cafs where people can come together to relax and talk over a few drinks
have been potential hotbeds of seditious ideas. The only vice routinely
available to the North Korean male is tobacco, and most are avid smokers. For
women it is unacceptable to smoke except, curiously, in old age.
But as ninety per cent of North
Koreans know next to nothing about the outside world, they do not conceive of
themselves as deprived. The people are constantly told that they are living in
a workers’ paradise. Most of them in their ignorance probably believe it.
There is, however, one section of
the population of the DPRK for whom life might realistically be described as
something approaching paradise. I have never in my life encountered such a
universally brighteyed, charming, cheerful, polite and friendly species of
humanity as the children of Pyongyang. Pyongyang is one third world capital
which has no wan, pitiful, ragged urchins on view.
I saw a lot of the children of
Pyongyang because the whole of one block on the other side of the street from
the Ansan Chodasso was taken up by schools for various age groups. The kids
never ceased to find amusement at seeing a European on their streets. Whenever
I caught their laughing eyes, the younger ones would bow or raise their right
hands above their heads, elbows slightly bent, in the Children’s Union salute.
When I used to replay with the Korean greeting, anyon hasimniga, literally have
peace of mind, they were so delighted. Sometimes they would run back so that
they could stand in front of me and greet me again so as to hear this
odd-looking anthropoid speak their language.
Children thrive on order and
stability and these are qualities that North Korea has to offer in abundance.
The children have the stability of a traditional Asian family life. Divorce is
very rare and traditional kinship patterns, e.g. parents residing with the
family of the eldest son, are routinely adhered to. The effects of any tension
or unhappiness in the home are mitigated by the amount of time the children
spend away from it. Even before compulsory education begins at the age of five,
in excess of seventy per cent of the nation’s children are placed in day
nurseries from the age of three months.
This practice is encouraged by the state for two reasons.
Firstly, the state wants to promote the collectivist consciousness in the
population from the earliest possible age. Secondly, it wants the women back at
work. However much the North Koreans may harp on in their propaganda about the
brilliant technological advances they are making and how modern and mechanical
their industry and agriculture have become, the reality is quite the reverse.
To quite an extraordinary extent the economy is powered by human muscle. Every
able body is required to keep the economic wheels turning. Therefore the
majority of women resume work after five months’ maternity leave. Each morning
the mother straps the baby on her back and delivers it to the nursery on her
way to work. The official standard working week is forty-eight hours. This does
not include time for meals and other breaks, compulsory political education, et
cetera. It is safe to assume then that the majority of North Korean infants
spend at least sixty hours a week in institutional care.
Childbirth can involve a change
of job for the mother. The country cannot afford powdered milk so the mother
must be employed close enough to the nursery to go there at regular intervals
during the day to breast-feed the child. Quite a few enterprises have their own
nurseries on the premises.
It is not generally compulsory
for women to return to work after childbirth. About twenty-five per cent opt to
remain at home. I do not know, but I would imagine that this option is denied
to professional women and women in specialised occupations whom it has cost the
state a lot of money to train, or who are not readily replaceable. Of these
women, the majority of whom choose to return to work, few will be motivated by
financial considerations. All the basic necessities of life, housing, food,
fuel, furniture, some clothing, are supplied free or at a token cost and strict
rationing controls are in force. The women return to work because for them work
is not an undesired but economically necessary intrusion on their real life,
their personal life. For the average Korean the workplace is where one
participates in life. Or, viewed from a negative perspective, life does not
have much else to offer in the DPRK.
So the North Korean child enjoys
stability at home within an extended kinship network, the routine of nursery,
kindergarten and school, and the security within the family that all primary
physical needs will always be met. There is not a lot of scope for feelings of
jealousy or alienation to arise growing up in a society where everyone is more
or less identically poor, no one knows anything better, and everyone shares
common cultural norms - no problems for working-class children having to adapt
to middle-class values at school. All school children are identically dressed
in uniforms issued by the state. The streets are safe for the children to play
in at all times. There is scarcely any traffic to worry about. There are no
child molesters. It is most unlikely that a child will witness any disturbing
scenes on the street of violence or other hysterical behaviour. In a society
that is both so primitive and tightly controlled, deviance and perversion are
virtually unknown.
The child may have few, if any,
personal toys, but will have access to them at nursery and school. Lots of
outdoor play apparatus, swings and climbing frames and so forth, are always
erected in the spaces between the apartment blocks and in the school playgrounds.
With such a high degree of
physical and emotional security, there is much to be said for growing up in the
DPRK. To me this is quite a significant factor in the society’s favour.
Not so many years ago foreign
language revisers were a rare commodity in North Korea. They were pampered
beings who were accommodated in hotels and had a car and driver at their
disposal twenty-four hours a day. They were even better paid. It was, I believe,
1984 when the rate of pay was cut by twenty-five per cent to take account of
the strength of the dollar. The dollar has taken a few tumbles since then but
the pay remained the same.
Although still living a life of opulence by local
standards, the revisers have, as they say out there, being working-classized
somewhat. By the time I arrived in Pyongyang, they were all accommodated
together in the Ansan Chodasso. The Ansan Chodasso is one of three six-storey
blocks, each consisting of twelve half-floors set in a pleasant compound near
the Potang River in South West Pyongyang. The other two blocks were reserved
for party members. They were quite old by Pyongyang standards, probably built in
the sixties, but a family assigned to one of these apartments would have had a
flat of European dimensions, a rare luxury in North Korea. It is strictly
forbidden for the Koreans to invite foreigners into their homes so I never had
the chance to look round any other apartments. However, while I was there they
were proudly proclaiming in their external propaganda that the new apartments
they were building in Pyongyang had an average floor area of one hundred and
ten square metres. It is safe to assume then that most existing accommodation
is substantially smaller. I am fairly sure that most families had just two
rooms and a kitchen.
We were not living among the elite, but we were definitely
among the haute bourgeoisie. From time to time one would see one of those
distinctive features of the Pyongyang landscape, a Mercedes with blackedout
windows to conceal the passengers from the public gaze, coming in or out of the
compound to convey our neighbours on official business. None of them was
important enough to warrant a car for his exclusive use but I doubt if there
are a thousand cadres in the whole country who are afforded such a privilege.
We did have from November, 1987, one neighbour, a vice minister I was told, of
sufficient status to quality for a twenty-four hour police guard. From then on
three able-bodied young men of twenty-four, each armed with a revolver, took it
in turns to sit in a little hut at the entrance to the compound furnished with
a desk, a chair, a telephone and the inevitable photographs of the great and
dear leaders, in the world’s safest city and do precisely nothing.
During my year of exile the population of the Ansan
Chodasso fluctuated but at its peak there were seventeen foreign residents.
There were three Chinese revisers; two East Germans, a married couple with a
six-year-old daughter who attended school at the German embassy; two Cuban (or
Spanish) plus the wife of one of them; two Russians plus again a wife; two
English; two French; and a Lebanese who did the Arabic. The Russian contingent
were unique in that they cooked for themselves. The rest of us took our meals
in three separate dining rooms on the second floor, or half-floor to be more
precise. The three Chinese gentlemen occupied one dining room, the Cubans and
East Germans another. The remainder of us occupied a third. We had the common
denominator that we were all from capitalist countries. Fortunately for me,
there was a second common denominator, that everyone spoke English.
The revisers in the capitalist zone who had come to
Pyongyang independently were paid several times as much as the ones from the
socialist countries, who were there on contracts negotiated by their
governments with the Koreans. I could not be certain, but I suspect that the
Russians and Germans were better paid than their counterparts from Cuba and it
was fairly obvious that the Chinese had about as much spending power as their
Korean hosts, i.e. virtually none at all.
It is possible that the revisers from the socialist
countries may have been paid some allowance in hard currency but the bulk of
their salary seemed to be paid in blue won. In North Korea there is a
three-tier currency system in operation. There is the basic unit of currency,
the naked, unadorned won. This is only valid in shops for the locals where,
essentially, there is nothing worth buying. As a result there is no currency
black market in the DPRK. Then there is the blue won, so called because the notes
are imprinted with a blue stamp. This is issued in exchange for soft
currencies. Finally there is the red won which bears a red stamp. This is
issued in exchange for hard currencies, dollars, sterling, yen et cetera. The
blue won is acceptable in some but not all dollar shops and international
hotels, but there is a two-tier pricing system in operation, if system it can
be called. For while some cheap foodstuffs cost the same in blue or red money,
a packet of imported cigarettes cost two won forty chen in red money but more
than fourteen won in blue. Between these two extremes the price differences
were more commonly double or treble in blue.
Because of language barriers, the Chinese, Russians and
Cubans tended to keep to themselves within the Ansan Chodasso. However, they
all had social outlets through their embassies. The inhabitants of the red won
zone plus the East German couple, Holmer and Astrid, who both spoke good
English , interacted socially with each other to varying degrees. Relationships
were on the whole civilized and cordial. This was just as well. Opportunities
for normal informal contact with the local population were severely limited.
Consequently, from the onset of winter at the end of October, when the hotels
rapidly emptied until they started filling up again in the beginning of April,
there was practically no-one else to talk to except each other. During those
long, cold, monotonous, boring, lonely months of winter, my enthusiasm for the
country evaporated faster than boiling water.
The Ansan Chodasso’s contingent
from the capitalist countries consisted of myself and Michael from England,
Jean-Jacques and Simone from France, and Sami from Lebanon. Unlike the vast
majority of foreigners who find themselves cast up in Pyongyang, unlike me once
my initial euphoria had worn off, they all to a greater or lesser extent liked
the life out there. They were all there when I arrived and none of them had any
urgent plans to go at the time I left, except Simone, who had decided to
retire.
Jean-Jacques like Michael was in
his early twenties. He had come to Pyongyang by a curious route. On graduation
from university in Paris in 1985, he had secured a grant from the French
government to go to Beijing and learn Chinese. At the Foreign Language
University in Beijing, most of his classmates were Koreans. He found he had an
enormous affinity with the Koreans, far more than with the Chinese. It was
through the good offices of his student friends that he had come to work in
Pyongyang as a reviser. He had already been living there nearly a year when I
arrived. He had learned quite a bit of Korean, which opened the way for him to
have some informal contact with the local population. During the day a couple
of old Mercedes were allocated to us to ferry us to the publishing house or to
the shops or anywhere around Pyongyang we wanted to go. Jean-Jacques spent a
lot of time chatting to the drivers and to our cooks and interpreters. He also
liked to hang out with the policemen at the compound gate. Occasionally he went
to Korean restaurants with Korean friends he had made. He may only have
assimilated himself marginally into North Korean society, but even marginal
assimilation is far more than most foreigners achieve. Even the foreign
students in North Korea who are sharing classes with Koreans are kept well
segregated from them outside of the classroom. Although fascinated by the life
and people in North Korea, Jean-Jacques felt the need to go up to Beijing for a
week or two every couple of months for a breath of normality and was fortunate
that he could afford to do so.
Simone was an intrepid lady in
her sixties who had been a reviser in North Korea since 1983. A childless
divorcee, she preferred to do something more adventurous with her retirement
than sit at home in Geneva. She too found a certain enchantment with the
society and the people, as did my close friend Sami.
Sami was a communist and had
long-standing connections with the North Koreans dating back to the early
seventies. He had revised texts for them in Beirut and written articles about
the country in the Lebanese newspapers. For these efforts he had been awarded
an Omega watch with the president’s name inscribed on it, which gave him a
status just a few rungs down from Labour Hero. He had spent several brief
periods in the country before. Then in 1985 he had taken up semi-permanent
residence in Pyongyang. He too spoke Korean quite well. When I used to complain
about the boredom and monotony, he used to remind me that boredom and monotony
had something to recommend them when you normally lived in Beirut. However,
even Sami could only stand so much of Pyongyang. He had insisted to the
publishing house that he was only prepared to work in Pyongyang for a maximum
of nine months a year.
Sami was an excellent friend and
his quiet humour helped to keep the lid on my sanity, which was continually
under threat from the unreality of my life in Pyongyang and the absurdity of
the work I was doing. He was a big miss when he migrated South for the winter
like the sensible person he was, abandoning the frozen, silent city and its
handful of deserted hotel bars.
Holmer was another who liked
being in Pyongyang. He normally lectured in Korean at the Humboldt University
in Berlin and had spent two years as a student in Pyongyang a decade earlier,
when by all accounts life was even more restricted for foreigners than it is
now. He had been back on several occasions as an interpreter for delegations,
but this was his first opportunity to live in the country since his
undergraduate days. He was a fluent Korean speaker and a Korea expert living in
his field of professional study. He also had his family with him. If Holmer was
in his element in Pyongyang, his wife Astrid did not share his enthusiasm. She
was highly delighted when they were recalled to Berlin unexpectedly early.
One of the factors that fuelled
my initial over-enthusiasm for North Korea was probably that my arrival in
Pyongyang coincided with a flurry of treats and excursions that would not be
repeated for a long time.
I had only been there a few days
when I was taken with the rest of the revisers down to Kim Il Sung Square in a
minibus to witness a torchlight parade to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the
founding of the Young Communist League.
Kim Il Sung Square is a wide
expanse of granite flagstones beside the embankment of the Taedong River. At
the top of the square, under the Grand People’s Study House facing the Juche
Tower on the opposite bank, is the tribune, a spectators’ gallery a bit like a
rather elegant football stand. At the centre of the tribune is an elevated,
covered area where the dignitaries and high officials, including on the big
occasions the president, take their places. On either side of what one might
call the stand where the dignitaries can sit are the open terraces where the
lesser mortals stand. As the tribune can only accommodate a few thousand people
at the most and admission to any of the functions in the square is by
invitation only, the lesser mortals are still quite elevated.
The interior of the tribune
incidentally is intended eventually to serve as Kim Il Sung’s mausoleum where
his mummified remains will be displayed to posterity, la Lenin in Moscow and
Mao in Beijing.
We arrived at about seven and
took our place on the right hand terrace, amid Pyongyang’s diplomatic
community. I looked up in the hope that the president or his son might be
present but sadly I did not have an opportunity to see either of them in the
flesh during my whole time in Pyongyang. The square below was filled with row
upon row of young people in alternate lines of boys and girls, all identically
dressed, the boys in black trousers and white shorts, the girls in white
blouses and their navy blue school smocks.
In the DPRK children must wear
their school uniform at all times throughout their school career. Under the
eleven-year compulsory education system, children must enter kindergarten at
five, proceed the following year to primary school for four years, and then to
Senior Middle School for a further six. In practice most children enter
kindergarten at the age of four having already spent most of their life in
nursery.
The boys wear navy blue vindon
suits, the girls navy blue vindon smocks. The state provides all school
equipment including uniforms at token cost. The uniforms are smart, practical
and hardwearing, and impose a rigid egalitarianism on the world of the child,
which is highly conducive to promoting the collectivist spirit. Although there
are differences in living standards between different strata of society, small
by the standards of other societies but there nevertheless, these cannot be
expressed in the clothing of the children, not even in their footwear, jumpers
and blouses, because the range available in the shops is so narrow. Even when
they leave school, the young people who progress to further or higher education
must still adhere to strict conformity in dress. The students wear green
uniforms like old-fashioned grammar school and high school uniforms in England.
I would imagine that all the
children of fifteen and sixteen years of age from every school in Pyongyang
were assembled in Kim Il Sung Square that evening. I am no good judge of size
or distance but I would hazard a guess that the square is about two hundred
yards long by a hundred yards wide and it was full of boys and girls, line
after line of them. I do not know how long they had been standing there already
when we arrived. It was still light when we came, and another half hour was to
elapse before the last light of day ebbed from the sky. Then the torches were
ignited and the vast square became a blaze of light. Above the blaze of light
in the square glowed the dark red torch of the Juche Tower. The twin fountains
that have been installed right in the middle of the Taedong River sent jets of
water thirty feet into the air. On the faades of the building that flank the
square, ideological symbols and slogans were announced in neon and speakers
pumped stirring music into the teeming silence.
Then with astonishing precision
and co-ordination this vast crowd of youthful torch-bearers began to assemble
themselves into a variety of intricate groups so that the light from their
torches formed a series of patterns, shapes and symbols, some of which echoed
the ones picked out more permanently in neon to the sides of them. At the same
time the unoccupied road between the square and the tribune filled with
complementary symbols as a vast parade of the nation’s youth, phalanx after
phalanx, all bearing torches, marched briskly by. The parade went on for an
hour and a half. I was not sure I approved of what I was seeing. It evoked
half-remembered images of old newsreel cuttings of Germany in the thirties. But
I found it impossible not to feel a slight sense of exhilaration.
I asked the interpreter who was
with me how long it would have taken them to rehearse such a large and
intricate spectacle.
“A week at the most,” he replied.
Then he added, “This country owes
a great debt to the Americans. They made us become a very disciplined people.
We have had to be to survive. The other great favour they did us was when they
bombed us to the ground they blew up all the churches as well, and put an end
to Christianity in this country.”
That sort of irony was rare in a
North Korean. I liked this interpreter very much. He was the same one who
accompanied me on my first two days when I was sightseeing. After that evening
I never saw him again. That is the way of things in the DPRK. We had no further
business together, and if a foreigner and a Korean have no business together,
they have no business meeting.
Although
things are easing up considerably, the DPRK is still a country where informal
contact between foreigners and locals is discouraged and restricted. There do
not seem to be any firm guidelines on whether locals can meet foreigners in
public places but there are very few public places, apart from the street and a
handful of restaurants, to which both have free access. Koreans are not, for
example, allowed in the international hotels except on business. In the absence
of firm guidelines, most Koreans anyway fight shy of arranging contact for fear
of getting into trouble. Koreans are not supposed to call on foreigners and are
definitely not allowed to bring them into their homes. I suspect this policy is
sold to the locals on the grounds of national security. The country is under
siege from the forces of imperialism and you never know who might turn out to
be a spy or saboteur.
The real reason is that the
government does not want the foreigner to find out from the local the real
conditions under which people are living because it wants the rest of the world
in general, and the South Korean people in particular, to think that things are
a lot better than they actually are. Even more to the point, they do not want
the local to find out from the foreigner that the world in general, and South
Korea in particular, are not as he has been told - in short, that he is being
fed lies. They want the people to go on believing that if they are not living
in a paradise already, they soon will be. If the ruling circles have finally
admitted to themselves that the South Korean people are never going to rise up
in revolt out of jealousy of the prosperity of the North and demand to be
assimilated into a reunified Juche Korea, they have yet to admit it to their
people, who are still being exhorted to work harder and tighten their belts to
hasten reunification. The danger for the ruling circles today is that if the
masses in the North knew how prosperous their compatriots in the South were, it
is they who might become rebellious.
To put things in a fair
perspective, North Korean living standards are firmly rooted in third world
poverty, as I gradually discovered. On the other hand, it is a country that has
a commendable record of supplying the whole population with the essentials of
decent living, food, housing, hygiene, literacy and a subjectively happy life
experience. The average North Korean lives an incredibly simple and hardworking
life but also has a secure and cheerful existence, and the comradeship between
these highly collectivised people is moving to behold.
It could reasonably be argued
that it is in the people’s best interests to be allowed to continue living in a
dream. It is only the ones who know or suspect that they are living in a dream
in whom one can detect any discontent. Even then these people are so highly
indoctrinated that their discontent is more likely to take the form of sorrow
and frustration that their system is not succeeding than anger and rejection of
it.
The minibus made slow progress
leaving the square that night, edging through droves of youngsters making their
way home on foot. It must have been a long evening for them. Two-and-a-half
hours is a long time to be on your feet if you can’t shuffle about at will. But
if it had been a chore for them, it didn’t show. They all seemed highly
animated and excited and groups of them kept bursting out into spontaneous
song.
The sort of mass spectacular we
saw that evening is something of a Korean speciality. I was to see another
example the following week, albeit only on the screen. To commemorate some
anniversary or other we were invited down to the International Club to see a
film show. We were shown two films. One was a Korean feature film of which the
less said the better. The other was a documentary of a parade through Kim Il
Sung Square by a million people on August 15th, 1983, the fortieth anniversary
of the country’s liberation. The parade was startling and impressive in itself
but I was even more interested in the footage of the president presiding in the
tribune. It was my first chance to have a good look at him in action. Up to
then I had only seen photographs, paintings and murals.
One thing for sure about
President Kim Il Sung is that he is a most extraordinary man. He has survived
in power for over forty years in spite of numerous crises and power struggles,
including a disastrous war. Although the success of his long reign is open to
question, there is no doubt that as far as the overwhelming majority of the
people are concerned, he is the great leader. Even the younger, better informed
people who want change, who are anxious to see an end to austerity and for
their country to liberalise - it should be emphasised, incidentally, that they
do not want to fundamentally change their system - revere their president.
No matter how much propaganda is
pumped out about a man being the great leader and the father of the nation, if
the people are to be truly convinced, the man has to look the part.
The
most common image of Kim Il Sung you see in Korea, the one on the photographs
in every room,
the one on so
many of the murals, dates back twenty years. He is wearing a high-button
Chairman Mao jacket. His expression is unsmiling and severe. But the rotund,
elderly gentleman with the broad smile I watched on the screen that day not
only exuded enormous presence and dignity, but it was a presence imbued with an
almost Pickwickian benignity.
It occurred to me as I was
watching this film that I had come to Pyongyang expecting to be living in a
grim, rigidly ordered society presided over by an austere dictator. What in
fact it felt like and continued to feel like was living in a very strict boarding
school run by a kindly but firm and autocratic headmaster. To what extent his
powers actually are autocratic is open to debate. Sami always took the view
that the Kim Il Sung personality cult was the creation of the party and that it
is the party that is in control in North Korea. Apart from the fact that this
view is in contradiction of the officially stated ideology about the leader, I
doubt whether the president could have designated his son as heir apparent
unless he possessed absolute authority.
For the thing that struck me most
in this film after the president’s undeniable presence was his son’s singular
lack of presence. Kim Jong Il is a short, plump, almost effeminate looking man
in his mid-forties. His main claim to fame seems to be that he has systematised
and elaborated the Juche idea, which remains a rather nebulous concept in the
references scattered through his father’s work over the years, into a coherent
ideological system. He is usually seen on films trailing around in his father’s
footsteps and looking decidedly uncomfortable. Interestingly he is not often
seen on television although his activities are extensively reported. Nor is he
present except on very rare occasions when his father receives foreign
delegations. In most Korean homes and workplaces his photograph is now
displayed alongside that of his father, but I never sensed any strong public
emotion about him. The propaganda machine is working energetically to build up
his public image but his unprepossessing appearance poses a major problem.
Autumn is a very pleasant season
in Korea. When summer ends, the humidity level plummets but it remains very
calm. From early September until well into October, one can rely on what we
would describe as perfect English summer weather. During the autumn there are
two important anniversaries in the North Korean calendar when the people are
allowed a rare day off from building the revolution and construction to go and
enjoy themselves. September 9th is the anniversary of the founding of the
Republic in 1948. October 10th is the anniversary of the founding of the party
in 1945. Whenever they are allowed any free time the North Koreans’ favourite
recreational activity is picnicking out of doors.
On both public holidays the
revisers were ferried out to the hills outside Pyongyang and treated to lavish
picnics. In a country where economising and not wasting anything are sometimes
carried to ludicrous extremes, the opposite policy prevails when it comes to
putting on a show to impress the foreigner. Invariably far more food was
provided at these affairs than could possibly be consumed. The first time I was
appalled at the amount of food that was wasted. That was before I had realised
what people’s living standards were really like, or had discovered that because
the country’s animal husbandry is in such a disastrous state, that year’s fish
exports, normally a valuable hard currency earner, had had to be cancelled so
that the people could have something now and then to augment their frugal diet
of rice and pickled vegetables.
Our picnics may have been
unnecessarily extravagant but they were always jolly occasions helped along by
general quantities of Pyongyangsul, the local equivalent of vodka, full of
chemicals but OK now and again, and compulsory singing. Towards the end of the
meal everybody was always expected to take it in turns to stand up and sing a
song. The Koreans can be very persistent people, so it was virtually impossible
to wriggle out of it completely, but one could usually get away with groaning
through a few lines of Blowing in the Wind.
People are always singing in
North Korea. They sing at picnics and other social gatherings. They sing on
trains. The school children sing as they march - literally march in columns
four abreast - along the street. It is not uncommon to hear the workers toiling
on the construction site break into the occasional chorus. Kim Sung, who had a
voice like a skylark, used to sing as she cleaned my rooms in the morning,
breaking off incongruously when she came to the bathroom sink to expectorate
enthusiastically in the best oriental tradition.
I imagine that this propensity
for singing is a traditional national characteristic. It is a characteristic
which the government has exploited as a potent device for instilling love and
loyalty towards the leader in the hearts of the people.
The Korean public has no access
to the popular music of the outside world. When Koreans purchase a radio, they
have to take it to a special place to be adjusted so that the dial cannot be
tuned to switch stations. It is not only forbidden to listen to anything other
than state radio. It is rendered a practical impossibility. As for foreign
records and tapes, like foreign books and magazines, they are not even
available in the dollar shops.
The only music Koreans get to
listen to is traditional folk songs, which are still popular. These might be
described as their secular music, although quite a few of them have been given
new words to make them ideologically sound. Then there is the sacred music, the
Juche-oriented revolutionary music, the compositions of the past forty years,
stylistically in the Korean folk tradition but heavy in ideological content.
About three-quarters of the songs are paeans of praise to the leader or his
son. For example: “The Song of General Kim Il Sung”, the immortal revolutionary
paean, and “Long Life and Good Health to the Leader” are widely sung among our
people. These are successful compositions which give artistic expression to the
fervent loyalty of the entire people.
“In addition, there are The
Leader’s Noble Idea Flowers Out, We Sing of His Benevolent Love, This Happiness
of Having the Leader and many other excellent compositions which celebrate the
happiness of our people under the paternal care of our leader and enrich the
cultural life of the people.” (Korean Review, p.175.)
Recent hits include “The Leader
Comes to our Farm”, a song about a presidential visit to a co-operative farm on
one of his tours of giving on-the-spot guidance, and a catchy number with a
slight rock feel to it that contains the lyrics, “I’m longing for you, dear
leader, I’m longing for you, honour to you, dear Kim Jong Il”.
The salient characteristic of
these songs is that they are composed in the folk tradition for the primary
purpose of being sung by people as opposed to being performed by professional
entertainers. Every time the people in North Korea give vent to their emotions
in song, as they frequently do, they reinforce in themselves the state
ideology.
On September 9th we not only had
a picnic during the day. In the evening the Government of the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea requested the pleasure of our company at a banquet
on the occasion of the 34th anniversary of the founding of the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea at the People’s Palace of Culture. It was probably
by international standards a modest affair and we revisers were assigned to the
bottom tables. Still, it is not every day that a provincial social worker from
Leeds gets to mingle with ministers, generals and ambassadors and be waited
upon by an army of monkey-suited flunkeys. It was a pity about the food. People
assure me that Korean food is not the worst in the world, that Japanese food is
far worse, but I find it a bit hard to believe.
On October 10th, the anniversary
of the founding of the party, we were taken before having our picnic to the
funfair at Mount Taesong. Situated a few kilometres to the East of the city, in
ancient times this picturesque mountain served the citizens of Pyongyang as a
natural fortress to which they could retreat in times of peril. Some of the
fortifications they built are still standing. Today it has been developed as an
alternative recreation centre to historic Mangyondae. The Revolutionary
Martyrs’ Cemetery, where the busts of the departed heroes, who took part in the
armed guerrilla struggle against the Japanese, watch over the city in the
plains below, has been established there. It also contains the national zoo,
the botanical gardens, and a funfair.
My most vivid recollection of that outing is of the
reaction of the female domestics from the Ansan Chodasso who came with us.
Although they looked like adolescents, they were young women in their early
twenties. Nearly all young adults in North Korea look young for their years. A
friend of mine had the theory that this is a side-effect of virginity. At the
funfair, Kum Sung and Myong Ok, A Ok and Sun Il, were enraptured like small
children.
“I can’t believe this,” I said to
Sami. “Look at the expressions on their faces.” “You have yet to understand,”
he explained to me, “these people lead such simple lives.”
One Sunday morning shortly after
my arrival I went for a walk with Simone on Moran Hill, an attractive area of
parkland in central Pyongyang, Pyongyang’s equivalent to Hyde Park. Simone was
telling me why she loved North Korea. She said it was above all because of the
people. “Constantly I am fascinated by them. I feel almost maternal towards
them. They are such delightfully simple people. I do not mean simple in the
sense that they are stupid. They are very far from being stupid. I mean it in
the sense of Gauguin’s South Sea islanders. They are unspoiled.”
A few weeks later I found myself
in need of medical attention. There were always two translators from the
publishing house in residence among us at the Ansan Chodasso to distribute the
texts, arrange transport for us, and generally be of assistance. Neither of the
two who were in residence during my first few months spoke English. One of them
spoke French, the other Spanish. I had therefore to enlist Jean-Jacques’
assistance to act as an interpreter for me. As soon as he heard that I was in
pain, the Korean’s face became a picture of alarm. He seized the telephone and
began making frantic arrangements for me to be transported to the Foreigners’
Hospital at once. I felt somewhat embarrassed by his reaction. I asked
Jean-Jacques to tell the chap to calm down, to tell him that I did want to see
a doctor as soon as it was convenient but I was not an emergency, I was not
about to expire. “No,” said Jean-Jacques, “I know these people. They cannot
understand such subtle distinctions. For them if something is not absolutely
urgent, then it can wait all day. They are a very simple people.”
Chapter 4
On my third full
day in Korea, I was set to work. Originally the translators worked side by side
with the reviser. They passed the reviser their translations as they went
along. At the end of the day they would discuss the corrections. By the time I
arrived they had settled on their present system. The translators send their
texts to the Ansan Chodasso. The reviser does his work in his apartment. From
time to time he is taken to the publishing house for a discussion, primarily to
ensure that the revised version has not strayed too far from the Korean
original.
The pattern for most language
sections is that there are two revisers. One concentrates on revising the
President’s Collected Works. In most languages they are now up to his speeches
for 1980. The other reviser works on the periodicals they put out and sundry
other works. In the English section, it was Michael who worked on the sacred
texts while I did the propaganda. I had some qualms about this, about being
involved in something I did not particularly approve of. I soon lost them when
I saw that their propaganda was so stupid that hardly anyone was ever likely to
read it and no-one could possibly take it seriously. The only valid
contribution I was making to the country was helping the translators improve
the standard of their English. It had been some years since the publishing
house had had the luxury of two revisers for the English language. At first the
quality of the translations I was presented with was not good. It was not so
often that I was given something unintelligible to raise, but always the grammar
was inaccurate and use of idiom inappropriate, while all the sentences were
long and rambling.
To be fair to the translators,
they had a very difficult job. It is much easier to translate from a foreign
language into one’s native tongue than to do it the other way round. None of
the translators had had the chance to live and study in English-speaking
countries except for a few young ones who had studied in places like Zambia and
Tanzania. They seldom had the opportunity to converse with an English speaker.
They seldom had the opportunity to see an English language film. They did not
have a great deal of access to books and periodicals in English. They did have
some, but they were more likely to see a copy of Moscow News than Newsweek. In
the circumstances their translations were not contemptible, and it seemed to me
that in the time I was there they effected a vast improvement in their standard
of translation by studying the amendments I made each week. By the time I left
they were writing English sentences instead of Korean sentences with English
words, although obviously they still made mistakes and there were some aspects
of the language they could not master, e.g. when to insert and omit the
definite and indefinite articles.
My staple fare was revising the
three English language periodicals: the weekly newspaper, the Pyongyang Times;
the monthly magazine, Korea Today; and a glossy pictorial magazine simple
called Korea.
The Pyongyang Times is an
eight-page tabloid that comes out every Saturday and is distributed around
hotel lobbies and other public places frequented by foreigners. The bulk of the
paper comprises articles translated from the national daily paper and organ of
the Workers’ Party of Korea, Rodong Sinmun. The Pyongyang Times also follows
the same format as Rodong Sinmun, which has six pages of what purports to be
news. The first four pages deal with domestic matters, i.e. brilliant successes
in agriculture and industry. The leading article on the first page is
invariably along the lines of “Great Leader President Kim Il Sung receives
special envoy of CPUs General Secretary,” or “New Hungarian Ambassador Presents
Credentials to President Kim Il Sung,” or “Great Leader President Kim Il Sung
Receives Syrian Government Military Delegation.” Page five is devoted to the
heroic struggle of the working people and students of South Korea against the
US imperialism and the puppet fascist military dictatorship regime. South Korea
is always south Korea with a small s, as it is not recognised as a separate
country. It is the southern half of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,
currently under occupation by the forces of US imperialism. The back page is
devoted to “foreign news”, not the real news of major events in the outside
world, but reports on the great economic achievements of other socialist
countries and fellow members of the Association of Non Aligned States.
References to the other socialist countries except Cuba become relatively
scarce after January 1988, when only Cuba met North Korean expectations that
they would all boycott the Seoul Olympic Games in protest against the South
Korean government’s refusal to agree to Pyongyang co-hosting the games except for
a handful of minor events.
The front page of the Pyongyang
Times is devoted to the President and always carries a picture of him with the
week’s most important foreign delegation. The next four pages record the
brilliant successes in the technical, ideological and cultural revolutions,
none of which would have been possible without the wise guidance of the great
leader or Dear Comrade Kim Jom Il, whether it be the construction of the West
Sea Barrage or the cultivation of the Pyongyang variety of thick-headed spring
cabbage. The back page used to correspond to the back page of Rodong Sinmun.
Cuba has opened a new sugar mill. Congratulations on their forty-fourth
anniversary of independence to the people of Lebanon, where “a great deal of
effort is going into achieving national amity and unity”. In the last months I
was in Pyongyang, however, the anti-South Korean propaganda was increasingly
spilling over from pages six and seven onto page eight.
Those poor South Korean people.
Even as the revolution and construction advance vigorously and energetically
towards the complete victory of socialism in the North half of the Republic,
where the broad masses of the people are rallied closely around the great
leader President Kim Il Sung under the banner of the Workers’ Party of Korea,
the compatriots in the South are tyrannised by the US imperialists and the Chun
Doot Hwen-Roh Tae Woo puppet clique and have to toil from twelve to sixteen
hours a day for subsistence wages. At least the minority of the population who
are fortunate enough to have a job do. According to the Pyongyang Times,
unemployment in South Korea is running at over 50%, this in spite of the fact
that the South Korean puppet army is a million strong, and there are a further
quarter of a million in the police force, not to mention a vast network of paid
spies and informers. As if the mass unemployment, starvation wages and brutal
suppression were not enough to cope with, there is also the pollution and
disease.
On 21st November 1987, the
Pyongyang Times carried a photograph of two men carrying cameras and wearing
gas-masks. The caption read, “Reporters are obliged to wear gas-masks for news
coverage in pollution-ridden Seoul.” It evidently did not occur to the editorial
board that the presence of riot police in the same photograph might suggest to
the reader a different explanation for the gas-masks.
It is reported in the same issue
that 57.6% of the South Korean population are infected with the TB virus, “that
the number of hepatitis patients totalled 4.5 million” and “there are 27,000
lepers”. Then there is the skin gangrene caused by eating pollution-infected
fish, and, of course, AIDS.
Reporting an AIDS epidemic in
South Korea, the Pyongyang Times for September 12th 1987 stated that this is
more than just attributable to the presence of the GI’s. The US government
actually posts AIDS-infected GI’s to South Korea as a deliberate policy. “The
aim of dispatching AIDS carriers from the US is to enable the transmission and
effects of the AIDS virus to be studied experimentally using Korean people as
guinea pigs.”
It is difficult to comprehend the
mentality that could be responsible for publishing such rubbish. It is one
thing to tell such grotesque fairy stories to your own people to reinforce
their sense of their own well being. Even that policy is fraught with long-term
dangers if the authorities are still serious about wanting peaceful
reunification of the country. The working masses are going to be pretty
confused if they ever have to find out the truth about living standards in the
South if these are the notions they are fed. It is another thing to direct this
nonsense at the outside world.
What makes it even more
ridiculous is that they do have plenty of legitimate ammunition with which to
launch a propaganda assault on the South Korean rulers and the Americans. South
Korea has had an atrocious record on human rights. The degree of autonomy that
the South Korean government has been able to exercise is very much open to
question. For a start, it is the American general commanding the US forces
stationed in South Korea who has supreme command over the local army. It was
noticeable that in the summer of 1987, Chun Doo Hwan did a complete volte-face
about staging pre-Olympic elections and restoring the prominent opposition
leaders, Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam, their liberty after “consultation”
with a US special envoy. There clearly has been considerable popular discontent
with the government in the South. It is known that Roh Tae Woo’s Democratic
Justice Party resorted to fraudulent practices in the December 87 presidential
elections. The military threat from backward North Korea cannot justify the
proliferation of 1,000 nuclear warheads in South Korea.
Even when the North Korean
journalists do address themselves to these issues, they invalidate their
arguments by their exaggeration, tone of hysteria and incoherence.
Their stupidity cannot be excused
on the grounds that they lack an adequate model for making external propaganda.
In Japan there is a sizeable Korean expatriate community. Many of them either
support the North or have to say they do if they want to be allowed to visit
their relatives in the homeland. They have an organisation called Chongryon,
the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan. Each week Chongryon
publishes an English language newspaper, the People’s Korea. This newspaper
manages to put over the North’s case reasonably persuasively. It does not rely
on wild lies and exaggerations. It also has the sense to play down the
presidential personality cult. The Koreans would do better to abandon the
Pyongyang Times, save on printer’s ink and paper, give the translators some
useful alternative employment, and distribute the People’s Korea instead.
The monthly magazines, which I
was told are distributed abroad as well as internally, are marginally more
sober in their content, but still hopeless. The level of propaganda is too
naive and the standard of writing too low.
Most of the other assignments I
was given to revise were equally futile. I revised essays on economics and
philosophy from the Academy of Juche Studies which would not have been
considered undergraduate standard in the West. I revised the Korean Review, an
encyclopedic introduction to all aspects of life in the DPRK, political,
economic and cultural, which to be fair was quite informative. I also revised
several books of anecdotes illustrating the infinite wisdom and love for the
people of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung. They are like books of stories
about Jesus that European children might be given to read in primary school.
They are immensely popular with Koreans of all ages. It is symptomatic of how
remote the North Koreans are from the realities of the outside world that
presumably quite senior officials in the publishing house have deemed them
appropriate for translation into other languages, oblivious to the fact that if
they are read at all it will be with derision. There is a whole series of them
under the generic title, The Peerless Great Man. There was also a long one
purportedly written by a high government official which nearly drove me to
distraction. It was called Anecdotes from the Great History. I came to refer to
it as Forty Tons of Anecdotes because that was what it felt like to me.
The Kim Il Sung personality cult
is designed to serve a dual purpose. Obviously it aims at binding the hearts of
the people to their leader to obtain their unquestioning loyalty and obedience
and unite them in a common faith. The quasi-religious element has been
explicitly acknowledged. Kim Jong Il is quoted in the April 1988 edition of
Korea Today as having said, “The cult of man by man is not just a simple
sentiment.
“In our society the worship and
adoration of a great man by millions of people does not emanate from any moral
sense of duty or any logical thinking. If they do, they can never be true and
firm.
“In short, the most sincere and
firm veneration and worship are formed only by complete fascination for his
personality.”
The other purpose of the cult is
to present the people with an ideal of humanity which they must not only revere
but try and emulate in their own humble lives. Here is half an ounce from the
Forty Tons of Anecdotes in which the President embodies the revolutionary
virtue of frugality and displays his innate egalitarianism.
“The officials who worked for the
great leader wanted to have new winter clothes made for him and revealed their
intention to him.”
“The clothes he usually wore on
his on-the-spot guidance tours were somewhat discoloured and it was getting
cold.”
“After listening to them the
great leader said: ’The clothes I wear now are perfectly adequate. Why should I
need a new suit? Although a bit discoloured the ones I have will do, if they
are remade, turning them inside out. They are good to wear when visiting
factories in winter. I should like to have these clothes mended rather than
have a new suit made.” “At this the great leader admonished them:
“‘Are you going to make a king of
me? You always want me to be given special treatment and you suppose it is for
my own good. This will not do. Is it the proper way to go among the people
wearing fine clothes? If I am dressed differently from them, the workers and
peasants will not be as free and open with me.
“‘We should always share sweet
and bitter with the people. Our daily life must be frugal. We must make a habit
of saving and sparing everything. Only then can we improve the economic life of
the country and the people’s livelihood.’
“He had spoken
in such earnest that the functionary had brought his clothes to have them
mended.
“I bowed before the outstanding
modesty of the great leader who wanted to have his plain clothes mended, the
winter clothes he had put on for years when leaving for his tours of
on-the-spot guidance.
“There were several subsequent
occasions when the great leader sent us his clothes to have them mended. Such
frugality in life was one of his noble popular qualities.”
Here is another extract from the
Anecdotes. This one illustrates the correct emotional orientation that the
subject should have towards his leader and the leader’s warm benevolence.
Remember that the narrator is a very high-ranking government official.
“The great
leader bestowed on me, a soldier who had done his duty, more praise than I
deserved.
“The great
leader looked at me standing there overcome with emotion.
“He said with a
smile:
“‘You have worked faithfully for
us for over 30 years. Let’s have a souvenir photograph taken in front of ginkgo
tree in honour of this memorable day.’
“Thus I sat for a photograph with
the great leader before a ginkgo tree tinted with autumnal foliage. I cannot
remember how the moments passed and when the shutters clicked.
“I merely felt my whole body
burning and my heart beating high beyond control. The vast blue sky over the
motherland, every blade of grass and tree in the garden, nay, all the world
seemed to be rejoicing over the great honour bestowed upon me. The memory of
that day excites me even today.
“After having
had a photo taken, I expressed my inner thoughts to him with a deep bow of
thanks:
“‘Great Leader,
I have so far caused you only anxiety. I have done nothing much to speak of.
“‘Nevertheless, on this memorable
day you deigned to invite me like this and sit for a photo with me. I cannot
find words to express my thanks for this honour and happiness. I will be
faithful to you and dear Comrade Kim Jong Il to the end of my life. I wish you
a long life in good health.’
“‘Thank you, thank you,’ the
great leader said, beaming at me, his hand placed affectionately upon my
shoulder.”
Many of the stories in this book
and in The Peerless Great Man series have as their setting the President’s
legendary tours for giving on-the-spot guidance. It is one of the appealing
idiosyncrasies of Kim Il Sung, the man that is as opposed to the myth, that he
has a most meticulous concern for the minutiae of his people’s daily lives.
Much of his presidential career
has been occupied with touring the country, inspecting towns and villages,
factories and farms, houses and schools, delivering instructions and advice.
Wherever he goes plaques are erected to mark the occasion and the date. There
is a plaque in the Pyongyang Department Store. There is one in the maternity
hospital. On the first floor of the publishing house there is a plaque to
commemorate a visit by Kim Jong Il, who is emulating the paternal model. Kim Il
Sung was once asked when he found time to deal with affairs of state when he
spent so much time on his on-the-spot guidance tours. He replied that these
were affairs of state.
In the mythology the Korean
people come across as a pretty witless bunch who would have struggled along
under Japanese rule for ever had the great leader not come along to lead them
out of captivity. He then had to teach these stupid ex-colonial slaves everything
they know. The legends are full of instances of his having to point out the
most banal errors to bewildered officials. It is fortunate for the Korean
people that he is not the only man among them with a brain. His son has one
too. So when their father leader finally shuffles off his mortal coil, his son
will remain to do all their thinking for them. Already it is Kim Jong Il who
has taken on most of the task of roaming the land putting things to rights
while his father stays in his palace to receive the homage of envoys from
abroad. Here is an extract from the Anecdotes in which the dear leader is
giving on-the-spot guidance to the officials in charge of the International
Friendship Exhibition at Mount Myohyant.
The International Friendship
Exhibition is a curious institution. It has been an established ritual for many
years that official visitors to the DPRK are expected to present the great
leader, and latterly the dear leader also, with a gift as a token of friendship
and esteem. According to the Korean Review, the president has now received over
28,000 valuable gifts from “heads of state, parties, governments, revolutionary
organisations and people from all walks of life in 146 countries”. Some years
ago the Exhibition was specially built to put the gifts on public display as an
enduring testimony to “the profound respect and reverence held by the
revolutionary peoples of the world for the great leader President Kim Il Sung”
(Korean Review, p213). “Thereupon he told them in detail how to run the
Exhibition in a well organised fashion.
“Dear Comrade Kim Jong Il looked
round all the display rooms. He said that all the visitors should be made to
wear overshoes in the future and went on:
“‘In the interior of the
International Friendship Exhibition overshoes should be worn without fail. This
will inspire in the visitor due feelings of solemnity and prevent the carpets
from being soiled . . .
“‘In the Exhibition not only our
people but foreigners except for heads of state should be made to wear
overshoes.’
“At that moment we blushed,
conscience-stricken. Although entrusted with the important duty of the
permanent preservation of precious national treasures, we had failed to think
deeply enough about how to manage them more carefully.”
Of course there are some
bureaucrats who simply will not be told. At one point in the Anecdotes we hear
the president commenting, “I told our officials, I rang them up, time and
again, not to let the mineral waters flow away uselessly but supply them to the
people. However, they didn’t do it. If they made a small investment, they could
by bottling it sell it on the train and in the shops but they don’t.”
It is always a good idea to
incorporate a few rascally officials into the mythology. Then when things are
not right in people’s reality, they can know whom to blame and sigh, “If only
the Tsar knew.”
Kim Jong Il incidentally does not
have to rest content with having his exploits recorded as marginalia in books
about his father. There are whole books of anecdotes about his virtue and
sagacity too of which The People’s Leader, Volumes One and Two has already been
translated into English. There are also books of legends about the immortal
woman revolutionary and mother of Korea, the cute Kim Jong Suk, the president’s
first wife and Kim Jong Il’s mother, who died in 1949.
For a week or two I found my
insane little job quite diverting, a pleasant respite from the pressures of
social work in the inner city. After that, my work too became part of my
nightmare. Most of the other revisers liked their job but I found sitting at a
desk day in, day out, simply too boring for words. I ached to be behind the
wheel of a car again, to drive down mean streets and experience strange and
wonderful people.
Like everything else for me those
first few weeks in Pyongyang, the social side of life had its novelty value. It
was clear from the start that there was not going to be a wide range of
entertainment on offer.
Chapter 5
If my working
life was dull beyond belief, my leisure hours were not much better. Pyongyang
is a fascinating place to visit, but for the average foreigner it is an
insufferable place to live. The majority of foreign residents in Pyongyang feel
as if they are living on another planet, not just in another country.
By deliberate policy, the
foreigner in Pyongyang is cut off from the life of the people. There are
definite indications that the barriers against informal contact between
foreigners and Koreans are in the process of being lowered, but as yet one can
do little more than look over the top and say hello. The Koreans are not
allowed to invite foreigners into their homes. They are only supposed to call
upon foreigners if they have some specific business with them.
Previously Koreans were not
allowed to meet foreigners informally in public places. This rule has recently
been relaxed but there are not so many public places to meet. The Koreans are
not allowed into the foreigners’ hotels except on business. Apart from the
restaurants, which they can only afford to visit occasionally, there are few
public places for Koreans to socialise with each other, let alone with
foreigners. When Michael first arrived in Pyongyang the interpreters who were
accompanying businessmen or delegations in the hotels were wary of conversing
with any foreigner they were not officially with. By the time I arrived, they
had been given the green light to associate freely with anyone who happened to
be in the hotel at the same time, but it was still against the rules for them
to go to the hotels except when they had official business there. One might
strike up an acquaintance with a Korean and see him every night for a week.
Then he would disappear from view for a few months until he was assigned to
another delegation.
When one did come into social
contact with Koreans, relations of friendship were inevitably stunted because
they are not at liberty to speak freely and openly about their lives. They tend
to be reluctant to divulge the most innocuous information about the realities
of their daily lives. In the course of my year at the Ansan Chodasso there were
two English-speaking interpreters who resided at the guest house for a few
months. They were both extremely nice people and I became fond of them.
However, it was impossible for friendship to develop beyond a superficial level
as they were under the constant obligation to play the diplomat. I expect that
it was on the basis of their ability to do this that the publishing house had
selected them for a spell of protracted exposure to foreigners. The foreigners
who learned the language did not necessarily get any closer to the people. The
people still mouthed propaganda at them.
Even if we foreigners had not
been excluded from it, in North Korea there was not much of what the rest of us
call life in which to participate. For the majority of people in the real world
the essential core of life is private life with family and friends. Whether we
regard our work as totally alienating or deeply rewarding, we still tend to
regard it primarily as a means to an end, earning our living. Ask a North
Korean what his life is all about and he will most likely tell you that he is
building the revolution and construction. On one level he would just be making
propaganda and he knows it. But if in the event of catching him in a rare
unguarded moment, you were able to press him and say Don’t just make
propaganda, tell me the truth, he would probably think for a minute and then
tell you, I am building the revolution and construction. This is partly because
when the cultural environment consists entirely of propaganda, the distinction
in the mind between propaganda and reality becomes obscured. It is also because
life in North Korea consists of little else. There is practically nothing
except the home and the workplace. In the communist ideology an individual’s
private family life may be important and necessary but it is of secondary
importance to his public life as a worker and member of the collective. Nowhere
has there been a more concerted effort to translate this ideology into reality
than in North Korea.
I
could never find out exact details, but North Koreans spend an inordinate
amount of time at their workplaces. The official working week is supposed to be
forty-eight hours but this is condensed into five days, not six. On Saturdays
they must attend the workplace for education, primarily of a political and
ideological nature. Most factories and enterprises in urban areas also have
responsibility for the cultivation of an acre of farmland.[1]
The publishing house, for example, has a nine-acre farm outside
Pyongyang. It is said that the Director General himself has to take a turn in
the fields occasionally. I am unable to say whether time spent in the fields is
included in the basic working week, or if it is a “voluntary” extra.
The
workplace is also the setting for occasional organised social activities and
for part-time study.
Everyone is
encouraged to study while working and a great many people do. At the Ryongsong
Machine Factory in Hamhung, one of the country’s key industrial institutions,
approximately half the technical personnel have qualified while working at the
factory as opposed to graduating from university. The president has said that
the ideal Juche revolutionary works eight hours a day, studies eight hours a
day, and rests eight hours a day. I was variously told that workers are
entitled to one or two weeks’ annual holiday. There are national holidays, May
Day for example, but the workers normally have to then work Sunday instead to
compensate.
Outside the workplace there are
hardly any outlets for social activities, even in urban areas. There are
theatres and cinemas in Pyongyang but these hold limited attraction. Except on
special occasions like the Spring Arts Festival, nothing from the outside world
is ever shown in them. North Korea does not produce many new films and plays
and in any case these are all shown on TV. There is the Pyongyang circus.
Soccer and ice hockey matches are played in empty stadiums and rinks and later
shown on TV.
People in North Korea really are
too busy building the revolution and construction to have time for anything
other than an hour or two’s television before bed.
Foreigners are at liberty to
enter the small number of restaurants and even smaller number of bars for the
locals, but if they do not speak Korean they will need to be accompanied by an
interpreter. They will also need to accept being stared at the whole time.
Realistically the only social
outlets for the foreigners were a few joint venture restaurants, predominantly
Japanese, which only the privileged locals could afford because they did not
accept local currency, the International Club and the hotels for foreign
guests. All these establishments had one thing in common. They were all largely
deserted most of the time.
The International Club and the
three oldest hotels, the Haebangsan Hotel, the Taedonggang Hotel and the
Pyongyang Hotel, were all clustered in the vicinity of the Taedong Bridge. I
seldom frequented any of these places. The International Club offered a bar, a
restaurant, a pool room and other facilities, and for the DPRK unusually
efficient staff, but it was not much used. I only ever went to the Haebangsan
Hotel once. Many of the foreign students who were based in the provinces stayed
there during their vacations. The least affluent of the Koreans from Japan
stayed there when visiting the homeland. It felt more like a hostel than a
hotel. The Taedonggang was the first hotel to be built after the war. A modest,
three-storied affair with a granite fa¸cade, it was now a pretty shabby-looking
hotel but it did have a pleasant coffee shop which was a popular meeting place
for the younger Koreans from Japan, both the visitors and the ones who had
taken the fateful plunge and repatriated.
Koreans who repatriate from Japan
are allowed to bring with them all their savings and their possessions,
including their car, from the capitalist world. They invariably live to regret
it. Japanese cars do not run for ever. Spare parts have to be ordered from Hong
Kong. Initially they are able to maintain a semblance of their accustomed life
style. They can go to the Taedonggang and drink Suntory brandy. They can take
their yen to the dollar shops to buy life’s little luxuries. The years go by.
Their savings evaporate. Economic conditions in the country do not alter.
Eventually they end up with the same abominably dreary life style as all the
other inhabitants except that they have the fatal memory of something better.
The Pyongyang Hotel, an ugly, characterless building both inside and out,
superseded the Taegongang as Pyongyang’s leading hotel. I was told that it had
quite a few guests sometimes but on the odd occasion that I went there, these
were few customers in the bar. This may have been partly due to a chubby
barmaid who seemed to regard serving customers as an unwarranted intrusion on
her leisure time.
Nearer
to where I lived were the Changgwangsan Hotel and the Koryo Hotel. The
Changgwangsan contained on the ground floor a prohibitively expensive coffee
shop, over two dollars for a bottle of Japanese beer, more than double the
price elsewhere in Pyongyang, and on the 18th floor and the DPRK’s premier, in
fact its only active night-spot, a discotheque which was known on occasion to
hold as many as two or three hundred people. Elegant, twin-towered, forty-six
storeys high, complete with rooftop revolving restaurant* (*never actually open
while I was there) the Koryo Hotel, completed in 1985, is Pyongyang’s one hotel
of international class, the rest being at best of average tourist standard. The
Koryo and the country’s other luxury hotel, the Myohyangsan at Mount Myohyant,
are remarkable for not containing enormous pictures of the leader in the
entrance hall. This fact and the fact that they exist at all are symptomatic of
Pyongyang’s tentative leaning towards a more open door policy and a willingness
to compromise a little with the outside world.
Nearest to home were the
Potanggang Hotel, which I adopted as my local, and the Ansan Club, a motel-type
complex where guests were assigned little bungalows instead of rooms or suites.
The Ansan Club contained a good dollar shop and Korean and Japanese restaurants
which were very popular with the local people who had some red won to spend.
For a brief period in 1984 it was the scene of a legendary social experiment.
Although it seems improbably that the authorities in the DPRK, where it is
considered indecent for a woman to wear her skirt above knee length, could ever
sanction such a thing, I heard from sufficient sources to give it credence that
for a few months there were professional ladies available for hire in the Ansan
Club at a hundred dollars a time. The rumours conflict as to whether the girls
were imported from Thailand or the Philippines. One thing is for certain. They
were not Korean. Nobody knew why the experiment folded. It may have been
because the prices were too high to attract enough business. Or it may have
been that the girls were unable to cope with the life - or lack of it - in
Pyongyang.
There seem to be two reasons why
all these places are so dead, except for brief explosions of social activity
when Pyongyang plays host to a big international convention or parties of
eastern European tourists. The first reason is that there are precious few
foreigners living in this city with an official population of two million, the
capital of a nation of twenty million people. The second reason is that many of
the foreigners who do live in Pyongyang are overcome by apathy and fail to make
an effort. A Latin American diplomat once complained to me that in other cities
to which he had been posted, there used to be a lot of informal socialising
within the diplomatic community, but in Pyongyang there was nothing but
protocol. An Ethiopian visitor could not believe the depression and despondency
he had encountered among the residents at his embassy. He recalled how, living
in war-torn Kabul, there had been a thriving social life among the expatriate
community with people holding regular parties in their homes. Perhaps it is the
absence of life as the rest of the world knows it, coupled with the total
estrangement from life as the Koreans know it, that breeds the apathy and
negativism that most foreigners who are condemned to live in Pyongyang for any
length of time succumb to.
Although there are now more
foreigners to be seen in Pyongyang than there have been for years, the
foreigner is still a sufficiently rare species that is it impossible to walk
anywhere without being stared at the whole time. I was told by a Soviet diplomat
in April 1988 that there were only about 700 Soviet technicians in the whole
country. Only a minority of these are resident in Pyongyang.
There was a tiny foreign business
community in the city. I met one Yugoslav businessman who was living in the
Potanggang Hotel. Simone was friendly with a Polish couple who were something
to do with shipping.
There was a handful of foreigners
teaching in the universities, including one American teaching English as a
foreign language.
There was our
little community of revisers.
During the time I was there,
there was a colony of West German engineers living in the Koryo Hotel. They had
come to North Korea to build a new cement factory. To a man they hated being
there. Every night they gathered in the basement bar of the Koryo to try and
keep their spirits afloat with copious quantities of beer and champagne.
There were a small number of foreign students studying in
North Korea. To help maintain their political and economic ties, the USSR and
other East European countries assign a small number of students to study
Korean, most of whom spent a year or two in Pyongyang mastering the language.
Holmer had spent two years as a student in Pyongyang. Quite a few of the East
European diplomats in Pyongyang had first come to Korea as students. There was
a representation of students from China and Syria, a country which maintains
strong ties with the DPRK. Most auspicious on the social scene were the
Africans. There were contingents from Guinea and a couple of other francophone
West African countries. There were Englishspeaking contingents from Lesotho,
Zambia, Tanzania and Ethiopia. Student exchanges between the DPRK and Africa
had begun in 1982 in the interests of international friendship and South-South
co-operation. The experiment had not been much of a success and no new African
students were arriving.
Some of the students were studying at universities in
Pyongyang. Some were studying medicine in the northern industrial city of
Hamhung. More were studying agronomy in the East coast port city of Wonsan.
Those based in Hamhung and Wonsan all used to look forward to coming up to
Pyongyang for their vacations, two weeks at Christmas, six in the summer - they
were allowed longer holidays than the Korean students. Pyongyang may not have
much to offer but in the provinces, there is nothing. All the African students
were male. There had briefly been some female students as well, but their
liberal ways had so alarmed the locals that they had had to be recalled.
Whenever I felt that the emptiness of life in Pyongyang was
more than I could bear, I used to remind myself of Sujar and John, Lazaro and
Giland, and how much more they had had to cope with and for how much longer. I
doubt if the average Soviet dissident exiled to Siberia for a few years suffers
more at the hands of his government than these good-natured, fun-loving young
men who had had to sacrifice some of the best years of their lives in the
interests of promoting international friendship. None of the ones I talked to
had the faintest idea of what they were letting themselves in for when they
volunteered to go to Korea. Most of them were serving five-year sentences
studying agronomy or engineering. Those studying medicine at Hamhung were
condemned to seven years, but most of these had the compensation that they were
getting the chance to qualify as doctors in Korea when they had not been able
to gain admission to medical school in their own country.
They had all had to spend their first year learning Korean
before embarking on their courses proper. To learn Korean in one year is a
tough assignment. They had all become fluent in conversation, but not all of
them were able to follow their lectures easily and many had to plough through
their textbooks with constant reference to the dictionary.
Most of them felt that on the whole the quality of the
education they were receiving was reasonable, although no better than they
could have received at home.* (*Some of them criticised the teaching method
which consisted to a large extent of learning by rote.) The agronomists
complained that all the Koreans knew how to cultivate was rice and maize. They
certainly would not have learned anything useful about animal husbandry. DPRK
propaganda is full of references to modern, mechanised duck plants, pig plants
and chicken plants. The Koreans will not be told that in English one cannot use
the term plant in this way. They reject the word farm as too antiquated to
reflected their advanced techniques of breeding animals on a mass scale. The
reality is that the meat supply is abysmal. North Koreans eat meat on gala
occasions like the president’s birthday. Otherwise they are lucky if they get
sufficient meat now and again to flavour their soup.
The Africans were not too dissatisfied with the quality of
their Korean education, but they were aware that it would count for little in
terms of prestige when they got home. Moreover, they had to put in long hours
to earn that qualification. They may have been granted longer holidays than
their Korean classmates, but vacations were still minimal by international
standards and they had to attend classes six days a week. Because of financial
constraints and the distance involved, the most they could hope for was to
spend one summer at home in a five-year stint. In other years the only breath
of freedom they enjoyed was a week or two in Beijing or Hong Kong.
Money was tight for them.
Although well-off by local standards, their allowance when converted into blue
won was such that a night out meant nursing a couple of small cans of beer. One
thing they all agreed upon, however, was that no matter how bad life was in
North Korea now, it was infinitely better than when they first arrived. There
had been no Koryo Hotel then, no Changgwansan disco. There was not even a
proper bar then in the whole of Pyongyang, and there were far fewer foreigners
passing through to meet. They had had to report to the college authorities
whenever they went in or out and, they assured me, they really had been
followed everywhere they went. These practices had only ceased after they made
protestations through their embassies.
The one thing that really got
these chaps down, though, was not the monotony of life, the hard work, the lack
of cash, the surveillance or the homesickness. It was the lack of sexual
opportunity. North Korean girls are not readily seducible. The prevailing moral
code is chastity before marriage. There is compelling social pressure on the
female to preserve her purity for her future husband. The society is also
nationalistic almost to the point of xenophobia. To have sex out of wedlock is
very bad. To have sex with a foreigner is unspeakable. Although the foreign
students had the advantages of speaking the language and being able to
communicate and to make informal contacts at college, the psychological
barriers they had to break down were immense. They then encountered the further
problem in such a closely supervised society of lack of privacy and
opportunity. In the foreign students’ hotels lived Korean guides who were there
ostensibly to assist them, but also to keep a careful eye on them. Many of the
female students would be living at home with their parents or, if they lived in
a students’ hostel, they would be sharing rooms. As one African explained to
me, the only chance you get is late at night and then you end up doing it in a
bush.
Contraception is another
practical problem. North Korea is not a place where you can walk into a
chemist’s and pick up a packet of Durex from the counter. I am told that
married women are routinely given contraceptive injections at the clinics, a
method of contraception deemed far too medically damaging for normal use in
developed countries.
Some students did register the occasional success. A
Zambian friend told me that he had managed two relationships with local girls
during his five years. The first relationship ended abruptly when the girl made
a sudden disappearance from the campus. He tried to find out what had happened
to her but nobody would say anything. His conclusion was that their
relationship had been discovered and his girl friend had been executed. From my
observation of the society, I personally think it far more likely that she had
been deemed unworthy of higher education on account of her moral weakness and
been packed off to a construction site to push wheelbarrows for the rest of her
life. Having said that, my friend was an intelligent young man who had lived in
the country for five years, and I later met another African who postulated the
same fate for a girl he had been associating with who made a sudden and
mysterious disappearance.
The only other significant group
of foreign residents in the DPRK are the diplomats.[2]
However, many countries which maintain formal links with North Korea do
not maintain an embassy in Pyongyang. Instead, their ambassador in Beijing
doubles as ambassador to Pyongyang, making only the occasional visit on
business or for a special occasion like the president’s birthday. Of the
diplomats who do reside in Pyongyang, one does not see so much. The Russians
are numerous enough to create their own little social microcosm in the embassy.
There is even a special satellite to beam Soviet TV programmes to the embassy.
There are diplomats from poorer third world countries whose social activities
are curtailed because they only have blue won. Many are invisible because they
have simply given up a life in Pyongyang and have adopted a policy of waiting
out time. An Asian diplomat told me that his country allowed diplomats to take
emergency home leave twice in their career, and everyone who came to Pyongyang
found some pretext to use up on of their options.
Without access to the local community and with such a small
and incohesive expatriate alternative, one largely relied on foreign transients
for social stimulus and interest. As well as the Koreans visiting the homeland
from Japan, there is a steady stream of tourists passing through from the
socialist countries during the summer months. Then there are scientists and
technicians whose visits have usually been arranged by the United Nations
Development Project. There are even people coming over to try and do business.
Theirs can be a frustrating undertaking. As one young businessman from Hong
Kong explained to me, “We’ve been here seven times this year trying to do a
deal. The trouble with these people is they’ve got no money. They never will
have any money unless they modernise their industry. If they don’t buy our
equipment, they can’t modernise. They ask for more and more discount and we
can’t give them any more. We waste hours and hours going round in circles. As
soon as you think you’ve got somewhere, the guy says he has to go and consult
somebody else before he can make a decision. Now we’ll probably have to raise
the price because the dollar’s fallen. These people are just so stupid.”
The only time any of the hotels actually becomes crowded,
however, is when Pyongyang is playing host to an international conference.
During the first few months I was there, Pyongyang was the venue in quick
succession for the first film festival of non-aligned countries, a World Health
Organisation regional conference, a conference for denuclearisation in the
Pacific region, and the annual conference of the World Federation of Democratic
Youth, among others. It was possible to park oneself at one of the bars in the
Potanggang or the Koryo with a reasonable expectation that one would fall in
with interesting people from all corners of the globe, all of whom, whether
they came from Sweden or Venezuela, from Indonesia or from Ethiopia, were, if
they were going to talk to each other, going to have to do so in English.
The opportunity to meet a diversity of interesting people
from different countries, different societies and different walks of life was
one of the few positive aspects of my year in Pyongyang. I returned with a
wallet full of cards that I had been presented with by nice people, whom I will
never be able to afford to visit. Like most other aspects of my life in North
Korea, constantly meeting new, interesting people became less of an attraction
the longer I stayed there. Although it has much to be said for it in the short
term, in the long term it is no substitute for ongoing friendships and the
sense of belonging within a community. Moreover, even in the summer months,
Pyongyang is by no means teeming with visitors and there were weeks when the
hotels could be almost as deserted as in winter.
The opportunity to meet other foreigners brought with it
the opportunity to meet more Koreans. Wherever in North Korea there are
foreigners, there must needs be interpreters. Where there are English speaking
foreigners, there must be English-speaking interpreters. As previously stated,
the interpreters were at one time uneasy about talking to foreigners they were
not officially attached to, but this had changed by the time I arrived. The
authorities presumably came to the sensible view that if the country is going
to open up somewhat to the outside world, and as Pyongyang is scheduled for an
influx of 20,000 foreign visitors for the 13th World Festival of Youth and
Students in the summer of 1989, they can no longer shelter their polyglot elite
completely from the pernicious influence of the outside world. From the Korean
point of view there is an element of risk in this. They are concerned lest the
interpreters divulge more to the foreigner than the foreigner ought to know.
They are concerned lest the foreigner disclose more information to the
interpreter about the outside world in general, and how the outside world views
North Korea in particular, than is good for the interpreter. The interpreter
will hear a lot more open speech if he is among an informal group of foreigners
drinking together, all half-pissed, than if he is with an individual foreigner
or specific group of foreigners in a relationship analogous to host and guest.
Most of the interpreters were young and the vast majority
were male. The Koreans did not like to expose their women’s purity to
unnecessary danger. Interestingly, on one of the few occasions when I did meet
a female interpreter, they had assigned her to an African gentleman who could
have been a prototype for Othello. The poor girl was in visible turmoil as he
put his quiet charms to work on her. Many of the interpreters seem to be from
privileged families. I met two whose fathers had been ambassadors. With their
privileged backgrounds, their knowledge of languages and the opportunities for
both travelling and meeting foreigners at home, the interpreters were quite
sophisticated by North Korean standards. By any other standards they were like
children. Early on I remember being amazed when I came across a group of young
women in their late teens or early twenties whom I guessed to be college
students playing tag on the banks of the Potang River. It was not just that
they were playing a childhood game, but they were playing it with the
high-pitched abandonment that does not survive the junior school playground in
the West. Later I understood that childhood is a protracted process in North
Korea, but it still seemed an extraordinary thing for unmarried university
teacher of thirty years of age to excuse himself from the Koryo at quarter to
ten because his parents had only given him permission to stay out until ten
o’clock.
I got to know a few of the
interpreters but, with one or two exceptions, I did not cultivate their
acquaintance too much. This was mainly because they did not have any money, and
so if you bought a drink for yourself it was awkward not to always buy one for
them as well. Some of them were greedy and would ask you to buy them cigarettes
as well, or order drinks for their friends without telling you, and expect you
to pay. From the point of view of researching this book they sometimes proved a
good investment. Sometimes they would tell you things when they were drunk that
they ought not to. Just as often, they would tell you something that was
obviously true which they naively thought was good propaganda, but which in
fact was quite detrimental. They were invariably in awe of the freedom and
affluence enjoyed by the foreigners they met. It did not happen to me because I
kept them at arm’s length, but Michael and Jean-Jacques were subjected to the
most tedious and sycophantic hero-worship.
Chapter 6
What exactly is
the Juche idea, the “monolithic ideology” of the Workers’ Party of Korea? Kim
Il Sung has described it as “a creative application of Marxism-Leninism in the
conditions of our country” (CW, Vol 27, p501). He has said that “this idea
advocates living independently, not dependently. We do not act on anyone’s
orders; we judge all problems with our own intelligence, solve them in the
interests of our people, and build socialism to the Koreans’ liking and in
accordance with the Korean way of life” (CW, Vol.27, p.309).
The Juche idea, as it has become
known rather than the Juche philosophy, was originally intended then as an
adaptation of Marxist-Leninist principles to Korean conditions and constituted
an assertion of Korean independence - political, economic, cultural and
ideological independence.
According to its author: “The
Juche Idea implies solving all problems by regarding man as the basic factor.
In a capitalist society, everything serves money, not man; capitalists know
nothing but money. But in our society man is most highly valued and everything
serves man. Man is the master of everything and decides everything. Man
conquers nature, and man transforms society. The Juche Idea requires that
everything should be made to serve man, to serve the people.” (CW, Vol.27,
p.309).
References to “the Juche Idea and
the need to equip the working people firmly with our Party’s monolithic idea,
the Juche Idea. . . the only correct ideological guide to the successful
carrying out of the Korean Revolution” (CW, Vol.22, p.513) are scattered
throughout the great leader’s works, but it is his philosophically minded son
who has refined and systematised his anthropocentric outlook into a coherent
body of thought.
In a 1986 speech, On Some
Problems of Education in the Juche Idea, Kim Jong Il states that: “Society
consists of people, the social wealth they have created, and the social
relations which link them. Here man is always the master.” (p.7) Man is the
master because it is man who creates the wealth and establishes the social
relations. Man exerts his will to transform the natural world to meet his
aspirations. Moreover, “Social movement is the movement of man which is caused
and promoted by man. Man is the factor which brings about social movement and
the motive force behind this movement. In conformity with the level of
development of his Chajusong, creativity, and consciousness, man proceeds with
the creative movement to transform nature and society and advances social
movement to shape his own destiny. Of course, man cannot create history in
disregard of the objective conditions. But the objective conditions are not
immutable; they can be changed in favour of man through his creative
activities. It is not the objective conditions but man that plays the decisive
role in the development of history.” (pp.7-8)
In an earlier work, On the Juche
Idea, the dear leader notes that “History develops through the struggle of the
masses to transform nature and society” (p.15). However, “Although they are the
subject of history, the masses of the people do not hold the same position and
play the same role in all ages and in all societies. In the class society,
unaware of their social status and class relationship and their strength for a
long time in the past, the working masses could not unite into a political
force. Therefore, they were deprived of all rights, subjected to exploitation
and oppression, by a handful of ruling class and denied their legitimate
position as masters of society. Even in the exploiting society they created all
material and cultural wealth by their own efforts, but they were unable to
shape history in an independent manner because they could not occupy the
position of masters of society. Only by seizing state power and the means of
production in their own hands and by establishing a socialist system can the
working masses free themselves from exploitation and oppression and create
history consciously as true masters of society and their own destiny.”
(pp.16-17) In the Juche philosophy, this notion of the masses living as
conscious creators of history, true masters
of society and
their own destiny is generally subsumed under the concept of realising their
Chajusong. The nearest equivalent in English to the term Chajusong is autonomy,
but the Koreans do not feel autonomy is sufficiently accurate because Chajusong
is a strictly social attribute of man which an individual can only acquire
through participation in the collective.
In On Some Questions in
Understanding the Juche Philosophy, Kim Jong Il emphasises that “Man is a
product of evolution, but not his Chajusong.”
“Chajusong is a social product.
Chajusong is an attribute given to men by society, not nature; it is not a
natural gift, but has been formed and developed socially and historically.
Nature gives man natural and biological attributes, whereas society provides
him with social attributes. It can be said that man’s Chajusong is the
requirement and reflection of social life, social practice.” (p.5)
It may be that a correct
understanding of this concept of Chajusong would enable me to reconcile the
apparent contradiction within a society which purports to uphold the
realisation of the masses’ autonomy as its principal goal but which allows the
component individuals who make up the masses the barest minimum of control over
their own lives. Or perhaps the explanation for the contradiction lies in the
fact that the revolution is still in a transitional phase before the complete
victory of socialism and the establishment of communism, during which the
masses cannot be entrusted with responsibility for their own Chajusong as they
have yet to be properly ideologically remoulded.
In Juche theory, the revolution
consists of three sub-revolutions, the technical, cultural, and ideological
revolutions. Of the three it is the ideological revolution that is of paramount
importance, and it aims at nothing less than the creation of a new type of
person.
In On the Juche Idea, Kim Jong Il
writes, “In order to build socialism and communism we must not only develop the
productive forces and change the social relations but also transform people
themselves into comprehensively developed communist men. No matter how highly
the productive forces have been developed and how great the material wealth is,
one could not claim to have built a communist society unless people, the
masters of society, are transformed into men of communist type.
“If we are to train people to be
harmoniously developed communists, independent and creative men, we must equip
them with communist ideology and advanced scientific and technical knowledge
and help them to acquire a high cultural level.
“In particular, primary attention
should be directed to the task of arming people with communist ideology.
“The transforming of man in
essence means ideological remoulding. Thoughts define man’s worth and quality
and, accordingly, ideological remoulding is of the utmost importance in the
transformation of man.”
(p.62)
He returns to the them in On Some
Problems of Education in the Juche Idea. “The Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung
said that in today’s new historical conditions we should construe Lenin’s
proposition - Soviet power plus electrification equals communism - as meaning
that the people’s government plus the three revolutions is communism . . .
Comrade Kim Il Sung instructed us that in order to build a communist society we
must capture the ideological fortress as well as the material fortress, and
give precedence to ideology.
“Capturing the material fortress
of communism is an undertaking that harnesses nature to meet the demands of
communism. The endeavours to capture the ideological fortress are the work of
reforming human beings, the masters of society, so as to meet the requirements
of communism. Socialism and communism are built by men, for men. In order to
build communism it is necessary, first of all, to reform the people, the
masters of society, along communist lines.” (pp 10-11)
On page 59 of On the Juche Idea,
he justifies giving primacy to the ideological revolution on the grounds that
“one can promote the revolution one desires when the internal forces are
prepared and the masses’ level of ideology is high, although other conditions
are unfavourable”.
Two themes in Juche ideology that have been conspicuously
developed by Kim Jung Il are the whimsical notion of “immortal socio-political
integrity” and the overwhelming importance of the leader and necessity for
everyone else to show him unquestioning obedience. The former preoccupation can
be interpreted as a reaction to the failure of the technical revolution and the
economic stagnation of recent years. The latter 35
can be seen as a
conscious attempt to consolidate his composition once his father has passed on.
In On Some Problems of Education
in the Juche Idea, he writes: “For the popular masses to be an independent
subject of the revolution, they must be united into one organisation with one
ideology under the guidance of the party and the leader. Only the masses, who
are united in this way, can shape their destiny independently and creatively.
The subject of the revolution means the integrated whole of the leader, the
party and the masses.”
“By uniting around the leader
into organisation with a single ideology, under the guidance of the party, the
masses form a socio-political organism which is immortal as an independent
being. The physical life of an individual person is finite, but the integrity
of the masses rallied as an independent socio-political organism is immortal.”
“The great leader Comrade Kim Il
Sung clarified for the first time in history that there is socio-political
integrity distinct from the physical life of individuals. An immortal
socio-political integrity is inconceivable without the existence of the socio-political
community which is the integrated whole of the leader, the party and the
masses. Only when an individual becomes a member of this community can he
acquire immortal socio-political integrity.”
“Since the socio-political
organism consists of many people it needs a focal point which has unified
command of the activities of the social organism. Just as a man’s brain is the
centre of his life, so the leader, the top brain in a socio-political community,
is the centre of the life of this community. The leader is called the top brain
of the socio-political organism because he is the focal point which directs the
life of this organism in a unified manner. The leader is the centre which
analyses, synthesises and integrates the interests of the masses and their
desire for independence; at the same time, he is the centre which has unified
command of their creative abilities to put them into effect.”
“The party is the core of the
masses, and it is rallied closely around the leader organisationally and
ideologically; it is the pivot of the independent socio-political organism.
When individuals are united organisationally and ideologically with the leader,
the centre of the socio-political organism, through party organisations, and
share the same destiny with the party, they will acquire an immortal
socio-political integrity. It is only when people take an active part in
organisational and ideological activities as members of a party organisation or
a socio-political organisation led by the party that they can become more
closely tied in kinship with the leader, the centre of the socio-political
organism, and exalt their socio-political integrity.”
“Since the leader, the party and
the masses are welded into one socio-political organism and share the same
destiny, they form a relationship based on revolutionary duty and comradeship,
the relationship of helping and loving each other. Revolutionary duty and
comradeship help towards uniting individual persons into a socio-political
organism.”
“So far many people have talked
about the value of freedom and equality. The Juche Ideaalso considers them
valuable. This is because everybody, as the master of the world, the master of
his own destiny and as an independent being, does not want to be subordinated
to anyone else. However, the principle of revolutionary duty and comradeship is
not on the same level as that of freedom and equality. The relationship of
revolutionary duty and comradeship presupposes the relationship of freedom and
equality. However, the former does not become established spontaneously simply
because the latter exists. We can say that a buyer and seller are on equal
terms, but we cannot say that they always love each other as comrades. It is
wrong to set the relationship of freedom and equality against that of
revolutionary duty and comradeship. It is also a mistake to try to dissolve one
into the other.”
“From the point of view of the
social community as a unit, the principle of equality contributes to the fight
against subjugation and inequality in personal relationships and to the defence
of the Chajusong of individuals, whereas revolutionary duty and comradeship
exert a strong influence on uniting people into a socio-political organism
sharing one and the same destiny and on defending the Chajusong of the social
community. The principle of equality is based on the individualistic outlook on
life; it sets the greatest value on the life of individuals. On the other hand,
the principle of revolutionary duty and comradeship is based on the
collectivist viewpoint on life; it holds the integrity of a socio-political
community incomparably dearer than the life of individuals.”
“Certainly, the socio-political
organism, too, is subject to the working of the principle of equality as well
as the principle of revolutionary duty and comradeship. Here, equality between
individuals does not contradict revolutionary duty and comradeship. Genuine
revolutionary duty and comradeship can exist only when exploitation and
oppression of man by man are eliminated and equality between people is ensured.
Revolutionary duty and comradeship do not restrict the Chajusong and creativity
of man. On the contrary, they ensure them.”
“If man’s Chajusong and
creativity are suppressed because the unity of the social community has to be
maintained, it will be impossible to achieve genuine unity within the
community. On the other hand, if the unity of the community is destroyed in the
case of providing people with Chajusong and creativity, the integrity of the
social community, the parent body of the integrity of individuals, will be
impaired and thus the individuals themselves cannot be provided with Chajusong
and creativity. The unity of the social community should contribute to giving
full play to man’s Chajusong and creativity. And man’s Chajusong and creativity
must always refrain from going beyond the bounds of the unity of the community.
This means that only through a harmonious combination of the principles of
equality and comradeship can the problems be solved of giving full play to the
Chajusong and creativity of individuals and of cementing the unity of the
community. Certainly, this is not an easy task, and certainly the problems do
not resolve themselves of their own accord. That is why I have stressed more
than once the need for leadership in a social community.
“Since the leader is the centre
of the life of a socio-political community, revolutionary duty and comradeship
must also be centred on the leader. Revolutionary duty and comradeship find
their most noble expression in the relationship between the leader and his men.
Within the socio-political organism in which a common destiny is shared by all,
the principle of duty and comradeship governs the relationship between
individuals, too. But in this case the principle is not absolute because none
of the individuals is the centre of the life of the socio-political community.
However, loyalty to the leader and comradeship towards him are absolute and
unconditional because the leader, as the top brain of the socio-political
organism, represents the integrity of the community . . . ”
“We must also fully understand
that the leader plays the decisive role in the revolution and construction.
Being at the centre of unity and leadership, he plays the decisive role in
shaping the destiny of the popular masses. This is similar to the brain of a
man playing the decisive role in his activities.” (pp.19-24)
An article I revised emanating, I
think, from the Academy of Juche Sciences, extended the anatomical metaphor to
compare the leader to the brain, the party to the central nervous system which
conducts messages from the brain to the limbs, the popular masses who carry out
the leader’s instructions. Kim Jung Il goes on to conclude that “The basic
quality of a communist revolutionary of the Juche type consists of a sound
revolutionary attitude to the leader and of the appreciation that loyalty to
him is the lifeblood of a communist” (p.24).
In his opinion, “The Juche Idea
is a perfect revolutionary doctrine: it shows the way for people to become
absolute masters of the world and of their own destiny by completely
transforming nature, society and human beings themselves in accordance with the
essential social quality of men who want to live and develop independently, as
well as the way for the lasting happiness and prosperity of mankind to be
achieved.” (Education in Juche Idea, p.2). It “not only provides a correct
outlook and viewpoint on nature, society, and man, but also demonstrates a
perfect revolutionary theory, strategy and tactics, and leadership theory and
methods” (ibid, pp 8-9).
He recommends that “The party and
people of every country must firmly establish Juche in ideology, and carry out
the revolution and construction in their country in a responsible manner, with
the attitude of masters.” (On the Juche Idea, p.37.)
He maintains that “Just as a
man’s worth is defined by his ideology, so the greatness of a nation is
determined by the greatness of its guiding ideology” (Education in the Juche
Idea, p.15). On this basis I leave the reader to form his own evaluation of the
greatness of Juche Kor
Chapter 7
The Ansan
Chodasso was handily situated for observing the construction in progress. This
was not an inconsiderable asset. There is not much else to see in Pyongyang.
Pyongyang is a nice, clean, orderly place and offers some pleasant walks by the
river, but it has little variety and none of the colourful street life that
makes other third world cities so fascinating to wander about in. Because it
has all been recently built and is the city of what is truly a nearly uniformly
working-class society, Pyongyang is a pretty homogeneous place. It is the same
throughout the city: wide main roads fronted by blocks of multi-storeyed
apartment buildings and, discreetly tucked away behind them, meaner apartment
blocks and rows of little white tile-roof cottages for the less advantaged
citizens. As for street life, when they are not hard at work building the
socialist construction or participating in some other approved, organised
activity, the people are at home watching the locally assembled black and white
television sets they saved up for months to buy.
The Ansan Chodasso overlooked a
light industry complex which included a printing works and a briefcase factory.
Both my rooms gave on to spacious balconies. From my bedroom balcony I
overlooked the entrance to the complex and I could watch our dainty doll-like
people’s guards, automatic rifles at the ready, bayonets fixed, in inaction as
they safeguarded the revolutionary gains. All the factories and enterprises in
North Korea, including the publishing house, have armed guards on duty at the
gates around the clock. It is an extraordinary precaution in a country with
precious little crime. Officially their presence is to guard against spies and
saboteurs as well as criminals. The real purpose for this and other similar
phenomena in the DPRK is to impress upon the people that they are living in a
society under siege from hostile forces, so that they will adopt n appropriate
siege mentality where one accepts that it is necessary to work jolly hard to
survive and unrealistic to entertain expectations of greater reward, and where
everyone must pull together and trust their leaders because danger is lurking
just outside the door. As an additional security precaution a few workers are
assigned each night to sleep at their factory.
It was a dull old life being a
people’s guard. Our little girls, however, could look forward to some variety
in their day’s work as they took it in turns to guard the back of the factory
as well as the front. Every so often two of them would march in single file
diagonally across the yard and disappear behind the building opposite. A few
minutes later the two they were relieving would march back towards the front
gate. They usually performed this ritual in correct military fashion but once I
saw a pair of them lose their discipline after stopping to banter with some of
the boys from the factory. They finished up crossing the yard side by side,
giggling and holding hands, rifles still slung incongruously over their
shoulders.
My living room balcony overlooked
the yard and the three main buildings of the complex, two of which had been
erected in the space of just one month in 1986 with the minimum of mechanical
assistance, through what they call a “vigorous speed campaign”. Two years
later, hardly any of the windows had been glazed. Polythene sheets held wind
and rain at bay. Glass is expensive and the construction can be built quite
satisfactorily without the luxury of windows.
Several hundred workers were employed there. Most of them
were young. Every morning I would see them arriving eagerly for work on foot.
Not even the director general or party secretary warranted a car. There was a
factory car, a small Toyota, but it was strictly to convey senior management on
official business. No-one came to work on a bicycle. Although common elsewhere
in North Korea, the use of bicycles is severely restricted in Pyongyang,
presumably because bicycles would make the country’s showpiece look untidy and
give the place a third world air. At lunch time the young workers would all be
outside playing noisy and energetic games of volleyball and football, just like
in a school playground. When they had to go and work in the fields, they were
packed like sardines into the backs of lorries. The girls used to put sheets of
cardboard down on the floor of the truck to keep the seats of their pants clean
- Koreans are very fastidious like that - and squeeze up together with their
knees tucked under their chins. They thought it was a great adventure. All
round the clock old-fashioned machinery hummed and boomed, the pulse and
heartbeat of the great socialist construction.
The nearly construction site of
the bridge could be a considerable nuisance when one wanted to go to the
Potanggang, but it was also a focus of interest. Apart from a few cranes that
in Europe would have been rejected as too dilapidated for an industrial museum,
there was no machinery permanently on site. The bridge was erected with the
help of slow, antiquated cement mixers, wheelbarrows, spades and base muscle. I
saw workers dragging great slabs of concrete into position with the aid of
nothing more than ropes. They did not have proper scaffolding with which to
support the structure of the bridge, but improvised with rough-hewn timbers
nailed together.
The period when I was there
coincided with an orgy of construction work in Pyongyang. They were building a
new airport and enough high-rise apartment blocks to house a projected 25,000
families. To put a veneer of reality on their bid to co-host the 1988 Olympic
Games with Seoul, precious manpower and material were being squandered on
building a complex of sports halls and gymnasiums known as the Angol Sports
Village, the 150,000 capacity Runguado Stadium, and a number of hotels
including a world-recordbreaking 105-storey hotel to augment the hotels they
already have standing empty for ninety per cent of the time. Consequently the
capital could not furnish enough manpower for all these building projects and
young workers had had to be mobilised from the provinces to build the bridge.
The young workers not only worked on their construction site, they lived on it
in cramped temporary barracks which they put up themselves and where they slept
side by side on the floor with scarcely room to turn over. They kept their
accommodation scrupulously clean. They slept on a raised floor. Just inside the
door was a gully where they left their shoes so as not to drag dirt into the
sleeping area. They were warm in winter, thanks to the proximity of their
comrades and underfloor heating. The traditional Korean cottage boasts a
rudimentary but effective central heating system. The kitchen stove is at one
end of the cottage, but instead of the heat being discharged straight up a
chimney, it is carried through a pipe beneath the floor and expelled at the
other end of the building. As the workers’ kitchens were housed in a separate
building, they lit a fire in an outside fireplace at one end of their barracks
and employed the same principle.
Both men and women were mobilised
for this construction project. The women endured the same spartan living
conditions as the men and performed the same arduous toil in sub-zero
temperatures in winter or in the torrential monsoon rain in summer. Like workers
in more permanent establishments they were expected to augment their food
supply by cultivating their own vegetable patches. They even kept a few pigs.
In the autumn they clogged one stretch of river with a particularly
repulsive-looking water plant that nobody could tell me the English name for: a
sort of grotesque cousin to the lotus, it was bright green in colour and
rubbery in texture. Pigs apparently love it.
An outsider might have reasonably
compared their living conditions to a slave labour camp. They did not see it
that way. They were discharging their revolutionary duty and exalting their
youth. They were sharing the joys of comradeship. They might well have
accounted themselves privileged to have been given the opportunity to leave
their native places and stay for two years in the famous metropolis.
Scattered around the construction
site were noticeboards plastered with revolutionary posters and slogans
exhorting them to work harder, and also charts showing the number of workpoints
that were being scored by each work-team and individual worker. Some pecuniary
award attached to high scores but it was not substantial. The chief motivation
remained personal pride and prestige. Top scorers each week had their
photographs taken, something North Koreans love, and displayed on the
noticeboards for public admiration.
As on all North Korean
construction sites, they were visited at intervals throughout the day by
loudspeaker vans to spur them on with stirring revolutionary music interspersed
with slogans shrieked out in a shrill falsetto. Less frequently itinerant brass
bands would come round and treat them to a live concert.
These young people are the
communist revolutionaries of Juche type who have been moulded behind North
Korea’s sealed frontiers, immunised from any corrupting influence from the
outside world, any breath of doubt or freedom, any knowledge of an alternative
life. From early childhood they have been trained to live disciplined,
organised and collective lives. Had it not been financially impracticable, Kim
Il Sung would have preferred all the children to be educated in boarding
schools so that their conditioning could have been more rigorous. They are
conditioned to behave as soldiers, ready to obey any order at any time, no
questions asked, without thought for their personal safety or well-being. They
must trust their cadres in the chain of command that descends from Supreme
Commander Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung to have thought of that for them.
They are taught that they live in
an ideal society where the worker is master of the state and of his destiny,
enjoying benefits and privileges denied to workers elsewhere in the world, and
that they must at all times behave in a manner befitting masters. In their
culture the worker is constantly portrayed as hero. Everything they read, see
and hear throughout their lives reinforces those messages. They are also
inducted into the community, comfort and consolation of the state religion.
They are united in worship of the great leader. Doubt and deviance are dealt
with paternalistically by the cadres who must be priests of Juche first,
managers and technicians second, and who are expected to try and emulate the
qualities of the fatherly leader.
These people are the sort of
labour force Mrs Thatcher must dream about. Utterly quiescent, they will go
anywhere they are needed in the economy. They will put up with the most basic
living conditions. They will accept minimal wages. They will perform back-breaking
toil without protest or complaint on a daily diet of pickled cabbage and seven
hundred and fifty grams of grain. They do not strike. They are patriotic and
grateful for what they are given. Most of them are even chaste. There are some
workers who, when their day’s work at their own work place is done, go
voluntarily to another work place or construction site to lend a hand in their
spare time.
Chapter 8
I have long
subscribed to the view that physical illness usually has a psychological
component.
I felt quite healthy the first
few weeks in Pyongyang, when everything was new and I was enjoying myself. The
work was absurd, of course, but it was different, it was stress-free, and a
rich source of unintentional humour. The sun shone as it ought to when a chap
is on holiday. When I was not working I roamed the streets like the dedicated
tourist I was, devouring the sights and sounds, trying to form an understanding
of the culture. I drank Scotch on my balcony, watching the factory hands at
work and play. I explored the construction site. I liked to travel on the
Pyongyang Underground with its murals, brass reliefs, marble floors and
pillars, gaudy coloured lights and interminable escalators.
It takes a good two or three
minutes to descend from the surface to the platforms on the Pyongyang
Underground. The stations are deliberately deep below the surface in order to
serve as air-raid shelters in the event of another war. It is forbidden to save
time by walking on the escalators. At the foot of the escalators are little
glass cabins in which officials are stationed to watch out for people breaking
the rules. Nobody does break the rules and the officials are usually asleep.
A particular source of fascination and Pyongyang’s number
one tourist attraction was the traffic conductresses in their gorgeous
kingfisher blue uniforms (except in summer, when they exchange their blue
tunics for white). There are traffic conductors as well, but they are far
outnumbered by the female of the species and are far less interesting. These
invariably stunning-looking girls stand in the middle of the road at every
major junction and imperiously direct the traffic rotating with stylised movements
like well-drilled guardsmen and pointing with their red and white striped
batons, like miniature barber’s poles, that turn luminous at night. It may be
that this occupation carries high prestige. It is fairly obvious that they are
selected partly for their good looks and physical grace. For whatever reason,
these young women seemed to have taken the great leader’s dictum about adopting
the attitude of masters of society more to heart than any other distinguishable
group of workers. Even away from their posts, they strode the pavements of
Pyongyang with all the poise and assurances of millionairesses in
Knightsbridge.[3]
In the context of a holiday, it
was very nice to go to the Koryo Hotel of an evening and meet different people
every night from all over the world in luxurious surroundings.
By the middle of October, the
weather had started to turn cold, I was fed up with sitting at a desk all day
revising stupid texts, I had seen as much as there was to see in Pyongyang
(more or less), I was weary of striking up ephemeral friendships. I had had
enough of eating rice and soup twice a day, seven days a week. We were, in
fact, served other dishes as well but rice and soup were the staple at lunch
and dinner. David Richardson’s predictions about the mail had come true and the
lack of news from home was unsettling. In short, I had had a good, long holiday
abroad and I wanted to go home. Although I was still charmed by the country and
under a lot of misapprehensions, it was beginning to dawn upon me that I had
made a mistake. I was coming to the realisation that in Pyongyang it would be
impossible for me to establish any sort of real life for myself, even on a
temporary basis. A friend of mine from Hong Kong who occasionally came to
Pyongyang on business echoed what were to become my feelings when he said that
it was one of his favourite places to visit, and the last place he would ever
want to live. My problem was that I had given up a job in England and it would
take me many months to save enough money to cushion my return.
My
initial response to this emotional turnabout was denial. I tried to force
myself into a positive frame
of mind. I suspect the effort set up
tension that contributed to my illness. Afterwards I allowed myself to loathe
every minute spent in Pyongyang. I counted off the days and weeks of my
sentence on the calendar like a prisoner and remained reasonably well. I also
turned my vague intention to write about being in Pyongyang into a firm
resolve. It seemed the only way to redeem the time.
There were many little things in life I missed in
Pyongyang. I missed turning on the television and understanding what was being
said. I missed having my own car outside the front door. I missed being able to
walk down the street without being stared at. One of the things I missed most
was playing football. In Leeds I used to keep tolerably fit by playing
five-a-side football at least once a week.
There were not many opportunities available for physical
recreation to the foreigner in Pyongyang. Apart from the ubiquitous table
tennis tables, there did not seem to be many opportunities for sport available
to the average Korean adult. For me, the only option was swimming, something I
had not done for a long time in Leeds. There is a tiny pool in the basement of
the Koryo Hotel. There is also an Olympic-sized pool in the Changwang Health
Complex.
The Changwang Health Complex is a typical Pyongyang public
building, all granite on the outside, all marble within. It contains the
swimming pool and an indoor and an outdoor wading pool. But during the week,
when foreigners are forbidden entry, the most popular facilities are the baths.
There are two floors of baths. There are communal baths, private baths, and
family baths. Nothing fancy, not Turkish baths or sauna baths; simply places
for the population to come and get clean. Even today in North Korea most
households are without hot running water and bathing facilities. Even in some
of the newer apartment blocks, where baths and showers are installed, they are
having difficulty for some reason in supplying just cold water for more than
three or four hours a day. However, people evidently do not consider it any
hardship to go down to the Changwang Health Complex to take a bath. I knew
young people from privileged families who had baths at home and hot water, as
in the Ansan Chodasso, supplied regularly for about five hours a day for
two-thirds of the year, who still went down to the Changwang Health Complex for
a bath and a drink in the cafeteria afterwards as a social activity. As I keep
saying, there is not a lot to do in Pyongyang.
On Saturdays, in typical North Korean fashion, the foreign
residents are allowed in and the Koreans are kept out. It is the swimming
pool’s turn to become the popular facility. I took to going down for a long
swim every Saturday afternoon. On Sundays I used to ache in my left shoulder.
This did not surprise me. The previous August I had incurred a nasty fracture
of my left arm in a collision playing football. It happened in the same week as
I applied for the job in North Korea. There was a psychological component to
this injury. Anyone who is so weak in the head as to be seriously contemplating
working in North Korea is in far too delicate a state to be taking part in a
robust game of soccer. The fracture took a long time to mend. My arm was in pot
for fully thirteen weeks. As my shoulder was consequently immobilised all this
time, it was predictable that there should be some atrophy of the muscles and
that they should ache after unaccustomed exercise. I could live with a certain
amount of stiffness and discomfort on a Sunday. It was a small price to pay for
the sense of well-being that follows a good workout and for having something to
look forward to on Saturday afternoons in Pyongyang. I was not too worried when
I woke up on a Sunday morning towards the end of October, in pain rather than
discomfort. I thought I had probably stiffened up more than usual as a result
of walking straight home after swimming, when a stiff autumn wind was blowing,
instead of having a cup of coffee while my body temperature normalised. I was
not unduly worried that evening when I set out for the disco at the
Changgwangsan Hotel to meet some East German tourists I had befriended, only to
have to turn back because I was in too much discomfort to be able to socialise
with anybody. I drank a couple of beers out of the fridge, went to bed, and
fell asleep immediately.
Nothing prepared me for the agony with which I was thrust
into consciousness at four o’clock that morning. I spent the next ten minutes
trying to lever myself out of bed with the help of my bedside table. Although
the slightest movement compounded the pain, I was impelled by that blind
compulsion to escape that always overrides the obvious rationale that it is
impossible to move away from pain when it is inside one’s own body. That same
compulsion had me pacing the floor for the next three and a half weary hours as
I waited for the building to come to life so that I could seek help. I could
not lie down. I could not sit. I could not read. I drank innumerable cups of
coffee and smoked and paced and paced. There was only one thought that
penetrated the cloud of pain that rose up out of my shoulder blade and
enveloped my consciousness. What the hell was I doing here? In Leeds I would
have been straight out of my front door, into the car, and into the comforting
embrace of Leeds General Infirmary’s casualty department.
The time passed eventually. I went down to breakfast. I
asked Michael, who was adept at both French and Spanish, to speak to the
interpreters on my behalf. Presently I was whisked off to the Foreigners’
Hospital in Pyongyang, a hospital specially reserved for foreigners and
overseas Koreans. It is in line with typical North Korean policy that they
provide a special well-equipped and well-appointed hospital for foreigners.
They do not want any unnecessary contact between foreigners and locals, and
they wish to give foreigners a misleading impression of the high standard of
medical facilities in the country. Not that medical care in North Korea is bad
by third world standards. As one might expect in such a well ordered society,
everyone is vaccinated against all major diseases. Standards of hygiene in
hospitals and clinics are good. The African students felt that the standards of
medical theory were reasonable. What is predominantly lacking are modern drugs
which the country cannot afford. As this is a deteriorating problem, there has
in recent years been a shift of emphasis towards traditional eastern methods of
treatment, but these would seem to be more efficacious for some disorders than
for others, and even traditional herbal medicines are in short supply. I
revised numerous articles for the periodicals about how wonderful traditional
Korean medicine was, but evidently the great leader had not heard about this
because when he wanted to have the growth on the back of his neck removed a few
years ago, he took himself off to Europe for treatment. As it happened, I was
treated largely by traditional methods and I did get better in time. Since my
return to Europe, friends in the medical profession have told me that
traditional oriental methods were probably as suitable for my condition as any
other.
I was not sure what to expect when I arrived at the
hospital that morning. I was in considerable pain but I still imagined that all
I was suffering from was a severe muscular reaction to excessive swimming that
could easily be rectified. All the pain at that point was concentrated in one
area around my shoulder blade.
The clean, well-appointed hospital building inspired
confidence. I had been assured when I set off that there was an English
speaking interpreter based full-time at the hospital but she was nowhere in
evidence when I arrived. Fortunately, the doctor who examined me spoke a little
English , enough to understand where the pain was and when it had started. She
sent me for an X-ray and then to the physiotherapist for heat treatment. The
heat treatment seemed to help. I was still in pain but it was no longer insupportable.
I returned to the Ansan Chodasso, expecting the pain to abate gradually over
the course of the next few days.
I was to be sadly disappointed. Not only did my pain
intensify over the course of the rest of that day, but it spread. By the end of
the evening I had a rope of fire running from the base of my neck across my
shoulder blade and all down my left arm. My fingertips were without sensation
and once again I found myself in the ludicrous situation where I was going to
have to survive hours, in this case a whole night, of total misery before I
could get medical help, when at home I could have been at a hospital in
minutes.
When I finally got to the
hospital the next day. I encountered further misery. Instead of seeing the
doctor, I was taken straight up to physiotherapy. The physiotherapist was a
delightful lady but her English was on about a par with my Korean. The range of
my Korean vocabulary never extended beyond that of an average two-year-old. I
tried to explain to her that I was very grateful for her heat treatment and all
that, but I was in far worse pain than I had been the day before. It was all
down my arm and what she had to offer was having no impact on whatever it was I
had got. I urged her to let me see a doctor with an interpreter. I suppose if I
had had the wherewithal to put on more of a pantomime, I might have got through
to her but, being British, my impulse was to do my best to comport myself with
as much decorum and dignity as my agony would permit and, because my agony was
sapping all my resources, I did not have the energy to overcome my natural
tendency to behave in a restrained manner. Consequently the poor woman was at a
complete loss to understand what I was jabbering about but did not perceive me
as being sufficiently agitated for her to go and fetch somebody else. After she
left the room my driver, who spoke not a word of English but for some reason
had chosen to accompany me round the hospital, presumably because it was more
entertaining to watch me being treated than to wait in the car, mimed pulling
his zip down and going to the toilet. He was evidently enquiring if what I
wanted was to know where the toilet was. This was the last straw. My dignity
went out of the window. I put my head in my hands and wept with frustration.
I ended up being driven all the way back to the Ansan
Chodasso on the other side of the city. There Jean-Jacques explained for me to
our interpreters that I was in excruciating pain and needed to go straight back
to the hospital. On this occasion we made a detour to the publishing house to
collect one of the English translators to interpret for me. I should add that,
given the state of some of Pyongyang’s roads, these car journeys were doing
nothing to alleviate my condition.
When we got back to the hospital, I was examined by a
different doctor and given my first taste of traditional medicine. I had to lie
prone on a couch. The doctor took half a dozen glass bowls. He put wads of
cotton wool into the bowls and set fire to them. He then stuck the bowls in
strategic positions all down the left side of my back. The burning cotton wool
evidently creates some sort of suction effect because the rims of the bowls
gripped like clamps into my flesh. The effect was rather like being bitten by a
crocodile. The connection between mind and physical pain is an unfathomable
mystery: why does the toothache always feel easier when one is sitting in the
dentist’s waiting room? I do not know why it was: the relief of at last having
an interpreter with me, the doctor’s air of professional assurance, or the
dramatic physical quality of the treatment. You don’t notice your backache when
a crocodile’s biting you. Whatever the reason, when he eventually removed the
cups, I placed the palms of my hands on the couch and levered myself up with
both arms without the slightest twinge of pain. Words could not express my
admiration for this oriental wizard who had driven out my agony. Through the
interpreter I asked how it had worked and whether there was any danger of the
pain returning. I was told that the treatment worked on the central nervous
system and that it was possible that the pain might return.
Just how possible I discovered on
the drive back to the Ansan Chodasso. Almost before we got there I was back to
square one. In almost thirty-eight years in Britain I only ever spent two
nights in a hospital. I had been in Pyongyang for just over two months and I
was about to spend the next two weeks in the
Foreigners’ Hospital.
The standard of the accommodation in the Foreigners’
Hospital in Pyongyang is like I imagine a private clinic in the West would be.
The North Koreans spare no expense when it comes to impressing foreigners. I
had a private room with a refrigerator and a colour TV set, a bathroom en suite
and a balcony. The balcony proved indispensable. The regulations against
smoking in the building were so strict that cigarettes were not even permitted
in the day room.
The immediate boon for me about going into hospital was
that I had a firm hospital mattress under my back and a high hospital bed with
handgrips in the frame, which made getting in and out of bed a hundred times
easier. The actual treatment seemed at first to have little impact on my
condition. Every day I was given a vitamin injection and sent to physiotherapy
for heat treatment. Every two or three days I was given acupuncture and the
glass bowls again. I remained in considerable physical pain. The only way to
avoid it was to lie flat and keep perfectly still. I was also by now extremely
worried. It is alarming when a body that one day swims a kilometre with ease is
two days later hardly able to get itself in and out of bed. I had been admitted
to hospital but I had still not the slightest idea what was wrong with me. I
knew very little Korean and I was being treated by a doctor and nursing staff
who knew very little English . It was a great relief then when on my third day
as an inpatient I received a visit from the fabled hospital interpreter. I
asked her to arrange for me to see the doctor in her presence so that I could
find out from him what it was I was suffering from and what his prognosis was.
She returned to my room with the doctor that afternoon. I
had been in Korea long enough by then. I should have anticipated what sort of
response I would get to my enquiries. By coincidence, just at the time when I
was admitted to hospital I had been revising in a book of fairy stories about
the indomitable woman revolutionary fighter Kim Jong Suk, the president’s first
wife and the mother of the dear leader, a passage in which she tells the leader
of a village children’s corps that there are two essential virtues which a good
revolutionary needs, and that one is punctuality and the other is secrecy. The
fetish for secrecy is one of the dominant traits in North Korean society. The
Koreans are not only secretive in their dealings with foreigners. They are secretive
in their dealings with each other, in the sense that nobody is told anything he
does not need to know, nor is anyone ever told anything before it is absolutely
necessary for him to know. A Korean who is to be temporarily dispatched to
another town or even another country will be lucky to get a week’s notice of
the date of his departure. There is method in this madness because it serves to
create a social climate in which the individual feels totally at the mercy of
the state and must therefore, if he is to preserve his equilibrium, adopt an
attitude of perfect trust towards the state and its authorities. They must
trust what Kim Jong Il refers to as “the material Party and paternal leader”
(Education in Juche Idea, p.26), as a child trusts his parents. Already I was
aware that secrecy was the norm in North Korea but I had yet to appreciate the
absurd lengths to which it is taken. Consequently when, after a lengthy
conversation with the doctor in Korean, the interpreter turned to me and said,
“The doctor says when there is something you need to know, he will tell you,” I
was so taken aback that for the moment I was stunned into silence.
The following day I redoubled my determination. I again
assembled the doctor and interpreter in my room. I explained that it was normal
in my culture for a patient to be told what was the matter with him and what
was being done about it, and it was therefore disquieting to me not to have
this information. I was reluctantly informed that I had neuralgia, that the
doctor was confident he could cure it, but it would be a slow process and I
would have to remain in hospital for about a fortnight. I then asked the
interpreter to ask the doctor why he could not have said this yesterday. She
declined to translate my question.
I was still in pain. The slightest physical effort provoked
agony. Sitting on the edge of the bed to attempt the dreadful meals they
brought me, going out on my balcony to smoke, taking a shower, all involved
complicated battles to master my pain. But at least I knew now that all I was
suffering from was neuralgia, a not very serious condition with a pronounced
psychosomatic factor, probably attributable in my case to a physically
susceptible area of the body plus the tension created by having to adapt to a
strange and increasingly uncongenial environment. I settled down with an easier
mind to wait for rest, time and medical intervention to restore me to health.
It was helpful that I had confidence in the doctor.
Subscribing to the national cult of secrecy was not his only eccentricity. His
diagnostic method consisted of prodding me in the back and snarling, “Pain?
Pain? Where pain?” or pulling my ark back sharply until I exclaimed, “Pain!
Pain! There’s the pain, you bastard!” Nevertheless, he always had the air of
knowing what he was about, and in his less playful moments he looked precisely
what I suppose he was, a distinguished, middle-aged consultant physician. His
characteristic demeanour suggested intelligence, shrewdness, self-assurance
and, untypical in a North Korea, urbanity and sophistication. I often used to
wonder what he thought in his private moments to the bizarre society he lived
in, how such a man viewed the naive and all-pervasive propaganda and the
presidential personality cult.
I could guess what the pensioners of Pyongyang thought, the
old people who gathered every Sunday afternoon when the weather was find in the
vicinity of the Juche Tower in the Taedonggang Pleasure Park. The old women put
on their best traditional costume and gathered round in circles to dance their
traditional peasant dances to the beat of the changgo drum, similar to a conga
drum except that it is hung on the drummer’s shoulder and played at the
horizontal. While the ladies danced, their menfolk preferred to squat around
playing cards or Korean chess. Whenever I used to come upon these geriatric
gyrators, their goodnatured faces lit up with conviviality, I sensed that these
good people, who had grown up under the Japanese colonial rule and fled as
young adults from the American bombs, never entertained the slightest doubt
that they were living in a communist paradise and that their great leader was a
Moses who had led his people out of the wilderness into the promised land.
These people would have had little knowledge and less interest in the world
beyond the boundaries of Korea. All they knew was that they lived in this
magnificent modern city that they had resurrected from the rubble of war under
the guidance of the great leader. They had enjoyed thirty years of peace and
security, thirty years when they had never gone hungry. In old age now, they
had little to worry about. If they fell ill, there were doctors. In extremis,
they knew they could rely on the state to look after them, but they need have
little concern for that eventuality. The ancient obligations of kinship are
alive and well in Kim Il Sung’s Korea. Old people live with their children and
grandchildren but they do not depend on them for their food or pocket money.
They have their own daily grain ration and their pension.
Only among young educated Koreans
can one discern serious doubts about the health of their society, and then the
doubts seem to give rise to more emotional confusion than critical thinking.
I once commented to Sami on how little many of the ones who
had travelled or even lived abroad seemed to have been affected by their
experience. His theory was that they were so deeply indoctrinated that they
were encased in their ideology like a cocoon that made them impervious to
outside influences. He had known Koreans serving as diplomats in Beirut,
including before the troubles, in Moscow, and in Paris. In his experience few
of them felt a strong attraction to the fun and freedom available in the outside
world. Most were homesick for the familiar world of Juche Korea.
While I was in Pyongyang there was plenty of evidence to
suggest that exposure to affluent foreigners made North Koreans greedy and
materialistic, but it did not seem to be giving rise to much ideological
questioning. The system under which they have been raised, of course, is hardly
conducive to the development of a capacity for critical thinking.
It was usually among older Koreans that I occasionally
detected the light of irony and sensed a lurking capacity for critical thought.
I discerned these qualities in the head of the English department at the
publishing house, a taciturn but charming man who used to call on me from time
to time. He was the sort of chap who in England would have been a gentle,
shabbily dressed don with a wry sense of humour and a penchant for the bottle.
Even when he had made deep inroads into my whisky bottle, he always remained
far too discreet to express any overt political views, but my impression was
that he looked upon the cult of the great leader and the Juche Ideawith
whimsical detachment, but he could remember bitter days and was not on the
whole displeased by the way his country was developing. I would have been very
curious to know what sort of thoughts passed through the mind of a man of my
doctor’s calibre when he turned on the television in the evening to an endless
stream of propaganda.
It is perhaps a little unfair to dismiss Korean television
as nothing but an endless stream of propaganda, but only a little. During my
two weeks in hospital I watched quite a lot of television. It made a change
from reading and it was something I could do standing up. For some reason I
found it much less painful at that time to stand than to sit. By the end of a
week I could endure to stand up for half an hour at a time, whereas I could not
sit for more than five minutes before the pain drove me back into bed. An
astonishing amount of viewing time is given over to documentary-style
celebrations of the great leader, the glorious achievements of the Juche
revolution, and also to the architectural splendours of Pyongyang and the
natural beauty of the Korean countryside. The people are encouraged to take a
great pride in their country’s natural beauty. But they do have dramas and
light entertainment. Every week there is an amateur song contest, when the
workers and peasants get the chance to put on their finery and step into the
spotlight. Koreans, as mentioned before, love to sing and these amateurs turn
in very stirring performances. Their eyes shine and they make impassioned
gestures as they perform the well-loved revolutionary ditties that extol the
virtues of the great leader and the victories of the socialist revolution, to
the accompaniment of accordion and guitar. When they have poured their hearts
out, impassive judges press buttons. A red light comes on if their performance
has gained the judge’s approval. A green lights denotes failure. Then the
performer has to stand and listen to the judge’s criticism before departing the
stage. The performers do not mind. Public criticism has become a standard part
of daily life in their culture. It is considered good for people. Before they
pour their hearts out, the performers announce their names and occupations.
They have exciting jobs like fitter at the Kum Song General Tractor Plant,
electrician at the February 8th Vindon Factory, or sub-work-team leader on a
co-operative farm. At any rate they perceive their jobs as exciting. For this
is a society where the highest honour is not to be made a knight of the realm,
but to be decorated as a Labour Hero. Outstanding sportsmen and entertainers
enjoy a modest celebrity but the quintessential heroes of the Juche Korea are
the workers and peasants and men of the Korean People’s Army, who exceed annual
production quotas, grow record crop yields, or build the West Sea barrage, and
the media do not let people forget this. There are no chat shows where
glittering celebrities offer tantalising glimpses into their personal lives on
North Korean television. Instead there are images of determined men up to their
waists in foaming, icy water laying pipes or building factories in the snow.
These are the activities that are portrayed as glamorous in North Korea.
At nine o’clock each evening the news comes on the
television. Just like in the real world. There all similarities end. The
newsreader always starts off with the same words, “Waidehon Sungong Kim Il Sung
Donzi”, “the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung”. Then follows a rsum of what the
great man has said and done today. Then there are likely to be some
announcements about the activities of the dear leader. Nobody else gets much of
a mention. As far as the general public knows, other high officials and ministers
of state are merely “attendant lords, ones that will do/To swell a progress,
start a scene or two”. The only time any of them get much of a write-up is when
they are safely dead.
The rest of the world hardly ever gets a mention on the
North Korean news except for South Korea, when the students and workers take to
the streets in protest. Scenes of confrontation between South Korean students
and police are shown over and over again. The rest of the news is just
propaganda about the brilliant successes of the national economy. There are
reports on factories which have broken production records, and interviews with
the cadres who always have to say that their success is entirely due to the
great leader and his heir. This is meant to be good for the national morale and
to feed the self-esteem of the average worker. Not such a bad thing. In any
society there are more average workers than there are stars of the
entertainment industry. It is not unreasonable to regard the daily heroism of
the miner as more worthy of note than the private agonies of a soap opera star.
The brave wiremen workteam of the Yonggwant district branch of the Yonggwant
County Power Distribution Station, who insisted that the power should be kept
running while they laid new electric wires over extremely high-voltage wires
because they did not want to interrupt production at local factories, deserved
their fame. The trouble is that most sectors of the North Korean economy have
not been performing well in recent years. Even a people as simple as the North
Koreans, when they watch the news or read the paper, must wonder why, when they
have such a brilliant national economy, they have less to eat than they did ten
years ago.
Korean drama must be high on ideological as well as
artistic merit. In other words, it has to serve principally propaganda
purposes. Consequently Korean films are deficient in characterisation, subtlety
and verisimilitude, but they do have their share of romance, melodrama, action,
tension and even violence. There are North Korean martial arts movies that are
every bit as violent as anything made with Bruce Lee. One thing you do not get
is comedy. Cultivation of the comic outlook on life could have a very damaging
effect on people’s attitude toward the Juche Idea. I do not suppose the
standard of programme on North Korean television is so much worse than the
average peaktime viewing rubbish in the West. However, it is a small, poor
country and cannot produce enough programmes to fill two channels seven nights
a week. The same programmes and films are repeated over and over again. The
song contest is probably shown three times a week. Not surprisingly, people
become bored. At the weekend the whole of the population turns over to the
third channel. The Mansudae channel has been in operation for the last few
years, broadcasting dubbed foreign TV programmes and films, mainly from China
and eastern Europe. Most of what is shown is not very good, and there is a preponderance
of ancient Russian war movies, but at least it gives the people a bit of
variety.
Korean television normally begins transmission at six in
the evening and closes down promptly at eleven. Staying up late is not
encouraged. There are broadcasts during the daytime on Sundays and, if I
remember correctly, on the 11th, 21st and 31st of each month. These are the
days when the peasants are allowed to take a break. They are less privileged
than the urban workers, being only entitled to three days’ respite a month from
toil. For some reason there is also one day a month when there is no television
at all.
I think it was during my spell in hospital that I first
began to realise how poor the people actually are. My balcony looked out across
the hospital gardens over the road to a compound in which were set rows of tiny
whitewashed cottages with crudely tiled roofs. There was a well in the compound
where the women used to squat and wash their clothes. I had seen this type of
accommodation before in the countryside, but had not thought it still existed
in the city. In the months to come, as my explorations of Pyongyang took me
further off the main thoroughfares, I found more and more of these traditional
cottages. The pattern is the same throughout the city. All the main roads are
fronted by relatively attractive modern apartment blocks. Step behind these
apartment blocks and there will be shabbier blocks or else rows and rows of
these comparatively primitive dwellings, discreetly hidden from the view of the
casual passer-by. It is like stepping backward in time. You never see
photographs of this type of housing in Korea Today. The cottages contain
neither running water nor modern sanitary facilities. The residents share
latrines that in summer emit a powerful stench.
Interestingly,
these humble dwellings were clean and adequately furnished, many contained
television sets, and the residents were as well-groomed as the rest of the
population. The fact that such poor quality housing stock proliferates even in
the capital, the national showcase, testifies to the gulf between North Korea’s
propaganda and the reality of its economic development. The fact that the
residents of these dwellings maintain such high standards of household and
personal care testifies to something else. The only reason why these houses
cannot be classed as squalid slums is that the people who live in them do not
permit their homes to degenerate into slums or themselves into slum-dwellers.
Another thing I noticed was that
the nurses in the hospital, although always immaculately turned out, wore the
same clothes day after day. Afterwards I noticed that the waitresses at the
Ansan Chodasso, the girls who cleared the rooms, the translators at the
publishing house, even the staff in the hotels, were wearing the same clothes,
the same skirts and blouses and cardigans, the same jackets and jumpers and
shirts, day after day. Yet they all managed to look neat, clean and
presentable. It is a good thing that Koreans know how to look after their
clothes when they have so few of them. They either do not sweat like the rest
of us, or there must be a lot of washing clothes at bedtime and hanging them to
dry overnight going on. They are certainly keen on clothes being folded and put
away. The nurse who usually attended on me in the hospital was forever picking
up my scarf and jumper from my chair where I had dumped them in readiness for
my next foray onto the balcony for a cigarette. She used to fold them and put
them away in the cupboard and hiss at me, “Clothes, Andrew, clothes in
cupboard.”
This admirable, if perhaps
excessive, impulse towards cleanliness, neatness and order is endemic in every
aspect of Korean society. To what extent it is deeply rooted in the national
culture and to what extent it is a product of the political system, I am not in
a position to judge. It is certainly something that the president has always
been very keen to promote. These comments that he made in a speech delivered to
the secretariat of the Central Committee in February 1973 are very typical:
“The league organisations must
ensure that the young people and children are dressed neatly in keeping with
the socialist way of life.
“At present, some members of the
Children’s Union go about in slovenly clothes. This is because their parents do
not take good care of them, but the main reason is that their schools and
league organisations neglect their education and control. The schools and
league organisations must improve the education of school children and tighten
up their control so that all the school children must always go about neatly
dressed.
“Young people must always wear
neat clothes. At present, some of them are careless about their clothes; they
seem to think that a slovenly appearance is the sign of simplicity and
frugality. Slovenly clothing is not a virtue of frugality. Young people must go
about in good clothes and wear neckties and always dress themselves in clean
clothes.
“Young people and children must
also keep the rules of hygiene thoroughly. The league organisations must ensure
that they bathe themselves and have haircuts frequently, wash their feet before
going to bed and brush their teeth every morning.” (CW, Vol.28, p.203.)
For anyone who finds the
necessity for children to wash their feet before going to bed to be an unusual
topic for the president of a republic of nearly twenty million people to be
addressing at an elite gathering of one of the highest organs of state power,
here is another delightful passage from the same speech:
“The members of the Children’s
Union must launch a campaign to eradicate flies, mosquitoes, and other harmful
insects. On many occasions I have stressed the need for them to kill flies
everywhere, but this work is not yet going well. The League and Children’s
Union organisations must see that the union members carry out a general
campaign to kill flies and mosquitoes and thus eradicate all harmful insects.”
For my first few days in hospital
I was too unwell to be bored. It was sufficient to lie on a firm hospital
mattress and feel no pain, to be able to get on and off my bed without too much
difficulty or discomfort. By the end of a week I had revived sufficiently for
tedium to set in. Apart from my daily trip to physiotherapy I did little except
read, smoke on the balcony, or stand and stare uncomprehendingly at the TV. I
did receive occasional visits from my colleagues at the Ansan Chodasso, who
also brought me fruit and chocolate to supplement the truly appalling hospital
cuisine. But their visits tended to be short as the drivers were waiting and
others might want the use of the car. There were always two or three cars on
hand up to seven in the evening for the convenience of the revisers, but there
were quite a few of us to share them and it was antisocial to monopolise them
for much more than an hour at a time. In the halcyon days when revisers were
less numerous and more cosseted, each reviser had a car and a driver at his
personal disposal around the clock, but these days were long gone.
One morning during my second week
in hospital I was out on the balcony having a cigarette under the clear azure
sky of a Far eastern autumn, watching the leaves turn golden in the lofty birch
trees, feeling thoroughly pissed off and cursing myself for landing in such a
ridiculous situation, when a vision of loveliness suddenly appeared two
balconies to my left. It was about five and a quarter feel tall with a
luxuriant growth of long soft dark hair, full lips, laughing eyes, and carried
itself with the sort of grace that made even the shapeless regulation issue
striped hospital pyjamas look elegant. I smiled at the vision and the vision
smiled back. I turned away wistfully. I did not speak Chinese.
It was a very pleasant surprise
then when later that day the vision of loveliness presented herself at my door
and asked in my own native tongue if she could come in. She was not only a
singularly attractive girl, but remarkable in other ways too. Now aged
twenty-three, she had been sent to Korea five years ago under a student
exchange scheme to study agricultural engineering in Pyongyang. As well as
mastering her subject, she had also obviously had to master first the Korean
language, and she had also taught herself English in her own time through
reading and practising conversation with the African students and any other
foreigners she chanced to meet. She already spoke English pretty well and she
was keen for me to help her improve it. I was very happy to oblige.
The last few days in hospital
passed quite pleasantly. I did not spent the whole time with my new friend. The
day after we met, she had the minor eye operation she had come in for and she
needed to convalesce. I still had to spend a lot of time lying on my back. But
we spent time together each day. I helped her improve her English while she
generally charmed me and opened my eyes a fraction to the culture of North East
Asia that surrounded me. Our friendship seemed to cause some concern among the
hospital staff. Whenever we were in each other’s rooms, we seemed to get more
nursing attention than cardiac patients on an intensive care ward.
My friend was, and to a large
extent remained, an enigma to me. She was an exceptionally intelligent,
self-assured and astute young lady, but often when we were together I felt as
if I was talking to one of my thirteen-year-old daughter’s friends rather than
to a young adult.
Her father was a scientist and
university teacher in Beijing. Both her parents, I gathered, were originally
from privileged backgrounds. She remarked that they had “such good lives before
liberation”. As a small child, she had been cared for in a residential nursery
for six months while her parents did their stint in the countryside as part of
Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution. Her parents had not relished the
experiences. The peasants were primitive and dirty people. Her father was often
sick as a consequence of the poor hygiene. When I asked if her father had a
car, she told me that he did not, “because although he is a professor, he is
not a party member”. She told me that when the family were obliged to display
Mao’s photograph in the living room, they had positioned it as high up the wall
as possible and seldom bothered to dust it. She told me that much of the
paraphernalia of Kim Il Sung’s personality cult and political ideology was of
Chinese derivation: the photographs, the badges, the monuments and the concept
of the three revolutions. Now, as any good revolutionary warrior of Juche type
will tell you, there is only one Great Leader, ever-victorious, iron-willed and
brilliant commander in time of war, infinitely sagacious and far-sighted in
time of peace, so if there was any copying going on, it must have been on the
part of the Chinese. Not that this implies any criticism of the Chinese. It is
a wise man who emulates the uniquely great. Not being a revolutionary warrior
of Juche type, I did not contradict her. Sometimes she used to tease the nurses
by saying to them, “We used to have a Great Leader. All the time it was Mao Ze
Dong, he say this, Mao Ze Dong, he say that.
Then he died.”
“You must not
say that,” they would hiss in genuine alarm.
Like, I suspect, most educated and relatively privileged
young Chinese, she did not fundamentally oppose her country’s system but she
was grateful for the changes that have been effected since Deng Xiao Ping has
held the reins of power. Her father now earns four times as much as a porter at
his university. Each member of her family, herself, her parents and her younger
brother, have their own cassette recorder. The family has a colour TV. She is
proud that her country can now manufacture such articles and no longer has to
rely on importing them from Japan.
Her father no longer has to learn the newspaper by heart
each day to be able to reiterate exactly the current party line, lest he be
caught out at a group study session and lay himself open to criticism or even
loss of position. She told me how once, when she was only eleven, her class
were given a homework assignment to write a criticism of Deng Xiao Ping. She
did not know how to proceed. She was only a small child. She knew nothing of
politics or Deng Xiao Ping. She asked her mother’s assistance, but her mother
was ignorant of these things also. Then her mother had the idea of finding a
critical article in the newspaper and copying it out word for word.
Happily all the other parents of her classmates also had
the same idea so nobody got into trouble. She held the opinion that if the
staff at her university were able to devote less time to studying the Juche
Ideaand spend more time on scientific research, then the country might progress
faster. Needless to say, no Korean student, no matter how gifted he may be at
his subject, can hope to pass his course without passing the examinations in
the Juche philosophy.
As well as the relaxation of ideological oppression by the
party and the new consumerism for the more privileged classes, she also
welcomed the advent of western popular culture that was banned until a few
years ago. She listened exclusively to western pop music, but I am sad to say
that her tastes were execrable. She adored a gruesome compilation of disco
music that Jean-Jacques had brought back from a trip to Hong Kong which offered
at best Mel and Kim’s Respectable and hit the pits with a number that went
“Boom, boom, boom, let’s go back to my room to have some boom, boom, boom,”
while she decided to make a copy of my treasured selection of sixties Motown
classics to give to her mother because “that sort of music is nice for older
people”.
Although she was not enamoured of Pyongyang, she did not
regret that she had been sent. She suffered from homesickness, particularly
because she had only been able to return home once a year for the six-week
summer holidays. She was incredulous when I told her that English students only
attend college for thirty weeks and year and had both Saturday and Sunday free
of classes. For her, coming to Pyongyang had been an adventure. She had never
had the opportunity to travel even in her own country before. The first time
she had left the environs of Beijing was to come to Pyongyang in 1982. She said
that she had had more opportunities to talk to foreigners and learn English in
Pyongyang than she would if she had stayed at home to study. And in Pyongyang
she could go out in the evening. “My daddy say: must not go out after dark.
Many bad people about. In Pyongyang bad Koreans also but they dare not do
anything. Is different in my country. Many, many people. Cannot control them.”
It was interesting to hear her talk about food. Food is not
something that we in the West give a lot of thought to. Our conversation is not
peppered with allusions to the subject of food. Clearly even for the relatively
well-off in socialist Asia, food is a major preoccupation. Even if one is not
personally experiencing scarcity, the possibility of scarcity is never remote.
“Always at home we have very good food. My daddy he say you can have to eat
whatever you like.” Although on this occasion she actually did require medical
treatment, she told me that she had been in the hospital five times before. She
said that she pretended to be unwell because if she spent a few days in
hospital, she received large quantities of free food and she could then claim a
rebate from the student’s hostel for the meals she had not taken there. This
helped to augment her meagre spending allowance. She told me that when she went
home and got a job, she would continue to live with her parents and give all
her money to her mother because that way she would be sure to have plenty to
eat. It was through talking to her that I first discovered how frugal was the
diet of the Koreans around me. Rice or maize, a little pickled vegetables, and
soup if they are lucky, three times a day. Meat, except a little to flavour the
soup, was for festival occasions. A bar of chocolate or a packet of biscuits
was a rare extravagance. The day that she was discharged from hospital, she
told me that she had been to the Pyongyang Shop, the biggest store for foreigners
which accepts both blue and red won, to buy presents for the nurses. This was a
typically kind-hearted gesture because I doubt if her monthly spending
allowance would have been any more than fifty blue won. I assumed that she had
bought them sweets or biscuits or something like that. No, she had bought them
vegetables. Not even vegetables are available in ample quantities. This is not
to say that anybody in North Korea goes hungry. It is not that sort of place.
Almost the entire population has the same relentless diet: a ration of grain,
preferably rice, soup, a little pickled cabbage or radishes, washed down with
hot water. Coffee is way beyond their price range. Nor can they afford to drink
tea or soft drinks except occasionally. People cannot always be bothered to
boil the water, so colitis is endemic in Pyongyang. Quite a few adult males
desist from drinking alcohol when they have the opportunity because alcohol
exacerbates the condition and causes stomach-ache.
One day while I was in her room she received a visit from a
slightly older Korean woman. She was one of the guides who look after the
foreign students and are at the same time expected to keep a watchful eye on
them. What made her remarkable was her clothes. She was not wearing a low-cut
dress or a miniskirt or anything like that. I fancy it will be a few years yet
before any such garment is seen on a North Korean woman. The style of her
clothes was conventionally plain and modest. She was wearing knitted tights, a
pair of plain leather shoes with a low heel, a raincoat, a skirt of just below
knee-length, and a jumper; but she also had a pale blue silk scarf tied round
her neck and every one of her garments declaimed by their texture and cut that
they had not been manufactured locally. They had either been purchased abroad
or at one of the local dollar shops where the prices of imported clothes is
astronomical. When I commented on this, my friend explained with a certain
amount of awe in her voice that this young lady’s father was a very high
government official, “only just below the president,” she added. “I have been
to her house. It is in one of the new blocks near the Koryo. There are five
rooms for one family.”
This was interesting. I did not know at that time that that
section of Changgwant Street, a block away from the Koryo, which is closed to
the general public, contains apartments of the central committee, so I never
ascertained whether she meant that this young lady’s family lived there or in
one of the modern apartment blocks adjacent to the Koryo. Assuming that the
lady’s father was quite elevated but not quite of central committee standing,
and that it was in the latter, publicly visible housing that the family
resided, this would confirm my impression that North Korea is a genuinely
pretty egalitarian society. From what I could see, the occupants of these flats
enjoyed no higher a standard of living than an affluent working-class family
living in one of Britain’s more desirable council estates might realistically
aspire to. Although the quality of this young woman’s attire stood out in
Pyongyang, in Europe she would have passed as just an ordinary young
professional woman. There is a wide gap between the standard of living enjoyed
by the occupants of this class of accommodation and the occupants of the tiled
cottages. On the other hand, this gap cannot be compared to the gulf that
divides the Rolls Royce owners in Britain from the destitute seeking shelter at
the Salvation Army.
Because one cannot see, one can only speculate on how the
central committee are living. The fact that they live in apartments in the city
centre and not in villas in the country may give some indication. Similarly one
has to speculate as to how the country people are living in the rural areas
where foreigners are not normally taken. However, visiting experts and
technicians who have had to be taken off the beaten track for the sake of their
projects invariably report that living conditions are quite reasonable by the
standards of rural Asia. For example, one agriculturalist was taken to the
extreme North of the country near the Soviet border to a remote area where it
was wintry for nearly two-thirds of the year, and in the depths of January,
such fierce winds prevailed that although it was frequently snowing the snow
never settled. To provide maximum shelter for themselves the people built their
houses half underground. Even up there electrification had been introduced and
there were schools and medical services, not to mention badges and photographs
of the leadership.
It should be remembered in
judging today’s communist societies that they neither claim to have achieved
complete equality of wealth nor aspire to achieve it in the immediate future.
These societies subscribe to the ideology that they are in the transitional
phase of socialism when the dictatorship of the proletariat holds sway, that
marks the passage from capitalism to communism proper. Their immediate aims are
the exploitation of labour and the elimination of institutionalised class
distinctions and privileges. Over twenty years ago Kim Il Sung made his view
plain that the dictatorship of the proletariat must continue in the DPRK until
the country’s productive forces have reached an advanced stage, the peasantry
has attained the same levels of affluence and cultural attainments as the urban
working class, and all traces of obsolete ideologies have been eradicated from
the minds of individuals. And even when a totally classless and technologically
developed society has been created, “while ever the revolution has not brought
victory on a worldwide scale” and “as long as capitalism remains in the world”,
then “the dictatorship of the proletariat will not vanish, and we cannot even
talk about the disappearance of the state” (CW, Vol.21, p.226).
Sounds like he is anticipating a
long reign for the Kim dynasty. In the meantime, according to Kim Il Jong, it
is “the socialist principle of distribution according to the quality and
quantity of work done” that should be applied. He modifies this by adding that
“neglecting the political and moral incentive and placing the main emphasis on
the material incentive runs counter to the essential character of socialist
society” and is “a very dangerous and harmful tendency” which “fosters
selfishness among the working people and makes them mercenary and acquisitive”
(On the Juche Idea, p.69).
Chapter 9
After two weeks
in hospital I returned to the Ansan Chodasso, still in very considerable
discomfort which only abated very gradually over the course of the next four or
five weeks. It was now November. Autumn had passed into winter. The year’s last
tourists had vacated the hotels.
For the first week after my
discharge I returned to the hospital each morning for heat treatment, after
which I would slip up to visit my friend for a few minutes. We continued to see
each other after she left the hospital, but, like so many aspects of life in
Pyongyang, it was not easy.
When she first arrived in
Pyongyang five years previously, the Chinese students were all warned by their
embassy that they were not to associate with any foreigners apart from fellow
students. They were told that to do so would give offence to the Koreans, who
were concerned lest the students should divulge to foreigners information about
life in Korea that they did not wish foreigners to know.
In actual fact, as I knew from
contacts with the veteran African students and others, life in the DPRK had
become a lot more liberal in many respects since she first arrived. Even
Michael, who had only arrived in Pyongyang a month before I did, had noticed
changes. The interpreters were no longer wary of approaching foreigners to whom
they were not officially attached. The girls behind the bars were no longer
reluctant to play tapes of western pop music on the cassette recorders. I very
much doubt if in the prevailing climate any Korean would have taken the
slightest interest in our relationship. Apart from anything else, it would have
been pointless for the Koreans to take active steps to discourage Chinese
students from associating with foreigners when they were unable to place such
restrictions on the Africans, who had far more access to the places frequented
by foreigners on account of their greater spending power, and who all knew a
European language. Basically I think her fears that there could be serious
repercussions if she was seen with me by anyone from her embassy or anyone who
knew her and might report her were groundless. Nevertheless, the fears were
there, and the fact that she only had a few weeks to go in Pyongyang did
nothing to diminish them. The prospect of being sent home in disgrace without a
qualification at this late stage was not appealing. One night she got in a
dreadful panic. We had deliberately chosen to go to the Potanggang in
preference to the Koryo to reduce the risk of being seen. What should be parked
just beside the entrance to the hotel but a Chinese embassy car with a driver
inside. It was too late to turn back but, after seeking a brief refuge in the
disco bar, we left again a few minutes later, separately, she with her woolly
hat pulled down almost over her eyes and her coat collar turned up as far as it
would go.
We still managed to spend a few
pleasant evenings together. Every few days as often as she was free and felt
able to go out from the hostel to meet me without attracting suspicion, she
would ring me up. Even the phone calls contained an element of absurdity. The
telephone was in the interpreters’ quarters. Neither of the resident
interpreters at that time spoke much English . It would have been simple for
her to speak to them in Korean but she feared that to do so might offer a clue
to her identity. Therefore she would only ask to speak to me in English. Until
they became familiar with her voice, this led to some confusion. We would meet
in the evening on Changgwant Street and go to a restaurant which she considered
relatively safe because it only accepted red won and Chinese diplomats only had
blue. Or we would take a chance and venture into the hotels. On one occasion we
went to the disco at the Changgwangsan. Although there were only a handful of
people there, she was quite delighted because she had never been to a real,
grownup discotheque before. The next time we went, we arrived to find that the
barman had just closed it because there had been no customers that night. Such
is the way of things in wintry Pyongyang.
Shortly before Christmas she
returned to her country for good. A few days earlier my close friend Sami had
migrated South for the winter. That was when life became really dull.
My mood as I settled down to
endure the long, cold, dreary Korean winter was not improved by something that
happened in early December, December 5th to be exact.
Pay day was always the fifth of
the month. That was when I found out that I was not going to be paid for the
two weeks I spent in hospital. When I mentioned this to Sami, he confirmed that
this was their normal practice. He said the same thing had happened to a
previous reviser who had had a drink problem and had several spells in hospital
as a result. Sami had not forewarned me about this but I did not hold it
against him. I had already realised that it is a characteristic of people who
spend a long time in North Korea that they end up being almost as guarded about
giving information as the Koreans themselves.
Coming on top of my early hassle
over money, I was furious, particularly as this was just after the Wall Street
crash and the collapse of the dollar. It was just as well I was not on the
other side of the 38th parallel within reach of a nuclear button that day. I
would have solved what they call “the two Koreas problem” and put an end to the
tensions on the Korean peninsula once and for all. There would have been just
Korea, and it would have been an island with its northern coastline hugging the
38th parallel.
Christmas was a particularly
dreary time. Pyongyang had already been dead for weeks. In the middle of
December they even started to close my favourite bar in the Potanggang Hotel at
7.30 in the evening because of lack of custom. Perversely they did not shut
down the disco bar, where the western disco music blared unheeded and the
coloured lights dazzled nobody except the two girls who sat in weary solitude
behind the counter night after night, even though hardly anyone frequented it
at the best of times. The only inhabited place left to go was the Koryo where
one was not guaranteed to meet anyone except the sturdy German engineers
marooned in the basement.
Sami had departed. Michael had
gone home to England to spend the holiday period with his parents. Jean-Jacques
had flown off to Beijing. The monotonous daily routine of trying to render into
lucid and intelligent English prose the most unsalvageable rubbish went on. The
food went through one of its periodic depressions when the fish, chicken and
meat they gave us to augment the staple rice and soup and the pickled
vegetables I could no longer look at were of poor quality. For the first time
in my life on Christmas Day I worked all day, left the meal table hungry, and
spent the evening alone while the machinery in the factory next door rattled on
regardless.
There was some festive
celebration of the new year. On December 30th, we had a banquet at the Ansan
Chodasso. Our little waitresses put on their best uniforms. One of the Deputy
Directors from the publishing house came and made a speech. As usual we all had
to take it in turns to stand up and sing a little song. I drank copious
quantities of Pyongyangsul (Korean vodka) and beer and attempted to stave off
famine by nibbling slices of dry bread as I waited in the forlorn hope that in
among all these lavish dishes of unpalatable Korean food, they might bring
something I could eat.
New Year’s Day was a public
holiday. My head of department, always a welcome guest, called round for a
pre-lunch drink. Later that day I sat amid the depopulated luxury of the Koryo
Hotel with a couple of Africans and we talked like prisoners discussing their
sentences about how long we had been in Korea and how much more time we had to
do.
A few days later we were given an
outing when we were taken to the February 8th Theatre to see the annual
children’s show. Whenever we were to go anywhere we were not usually told until
the day before. The Korean custom of keeping people in the dark up to the last
possible moment is extended to foreigners as well. On this occasion the Koreans
excelled themselves. I was given ten minutes’ notice and five of them were
taken up by the French-speaking interpreter trying to get through to me that I
was about to see something to do with children, that, no, the children would
not be coming here, I would have to put my coat on and go to them, and yes, it
was “ce matin, oui, maintenant, dix minutes”.
The children’s show turned out to
be a most charming spectacle. If this spectacular variety show had been
performed by adults, it would have been impressive. Performed by children, it
was amazing. The ages of these dancers, musicians, singers and acrobats ranged
from about four to sixteen. Many of the star solo artistes were as young as
nine or ten. Yet they performed dances of such complexity that they might
almost have been choreographed by Busby Berkeley with the precision of a
Broadway chorus. They played their instruments and sang superbly. They
displayed poise and assurance and exuded an innocent sweetness that was not the
least bit fey or self-conscious. I had gone with the attitude that it would be
better than working. I came away wishing it could have gone on for hours.
Simone kindly sat beside me and interpreted the proceedings
for me. Like everything else in North Korea, the more you understood what was
going on, the more ludicrous it became. For example, one delightful song and
dance sequence turned out to be a celebration of how wonderful life would be
when the massive new Sunchon Vindon Complex is operational and everyone has
lots of new clothes to wear. It ended with the great leader’s avuncular image
projected onto a screen on the back of the stage and all the children
curtseying to him and expressing their gratitude for his munificence in making
this miracle possible. The magical world of childhood lives on a new socialist
dimension with an original Juche-oriented slant on the archetype of the Fairy
Godmother.
Simone was as impressed with the performance as I was but
she had seen previous years’ productions and could not help feeling a little
nostalgic. When she first came to Pyongyang and diplomats and foreigners
generally were thinner on the ground than they are today, then the revisers
used to attend the gala New Year’s Eve performance, which the president himself
traditionally attends, and came away with gilt-edged souvenir programmes. Now
the revisers are in the process of being working-classized, to use a favourite
DPRK concept, and have to make do with a matinee performance along with a lot
of school parties. Personally, I rather liked it that way.
They sent one of the translators from the publishing house
to the New Year banquet at the Ansan Chodasso to translate the Deputy
Director’s speech to me. During the course of the meal he suddenly announced,
propos of nothing, “The greatest sorrow in my life is that my country is
divided.” My initial impulse was to smile and say something on the lines of,
“Now steady on, old chap, I’m not too keen on the way my country’s going at the
moment but it doesn’t do to take these things personally.” I restrained myself
because he was a nice man and I sensed that he really did feel his country’s
misfortune as a personal tragedy.
Koreans generally seem to be a pretty nationalistic lot. I
have read that the people in South Korea too entertain passionate feelings
about an eventual reunification of their country. If nationalistic fervour is
an innate trait in the Korean character, it is also something which the North’s
propaganda machine cultivates for all it is worth. Night after night the TV
screens are filled with pictures of South Korean students demonstrating on the
streets and chucking petrol bombs at the riot police. It does not matter if the
students have been quiescent for a few weeks. There is plenty of footage from
the summer of ’87. The cameras linger on scenes of police beating up
protesters, scenes that are genuinely shocking to the citizens in the North,
where outbursts of aggression are exceptionally rare. Day after day from
childhood the populace are reminded about the terrible calamity of national
division that has been inflicted on them by the US imperialist aggressor and
has the compatriots in the South eke out meagre lives of poverty and servitude
under the yoke of the US colonial rule and the fascist repression of the puppet
military dictatorship. Day after day they are told that it is the most ardent
desire of every Korean to see his country reunified. I suppose if people are
told often enough that this is or ought to be their most ardent desire, it is
not surprising if a lot of them take it all very much to heart.
As is well known, the first attempt by the North to achieve
reunification was by force of arms. Needless to say, the North claims that it
was the other side that started the war. If that were the case, the North must
have had its counter-attack very well prepared. Hostilities commenced on June
25th 1950. On June 28th, the Korean People’s Army entered Seoul.
When three years later the Korean War ended in a stalemate,
the North pinned its hopes on rapid economic development. The idea was that the
North would become more prosperous and the people in the South would be
overcome with envy. Then they would rise up and overthrow their government,
expel the Yankees, and demand to be taken into the fatherly embrace of the
great leader. As Kim Il Sung put it in 1954, “An important condition for
achieving the reunification and independence of our country is to consolidate
the economic basis of the northern half of the Republic, make the people’s life
more bountiful and turn the North into a prosperous land of bliss. There is no
doubt that when our economy and culture develop and the people live more
happily, the people in the southern half suffering from hunger and groping in
the dark will hate more and more the US imperialists and the Syngman Rhee
traitors and rise up against them and will trust more deeply and follow our
Party and the Government of our Republic. Then the question of national
reunification and independence will be easily solved.” (CW, Vol.9, p.19.) Brave
words from ahead of state who at that time presided over little more than a
ragged and hungry populace dwelling among charred rubble and burnt-out fields.
Ten years later, in a speech delivered at the Eighth
Plenary Meeting of the Fourth Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea,
he was advocating a more directly interventionist approach to stirring up the
laggardly southerners, presumably by means of intensified propaganda,
infiltration, and setting up underground organisations. I have to say
presumably because the final section of this speech carries the heading “On
Concrete Ways to Reunify the Country”, but all it says underneath the heading
is “Contents Omitted”. Clearly at that time there was a quite definite and open
commitment to exporting the revolution South, although one can only speculate
as to how extreme the methods were that he was recommending.
In recent years the official stance has modified somewhat.
For almost a decade there has been a proposal on the table from the North that
Korea should be reunified under a confederal system and that the reunified
country should be rechristened the Democratic Confederal Republic of Koryo. It
is proposed that under this system a central government body composed of equal
representatives from both sides would determine issues of foreign policy and
defence, while either side would exercise regional autonomy and retain its
existing political system and ideology. This sounds an eminently fair, if
impractical, proposal. One could make out a case that it is not as impractical
as it first sounds on the basis that North Korea is a committed member of the
non-aligned movement and has a commendable record of upholding its political
independence when this has sometimes meant keeping both its powerful communist
neighbours at arm’s length, even at the sacrifice of much-needed economic and
technical assistance. How serious the North is, or ever was, about this
proposal is another question. It may have been serious in 1980. In 1988 South
Korea is a newly industrialised country with one of the world’s fastest growing
economies. Corporations like Hyundai, Daewoo, Samsung and Sosangyang have
emerged as major forces in the international market place. In 1987, South Korea
had an international trade surplus of getting on for ten billion dollars. In
the same year, according to Time magazine (5.9.88), North Korea imported “2.1
billion dollars’ worth of machinery, oil and other necessities largely from the
Soviet Union, and shipped out 1.5 billion dollars’ worth of minerals, clothing
and seafood”. North Korea’s economy is strictly small time and running at a
loss. As yet the fruits of the new-found prosperity may not have filtered down
to the common man in South Korea but living standards are rising and will
almost certainly continue to do so. It is equally likely that North Korean
living standards will remain rooted in third world poverty, albeit a well
managed poverty, for the foreseeable future. The more the economic gulf widens
between South and North, and is reflected in workers’ living standards, the
less the North can afford North-South contacts, let along reunification, if it
wishes to maintain its present system. The time is coming if it has not already
arrived when it is the people in the North would be likely to become
disaffected if they knew how the other half lived.
Meanwhile the North Koreans continue to do everything they
can to promote the illusion that everything on their side of the 38th parallel
is wonderful, in the hope that some people in the North will believe them. They
continue to tell their people that the reason they have to work so hard for so
little is to make their economy so prosperous that the people in the South will
rise up in revolt to be reunited with them, and then they will all suddenly
lead affluent lives. Also the North in no way modified the confrontational
attitudes expressed in its propaganda in response to the political changes that
took place in South Korea during the time I was in Pyongyang.
In the summer of 1987 the South Korean dictator, Chun Doo
Hwan, succumbed to public pressure at home and diplomatic pressure from his US
sponsors to allow democratic elections to be held later that year. The
candidate for Chun’s Democratic Justice Party, his long time friend and
colleague Roh Tae Woo, was elected president on December 16th, 1987, with
thirty-six per cent of the vote. Neutral observers were in agreement that Roh’s
supporters boosted his share of the vote through fraudulent practices, but not
sufficiently to affect the overall result. Roh was able to scrape home because
the two principal opposition leaders, Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jong, could not
agree on a united platform and so split the opposition vote. In February 1988,
Roh’s power base was eroded when his party failed to secure a majority of seats
in the elections of candidates for the South Korean parliament. Although Roh
was undoubtedly party to the political repression and abuses of human rights
perpetrated by the Chun regime, since his election he has given every
indication of having adopted a genuinely more liberal and democratic attitude.
There is a theory that he is only maintaining this attitude to ensure a
peaceful social climate for the Olympic Games and that he will afterwards
revert to dictatorial type. From what I have read, though, the reality in South
Korea seems to be that events have moved too far forward for him to do that if
he wanted to, unless some quite exceptional situation arose. These changes in
the South have not been reflected in the North’s propaganda, which is still all
about the traitor Roh Tae Woo and his puppet fascist clique who are manipulated
by the US imperialists who wish to maintain South Korea as their colony to
serve American economic interests and as bridgehead for aggression in Asia. In
July 1988, Roh announced a new policy towards the North. From now on the South
would actively try to bring the North out of its isolation .South Korean
history books would be rewritten with a softer anti-communist bias. He proposed
cultural and economic exchanges. Japan, at Seoul’s request, offered to set up a
trade mission in Pyongyang. Kim Woo Choong, the chairman of the Daewoo
Corporation, stated that his company had already built a refrigerator factory
in China and would be happy to set a precedent for other South Korean firms by
building factories in the North. The North was not interested, which suggests
to me that the Kim dynasty is more concerned with maintaining Juche than
achieving either prosperity or national reunification except on its own terms.
In spite of its economic difficulties, North Korea
continues to invest 25% of its gross national product in the military. There
are at least three-quarters of a million in the armed services and in 1988 it
took delivery of advanced Soviet missiles and war planes, including top of the
Mig 29’s. It would be wrong to necessarily assume from this that North Korea is
currently harbouring thoughts about another southward invasion. The South
Korean armed forces are numerically smaller at 629,000. They are estimated to
have only approximately half the North’s 2,900 tanks and 6,000 artillery
pieces. However, their equipment is generally more sophisticated and they are
augmented by 40,000 US troops with a nuclear arsenal of no less than a thousand
warheads. It could equally be assumed that the North feels compelled to
maintain its arms buildup to safeguard itself against an invasion from the
South. Every year since 1976, South Korean and American troops have staged a
joint military exercise known as Team Spirit. From modest beginnings, Team
Spirit has grown each year until now it is of two months’ duration and involves
over 200,000 servicemen. In content, it amounts to a full scale rehearsal for
an invasion of the North, complete with tactical nuclear strikes. In a tense
situation where there are always frequent incidents along the demilitarised
zone, for which each side always blames the other, should such an exercise be
classed as a reasonable deterrent or an adventurist provocation? Even if one
accepts that it is intended to be the former, one should not be surprised if
the North evinces a high degree of paranoia.
Having said that North Korea harbours no intentions at the
moment of invading the South, that is not to say that it may not do so in the
future. At present the northern masses are content with their simple life style
and united in their worship of the great leader. Kim Il Sung has proved himself
no fool. He is not about to do anything reckless. If, however, over the next
few years living standards decline rather than improve, which is quite
possible, and should the great leader prove mortal and the dear leader have
difficulty in sustaining his father’s hold over the masses, both of which are
likely, then a desperate and erratic response to a perceived external threat in
order to hold internal dissent in check cannot be ruled out. Whether this
justifies a continued American military presence in South Korea is open to
question. One may not approve of what America has been up to in Korea over the
last forty-odd years. In the name of democracy, they have sponsored a
succession of authoritarian dictatorships. Nevertheless, under these tyrannical
regimes, South Korea has prospered. The aspirations of the people are for the
sort of western style democracy they have recently achieved. What pro-communist
sympathies remain in South Korea are largely fuelled by resentment at American
domination over South Korean affairs. In the event of armed hostilities between
the two Koreas, the military usefulness of American troops to the South could
be cancelled out by the adverse political effect they could have on the
internal situation. If Americans were participating on active service in
another Korean war, and even commanding the South Korean army, the North would
be asking the South Koreans whose war they thought they were fighting and there
would be bound to be some who would be susceptible to the implied line of
reasoning. It would certainly be in nobody’s long term interests for the
Americans to employ nuclear weapons against North Korea. The North has only
half the population of the South. It is far behind technologically and
economically. It would be most unlikely to obtain active support for an armed
conflict from either the Soviet Union or China. Even its numerically vast army
should not be overrated. Putting undernourished peasants into uniforms and
setting them to build factories is unlikely to produce top quality fighting men
for modern, technological warfare. Therefore, it would have very little chance
of winning prolonged war against the South, unless the South were undermined
from within by widespread dissent. On the other hand, the North Koreans might
well prove fanatical foes who would not easily be swept aside. If they obtained
some early victories, there would inevitably be a temptation to resort to
nuclear weapons to stop them, particularly if there was a danger of some of the
nuclear weapons deployed in South Korea falling otherwise in to the hands of an
advancing North Korean army. The possible repercussions of nuclear weapons
exploding on the doorstep of both Russia and China does not bear thinking
about.
On the assumption that the main reason American nuclear
weapons are deployed in South Korea is to contain the “Soviet menace”, then
this purpose could be served just as well if they were relocated in Japan,
which is unified, stable, prosperous, committed to capitalism and already in
the process of becoming a junior partner in the Star Wars programme. I am not
saying that America should discontinue military support to South Korea, but
that nuclear weapons are quite inappropriate in the situation, and that actual
involvement of American troops on the peninsula may soon be counter-productive.
Northern paranoia reached a fever pitch in early 1988, when
a renewed request for talks on arms limitation was rejected by the South side,
which levelled accusations that the North had been responsible for the
disappearance over the Thai-Burma borer of a Korean Airlines passenger plan,
with a hundred and forty people on board, in November 1987. This was followed
by the announcement of sanctions against the North by the United States and
Japan.
North Korea has been no stranger to terrorist activity in
the past. There was the notorious bombing incident in the Burmese capital of
Rangoon in 1983, when four visiting South Korean ministers were killed.
Pyongyang is widely reputed to supply funds to the Japanese Red Army. Whether
it was really responsible for the disappearance of the KAL plane remains
debatable. The wreckage of the plane was never found. It was suspected that a
couple travelling on Japanese passports, who left the plane at Dubai, may have
planted a bomb. The man committed suicide before he could be questioned. The
woman was brought to Seoul for questioning in a blaze of publicity on the day
before the South Korean presidential elections. She did not resurface until
January, when she made a public confession at a press conference that she was a
North Korean agent, and had planted a bomb on the plane on the instructions of
Kim Jong Il.
There were several aspects of the woman’s confession and
the South Korean explanation of the incident in general that were not entirely
convincing. Even if the woman really was a North Korean or a sympathiser with
the North and had planted a bomb, there were reasons for thinking it unlikely
that she was acting on official instructions from Pyongyang. The timing for
such an outrage could hardly seem less in keeping with North Korean interests.
The first democratic elections in years were about to be held in the South. The
reactionary candidate and close associate of Chun Doo Hwa, Roh Tae Woo, was by
no means certain of winning. Much of his appeal was based on the fear of the
communist threat and his reputation as an intractable opponent of communism.
Nothing could better serve his electoral cause than a terrorist outrage on the
eve of the elections which could be laid at the North’s door. If he did not
win, both the leading opposition figures, Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jong, were
essentially centrist. Neither of them were about to hand over the keys of Seoul
to Kim Il Sung. But they could be expected to adopt a more conciliatory
attitude to the North, to be more amenable to talks and contacts with a view to
possible eventual reunification, in fact, to hold out the sort of olive
branches that Roh Tae Woo started to dangle in the summer of 1988.
In view of Pyongyang’s response
to Roh’s overtures, one wonders if the North might in fact have deliberately
arranged a terrorist atrocity on the eve of the elections precisely because it
did not want a more sympathetic government in power in the South. In many ways,
a US-sponsored fascistic dictatorship in Seoul was in the Kim dynasty’s
interests. While Chun Doo Hwan was denying the South Korean people basic
democratic rights and imprisoning dissenters without trial and condoning
torture, Pyongyang could claim the high moral ground in the international
arena. While the South Korean stance towards the North remained one of outright
antagonism and confrontation, Kim Il Sung could more easily justify the
imposition of austerity and military discipline in the North’s civilian
population on grounds of national security. While the South side refused to
enter into reasonable dialogue and dragged its feet on promoting mutual
contacts and exchanges, the North had some justification for adopting a similar
attitude. And the less contact the people in the North have with the people in
the South, the simpler it is to lie to them.
However, at the time when the
South was accusing the North of blowing up the passenger plane, it seemed at
face value as if this was the last thing the North would want to do at such a
time. Northern reaction to the accusations was angry and voluble. I was deluged
with articles and speeches to revise about the missing airliner incident.
Sadly, not one of them contained an intelligent refutation of the charges. Not
one of them pointed out that it might have been against the North’s interests
to have done such a thing. Not one of them offered a coherent demolition of the
South’s rather flimsy evidence, or went on to castigate the South Korean
authorities for irresponsible opportunism, for trying to make political capital
out of a tragic air disaster. Instead there were wild counter-accusations that
the treacherous Chun Doo Hwan-Roh Tae Woo puppet clique, at the instigation of
their US masters, had blown up the plane themselves so that they could then
turn round and blame the North. These totally unsubstantiated accusations were
accompanied by a lot of sabre-rattling rhetoric. Some of it was so belligerent
that I experienced a physical revulsion in revising it.
Here is an extract from one of
the more sober effusions of that time, a press statement issued by O Jin U, the
Minister of the Armed Forces, on January 27th.
“A desperate situation has been
created on the Korean peninsula in which some slight accidental factor could
easily precipitate a nuclear war. The Korean people are entering a crucial
phase where they are balanced on a knife edge between peace and nuclear war.”
“In this dire situation when the
nation stands at the crossroads between a life of peace and the havoc of a
nuclear holocaust, it is absolutely vital that all Koreans rise up in the
nation-saving struggle to prevent a nuclear war.”
“However, the South Korean
rulers, utterly indifferent to the destiny of the country and the nation, are
zealously assisting the US imperialists in their moves to provoke a nuclear war
that would bring immeasurable calamities to the whole nation. They are
imploring the Americans for the protection of their ’nuclear umbrella’ and for
a permanent occupation by their aggressor forces. Worse still, they are taking
an active part in the US imperialists’ large scale nuclear war exercises
directed against their fellow countrymen.”
“The criminal acts of the South
Korean puppet clique are unpardonable treacheries intended to draw the whole
country into the US imperialists’ nuclear war shambles and sacrifice our nation
as victims to their nuclear war.”
“I, on behalf of the entire
Korean people and the officers and men of the People’s Army, vehemently
denounce the thrice-cursed nuclear war moves of the US imperialists and the
South Korean puppet clique, who, having converted the entire territory of South
Korea into a nuclear base, are seeking to inflict a nuclear catastrophe upon
our nation. There are no grounds whatsoever for the United States to ship
nuclear weapons into South Korea.”
“The whole world
knows that there are no nuclear weapons in the northern half of the Republic.”
“If the nuclear weapons deployed
by the United States in South Korea are in reality aimed at other socialist
countries, then the US imperialists ought to withdraw them now that they have
concluded a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union.”
“The Korean peninsula must be
converted into a nuclear-free peace zone to meet the aspirations of all the
Korean people and other peace-loving peoples of the world.”
“The US imperialists and the
bellicose elements of South Korea should acquaint themselves with the miserable
ends of all previous war maniacs who have had a fondness for playing with
fire.”
“If the US imperialists and the
South Korean puppet rulers think that they can frighten anyone with nuclear
weapons, they are making a serious miscalculation.”
“The US imperialists must
withdraw from South Korea at once, taking all their nuclear weapons and forces
of aggression with them, before it is too late.”
“The
Chun Doo Hwan-Roh Tae Woo group must cease to act as servants to the US nuclear
war machine.
They must desist
from further acts of criminal treachery that are liable to lead to the
extermination of their fellow countrymen. They should accede to the demands of
the people and step down from power without delay.”
“The Korean people and the
officers and men of the People’s Army will continue to keep watch with
increased vigilance on the reckless manoeuvres of the US imperialists and South
Korea puppet clique to provoke nuclear war. They will respond to any acts of
enemy aggression with a thousandfold retaliation.”
O Jin U occupies an interesting
place in the North Korean hierarchy. Officially he is one of only three members
of the presidium of the politburo of the central committee, the highest organ
of government which makes all major policy decisions. The other two members of
course are Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. Whether he is now able to exert any
active influence on decisions is highly debatable. He evidently had ideas of
his own at one time, because in November 1976, he was the victim of one of the
legendary Pyongyang “road accidents” which was almost certainly arranged for
him by his two colleagues in the presidium. He sustained serious injuries in
the crash but survived. He was packed off to eastern Europe for medical
treatment. Incredibly, after his recovery he was allowed to resume his
position, presumably having learned his lesson and promised the fatherly leader
to be a good boy in future.
I have quoted from his statement
at some length because it is a fair sample of North Korean rhetoric. Very fair,
in fact. The usual standard is much worse. Can such a senior minister seriously
equate a doubtful accusation of terrorism with a provocation to all-out war?
Does he really expect this sort of outburst to attract the sympathy and support
of the peace-loving people of the world? As far as I can see, his tone of
hysteria, his call for “all Koreans” to “rise up in the nation-saving struggle
to prevent a nuclear war” and the threat to “respond to any acts of enemy
aggression with a thousandfold retaliation” can only confirm the official South
Korean view that the North is still a highly erratic and dangerous foe, bent at
the very least on fomenting insurrection, and lend justification to the
continued American military presence in the South.
One cannot help wondering whether
this sort of muddled hysteria is merely representative of what high ministers
of state in the DPRK regard as effective propaganda, or whether they actually
think like this. The latter is a disturbing possibility and a very real one. In
a society where so much power is invested in one person that no point of view
other than his is permissible, where all critical thinking is suppressed in
favour of the parroting of received ideas, and where advancement is dependent
on conformity to those ideas, it is conceivable that even the occupants of
highest office are incapable in thought or speech of doing more than parodying
the ideas and rhetoric of their great leader. This would help account for the
stupidity that prevails in all spheres of activity in North Korea today, and
explain why the country is in decline.
I could not help smiling at the
unconscious irony when I came across this passage in a talk the president
delivered to Spanish journalists in 1980. “To establish Juche in ideology
means, in short, being conscious that one is the master and acquiring the idea
and viewpoint of participating in the revolution and construction of one’s own
country with the attitude of a master. If one fails to establish Juche in
ideology, one’s independent cognitive faculty will be diminished so that one
will be unable to display any creativity and end up following implicitly
without discerning between right and wrong. If one loses originality like this,
one will, in the end, make a mess of the revolution and construction.”
Chapter 10
The high spot of
January was Michael’s return from holiday in England with a number of letters
for me. David Richardson had warned me that receipt of mail could be a problem.
His warning proved well founded. In my first four months in Korea, I received through
the mail two bank statements, two birthday cards without letters enclosed, one
postcard and two personal letters. It was fully three months before I received
any news of my family. I tried to adopt a philosophical attitude. I told myself
that if I had chosen as my life’s big adventure to float up the Amazon in a
canoe, I might have had exactly the same problems and a few other minor
inconveniences besides. Unfortunately I could not stop myself from worrying.
Before Michael left for England,
I gave him a dozen letters to post for me. In some I enclosed the address of
his parents in Warwickshire so that people could send letters there and Michael
could bring them back with him. It was a lovely warm feeling to learn that all
the people I cared most about were alive and well and still thinking about me.
It was distressing to think that it might be months before I hear from them
again. In my last eight months in Korea I received another bank statement,
three postcards, and one solitary letter.
It would have been possible to
telephone, but the expense was prohibitive. International calls still had to be
booked in advance and put through the operator, and the charge per minute was
about treble the cost of a comparable call made in the UK.
Incongruously, it would seem that
the vast majority of the letters that I sent out reached their destination,
although I am told there was sometimes a couple of weeks’ gap between the date
on the letter and the date on the postmark. One would have thought that the
censors would be more concerned with outgoing than incoming information. The
only vaguely logical explanation I can think of why the North Koreans deprive
foreign residents of news from home is that they think it might distract them
from their work, and it has never occurred to them that people might actually
function better when they have the reassurance that everything is all right at
home. Logic, however, is not a North Korean strong point, and there may well be
some other quite bizarre explanation.
I was not alone in being deprived
of mail. At the time I left, the American who was teaching English at the
Foreign Languages University had received nothing for eight months. A West
German telecommunications engineer who spent three and a half months commissioning
a new direct dial international telephone link thirty-two lines for the entire
country - received no letters in that time. I was never quite able to ascertain
what the situation was with the other revisers. The revisers from the socialist
countries had no problem because they received their mail through their
embassies. My colleagues from the capitalist world tended to be reticent about
discussing their mail situation. It is the sort of thing people in Pyongyang
become cagey about. They all wanted to remain in Pyongyang and their underlying
fear was that Andrew Holloway might risk getting himself sent home by making
insinuations to the Koreans that they were behaving in an underhand and
dishonourable fashion, so if he did, he was not going to be able to drag anyone
else’s name in as well. I suppose it is the hallmark of an efficient
totalitarian system that individuals regulate themselves according to the
unwritten rules and become furtive and quiescent of their own accord.
As well as the letters Michael brought back other wondrous
gifts, recent copies of the Guardian and the Observer. No foreign newspapers,
books or magazines, not even from other communist countries, are on sale in
Pyongyang. I was not totally out of touch with world events. Jean-Jacques had
the weekend edition of the International Herald Tribune sent to him every week.
He also used to bring back from his trips to China English language periodicals
like South, the Far eastern Economic Review, and Newsweek. Still, it was good
to read an English newspaper again, even if the news was uniformly bad.
Newcastle were once again floundering in the lower reaches of the first
division. World cricket was falling apart. Not only had Mike Gatting in
Pakistan behaved in a manner that would have once been unthinkable for an
English cricket captain, but he had subsequently received official backing. I
could not help wondering how the TCCB would have reacted if it had been Tony
Greig or Ian Botham who had behaved so disgracefully. Viv Richards had been
tarnishing his legend in Calcutta. And Mrs Thatcher was about to demolish
another bastion of fair play and civic decency by abolishing the rates and
introducing her notorious poll tax.
I was appalled by a commentator in the Observer who seemed
to think it very funny that Ted Heath had argued that redistribution of income
was a traditional tenet of Conservative Party philosophy. Surely it was not so
many years ago when it would have been as unthinkable for a major British
political party to have no commitment to maintaining any degree of social
equality and welfare as it would have been for an English cricket captain to
publicly abuse an umpire and accuse him of cheating. The Thatcherite revolution
has swept away the assumption of government responsibility to uphold decent
human values implicit in Keynesian economics and consensus politics as
comprehensively as the Juche revolution has swept away individual liberty.
In early February I was surprised to encounter an English
guest at the Koryo. This Englishman, moreover, had been visiting North Korea on
and off for a dozen years. He was a marketing consultant whose services were
engaged by the government from time to time. Although no communist, he was full
of enthusiasm for the country. His enthusiasm reawakened some of the positive
feelings I had had in the beginning, feelings that had been dissipated by
months of boredom and indifferent food. He reminded me of the things which I
had initially found inspiring but which I had stopped noticing: the gentleness
and kindness and dignity of the people; the fact that everywhere was safe,
clean and orderly, and that the people were adequately fed, clothed and housed.
I had been there long enough to know that the people were by no means as well
provided for, even in respect of the basics, as at first appeared. They did not
get as much to eat as they would like. They had very few clothes. Many lived in
quite primitive accommodation. Many who lived in modern apartment blocks
suffered from the cold in the winter; I had learned that not all the apartment
buildings had as reliable a central heating supply as the Ansan Chodasso. As
for the workplaces, they were barely heated at all. Whenever I went to the
publishing house to discuss my revision, I had to keep all my outdoor layers of
thick winter clothing on indoors. That was in the rooms I was entertained in,
which had carpets and curtains helping to retain a little heat. It must have been
even colder in the bare rooms where the translators did their work. This,
however, was not Europe. This was Asia. This was the third world. Yet nobody
was homeless or starving. Everybody had security. Everybody had a place in
society and the vast majority were contented.
He was also optimistic about the
country’s economy. He did not see it as stagnant. He had been coming for a
dozen years and could see the changes. When he first came, he told me, there
was hardly a car to be seen on the roads. When I came to think about it, the
volume of traffic seemed to have increased just in the short time I had been
there. I recalled how a few days previously, returning from the Pyongyang Shop
at about 6 pm, there had been almost a traffic jam building up on the Okryu
Bridge across the Taedong
River.
He reminded me how much the country was liberalising. Only
a few years ago it would have been out of the question for us to be sitting at
a bar with western pop music playing on the tape recorder, holding a
conversation about the country with no Korean lurking close at hand to listen
in to what we were saying. I took his point, but had to add that the country
would have to liberalise a whole lot more before I would ever consider a return
engagement.
He sighed a bit when I asked him what it was like to advise
them on their marketing. It was difficult to get through to them. Their own
culture was so out of step with the rest of the world of which they had so
little understanding. They failed to comprehend how the rest of the world
thinks and functions. He mentioned their ginseng products. The ginseng root
flourishes in Korea. Although the term is unfamiliar to the outside world the
North Koreans insist on calling ginseng by its Korean name, insam. They manufacture
a range of products from it: insam toothpaste, insam soap, insam lotion, a
liquor called Insamsul, even insam cigarettes. He rightly pointed out that,
apart from the odd-tasting cigarettes, all these products are of a high
standard. He was having difficulty in educating the Koreans in the fact that
these products are only going to competitive in the world market when they are
professionally packaged and intelligently advertised and promoted.
By coincidence, the following day I received the February
edition of the DPRK’s magazine, Foreign Trade, a glossy brochure which serves
as a vehicle for promoting the country’s exports. Incredibly it was something I
was never called upon to raise, although one would have thought the Koreans
would consider it a more important publication than, for example, the utterly
ridiculous Pyongyang Times. What should I find in Foreign Trade but a
double-page spread in Insam-based tonics, which read in part: “Kaesong Koryo
Insam exerts a favourable action on all systems including the central nervous
system, the cardiovascular system, the urinary-generative system, the
muscular-bone system and hematogenous system, and is wide in its action. It
enhances the mental-physical activities, dissipates one’s fatigue, increases
resistance to internal and external unfavourable factors, prevents the ageing
of cells or promotes their regeneration and improves metabolic process as a
whole. Namely, it has an affirmative action on every side of activities of
organism.” And that is just for starters!
How on earth did I survive that dreadful Pyongyang winter?
I suppose before I start complaining I should record that I was actually quite
lucky. By Korean standards it was an exceptionally mild winter and there was
very little snow.
It was an unusual winter too, inasmuch as it turned
viciously cold when it was still only November and then became milder in
mid-December. For the next three or four weeks, although there were cold
spells, temperatures were little worse than one would normally expect in
Britain at that time of year. This was a bit of a disaster for the locals. At
the beginning of each November, each household is issued with several kilos of
cabbage to which the people then add spices to make their revolting national
dish called kimchi, which supplements their grain ration. Refrigerators are a
luxury. The households that do have one do not have large enough ones to store
a whole winter’s supply of kimchi. Everyone therefore stores it out of doors in
earthenware jars, relying on the sub-zero temperatures to keep it fresh. When
temperatures in December 1987 rose as high as eight degrees centigrade, this
had a most deleterious effect on the quality of their diet.
As January advanced temperatures plummeted to somewhere
near the Korean norm, reaching as low as minus twenty centigrade at night. And
that was where they stayed for weeks and weeks on end. Day dwindled into dismal
day with mindbending monotony. Every morning I would get up at twenty five past
seven for breakfast. Because breakfast was the only meal of the day guaranteed
to be edible, even on Sundays I had to force myself to get out of bed for
breakfast, although I did go back to bed again afterwards. The food, which was
never brilliant at the best of times, plumbed new depths in the winter. Some of
the cuts of meat we were served were only fit for pet food. I never actually
went hungry in Pyongyang. I ate enough each day for the maintenance of health,
but most days that was not as much as I felt like eating. In this I was sharing
the same experience as the local population, except that in my case I was being
served quite substantial quantities of food that I rejected because it was so
revolting. To my embarrassment, the Koreans sent a deputation to see me to
express concern that I was not eating enough. They asked if I had any requests
to improve my diet. How could I tell these sweet, kind-hearted people to whom
any meat was a luxury that what I was being served was only fit for pet food? I
told them they must not worry. I was not about to starve to death. It was
probably a good thing that I was not eating too much when I was not taking any
exercise - since my hospitalisation, I had not dared to go swimming again -
because it kept my weight down. Afterwards on their initiative they started
giving me an extra round of toast in the morning, which was actually very
welcome.
After breakfast I went back to my study-bedroom and set to
work on my texts. It was the work that drove me crazy as much as anything else.
I was not used to sitting alone in a room at a desk all day long, day in day
out, for forty-five hours a week. Social work in Britain may be an occupation
where the pay does not reflect the pressures and responsibilities, but at least
it is interesting and varied; it offers occasions for humour and drama, and the
sense of doing something worthwhile. Nothing could be less worthwhile than
revising the Pyongyang Times. However, in spite of the futility of my task, I
always applied myself to it diligently. For a start I was being paid for it.
Also the translators were lovely people. It seemed to me that if these nice
people were doing their utmost to translate the rubbish that was being
published to the best of their ability, then I owed it to them to revise their
translations to the best of mine, particularly as they used to study my
revision each week in order to improve their standard of English.
Once a week, usually on a Tuesday morning, I used to have a
little outing to ease the monotony. This was when I was taken to the publishing
house to revise the Pyongyang Times in situ. In the winter months this was a
mixed blessing. Although it was nice to have a change of scenery, from November
to March the interior of the building was always freezing cold. I used to sit
there dressed in my overcoat, scarf, two thick pullovers and two pairs of
socks, and I would still be blue with cold by the end of the morning. There was
a thermometer in the room I worked in. It usually registered about fifteen or
sixteen degrees centigrade. It must have been even colder in the bare,
uncarpeted rooms where the translators worked. Such low temperatures were
typical of North Korean workplaces in winter. In the shops and department
stores for the locals, I used to see the salesgirls standing behind their
counters swathed in their overcoats and voluminous headscarves. We were
fortunate in the Ansan Chodasso. Most of the time a comfortable temperature of
around twenty-five degrees was maintained, although we did have a few days of
misery when it slipped down to twenty or twenty-one. Whenever I went to the
publishing house in winter, I was always relieved when the time came to return
to the warmth of the Ansan Chodasso. Nevertheless I still preferred to go there
than not, as it meant at least some variety in my daily routine. Otherwise I
spent the whole of every working day in my room.
I once asked an interpreter when I thought he was off his
guard what heating conditions were like for the average Korean living in an
apartment block. He told me frankly that the heating situation was variable.
Half the time the temperature would be quite comfortable, at other times it
would be like it was in the publishing house, pretty dire, albeit above the
level where old people are likely to expire from hypothermia. I was told that
the power stations have been having difficulty keeping pace with the increased
fuel demands of industry and also domestic consumers, as more people have been
rehoused in modern flats from the traditional cottages which have their own
coal-burning stoves, and are not connected with the centralised heating system.
The Koreans cope with their spartan conditions by wearing several layers of
underwear. I noticed that all the men wore track suit bottoms under their
trousers. I assumed this was to keep themselves warm in winter, until I saw
that a lot of them continued to wear them, even in spring and summer.
I did not often venture such questions to Koreans. Apart
from the fact that one could not always rely on a truthful answer, asking
questions puts them on the spot and can create uneasiness. Once they get to
know you, they are torn between the natural human desire for genuine
communication and the duty to make propaganda. If they cannot bring themselves
to lie to you, they tend to resort to evasion. Usually such excessive secrecy
defeats its own purpose. In the absence of knowledge there arise wild speculation
and rumour. It is not surprising that there are diplomats living in Pyongyang
who seriously believe that most Korean apartment blocks are provided with no
form of heating at all. As long as foreigners are not allowed to visit Koreans
in their homes, such erroneous beliefs will persist. Of course I cannot prove
that my informant was telling the truth. I can only trust my judgement that he
was.
The revisers who were working on the president’s collected
works used to have detailed discussions with their translators about the
revisions they had made. The Koreans regarded their president’s works as
sacred. Great importance therefore was attached to faithfulness to the original
in the translations. Much more latitude was allowed in translations for the
periodicals and the other texts that came my way to revise. All that mattered
in these was that they should read satisfactorily and communicate the same
information as the original. Usually the translators accepted my revised
versions just as they stood. I was always told that I was going to the
publishing house for a discussion about the Pyongyang Times but what actually
happened was that I would revise articles while I was there and the translators
would take it in turns to sit with me while I did them, as a learning exercise.
They could ask questions about the amendments I was making and practise their
spoken English by making conversation with me. It was a congenial arrangement
from my point of view. I was always pleased to chat to the translators. There
were some I would have loved to be able to mix with socially. From the work
point of view, however, I could never concentrate as well at the publishing
house as I could in the solitude of my room.
I often used to receive a brief visit on a Tuesday morning
from the chief translator of Korea magazine, who was a particular favourite of
mine. He was a genial little man and as a translator he had a good feel for the
English language. His command of idiom and vocabulary were no better than any
of the other translators but he had the right idea about English style and
sentence structure. Korean sentences are like Latin periods, long and complex,
full of subordinate clauses, with the main verb tantalisingly deferred until
the end of the sentence. I remembered from my school days how I used to make a
literal translation from the Latin and then go over it again, breaking down
what was still essentially a Latin period with English words into a number of
short English sentences. At first many of the translations I received reminded
me of my original draft translations from Latin at school. They consisted of
Korean sentences with English words. By the time I left, all the translators
had learned from my revisions and were presenting me with English sentences. My
friend from the pictorial magazine was one who already grasped how contemporary
English should be written.
I was constantly being asked what I thought to their
translations. It was a hard question to answer. I was not sure how a competent
English linguist specialising in a very alien language like Chinese or Arabic
would fare if required to make written translations from English into the
foreign language instead of the other way round. I was aware that those people
laboured under very considerable disadvantages. They had very, very few
opportunities to converse with native English speakers or even to hear English
being spoken on films. Their access to contemporary English language books and
periodicals was severely limited. Their staple fare seemed to be things like
Moscow News and China Daily, or Britain’s own Morning Star, although I had the
impression that the situation was slowly improving. I once saw a young
translator with a copy of Newsweek.
Sometimes I used to answer them that the quality of the
translations was less of a problem than the quality of the original articles. I
pointed out that their propaganda was pitched at an incredibly naive level
while many of the articles were rambling, ill-informed and incoherent. My
remarks cause the translators some embarrassment. They were not at liberty to
say as much, but it was evident that they were already aware of this problem.
Moscow news, China Daily and Beijing Review may not provide the optimum models
of English prose but they are all characterised in recent times by a
willingness to engage reality in putting over the state’s viewpoint. From their
reading of publications such as these, the translators could tell that the sort
of nonsense their country was putting out was out of step even with the rest of
the communist world. They sensed that to portray everything in their country as
perfect was to invite derision from the outside world. They knew enough to know
that their government’s version of what South Korea is like was less than
truthful and would therefore make no impression on foreigners who had access to
plenty of other sources of information. I sensed with the translators, as with
most educated people in North Korea, that they were committed to their
revolutions, but realised that changes were needed and that abandoning naive
and self-defeating propaganda was one of them. I sensed that they felt
frustrated at not being able to do anything to rectify things. In North Korea
all decisions are passed from the top down. Comments and criticism from
grassroots level are not encouraged.
Of the three English language periodicals, the publishing
house attached least importance to having the glossy pictorial magazine, Korea,
revised. My friend the chief translator was determined that if I did not have
time to make a careful revision of translations each month, then I would make
time. He employed a variety of amusing methods to spur me on. One of them was
to contend that I should give priority to his magazine because it was the most
important and prestigious propaganda organ of the DPRK. He pointed out that it
was printed on high quality paper and packed with bright photographs that would
attract people’s attention and convey a favourable impression of his country.
He was not being entirely serious but I, for my part, was
inclined to agree with him. Primarily a pictorial magazine with brief articles,
his magazine had little space to devote the expounding the Juche Idea, and,
apart from an obligatory piece each month about the heroic struggle being waged
by the South Korean people against the military fascist puppet regime of
traitor Roh Tae Woo, it was relatively free of polemics. It concentrated
instead on portraying in words and pictures the genuinely attractive aspects of
North Korean society, a society which is striving to develop independently and
maintain a benign and decent social system. The system may be failing but its
intentions are fundamentally good. “Still, in principle,” my friend Sami used
to lecture me from time to time, “in principle they are right.”
Korea magazine is full of
celebrations of the banal achievements of factory girls and railway workers,
ordinary citizens whose only claim to fame is that they have overfulfilled
their production quotas, people like the ladies of the Kin Chaek Knitwear Factory:
“At the entrance of the next shop, we saw a bulletin board which displayed the
results of workteams Nos. 2 and 3, awarded the Three Revolution Red Flag. ’Pang
Yong Sun and Choe Jung Hui have overfulfilled today’s quota by five per cent’
“Kim Suk Gyong, chief engineer,
who was taking us round, remarked, ’Most of our workers are women. They are
hard-working and keep their factory clean. The Broad Bellflower brand of
women’s sweater has won a gold medal at a national fair’
“Their products are attractive
and the quality is good. The workers look after the factory like a palace and
its compound like a park. They truly love their workplace.” (Korea, March 1988)
Even the naivety of style and
content seem less inappropriate in this publication, perhaps because they
reflect the way things are in this hard-working society, where simple people
have a simple outlook on life.
Another tactic my friend used to
stir me up on his behalf was flattery. “All the time,” he used to say to me,
“whether I am walking in the street or lying in my bed at night, always I am
thinking how can I improve the standard of my translations. Always I look
forward so much to receiving your revisions. I think your style of English is
so clear and concise. I am able to learn so much from you. Always I study your
revisions with the greatest care so that I can learn from your corrections.
Every morning I am waiting to see if you have returned my translations yet. I
am so disappointed when I have to wait and wait. So please in future try to
send them back as quickly as possible to help me improve my translations.”
He was not averse to a spot of
emotional blackmail either. He would remind me that he was fifty-four this
year, deaf in one ear, and having trouble with his eyesight, “and so I cannot
do with so much criticism. If you do not return my translations in good time,
then they are late for the printers. I say it is not my fault, the reviser did
not send them back in time. Then they say it is still my fault because I should
have kept urging you on to get them done. When I have to wait so many days for
you to revise my translations, I cannot sleep at night for worry.” He was
saying this to me in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, but I sensed, as is often the
case when people are speaking frivolously, an underlying seriousness. His tone
and manner were not intended to suggest that he really was unable to sleep at
night for fear of harsh criticism, but I did get the impression that he was
subject to a certain amount of pressure he could do without.
From my observations, I would say
that people in the DPRK are not subject to brutal coercion, but they are
constantly subject to intense psychological pressure to conform in thought,
word and deed and to push themselves to the limit in building the revolution
and construction. Collectively, people are continually exhorted to work harder
by posters, slogans, loudspeaker vans, newspapers, radio and TV. From time to
time special campaigns are launched. In February 1988, the biggest ever was
launched, a two-hundred-day campaign during which people would work a
twelve-hour day, seven days a week, to step up production. The intention was to
fulfil all the economic targets for the whole year by September 9th, the
fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Republic, and make the occasion a
“great festival of victory”. The campaign was heralded by a mass rally in Kim
Il Sung Square which was broadcast live on television. Reports on the
campaign’s progress, uniformly and unrealistically glowing, dominated the North
Korean media over the ensuing months.
I do not know, because in the
DPRK it is impossible for foreigners to know, how pressure is brought to bear
on people on an individual level, but one can be fairly sure that cadres and
party officials make extensive use of criticism. Kim Il Sung is a great
advocate of criticism. “Criticism is meant to train people, and they need it in
the same way as they wash their faces every day. If a man does not wash his
face, it becomes dirty. So he must wash his face every day. Just as washing is
needed to keep our faces clean, so is criticism to keep our minds clean.” (CW,
Vol.27, p.113)
It is not sufficient for people
to passively submit to criticism. It is important that they acknowledge the
relevance of the criticism they receive and are prepared to criticise
themselves. On the subject of selfcriticism, he refers to the thoughts of his
mentor Josef Stalin - until as recently as 1980, one of Pyongyang’s main
thoroughfares was still called Stalin Street:
“We have the sharp, tested
weapons of criticism and self-criticism to use in the struggle to temper party
spirit. Wielding this weapon, we must sweep away all tendencies that run
counter to party spirit and expose and rectify defects and errors in our work
and thus improve it constantly.”
“Comrade
Stalin has said, ’Should we fail to recognise or to bring out into the open in
all frankness and honesty, as behoves Bolsheviks, the shortcomings and mistakes
in our work, we will be barring ourselves from the road to progress. But we
want to advance. And precisely because we want to advance, we must pose to
ourselves as one of the most important tasks, the task of honest and
revolutionary self-criticism. Otherwise there will be no advance. Otherwise,
there is no development.’” (CW, Vol.7, p.335)
Nor will criticism in Kim Il
Sung’s view be effective in itself. It must be accompanied by kindness and
understanding. The prescription he offers in the following passage has a
military context but it could equally well be applied in a civilian one. Just
as the Korean People’s Army, like all communist armies, has a dual hierarchy of
military commanders and a political commissariat, power in commercial and
industrial enterprises is shared between the director or manager and the party
secretary.
“The company commander must treat
his men just as he does his own younger brother, and when any of his men has
made a mistake he must criticise him sternly and intelligibly. The company
political instructor must, like a good-natured elder sister [sic], deal with
the men kindly and gently.
“Suppose a man made a mistake and
was criticised severely by the company commander. Then, the company political
instructor must see him and explain to him kindly that he must not complain of
the criticism made by the company commander, that his mistake was a fact, that
the criticism will benefit him because it will stimulate him to improve and
that he should try to correct the mistake with the help of his comrades. If,
instead, the political instructor joins the company commander in criticising
the men, the men will not follow the commander and the political instructor
enthusiastically. They will say that they have no-one to depend on in the
company, and become homesick.
“Only when the company political instructor treats the men
with the tenderness of an elder sister, will the men come to see him and speak
their minds. The political instructor must listen to what they have to tell him
and, if he hears any serious error, he must persuade the man involved to
correct it immediately and maintain secrecy about those matters which he must
keep to himself.” (CW, Vol.28, p.439.)
I have digressed from recounting
my own personal miseries. Apart from my weekly outing to the publishing house,
I spent the rest of the week trapped in my study-bedroom with my texts. This
was something I did not much care for at the best of times. At least in warm
weather I could go for a short walk if I felt too restless or just take a turn
on the balcony. In winter the cold was too extreme to step outside without
physical and psychological preparations. Meals offered some respite but they
were nothing to look forward to.
Nearly every day at five o’clock
I padded myself out in two pairs of socks, a thick pair of trousers, two thick
pullovers, scarf, gloves and woolly hat. I also wore two overcoats. I augmented
the coat I had brought from England, one which had proved more than adequate
for the winters at home, with a cheap, outsize, fur-lined Chinese raincoat
which I purchased locally for a few dollars. It was an unsightly garment, a
stereotype flasher’s mack. I did not care. Vanity is a luxury to be dispensed
with in wintry Pyongyang. The important thing was that it was big enough to fit
over the top of my other coat and afford an extra layer of insulation.
There were days when I was so
keen to escape from my room, I was down the stairs and out at five o’clock
sharp like a greyhound bursting from the trap. There were other days when I
dreaded the thought of stepping out into the icy blast that raked the streets
of Pyongyang, these streets that had looked so attractive when I first arrived
and there had been green on the trees and flowers everywhere, but which now
looked utterly drab, dreary and monotonous. There were a few days when I
succumbed to apathy and stayed indoors. I always regretted it the following day
as my feelings of claustrophobia would become more intense. It was easier to
motivate myself to get out if I had something to buy from the shops, a biro, a
jar of coffee, a bottle of whisky. Having a purchase to make gave a sense of
purpose to my expedition. Sometimes I could only force myself to stay out for
ten or fifteen minutes. On other days, if the wind was still, I might manage a
whole hour. There were times when I enjoyed my walk as the sun went down over
the Potang River and the first stars emerged in the darkening sky. Often,
though, my walks had the character of a grim necessity. I felt I had to get
outside for a little fresh air and exercise each day if I was to hold onto my
health and sanity. I was very conscious of the fact that I was following a more
sedentary occupation than I had in England and not participating in any sport
either.
I
doubt if there are many cities in the world that can be both as attractive in
the summer and as desolate in the winter as Pyongyang. Shorn of its flowers and
foliage, North Korea’s capital was revealed as stark, drab and functional. The
women who had looked so graceful in summer, now cowled in their thick
headscarves, were like wraiths swept along by the wind.
On returning home from my walk, I would read until supper
time at seven o’clock. Reading is not an ideal activity when one has been
poring over texts all day, but there was no alternative. From the end of
December I virtually abandoned going out in the evenings. There was nowhere to
go except the Koryo. Everywhere else was completely dead. Even the Koryo was
virtually kept open for three months for the exclusive convenience of the West
German engineers. It seemed almost eerie to me, this big luxury hotel devoid of
activity or guests. And it was such an effort to drag oneself out in the cold
to get there. I would go there every few days only when I was compelled by an
urgent need to get out of my environment at all costs. Sometimes I would bump
into an acquaintance and it would be quite pleasant for a while. Then I would
have to keep checking my watch because it was imperative to get to the
underground station by ten thirty to be sure of catching the last tube train.
Since the collapse of the dollar I had been reluctant to take taxis. With the
initial problem over my salary and my illness, my finances were not looking to
healthy, and taxi fares in Pyongyang are not cheap. After 11 pm they double.
Then it costs the equivalent of four dollars in red won to go from the Koryo to
the Ansan Chodasso, which is no more than two miles away if that. It is no good
trying to leave just a little bit earlier. The taxi drivers vanish between
10.15 and 11 pm and reappear when it is time to double the fares. The thought
of walking back at night in such weather was insupportable. I did it once with
Jean-Jacques, and the journey seemed to go on forever. I bitterly resented not
having a car. If I had had a car, I could have popped down to the Koryo each
evening for a change of scenery. If there was no-one there, I could have stayed
for one drink and then left. When I met somebody to talk to, I need not have
had to worry about getting home. As it was, by foot and underground it took the
best part of half an hour just to get there and another twenty minutes to thaw
out on arrival.
Most evenings, then, I sat in my living room. When I could
summon the will power, I used to work on this book. When I went out to
Pyongyang, I had a vague intention of writing about my experiences. It took the
awfulness of winter to really galvanise me into literary activity. Writing gave
me something to do to pass the time. It is a sad thing when time is something
to be killed as opposed to spent. Writing also shored up my self-esteem. I felt
less of a fool for being in Korea if I could define myself as an anthropologist
in the field, making a study of a reclusive, little-known tribe. I could not
always summon the will power to write. When I could, I could seldom sustain the
effort for more than an hour. I always spent part of the evening reading. Then
I would put on the television or play tapes while I drank enough alcohol to
ensure a good night’s oblivion.
Before the end of January I felt as if I had reached the
limit of my coping capacity. I was far short of saving a respectable amount of
money to come home with, but I was thinking that whatever problems I might have
on my return, anything would be better than the limbo in which I was living in
Pyongyang. On the other hand, I felt that to go home at this point would be an
admission of defeat. I had given up a secure job and taken myself off to the
far side of the world, and up to now I had seen nothing. If I stuck it out, I
would be able to travel across China to visit Hong Kong, I would have the
opportunity to see something of Korea other than the capital, and I would be
able to accumulate enough material for a book. To return prematurely would make
the whole venture an irrevocable waste of time. To stay was not a pleasing
prospect. Faced with this dilemma, I decided to up the stakes and see what
happened. I told the Koreans I wanted an eighteen per cent pay rise to take
account of the fall in the value of the dollar. Otherwise it was not worth my
while to stay and they must fly me home in March.
I had been there long enough to
know what was going to happen next. Nothing. They played a waiting game. The
hope was that I would interpret prolonged silence as refusal and retract my
ultimatum. If I did not, and they were going to keep me, they would at least
save themselves a few dollars by delaying my pay rise as long as possible. I
gave them nearly a month. Then I told them that I must have a decision soon.
They chose to keep me dangling for a few days more. Finally they told me in
February that they would grant my request from the following month, on
condition that I would guarantee to remain until August and that I told no-one
else, not even Sami, about my pay increase. I did not like being sworn to
secrecy but it seemed expedient in the circumstances. To come away after twelve
months with a book and something like my original savings target might enable
me to define my year in Pyongyang as time invested rather than time wasted. The
extra money I was to receive would just about cover the money that earlier they
had, as far as I was concerned, cheated me out of.
By the time this was sorted out,
I was still living in a fog of depression, but at least I was only a few weeks
away from a sanity-saving holiday in Hong Kong. At the end of the long, dark
tunnel of winter in Pyongyang beckoned the bright lights of Hong Kong. I
gritted my teeth, took my later afternoon walks through the frozen streets, ate
my rice and soup, and drank myself to sleep. It was one of the few
compensations of life in Pyongyang that liquor was extremely cheap. Until June
1988, when the prices of alcohol and cigarettes doubled overnight, reputable
brands of Scotch could be bought for as little as five or six dollars a bottle.
Vodka was even cheaper. A half-litre of Stolichnaya cost a little over a
dollar. I imagine this was due to Mr Gorbachev’s clampdown on drunkenness. The
vodka that the Soviet authorities would not release on the domestic market was
being sold off to friends and neighbours at bargain basement prices.
Naturally life was not all
unremitting tedium. For example, I spent some extremely pleasant evenings in
the company of Holmer and Astrid, with whom I became fast friends. I derived
immense pleasure from re-reading Lord of the Rings for the first time since
college days. But all in all winter in Pyongyang was not an experience I would
wish to repeat.
Weekends were almost worse than
weekdays. I was glad of the respite from revising ridiculous texts but time on
Saturday afternoons and Sundays used to weigh heavily on my hands. Once nice
thing was that I was able to make my daily excursion earlier in the day while
the cold was less intense. In Pyongyang in winter the air is very dry, and
there are many days of sunshine and clear skies. When there was no wind, it
could be very pleasant out in the middle of the day if one was well wrapped up.
Sometimes I would be out for two or three hours, exploring the city - not that
there is so much to explore, because it is all so homogeneous - or strolling
along the banks of the Potang River, or even walking on the frozen river
itself, always a novelty for a native of more temperate zones.
One section of the population
which evidently had no objection to the winter was the children. Everywhere
there was ice, and wherever there was ice there were ebullient boys on skates.
For some reason, I never saw many girls skating. As for the adults, they were
as usual too busy building the revolution and construction. The younger boys
did not usually have proper pairs of skates. They used to squat on a tiny
wooden platform mounted on a single skate and propel themselves along on this
peculiar device with two spiked sticks, like crude miniature versions of the
ones skiers use.
In February, to mark the dear
leader’s birthday, we were taken on an outing to the International Club for a
film show. The first film was an hour-long propaganda documentary dedicated to
the promotion of the dear leader. This was quite interesting. It was evident
that there had been an awareness that the poor chap tended to come over as a
bit of a drip, trailing diffidently in his father’s footsteps, and that a
conscious effort had been made to give him a more dynamic image. To some extent
I think it is fair to say that the film makers had succeeded, although I do not
understand these things sufficiently to attempt an analysis of how they did it.
I remember there were quite a few shots of him gesticulating expansively with a
cigarette in his hand. Nevertheless, whatever his real intellectual and
political capabilities may be, I was left in no doubt that this tubby little
man in built-up shoes will never managed to fill the role of monarch and high
priest of the Juche religion around whom the Party and the people unite firmly
in unquestioning loyalty and obedience.
The other film was a Korean
feature film called Broad Bellflower. I had revised so many articles about this
film for the periodicals that I felt as if I had seen in already. In September
1987, Pyongyang had provided the venue for the first Film Festival of Non
Aligned and Other Developing Countries, and Broad Bellflower had been awarded
first prize, so the Koreans were incredibly chuffed about it. The film is, like
so many things North Korean, rather charming and patently absurd.
The story concerns Song Rim, an
orphan girl who lives with her younger sister in a remote mountain village. The
villagers live in thatched cottages and have no electricity. She is in love
with a talented young man called Won Bong. Won Bong is dissatisfied with the
limited horizons the village offers and the low standard of living. He wants to
move to an urban environment to better himself. He asks Song Rim to go with
him, but she refuses. She insists that it is their duty to stay and work to
raise the quality of life in their native place, instead of looking elsewhere
for easier opportunities. Won Bong remains determined to move to the city in
search of a better life. Song Rim will not go with him. So they separate,
although they love each other dearly. Song Rim plays a leading role in
organising the villagers into modernising their village, until one day she is
buried in an avalanche while trying to rescue a sheep during a storm. A quarter
of a century after his departure, a despairing Won Bong returns to his village
with his teenage son. He is in despair because he had discovered the important
truth in life that it is impossible for a person ever to find true happiness
outside the place where he belongs. He knows that he is persona non grata in
the village because he turned his back on it all those years before, but he
wants his son to have the opportunity to live life as it should be lived, as
part of the community to which he rightly belongs. He sends his son on into the
village while he remains looking down from the path above. Once his son is out
of sight, he sinks to his knees and scoops up handfuls of his native earth and
weeps. The villagers initially make his son welcome, but when they discover who
his father is, controversy rages as to whether he should be allowed to remain
in what is now a thriving little community with tiled roofs on the cottages,
electricity, and a fleet of tractors. The makers of the film do not seem to
have considered that this controversy reflects badly on the villagers’ humanity,
or that Won Bong’s abject despair says little for the relationship he has with
his son or with the boy’s mother.
Nevertheless in spite of all its
absurdities, it was not a bad film. The acting was very good. The photography
was stunning. It was even enlivened with a couple of catchy songs, one of which
included the immortal lines sung by Song Rim’s sister, “I’m not going to get
married until I’m a fully qualified tractor driver.” Most people who saw it
felt that the people who made it had the ability to make a film of genuine
quality if they were freed from the restrictions of socialist-realist canons of
art, the obligation to subordinate artistic considerations to getting the Party
message over, the message in this case presumably directed at the younger
peasantry who have doubtless been getting a bit restive since television was
introduced into the community hall down on the co-operative farm.
There was another event to mark
the dear leader’s birthday to which we humble revisers were sadly not invited.
This was the banquet for the diplomatic community which was thrown at the
sumptuous new Workers’ Party of Korea headquarters. Something extraordinary
happened on this occasion that made it an instant legend in Pyongyang. The
foreigners were treated to a cabaret that included a display of dancing by
scantily-clad Korean nymphs. From all accounts, it was pretty tame stuff by
international standards, but for North Korea it was quite without precedent and
became the main topic of conversation on the diplomatic circuit for weeks
afterwards. Not everyone was pleased by it. The Pakistani ambassador expressed
outrage at being exposed to such an immoral spectacle. His Indian counterpart
told him that if he did not like it, he could have closed his eyes. On the
assumption that the girls had had previous practice, speculation hardened that
a small elite at the pinnacle of Pyongyang society may be enjoying a less lofty
morality than is advocated for the rest of the population.
Chapter 11
For weeks the
prospect of going to Hong Kong for a holiday had been dangled before me like a
dream of resurrection. I originally planned to go at the end of March, but
there came a point when I could not stand to wait any longer. I finally made my
half-term escape from Pyongyang on Monday, March 7th. Just before noon, I
settled into a comfortable sleeping compartment on the international train to
Beijing, armed with my Chinese transit visa, my Korean re-entry visa and my
Korean exit permit - yes, you even need official permission to leave the
country. Among other things, I was looking forward to a rare, uncensored view
of the Korean countryside. I had yet to be taken on a weekend outing, but other
foreigners had told me that when the North Koreans took you on a trip, they
usually arranged for you to travel at night. There may well have been an
innocuous explanation for this but it naturally gave rise to the theory that
they wanted to transport you in the dark to stop you seeing anything you were
not supposed to.
What I saw en route on the
four-hour journey to the border town of Sinuiju was neither particularly
prepossessing nor anything to be ashamed of. Orderly fields, drab and
colourless at the end of a long winter, co-operative farm villages of identical
whitewashed tiled cottages, the same as the ones that proliferate between the
apartment blocks in Pyongyang. Some more industrialised townships where the
train sometimes stopped. It all looked pretty dreary, but then things always do
in winter and there were tractors to be seen as well as donkeys and bullock
cards. Technical advisors whose tasks had necessitated that they were taken off
the tourist track assured me that the countryside was much the same wherever
they went. People who had been to South Korea as well told me that the
countryside there looks quite similar, although obviously the level of
development in urban South Korea is in a different league entirely.
The town of Sinuiju on the South
bank of the Mnok River, which constitutes the border between China and Korea,
looked to be one of those places on the planet like Rushden, Northamptonshire,
or Grantham, Lincolnshire, best to be seen from the windows of a passing train
and almost certainly unhealthful to the soul to grow up in. The train stopped
there for two hours. I stepped outside for a few minutes. From the platform I
could see the town’s outstanding feature, a giant statute of the leader facing
southwards, his arms extended as if to embrace his devoted subjects. Every town
of any size or significance has at least one big bronze statue of him set up in
a prominent place. I went into the sad little souvenir shop on the platform. It
was unheated. All it contained were a few unappealing handicrafts. A stoical
young lady huddled in an overcoat and pale blue headscarf, stood behind the
counter in the cold. I wondered how often she made a sale: once a week? once a
month? I did not hang around long. The cold soon drove me back to the warmth of
the compartment. The long delay at the border is partly incurred by the need to
uncouple the Korean engine, buffet car and local passenger carriages from the
international portion of the train, which is then shunted across the river by
an old steam locomotive. I saw several of these in Sinuiju. DPRK propaganda has
it that the railways are more than ninety per cent electrified and steam trains
are never seen in Pyongyang. On the basis of what I saw in Sinuiju and other
provincial towns I visited later, I would not be surprised if in reality steam
did not account for as large a proportion of the freight transport of North
Korean as it does of China, where steam engines are still being manufactured.
In Hamhung I saw a steam locomotive pulling a passenger train. The other reason
for the long halt is that the customs officials, who never seem to trouble
foreigners at all, go through the belongings of their fellow countrymen with a
fine tooth comb. The list of articles not to be taken out of the country
includes unprocessed animal products. I smiled when I saw this, but it is
evidently meant to be taken seriously. A few minutes later I noticed a customs
officer going down the platform with a carton of eggs. Would he have been
within his rights to confiscate them if they had already been boiled?
Alongside
the railway bridge that links Korea to China, the ruins of the former bridge
have been deliberately left in place as a memento of the American bombing.
There is not much of it to see. The bridge is intact for about fifty yards out
from the Chinese bank. All that remains after that is the damaged pieces.
After all the excitement of the river crossing there is
another two-hour wait at Dan Gong on the Chinese side of the border for one to
recollect one’s composure. I again left the train to take a brief turn on the
platform. Except that, being Chinese, it is less clean and tidy-looking, Dan
Gong seemed to have as little to recommend it as Sinuiju, but, like Sinuiju, it
has its monument, an almost identical statue in scale and pose to the one on
the southern bank, only this one of course is of dear old Uncle Mao. I wonder
which was erected first. There is a shop on Dan Gon station, too, and it offers
money-changing facilities so I was able to purchase some yuan. Like the shop in
Sinuiju station it was unheated, but the goods on display were more attractive
and the assistants carried an air of optimism that they might make the
occasional sale.
Half an hour or so before the train was due to leave, I was
visited in my compartment by three customs officers. They had not come to
harass me. They had noticed my British passport and wanted an opportunity to
practise their English on me. They were all young men in their late twenties.
Each was married. Each had the statutory one child. They would have liked to
have more children, but they understood and accepted the reasons why their
government was imposing restrictions. They had lived narrow lives. None of them
had ever been to Beijing. One of them had, while serving in the army been able
to visit the Great Wall. They were minor officials working a forty-eight hour
week with, one imagined, little realistic hope of significant advancement. Yet
they were striving assiduously in their spare time to master a remote European
language. They were learning it from the television. When I mentioned this to
Jean-Jacques, he told me that Chinese television not only broadcasts daily
lessons in English and Japanese, but in the evening one channel goes out
exclusively in English from 9pm onwards, the news read in English followed by
English or American films or TV programmes.
These young customers officers were not making bad progress
with their English, either. We were able to have quite a reasonable
conversation. I felt quite moved by them. Imagine the average working man in
England going home to learn Chinese at the end of his day’s labours. It is
symptomatic of China’s current determination to drag itself out of its
backwardness into the modern world that it is encouraging the whole population
to master the international language of technology and commerce. One could make
out a case that it is symptomatic of a socialist country that the ordinary
provincial working man feels that this challenge has some relevance to him.
The need for a better knowledge of foreign languages,
particularly English, is something the North Koreans are only just waking up
to; for years they lived in a dream in which the technical revolution would be
carried out by the Koreans themselves using their own techniques and
experiences, as if a small underdeveloped country could attain world standards
in science by its own researches alone. They have now made it the rule that
technical and scientific students must also learn a foreign language, and that
foreign language specialists have to study at least two languages. But for the
moment linguistic limitations are a serious impediment to economic progress.
Some technical advisors, frustrated at having to try and communicate with
technicians who only had a flimsy command of English, or else at having to
communicate through interpreters who had no idea about the subject under
discussion, went so far as to state that poor language skills constituted the
major impediment to the country’s advancement. Although I met plenty of Koreans
who could hold a conversation in English there were few indeed, including the
translators at the publishing house, with whom I could converse as easily as I
could with educated Swiss, Swedes, Germans et cetera, and be understood without
speaking in a consciously slow and deliberate manner - and, remember, I was
talking to their English language specialists.
When the train finally left Dan Gong, what little I saw of
the Manchurian countryside before darkness descended seemed to differ from
Korea only in that the cottages were of red brick and the villages were less
tidy. It was only when I went down to the restaurant car for dinner that I
experienced a real contrast between Korea and China.
Shortly
after the train let Pyongyang station, a beautiful, immaculately turned-out
Korean girl came to my apartment with a menu in four languages plus pictures of
the dishes for anyone who did not understand Korean, Chinese, Russian or
English. I ordered a dish of meatballs, chicken and fried potatoes. This turned
72
out to be a bit on the greasy side but by
Korean standards quite palatable. My lunch was served in a bare but
immaculately clean and tidy restaurant car, with flowers on the tables, by
another very attractive and graceful girl in a black crushed velvet frock. As
there were not many foreigners on the train, there were few diners. The meal
was cheap by international standards, about five dollars with a couple of beers
thrown in, but this was beyond the price ranges of ordinary Koreans who had to
take their own food to eat on the journey.
The Chinese restaurant car was a very different story, a
tatty affair, the tables covered with greyish plastic cloths. My travelling
companion and I were presented with a greasy menu several pages long. However,
when we tried to order from the vast array of dishes that were advertised, the
Chinese waiter just kept shaking his head until at last we asked him to point
to the dishes that were available. This made our selection process simple in
the extreme. The food turned out to be quite good. Even with a couple of beers
included, the meal only came to about two dollars. The low cost offered a
singular advantage to the local population. The Chinese could afford to eat in
the restaurant car too.
I could not class Beijing, apart from its great tourist
attractions the Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden City, among the most
attractive cities I have visited, but it was wonderful to be back in the real
world again. As one would expect in such a populous country, there were plenty
of people on the streets although I did not encounter the same crush of
humanity as in Cairo or an Indian city. There was traffic on the roads, just
like in a real city, and of course lots and lots of bicycles. The bicycles were
for some reason exempt from traffic light regulations, which made being a
pedestrian in Beijing a hazardous experience. The fact that some of the drivers
of motor vehicles seemed to think they should be exempt too made matters even
worse. It was all very nerve-wracking after Pyongyang, where there is little
traffic and hardly any bicycles at all. Only people who need a bicycle to go
about their business, e.g. electricians employed to maintain the streetlights,
are allowed to ride on in Pyongyang. In spite of the low volume of traffic,
pedestrians in Pyongyang are governed by strict regulations. Except on side
streets they must cross either by pedestrian underpass or by zebra crossing.
The zebra crossings confused me at first because although pedestrians must
cross at them and can be fined for crossing elsewhere, the cars are not
required to stop! Pedestrian underpasses are located at every major crossroads.
To somebody coming from urban Britain, they are remarkable because they are
entirely free of graffiti and perfectly safe at all times of the day or night.
Beijing boasted busy, modern hotels. The shops were teeming
with produce. There were caf´es and restaurants catering for both tourists and
locals. Maxim’s of Paris has set up a Beijing branch. It was lovely to be
surrounded by so much vitality, but the loveliest thing of all was to be able
to walk around without being stared at all the time. China’s open door policy
has been in operation long enough now for foreigners to be no longer objects of
curiosity. The only unwelcome attention I received was from a young man
stopping me on the streets and furtively enquiring if I wanted to
change-a-money.
High-buttoned Mao suits were still in evidence but the
younger people’s clothes were more in line with world fashions. But if the
youth of Beijing looked less old-fashioned, they also tended to look shabbier
than their counterparts in Pyongyang.
In spite of Beijing’s new-found cosmopolitanism and the
evidence of burgeoning prosperity, I did not have to venture far from the main
thoroughfares to be reminded that the country is still firmly entrenched in the
third world. This fact was brought home to me more forcibly on the train to
Guangzhuo. To travel by the highest class, the soft sleeper class, cost me the
princely sum of two hundred and thirty-five yuan. The rate of exchange at the
time was 3.79 yuan to the dollar. If I had been Chinese, my fare would have
been fifty per cent cheaper. Tourists on Chinese railways are charged double
fare. The fares are still beyond the means of most Chinese. Many Chinese, I
suspect a majority even of the urban population, never stray far from their
native towns and cities because of the cost. Nevertheless, demand for transport
is high. Chinese trains are nearly always full and it is virtually impossible
to buy a ticket on the same day that you wish to travel, and by no means
certain that a ticket will be available for the following day.
I expect it is the novelty of
travelling that makes the people get a bit over-excited. As soon as they opened
the gates at Beijing station to let us onto the platform, they all rushed down
it in a noisy melee, like war-whooping Red Indians in the cowboy movies. This
is in spite of the fact that there is no need to compete for prime places. Each
ticket is clearly marked with both compartment and seat number.
It was a fascinating journey from Beijing to Guangzhuo, but
not an unmitigated joy. The sleeping compartment was reasonably comfortable but
it was less spacious than the compartment on the Korean train had been and all
four bunks were occupied. There was not an empty seat or bunk throughout the
whole train, which must have been twenty carriages long. If the accommodation
was satisfactory, the state of the toilets left a great deal to be desired.
They were nastier and smaller than anything I ever encountered on Indian
railways. What was even more annoying was that the tap water kept running out.
I soon picked up that the train took on more water each time it made a
protracted stop at a major station. I learned that this was the time to grab my
soap and towel and join the milling throng that surged outside the washroom
waiting for the guard to unlock the door once the train had left the station.
In spite of such inconveniences, it was wonderful to be journeying across vast
tracts of China. What made it particularly wonderful was that the train was
heading South. All the time the weather was becoming steadily warmer, and the
iron grip of the Pyongyang winter was receding into the mists of memory.
China’s new prosperity was visible in the countryside too. Everywhere spacious
new two-storey red brick houses were springing up, which the peasants are now
able to afford since the institution of economic reforms.
I shared my compartment with a young Japanese student
couple who spoke only a little English and a Chinese lady who spoke none at
all, so our conversation was limited. However, I had been invited for lunch by
a Chinese whose acquaintance I had made while queuing to get onto the platform
at Jailing.
There was no restaurant car on the train. I had been
forewarned of this probability by Jean-Jacques and had stocked up with bread,
biscuits and fresh cheese, an item unobtainable in Pyongyang, at Beijing’s
excellent International Friendship Store, a supermarket and department store
nicely calculated to induce foreigners to part with their dollars, with the
like of which Pyongyang has nothing to compare. I also knew to bring a jar of
coffee and a plastic mug. Tea and coffee are not sold on Chinese trains, but
each compartment is provided with a thermos of hot water which is periodically
replenished so that travellers can make their own. The boiled water also comes
in useful for cleaning teeth.
Xiao Zhenya was in his early thirties and spoke excellent
English. At noon he came and collected me from my soft sleeper compartment and
led me down the train to his hard sleeper compartment. The carriage was not
divided into compartments with doors and walls. There were just rows of bare
bunks, three tiers high, facing each other the length of the carriage. Ladders
were provided for the convenience of those unfortunate souls to whom fate had
dealt the top bunk. At the next station Xiao Zhenhya’s friend, Mr Li, slipped
out onto the platform to purchase our lunch. He returned with three cans of
beer and a freshly cooked chicken in a polythene bag.
My friend was the sales manager of the import-export
division of the Hunan branch of the China National Non-Ferrous Metals Import
and Export Corporation. This seemed to be as important a job as it sounded. His
work had taken him on several occasions to the States and the Europe, including
Britain, where, like the good communist he was, he had paid his respects at
Karl Marx’s tomb in Highgate Cemetery. He was on his way back from a business
trip to Beijing. I expressed surprise that someone in his position should be
travelling in such poor circumstances. He showed some amusement at this. He
reminded me that China was a communist country where all men are equal.
Naturally, he explained, if he went abroad he enjoyed the comforts and
accommodation that were necessary for meeting foreign businessmen on equal
terms. If there was no such necessity, it was only fitting that he should share
the lot of the common man. “Besides,” he added, “we want you foreigners to fill
our first-class carriages and give us your hard currency in exchange.” He
explained that the system in his country now enabled people who studied hard
and worked hard to build the country’s economy to gain material benefits for
themselves but, in contrast to the capitalist system, it was by far the greater
portion of the wealth that any individual generated that went to the state and
only the smaller portion went to the individual.
So I sat and conversed in my native tongue with this
friendly, intelligent and articulate young man amid the squalor of a second
class third world railway carriage. Mr Li and I exchanged the occasional nod
and smile, and the train headed into sunshine and warm weather, as we pulled
our chicken apart and devoured it with our fingers. I was not sure at first
what to do with the bones. Then I caught on that the thing to do was to chuck
them on the floor among the empty beer cans and cigarette ends and sheets of
toilet roll with which we wiped our fingers. For dessert we had little pastries
filled with syrup. They tasted nice but 74
they made our fingers sticker than ever. We
did our best to clean them off with sheets of toilet paper but it would have
been good to give our hands a proper wash. However, by the time we had finished
eating, the train had run out of water again.
Still the grain-fed, free range chicken was delicious and
the good company more than made up for the surroundings and, to be fair, a lady
did come round during the afternoon with a big mop and shovel to clear the
debris from beneath our feet. It was also a welcome change to be in a free
country again. Here I was in a second class carriage of a Chinese train, having
a totally uninhibited conversation with a Chinese citizen, and nobody was
showing the slighted curiosity about us. It was the sort of situation that
would have been impossible in North Korea.
Something else that would have been impossible in North
Korea was the sort of music that was being piped through the train, Chinese
adaptations of western pop music. When I commented on this infiltration of
capitalist culture, my friend laughed and said something to the effect that
China today wants our western technology and is no longer averse to some of our
culture but, as for our unjust social system, we could stuff that up our
backsides.
If I had spent much longer with him he might have made a
communist out of me yet, but in the late afternoon the train pulled into his
home town of Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. We said our farewells and
I made my way back to my compartment.
Changsha is a grim industrial city in South-central China.
It has little to recommend itself to the casual tourist but during the cultural
revolution, when Mao’s personality cult was at its height, Changsha was the
Chinese equivalent of Mecca for millions of dedicated disciples. For it was the
city where the late chairman studied as a young man and where he first embarked
on his revolutionary activities. Although the cultural revolution is now
dismissed as something of a national disaster, and Mao is ascribed his share of
the blame, he is still honoured for his earlier achievements. And so, as the
train pulled out of Changsha, all the Chinese occupants of the carriage left
their compartments and stood in the corridor to gaze reverently out of the
window upon the river where he used to swim. Very picturesque it looked too, in
the light of the setting sun. I continued to look out of the window until the
last light had faded from the sky. By that time I was the only person left in
the corridor. Once they had dutifully paid their respects, my Chinese
companions were not long in resuming their naps or their interminable card
games.
Thirty-six and a half hours after leaving Beijing, the
train pulled into Guangzhuo station at seven thirty in the morning. I had read
that Guangzhuo has a population of three million. It seemed as if every single
one of them was crowded onto the station and the square outside at that hour of
the day. None of them, unfortunately, spoke enough English to direct me to the
China International Travel Service office. When I passed through Guangzhuo
again on my return journey, I discovered that if I had only arrived later in
the day I would have been positively besieged by offers of help because, with
its proximity to the capitalist decadence of Hong Kong, Guangzhuo has acquired
since China’s liberalisation almost as many hustlers to the square yard as
Tetuan or Tangier, although as yet they have little to offer except currency
exchange. Nor do they as yet indulge in the relentless pursuit of unwilling
targets. However, hustlers as a race are not early risers and so I found myself
floundering helplessly through the throng for several minutes. Eventually my
brain became sufficiently clear to point out to me that there was a big hotel
called the Liuhua on the other side of the square. All I had to do was go there
and ask directions from the staff. The only problem was getting across the main
road. Compared to Guangzhuo, the traffic in Beijing is disciplined. In a few
years’ time, when with increasing affluence a large proportion of today’s
cyclists become motor vehicle drivers, the streets of Guangzhuo will become as
big a nightmare for the pedestrian as those of Cairo. As it was, the only way I
could get across the rush hour traffic was to adopt a tactic I had developed in
Cairo. I paid no attention to the cars and bicycles. I simply stood beside some
locals who were also trying to cross. When they moved I moved, when they
stopped I stopped, and I prayed that they knew what they were doing.
Thus it was that I finally made my way safely to the China
International Travel Service office. There I booked my return journey to
Beijing and was pointed in the right direction to buy my ticket to the city of
boundless delight which I had been dreaming about almost continuously for the
past three months. Unfortunately at this ticket office they would not accept
yuan, only Hong Kong dollars. I had in fact been to the bank in Pyongyang
before setting out to try and buy a small quantity of Hong Kong dollars for
precisely this sort of contingency. I was informed by the International Trade
Bank of the DPRK, a country of twenty million people, that it had temporarily
run out of Hong Kong dollars. It is the sort of thing that happens in Juche
Korea. Luckily by this time there was one hustler up and about. He led me back
into the seething main concourse of the station to a counter where you could
buy a ticket for the Hong Kong train in yuan. I was so grateful to him that
when he moaned that five US dollars was a paltry reward for ten minutes of his
invaluable time, I gave him a pack of Korean cigarettes as well, a gesture he
seemed to find so insulting that he stalked off without another word.
Within the hour I was through customs and on my way on a
train of European standard, tired and grubby but bursting with joy, back to the
delights of late twentieth century civilisation. And the sun as shining! Only a
few days ago it had been unsafe for me to step out of doors without my two
overcoats and a scarf. In Beijing it was sufficiently warmer for me to shed a
layer or two. Now I was down to my shirt sleeves. Although it was still early
in the day, I poured myself a Scotch and looked out of the window at the
peasants in their straw hats guiding their wooden ploughs in the wake of their
water buffaloes and felt jolly pleased that I had been born a bourgeois in an
advanced capitalist country.
We returned to the twentieth century as we passed through
the Shanzhen Special Economic Zone which the Chinese have sensibly located on
the Hong Kong border to act as a buffer zone between China’s third world penury
and the affluence of Hong Kong. And then I was back on British soil once more
and civilisation was just a routine customs check away.
Hong Kong proved as idyllic as I had hoped. The weather was
fine. The people spoke English. The traffic moved on the correct side of the
road and obeyed traffic signals. The streets of Hong Kong were as safe and
clean as those of Pyongyang, only these streets were teeming with life and
prosperity. The spectacle that Hong Kong presented to me was of an ultra-modern
consumers’ paradise in a setting of great natural beauty. There may be an
underside to life in the territory but I did not go looking for it. I only had
a week and I was determined to enjoy every minute of it. I never strayed from
the tourist beat. I was as curious about the underlying social realities of my
holiday environment as a typical bottom-of-the-price-range package tourist on
the Costa Brava. Hong Kong is renowned throughout the world for the excellence
of its oriental cuisine. Personally I ate nothing but western food all week. I
was sick of the sight of rice. Through those dreary weeks of January and
February in Pyongyang I could feel my sanity ebbing away from me. After a week
in Hong Kong I felt like a normal human being again.
I shared a compartment on the train back from Guangzhuo to
Beijing with an Englishman who was returning home after working in Hong Kong
for eight years. He had decided to send his family back by plane and have a
little adventure by travelling home via the Trans-Siberian railway. I asked him
if Hong Kong was truly the fully developed society that it had appeared to me
to be. He assured me that it was. The shanty towns of the Suzie Wong era have
all gone, he told me. Even in the less developed parts of the New Territories
people are living at levels well above third world norms, while the sampan
dwellers in Aberdeen harbour were by and large continuing their traditional way
of life by choice and they owned the basic electronic gadgets, colour
televisions and cassette recorders, which contribute so much to our daily
lives.
I was fortunate in that the train that took me back from
Guangzhuo to Beijing was in a different class from the one I travelled down on.
The toilets on this one were quite tolerable, the supply of water
uninterrupted. It even had a restaurant car which served good, cheap meals. It
was not really big enough though to accommodate all the diners. What you had to
do to get a table was to calculate which table of diners which had not already
been staked out by others was going to finish eating first, then hover over
them while they ate, ready to dive into their chairs before they were halfway
out of them. Chinese tend to be messy eaters. There was always a pile of
spilled food on the table after the plates were cleared away, but each table
was covered with a plastic cloth and the waitresses had the knack of wiping the
debris off the table into a waiting bucket with a couple of deft sweeps down to
a fine art.
It was
on the whole a very pleasant journey, but I could not help being conscious of
moving back up a class when I climbed into a Korean railway carriage again at
Beijing. When the following day, back on Korean territory, the beautiful girl
in the tailored uniform came round with the menu and the lovely girl in the
crushed velvet dress served the meatballs and fried potatoes in the spotless
restaurant car, I had a
76
similar sensation
as when leaving China and entering Hong Kong that I was returning to a
civilised country. Only this civilised country was an extremely poor and
threadbare one. And likely to remain so.
Chapter 12
When I arrived
back in Pyongyang at the end of March, the sun was shining. It was still cold.
The spring had not yet sprung. But it was no longer bitter, bollock-freezing,
horrendous cold. It was still what we would class as winter in Britain, but
that is nothing by Korean standards. Now, I thought, the worst is over. I had
seen off the winter. My holiday had restored me to sanity. From now on I could
count down the weeks of my sentence remaining as opposed to counting up the
weeks completed. I was cheered to find that my friend Sami had made a safe
return from the Lebanon while I was away. In an unjustified burst of optimism
that did not survive a fortnight of revising texts, I entertained hopes that I
might enjoy the remainder of my stay.
As well as feeling more
optimistic for myself, now that the scales of misery and boredom were
temporarily lifted from my eyes, I could see again those aspects of the country
that had made me fall in love with it when I first arrived seven months
previously, although it seemed much longer. I was better informed now and my
vision was less naive, but I again noticed with appreciation the cleanliness
and the care for the environment and the orderliness, and once more my heart
went out to the people for their gentleness and kindness, their warmth and
simplicity. I remember saying to Sami something along the lines that all they
needed to create a paradise for the Koreans - it could never, of course, be a
paradise for somebody conditioned to a more normal type of society - was a bit
of prosperity. Whether prosperity can be achieved in the DPRK without changing
the essential nature of the society is doubtful.
Undeniably much progress has been
made. The country has been resurrected from total devastation in the war.
Living standards are frugal, but the whole population is adequately provided
with the basic necessities. The people enjoy a very high degree of security. As
long as they behave themselves, they have nothing to worry about. All the
children go to school. There is a rudimentary free health service. School,
factory and farm offer facilities for organised cultural and recreational
activities.
A constant refrain of the
president’s is that for a country to be truly independent, it must be
self-sufficient economically, politically independent, and self-reliant in
defence. Needless to say, he claims brilliant successes for his country on all
three counts. He contrasts the situation in his country with that of South
Korea, where the Americans exert a decisive influence on the internal politics,
have supreme command of the army, and supply much of the military hardware.
His claims are exaggerated, but
not without substance. North Korea is a member of the non-aligned movement and
can claim a laudable record over the years for asserting its political
independence from the Soviet Union and China. There is a school of thought that
the world would be a safer place if North Korea was under Soviet control.
Militarily Pyongyang relies on
Moscow for advanced weaponry but, according to an American professor, Edward
Olsen, writing in the Far eastern Economic Review (14.5.87), “still stresses
the need to be selfreliance in weaponry via domestic arms production, and in
most categories of weapons it is self-reliant”.
By the standards of developing
countries, the North Korean economy is pretty self-sufficient. Agriculturally,
in spite of limited arable resources due to the predominantly mountainous
terrain, they grow enough rice and maize to feed themselves. There have been
years when they have had to import additional cereals. There have been years
when they have had some surplus rice for export. Lately the food situation has
not been so good. The weather has not been conducive to bumper harvests. The
population is gradually expanding and, although they have a programme for
reclaiming tidelands, there are no other additional arable resources to
exploit. I have been told that if they could produce more chemical fertiliser
they could increase per hectare yields, but this would be at the risk of
exhausting the soil. It is a risk they seem prepared to run. One of the targets
for the third seven-year plan, 1976-93, is to expand annual grain production to
15,000,000 tons. This is the same target incidentally as was set in the previous
plan, 1978-84. Apart from grain, there is not much else to eat. Vegetables are
not abundant.[4]
Their animal husbandry is a disaster. One of the reasons for this may be
that there is not enough grain to spare for the animals. There are only 200,000
beef and dairy cattle for the whole country. They have sought expert opinion
and been told that the best hope for improving the national food supply lies in
sheep. There are at present half a million sheep scattered around the country,
but the numbers could be expanded very considerably. Many of the hillsides
could be cleared of scrub and seeded with grass for sheep to graze on. Whether
there is the political will to make the initial investment and pursue this
option remains to be seen. One of the attractions of grain is that it can be
stored up for time of war and easily distributed.
Industrially, the policy has been
to give priority to the development of heavy industry and emphasis has been
laid on the utilisation of domestic raw materials; North Korea enjoys extensive
mineral wealth. The Koreans use their indigenous resources of coal and water to
generate electricity. They manufacture steel. Korean-built trains run along
Korean-built railway lines. Korean-made trucks convey to the sites of peaceful
construction Korean-made building materials, including cement which their Hong
Kong-based agent once told me is one product they do manage to manufacture to
competitive world standards. He added that his difficulty lay in persuading
prospective buyers that the cement was of genuine high quality because the
general reputation of the country’s manufactured products is so low. In
addition to heavy industry, they have sufficient light industry to provide the
population with all the everyday necessities: clothes, cutlery, crockery, pots
and pans, furniture et cetera. Nothing exciting and nothing of high quality. It
may well be that they would do better to manufacture a narrower range of light
industrial goods to an exportable standard and to import others. Still, if the
rest of the world closed down tomorrow, North Korea could muddle along without
it pretty well as it does already. This is no mean achievement, especially when
one thinks of the third world countries which have a precarious reliance on a
small number of primary commodities for export. Moreover, although the claim
that the North Koreans have accomplished this all by themselves is not only an
exaggeration but an act of ingratitude to their allies the Chinese, estimated
to have donated a billion dollars in aid in 1987, the Russians, and the other
socialist countries, it is true that the Koreans have probably received less
foreign aid and technical assistance than most developing countries. Contrast,
for example, the maximum of 1,000 eastern bloc technicians in politically
independent North Korea, population approximately 20,000,000, with 35,000
eastern bloc technicians in Soviet satellite Mongolia, population approximately
2,000,000.
If Kim Il Sung’s goal for the
country’s economy is self-sufficiency, he can claim to have done quite well. If
another goal is prosperity, there is a long way to go and not much sign of
getting there.
When talking about North Korean
priorities, it should be remembered that the North Korean people are not just
“energetically engaged” in the technical revolution to occupy the “material
fortress of communism”, they are also carrying out the “ideological and
cultural revolutions to occupy the ideological fortress Win accordance with the
plan for the complete victory of socialism expounded by the great leader Kim Il
Sung” (Korean Review, p.65). And both Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il have stressed
on numerous occasions that it is the ideological revolution that is of prime
importance.
North Korea’s ideological
revolution aims at nothing less than the remoulding of man, the creation of a
new specimen of humanity, the communist revolutionary of Juche type. Every
vestige of bourgeois individualism and selfishness is to be eradicated from the
minds of the new communist men and women. They are to be conditioned to find
self-esteem and fulfilment not by defining themselves as individuals against
the background of society but through merging their personal identities with
the collective. The sole aim of all their endeavour is to benefit the
collective. Any benefit that accrues to the individual will only be in so far
as he is a participant in the collective’s benefit. The Juche revolutionary
will be boundlessly loyal to the leader and the party (in that order), an
ardent patriot, a dedicated and uncomplaining worker, well-mannered but proud,
simple-hearted and kind. He will have worthwhile hobbies and the morals of a
Sunday school teacher. The good revolutionary will be guided through life at
every step by the torch of the
Juche Ideawhich
is held aloft by the leader. The torch was originally kindled by the great
leader who has
79
divine status.
The spark of his divinity has been transmitted to his son and heir. He may be
expected to transmit it in turn to his son and heir and so on down through the
generations.
The Juche state is not a loose
economic coalition of individuals and their families like a bourgeois
democracy. It is a total institution. The process of institutionalisation
begins in childhood, for most citizens when they are admitted to nursery at a few
months old, and continues through life. Since returning to England, I have been
asked if life in North Korea is like the society depicted in Orwell’s 1984,
where Big Brother is watching you. The answer is that the structure is similar
but the texture of life is quite different. I return to the analogy of the vast
boarding school where the fatherly leader, headmaster Kim Il Sung, imposes a
strict but paternalistically benevolent regime on the pupils in his care. The
restrictions are not resented because the people perceive them as
schoolchildren perceive school rules, irksome but reassuring, imposed in their
best interests by kindly and responsible adults. There is a safe feeling
huddled together with one’s peers behind the arbitrary parameters of the rules.
Each citizen is not only a pupil of the big school, he is also a member of a
House within the school, a school or factory, a co-operative farm or office.
Life, both productive and recreational, is largely lived within the
sub-institution of the House, which duplicates the ethos of the greater
institution, the school.
The actual schools in the country
naturally play a crucial role in indoctrinating the young with the collectivist
spirit. “We must strengthen the ideological education of the pupils,” Kim Il
Sung tells a national meeting of teachers.
“We must educate
the pupils in the spirit of collectivism.”
“Collectivism constitutes the
basis of social life under socialism and communism. In a socialist and
communist society the interests of the collective and society include those of
every working man and woman; they are identical with those of the working people
themselves. It is, therefore, an essential requirement of socialist and
communist society that all people should work helping each other under the
slogan of ’One for all and all for one.”
“In order to equip pupils with
the collectivist spirit, they must first be awakened to the fact that the force
of the collective is greater than the force of individualism, that collective
heroism is superior to individual heroism and that the organisational or
collective life is more important than the private life of individuals. The
pupils must be encouraged from childhood to reject individualism and
selfishness, to love the organisation and the collective, and devote themselves
to society and the people, to the Party and the revolution.” (CW, Vol. 26, p.
479)
If North Korea is like a school,
it is a school with strong religious affiliations. The Juche Ideais like a
state religion and the people literally the author and embodiment of the Juche
idea, great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung.
Religious instruction is an
important aspect of a child’s education in North Korea. At school the children
are equipped with the “collectivist spirit”. They learn unquestioning obedience
and unfailing politeness. They are trained to be orderly, clean and tidy. Like
schoolchildren everywhere, they acquire numeracy and literacy. They learn to
accept responsibility for the collective property; in Pyongyang I often saw
children at school sweeping the yard, painting the doors, or cleaning the
windows. And all the while they are reading or hearing legends about the
infinitely wise, infinitely kind, infinitely brave father leader and learning
hymns about him which they chant together as they march through the streets.
When the children leave their
organisational life behind at the end of the day they return to another
strictly regulated and largely stable institution, the traditional Asian
family. In the bosom of their family, they watch television or listen to the radio
and are exposed to further indoctrination.
If first priority is given to the ideological revolution,
the cultural revolution is by no means neglected. The national literacy rate is
high. In accordance with the leader’s instructions, all the children are taught
to brush their teeth every morning and wash their feet before going to bed, so
that even the ones who live in the meanest of whitewashed cottages look clean
and presentable. Adults are encouraged and given opportunities to study in
their spare time. Both adults and children are encouraged and given
opportunities to pursue creative leisure interests. I met an impressive number
of ordinary Koreans who could play a musical instrument; one of my translators
played the trumpet, one of the policemen who guarded our compound played the
guitar, and of the two girls who served at my favourite bar in the Potanggang
one played the flute, the other the violin.
On completing the educational phase of their organisational
life, young people move on to the adult institution, the workplace. Not only do
they spend long hours working there, it is also the setting for much of their
leisure activity. Even on the two major public holidays, the dear leader’s
birthday and the great leader’s birthday, they turn up at the workplace in the
morning for fun and games and on the evening before for dancing. On these
occasions I watched from my balcony the factory workers in the yard below
having volleyball tournaments, three-legged races, and tug-of-wars under the
supervision of the tall, distinguished looking party secretary, a man whose
authoritative bearing instantly marked him out as someone of standing even
though most days he came to work in the same simple clothes and canvas shoes as
everyone else.
As the weather grew milder, I started venturing out on my
balconies to observe the workers more frequently. Once again I could not help
being impressed by how they all seemed to enjoy their working lives. They
always looked so cheerful when they arrived for work and they were all, like
everyone else in Pyongyang, immaculately turned out; even the manual workers in
their dark blues or olive drab working clothes looked clean and tidy and were
neatly coifed. When they were told to cram into the back of a lorry to be taken
out to the fields, or to help out on a construction site, they all acted as if
it was great fun. They seemed to regard it not as an imposition but as an
adventure. Often they would be squeezed on to the lorry for a good fifteen
minutes before it was even ready to depart, but I never saw anybody grumbling
about it.
Shortly after I came back from Hong Kong, they built a shed
on to the side of the factory. One day I watched as a party of young female
workers climbed onto the roof of the shed. As she set out on this awkward but
not particularly perilous ascent, each girl would give a little pantomime of
trepidation, which would be countered by shrieks of encouragement from her
playmates. There were hugs and congratulations when she reached the summit.
Slowly the numbers on the roof swelled until there must have been about twenty
girls up there. They all thought it was wonderfully exciting. Once they were
all up, they squatted in a row with their backs against the wall of the factory
and did nothing except chatter and giggle and touch one another - North Korean
girls are very physical in displaying their affection towards each other. After
a while a couple of girls did set to work to perform the task they had been
sent up there for: to spread tarpaper down on the wooden roof. No doubt more
girls would have joined in and helped except that there were only two hammers
and one bowl of nails between the lot of them. It was all perfectly charming,
more like watching young children at play than young women at work. It was a
typical North Korean scene; sweet, endearing, innocent people, without a clue
what they are doing. These people may not be creating much wealth but they have
a happy time being together. They are leading the collective life they have
been trained for and they know nothing else.
I can honestly say that the citizens of sinister, Stalinist
North Korea are the nicest people I have ever met in my life. They were nice to
me, and they are nice to each other. The comradeship of the girls on the roof
was touching to see and it was the sort of thing I saw all the time. It was
touching when I came back from Hong Kong. The interpreters and the domestic
staff at the Ansan Chodasso were people who had never been anywhere or had an
adventure in their lives. Most were never likely to. Yet, far from being
jealous, they were all genuinely thrilled that I had had a nice time. It was
the same when I was negotiating over money. The people I negotiated with had a
duty to minimise the publishing house’s expenditure but really they wanted me
to have more money, they wanted me to be happy. In view of the frugal lives
they had to live, they had every right to be resentful of my demands, but they
were not.
In a whole year in Pyongyang, I only ever witnessed a
handful of unpleasant incidents. There were a couple of occasions when I saw a
scuffle as people tried to squeeze onto overcrowded buses and trolley-buses. It
surprised me that this did not happen more often, particularly in winter when
tired, underfed bodies, blood sugar levels depleted at the end of a long
working day, had to wait in long queues for transport home in sub-zero
temperatures. One Saturday afternoon I cam across two young men shaping up for
a fight in a pedestrian underpass in Chollima Street. Once, walking in the
streets, I saw a van driver stop his van and chase after a small boy for no
apparent reason. He proceeded to give the child a good hiding until other
citizens intervened. On another occasion, walking beside the Potang River, I
saw a demented-looking chap hurling big stones at the ducks swimming in the
middle of the river. It may be that throwing stones at animals is a national
vice. At the zoo I saw several children, and worse, young adults, doing it.
Another 81
time I was present when a couple of young
drunks barged their way through a crowded platform on the Metro. They calmed
down after people gently remonstrated with them. I have seen more
unpleasantness in a single evening in urban Britain on a Friday or Saturday
night.
I have not forgotten my Chinese friend’s comment that there
are bad Koreans but they dare not misbehave. However, it was my impression that
it was not just close supervision and possibly a harsh legal code that caused
North Korean people to maintain good standards of conduct. I felt there were
positive factors at work as well. People tend to behave nicely when they feel
all right about themselves, as most Koreans, guaranteed a fairly equal standard
of living and a role in society, do. Before I left, there were indications that
standards were falling, and I except them to continue to fall if living
conditions continue to deteriorate and disillusionment seeps in. Even so, the
deterioration is likely to be a slow process as people’s basic material needs
are still being met, nearly everybody shares a common penury and, most
important of all, everyone lives with the feeling of assurance that their needs
will continue to be met. Security is the one commodity the citizen of the DPRK
enjoys in abundance Between the support of the traditional Asian extended
family and a comprehensive welfare system that guarantees employment, shelter,
food, clothes, warmth (up to a point), free education and medical care, no one
has too much to worry about. In this traditional Asian culture there are not
even the stresses of competing in the sexual market-place. Most marriages are
still arranged, commonly through the intercession of a matchmaker. The party
has in recent years been encouraging young people to seek their own partner and
fall in love, but so far, I am told, it is only the more highly educated who
are responding. One interpreter told me that he was introduced to his wife as a
potential partner by one of his friends. They then met a few times and once
went for a walk by the river. He knew he had been accepted as a suitable
bridegroom when she invited him to join her family on Ancestors’ Day for a
picnic by the grave of one of her relatives. He said that prior to the m´enage
they had never touched, not even held hands, and that he actually would have
preferred the girl who introduced them. Different Koreans I spoke to gave
equally odd accounts of their courtship. I only ever met one who had enjoyed
what we would consider a normal romance with his future wife.
The first book I read on my return from Hong Kong was Eric
and Mary Josephson’s famous 1962 compilation of writings on the theme of
alienation in contemporary capitalist society, Man Alone. It was the first
serious book I had attempted in work. During the winter all I had wanted to
read were escapist novels, of which Michael had a generous supply to lend me.
There is a piece in Man Alone entitled Life in the Crystal Palace, by a writer
called Alan Harrington, in which he relates his experience of working for a big
American corporation which offered its staff idyllic terms of service and where
promotion tended to be based on loyalty, reliability and seniority rather than
on dynamism and initiative, and where it was “practically impossible to be
fired, unless you drink to alcoholism or someone finds your hand in the cash
box”. In this environment, Harrington comments, “Every so often I hear my
seniors at the corporation inveigh against socialism, and it seems strange. I
think that our company resembles nothing so much as a private socialist system.
We are taken care of from our children’s cradles to our own graves. We move
with carefully graduated rank, station and salary through the decades. By what
marvellous process of selfdeception do we consider our individual enterprises
to be private? The truth is that we work communally. In our daily work, most of
us have not made an important decision in years, except in consultation with
others.
“Good people work here. Since joining the company I have
not heard one person raise his voice to another in anger, and rarely even in
irritation. Apparently when you remove fear from a man’s life you also remove
his stinger. Since there is no severe competition within our shop, we are
serene.”
It would seem that, whether in a rich American corporation
or a poor third world country in Asia, it is possible to bring out the nicest
qualities in people by giving them security. The other side of the coin may be
that, as Harrington goes on to suggest, people lose an edge to their
personality under such a benign system. He doubts whether his company could
sustain its easy-going, paternalistic ethos if the product it was manufacturing
faced stiffer competition in the market place.
Not only are all the citizens of
the DPRK granted material security, they are also assigned a role to play and a
religion to believe in. People are not susceptible to feelings of alienation
because they are united as members of the same congregation with their
president as prophet, if not God. Their religion gives them the common cause of
fulfilling the great leader’s prophecy of a communist paradise on earth through
building together the revolution and construction. As in all the most potent
religions, the forces of good are displayed against the forces of evil which
are incarnate in US imperialism and the South Korea puppet clique. The
incarnations of evil are all the more sinister and threatening when they are
invisible. No pictures of Chun Doo Hwan, Roh Tae Woo or Ronald Reagan are ever
published in the DPRK. Denied human form, these creatures of darkness take on
mythological dimensions in the popular imagination, like Satan or Beelzebub.
The Josephsons comment in their
introduction to Man Alone: “Implicit in most approaches to alienation is the
idea of an ’integrated’ man and of a cohesive society in which he will find
meaning and satisfaction in his own productivity and in his relations with
others. As Emile Durkheim expressed it, man in a ’solidaristic’ society ’will
no longer find the only aim of his conduct in himself and, understanding that
he is the instrument of a purpose greater than himself, he will see that he is
not without significance’.”
The North Korea in his highly
organised, highly cohesive society, is fortunate to be the instrument of two
purposes greater than himself: in the long term, the realisation of the fully
communist society; in the shorter term, the achievement of national reunification.
The latter is a particularly effective goal in terms of uniting the populace
because it is less abstract than the other and appeals to the almost
chauvinistic patriotism which seems to be inherent in the national character,
and which is played upon ceaselessly by the propaganda machine. The common
people still believe what they are told about the lamentable condition of their
compatriots in the South, and that if they make sacrifices to build up a mighty
national economy, this will inspire the South Koreans to rise up against their
puppet rulers and their US masters in the struggle for a reunified Korea under
the great leader and the banner of the Juche Idea.
Perhaps this sense of mission is
another reason why the ordinary manual worker in North Korea likes being at
work, even though he is performing the same unappealing tasks as manual workers
everywhere. Whenever, years ago in vacations from school or college, I worked
at manual occupations, I found that, while it would be an overstatement to say
that manual workers actively hated their jobs, nearly all of them regarded
their work as a necessary evil and something apart from their real lives,
offering no intrinsic pleasure or interest but unavoidable if they were to have
a decent standard of living.[5]
The Josephsons would confirm my impressions. They cite a survey of
industrial workers that showed “that for most of them work is not a central
life interest. Nor do many of them value the informal associations with fellow
workers that jobs offer. Durbin writes: ’Not only is the workplace relatively
unimportant as a place of profound primary human relationships, but it cannot
evoke significant sentiments and emotions in its occupants.’ Other observers of
factory life have made it abundantly clear that most workers are not happy in
their jobs, that they feel trapped and degraded by their working conditions,
that they have a powerful desire to escape from the factory, and that what
drives them on is the incessant demands of our consumption economy.”
There is no question of North
Korean workers being driven on by the “incessant demands” of their “consumption
economy”. They are at work because they have to be of course, but it would
never occur to them to be anywhere else. If they were not at work, there would
be nothing else for them to do. On the positive side, being at work they are
occupied, they are acquiring immortal socio-political integrity, and they get
to have adventures like climbing on a roof or going for a ride on the back of a
bumpy lorry with their friends. From kindergarten if not nursery they have
lived most of their working lives collectively in institutions. They are
conditioned to find themselves among their colleagues in the work institution.
Being part of the collective at work is what life is all about. Being a worker
carries status in their society. Gifted sportsmen, actors and singers enjoy a
modest celebrity in their society but the main heroes, the subjects of media
attention, are workers. The state can award no higher honour than that of
Labour Hero. In North Korea, the worker is not regarded as a failure or an
object of exploitation. The worker is the archetypal hero.
Chapter 13
The DPRK has not
only been successful in abolishing squalor, primary deprivation, and
insecurity. It has not neglected the cultural aspect of people’s lives in terms
of educational provision and organised recreation and has created a decent
social ambience, within which people can live simple, virtuous hard-working
lives and can feel good about themselves and be nice to one another. Sadly the
country enjoys no prosperity. It lacks the means to manufacture the material
goods that make people’s lives more comfortable and more rewarding. It lacks
the money either to import them or to import the technology that will enable it
to manufacture them in the future. The national debt is relatively modest,
about five billion dollars, but since the mid-seventies it has been incapable
of servicing it and, until very recently, has tended to adopt a cavalier
attitude towards meeting its financial obligations. North Korea does not ask
for debts to be rescheduled. It simply ignores them. As a result it has the
greatest difficulty in obtaining any further loans. Given that the majority of
the population are quite contented, the country’s economic problems would still
not be all that desperate were it not for the obsession with reunification with
the South on favourable terms and the related need to try and keep up with
looming South Korea.
Perhaps it is the pressure
generated by the South’s advances, perhaps North Korean minds are becoming
tangled up in their own propaganda. Whatever the reason, North Korea is not
displaying much wisdom at the moment in its efforts to get the economy moving
again.
The official line in their
propaganda is that the economy is brilliant, independent and thriving, and that
all the factories are equipped with the latest technology that has been
developed by the Koreans themselves, using their own scientific techniques.
The reality is that there is a
dearth of sophisticated technological expertise and most of their industrial
plant and equipment is twenty or thirty years out of date. Their industry can
at a basic level service existing domestic needs but cannot compete in world
markets. At the moment they are investing as much foreign currency as they can
lay their hands on in purchasing new technology. Unfortunately, because the
official line is that their factories are furnished with all the latest
equipment, they are tending to succumb to the temptation of trying to translate
their propaganda into reality by buying the very latest, when informed opinion
has it that investment in an intermediate level of technology would be cheaper
and more in line with their current developmental needs and existing levels of
scientific expertise. For example, they recently built an Orlon-spinning mill
in Anju, South Pyongan province, complete with the latest in hi-tech machinery.
The mill was built under the supervision of engineers from East Germany. The
Germans were not optimistic about the mill’s future. They feared that in a few
years all the expensive new machinery will be in a sorry state. The machinery
needs to be running constantly. In North Korea there are often interruptions in
the power supply. In addition, they were sceptical as to whether adequate
quantities of raw material could be supplied to feed the machines continuously.
They were also doubtful as to whether the local technicians had sufficient
expertise to maintain the machinery correctly.
Interestingly, when Kim Il Sung
went to Anju to preside over the official opening ceremony at the mill in the
autumn of 1987, the Germans were sent away for the day. Was this simply because
their presence would have been incongruous when the great leader made his
stereotyped speech about the notable achievements of “our own technicians using
their own techniques and local raw materials”? Or could it have been because
the ageing autocrat is no longer in touch with what is going on in his country
and someone did not want him to know about the involvement of foreign
technicians?
The new cement factory built by a
West German firm is also blessed with all the latest state-of-the-art
technology. A billion deutschmark investment, it is intended to play a vital
part in fulfilling the seven-year plan target of nearly doubling cement production
by 1992. The West German engineers expressed greater optimism about their
factory’s future but, again, the machinery must be kept in constant motion. The
Koreans will be hard pressed to provide uninterrupted power to the factory and
harder pressed to do so without diverting energy resources away from domestic
consumers.
Someone has told the Koreans that
optical fibre cable is the latest thing in the telecommunications industry.
Although this is still in the experimental stage in the developed countries,
they are hell bent on squandering their money by trying to use it in expanding
their communications network. They even went so far as to set up a factory to
try and manufacture it themselves. This predictably ended in a fiasco.
A foreign scientist told me about
being taken to look round an office complex somewhere in the North of the
country. He was shown a highly sophisticated and expensive computer system that
had been imported. Unfortunately nobody had a clue how to use it properly, so
they were more or less using it as an adding machine.
Nor will they invest money for
their scientific and technical personnel to have proper training. Man is the
master, sayeth the Juche philosophy. There is nothing he cannot accomplish if
he has the will and the determination. The president has been telling his
people for nearly half a century that they must overcome the mystique that
surrounds machinery. The official propaganda has it that their standards of
scientific knowledge and expertise are nearly as high as anywhere in the world.
Therefore local scientists and technicians will be capable of working
everything out for themselves if they can just get their hands on the hardware.
Consequently, as I was reliably informed, when they are costing possible
projects with the United Nations Development Project, the first item of
expenditure they always cross off the list is Training and Development. Then
their scientists have to try and bridge a technological gap of ten or twenty
years by their own efforts or, if they are working alongside foreign experts,
try to learn from them in spite of daunting communication difficulties due to
inadequate language skills.
North Korea recently purchased
from Siemens of West Germany a new international telephone system comprising no
less than thirty-two direct dial lines to the outside world. In theory, further
lines can be added onto the existing system ad infinitum. The Korean hope was
that their technical staff would work it all out and do just that. In practice,
the engineer who installed it did not think they would be capable of
maintaining it. Apart from any other difficulties, the instruction manual was
in English, a language that none of them understood too well. He probably
underestimated their assiduousness and willingness to learn. His boss, who came
out later to put the system into commission, was confident that they would be
able to maintain it, but as for their adding new lines, well . . .
If anything went wrong with the
system, the Koreans were on their own. They had chosen not to pay for any
after-sales service and they were so late in meeting the payments on the
contract that the two-year guarantee had expired before the system was even
commissioned. Because of North Korea’s abysmal credit rating, Siemens insisted
on payment in cash. When eventually the Koreans had saved enough money, an
official from Siemens was sent over to Pyongyang to count the banknotes as they
were loaded into two containers which were then driven across Asia and eastern
Europe to be handed over at the Czechoslovakian border.
I am sure there are plenty of
scientists in North Korea who know that a more modest and realistic approach is
called for in updating the economy. I am also sure that they are not in a
position to take final decisions and that they have to be careful in making
recommendations not to imply that anything is beyond their personal capability
lest they be accused of the heinous crimes of “passivism” and “defeatism”.
Apart from all the other problems
North Korea experiences in updating its economy, there are some projects which
are agreed with the UN Development Project that never get off the ground
because export licences are refused for the requisite technology by countries
like the USA, Japan and Britain. This is often quite malicious, involving
withholding technology that can have no military application. It is also
stupid, just the sort of thing to push North Korea into the arms of the Soviet
Union, which it has been trying for years to keep at arm’s length.
When the North Koreans are not
squandering foreign currency on ultra-modern technology that is inappropriate
to their level of development, they are supplying raw materials to the USSR in
exchange for obsolete plant and technology. In 1987, they compromised their
stance of political independence by at long last granting the Soviet navy free
access to their ports - an invaluable resource, as Korea’s eastern ports remain
ice-free in winter, unlike those of Soviet Asia - in exchange for further
military and economic assistance.
Another recent money-spinner for
North Korea has been selling arms and munitions to Iran for the Gulf War and
acting as a middleman for the sale to Iran of Chinese missiles. As the Iranian
ambassador used to cheerfully acknowledge, “That’s what I’m here for.”
With regard to Korean
decision-making, everyone I ever spoke to complained about how slow and
tortuous a process it was and of frustration at never meeting the people who
held ultimate authority. This is one of the classic problems of an overly rigid
and centralised economy. The problem is likely to be compounded in the case of
North Korea because it is unlikely to be the most suitable people who occupy
the positions of highest eminence and take the important decisions. In a
society in which first priority is explicitly given to the ideological
revolution, which is defined as closely arming every citizen with the Juche
Idea, the monolithic ideology of the Party, it is more than likely that
advancement is dependent upon the ability to parrot the thoughts of the
leadership. In a culture in which the highest virtue is boundless loyalty to
the leadership, one cannot help wondering whether a lively, questioning
intelligence would be more of a handicap than an asset.
I
suspect as well that another factor in advancement may be nepotism if other
senior cadres are able to follow the presidential example. Not only is Kim Il
Sung’s son the heir to the throne, his wife is a member of the central
committee and he is rumoured to have many other relatives installed in high
places.
As long as North Korea remains an
essentially theocratic society, it is the priests of Juche, the parrots, be
they sincere or cynical parrots, who will remain in control. Like priests
everywhere their judgements will be influenced more by considerations of faith
and dogma than by reason and pragmatism. They are likely to continue to
mismanage the economy. Even if the penny does drop and they start to take some
sensible measures, like investing their scarce resources of hard currency in
more appropriate and cost effective technology and delegating powers of
decision-making, there will remain considerable obstacles to the country’s
economic advancement. Thirty-two direct dial telephone lines to the outside
world, assuming they manage to maintain them, is not a lot for a nation of
twenty million inhabitants. Although they are building a larger airport in
Pyongyang in readiness for the thirteenth World Festival of Youth and Students
in 1989, there are at present only four scheduled flights a week between Pyongyang
and Moscow (two each way), four between Pyongyang and Beijing, and two between
Pyongyang and Khabarossk, to supplement the daily train service between
Pyongyang and Beijing and weekly between Pyongyang and Moscow. At the
International Trade Bank a routine transaction, remitting monthly maintenance
payments to the UK, turned out to be an inordinately costly and time-consuming
operation. The stage is not set for international commerce on a grand scale.
North Korea has at last been
making some effort during the last year to pay off its foreign debts, but it
has a long way to go before it can obtain a sufficiently respectable financial
status to obtain extensive credits. Until it does, it will have to make do with
handouts from the USSR, China and other socialist countries. The legends about
foreign loans that the DPRK has quite simply ignored are legion.
On the train journey from Beijing
to Pyongyang, I met a Finn who had been sent by his government to try and
extract some payment for a paper mill which the Finns had built for the North
Koreans some years previously and for which they had so far received not a
penny. An elderly diplomat who was travelling with us found his mission highly
amusing. He told him the Koreans would throw banquets in his honour all week.
There would be lots of toasts to Korea-Finland friendship, but he would be
damned lucky if the question of payment was even discussed. He said he had
already been warned that this was what might happen. He was determined that
there would be no socialising until some satisfactory financial arrangements
had been agreed on. The old diplomat laughed at this. He told him he might as
well make up his mind to enjoy the free booze-ups because that was all he was
ever going to get out of his trip.
The Koreans are enthusiastic advocates of the South-South
co-operation movement. The South-South movement is about developing countries
easing their economic dependence on the advanced countries by helping each
other, offering each other mutual technical co-operation and other economic
assistance such as bartering commodities. A diplomat told me how his country
agreed to swap a shipload of mineral found in his country for a shipload of a
different mineral from Korea. His country fulfilled its part of the bargain.
Nothing arrived from Korea. Remonstrations were made to the Koreans. Their
response was that they were not going to honour their commitment because all
they had received was worthless dust. They even drove an official from the
embassy to the port where the mineral had been delivered to show him. A pile of
dust was what the official did see. It was a small one, consistent with the
residue that would be left over after the mineral had been loaded onto lorries
and carried away. He pointed this out to them. He asked what had happened to
the rest of the alleged consignment of worthless dust. He was told that the
wind had blown it away.
It would be an overstatement to say the North Koreans are
not doing anything right. As mentioned earlier, they are starting to rectify
their shortcomings in foreign languages, particularly English, and they have
opened the door a fraction to foreigners. To accommodate them, they have built
the Koryo Hotel, a hotel of international standard that does not contain any
images of the great leader. Since 1984 they have allowed joint venture
companies to be set up, although so far there have been few taken apart from
expatriate Koreans living in Japan. Strangely, one joint venture that has been
set up is with a French company to build and operate a hotel in Pyongyang, as
if there was not enough surplus hotel accommodation in the capital already. In
recognition of the fact that they do need the outside world and have to make
concessions to it, interaction between foreigners and locals, although strictly
limited by any normal standards, has been greatly relaxed by theirs.
Nevertheless they are still reluctant to emulate the Chinese example by
decentralising some decision-making and throwing the door wide open to
basically revitalise the economy by offering foreign capital their cheap labour
and facilities in return for investment of funds and access to new technology.
Ultimately the Chinese road is the only road open to them,
but as yet they are only taking a few faltering steps down it when they ought
to be running. There are understandable reasons for their reluctance to do so.
First of all, it could be seen as a dilution of ideological purity. Secondly,
it would entail an admission that everything is not as they would have others
believe. That would be almost tantamount to abandoning their campaign to con
the South Korean working class into thinking they could have better lives in
the embrace of the great leader. Thirdly, the impact of an open door policy
could have a very unsettling effect on the internal situation.
At the moment the masses are contented with their simple
lives. One of the reasons for this is that they do not know any better. The
indications are that while some Koreans are so cocooned in their ideology that
exposure to foreign influences will only have a superficial impact, there are
others who, once they have glimpsed alternative ways of living, are bound to
start feeling that theirs is a hard, limited and unrewarding life, and
wondering if there is any need for it.
Among the interpreters who frequented the international
hotels, there were plenty whose faith in their system seemed inviolable. There
were others with whom you only had to scratch the surface for intimations of
disenchantment to ooze out. Some of them had acquired a very distorted picture
of the way the rest of the world lives because nearly all the foreigners they
had come into contact with came from the more privileged echelons of their own
societies. No matter whether or not contact with foreigners had a significant
effect on their ideological orientation, there were few indeed who did not
become susceptible to the craving for alcohol, foreign cigarettes, western pop
music and everything else that makes life fun. More and more of them, in the
brief time I was there, degenerated into blatant hustlers.
Foreign books were another much coveted commodity. As far
as I could tell from what they have translated into English, their contemporary
literature, written under the direction of the Party, consists entirely of
naive tales with a clear ideological message, an uncomplicated plot, and
rudimentary characterisation. Some of these have a certain charm. Others are
merely pathetic. There may well be a large and appreciative audience for them
among the masses of simple but literate workers and peasants, just as there is
a large audience in our culture for simplistic literature like Mills and Boon
romances. The problem in North Korea is that there is no alternative literature
to satisfy the more intellectual members of society.
The big dilemma for the North
Korean rulers is that to make any further economic progress they have to trade,
they have to get access to new technology, and frankly they need some help.
They need to open up. Unfortunately, the wider the door is opened, the more
people will find out that the propaganda they are constantly fed is a load of
fairy stories. This can only lead to increased discontent. Reluctant to take
this risk, they try to boost the economy by asking the people to work harder.
They resort to lunatic twohundred-day campaigns where people are required to
work twelve hours a day, seven days a week on a low protein diet. They have had
similar campaigns before: a seventy-day campaign, a hundred-day campaign. But
two hundred days is different; just short of seven months of nothing but
relentless toil. No matter how high the ideological consciousness of the masses
is raised, the body rebels against such demands. So this too must lead to
discontent, especially when so much energy and resources are being wasted on
absurd prestige projects like the 105-storey hotel and the Angol Sports
Village.
North Korea is not a sporting
nation but even before it made its bid to co-host the 1980 Olympic Games,
Pyongyang already had an Olympic-sized swimming pool, an ice rink, a modern
sports hall and the 100,000 capacity Kim Il Sung Stadium. Since then they have
been building a 150,000 capacity stadium, a smaller 25,000 capacity stadium, a
new swimming complex, and separate gymnasia for badminton, boxing, table
tennis, weightlifting et cetera, in order to substantiate their claim that they
could have realistically co-hosted the Olympics. These de luxe sporting
facilities will probably never be used in the immediate future; they will be
preserved in pristine condition to show foreign visitors for propaganda
purposes. The majority of the facilities were still incomplete when I left
Pyongyang in August, just a few weeks before the Olympics were due to start.
Whether they could have been completed in time, I cannot say.
What I can say is that their
effort to make political capital out of the Olympic issue is typical of the low
level of thought that characterises the DPRK leadership at the moment. It is
almost incredible that the leadership failed to grasp the simple concept that
the Olympic Games are allocated to a city and not to a country. In this context
their hopes that all the socialist countries, which originally voted en bloc
against holding the Olympics in Seoul, would go as far as to boycott the games
over the co-hosting issue were naive in the extreme. The amount of manpower and
resources invested in building the facilities for co-hosting the games could
not have been justified even if a significant proportion of the events had been
conceded to Pyongyang. The country simply could not afford the expense. When
the country’s priority is to court international prestige before improving
living standards, and two-hundred-day campaigns are imposed on the people, then
the country is degenerating into the sort of slave labour camp that prejudiced
observers in the West would prefer to believe that it always was.
To whose account must these
follies be laid? Given that power resides in the hands of the triumvirate of
the president, his son and O Jin U, whose influence can be assumed to be
minimal since his “accident”, then it must be either the man himself or his son.
While I was in Pyongyang, rumour was rife that the president has adopted a
largely ceremonial role and left the day-to-day running of the country in the
hands of the dear Comrade Kim Jong Il. If this rumour is correct, perhaps the
old man should resume the reins of power before the genuine achievements that
were made under his rule are irrevocably undermined.
Chapter 14
During the early
months of 1988 the focus of DPRK outrage moved away from the South Korean
allegations that the North was responsible for the disappearance of the South
Korean airliner, to the Team Spirit Joint Military Exercise staged each year in
the late winter/early spring by American and South Korean forces.
This exercise has been staged
each year since 1976. Each year it has been expanded in terms of duration,
scope, and the number of troops involved. 1988 saw the biggest yet. It involved
over 200,000 troops over a period of several weeks, plus aeroplanes and
warships, some carrying nuclear weapons. The justification for the scale of the
exercise was to deter any untoward acts of aggression by the North in the year
when the Olympics were due to be staged in Seoul.
When the nuclear weapons the US
has deployed in South Korea are left out of the equation, the North may at best
be equally matched militarily against the South. Economically it is
incomparably weaker and it only has half the population of the South. Therefore
it cannot entertain realistic hopes of mounting a successful invasion of the
South at this time. I assumed that the Americans for their part had no
intention of launching a full scale war against the North, complete with
limited nuclear strikes, in reprisal for any terrorist outrages the North might
have perpetrated. In which case Team Spirit struck me as a pretty silly
exercise in provocative sabre-rattling.
Predictably the North’s reaction
was not exactly the embodiment of good sense and moderation either. Instead of
just issuing reasonable protests against America’s behaviour, the Supreme
Commander of the People’s Army, ever victorious, iron-willed, brilliant Comrade
Kim Il Sung ordered the armed forces on full combat alert. Bellicose speeches
were made. The Korean people will retaliate a hundredfold, a thousandfold,
against any act of enemy imperialist aggression. Nuclear weapons don’t scare
Juche revolutionaries. And every effort generally was made to wind the whole
population up into a mood of heroic and self-sacrificing patriotism. We even
had a few evenings of blackouts in Pyongyang to rehearse the civilian
population for air-raids. The girls at the Ansan Chodasso thought it was
terrific fun, running up and down the stairs, issuing us with candles and
making sure our curtains were drawn properly. Fortunately the Koryo was excused
from all this nonsense. It became literally an oasis of light in a darkened city.
I was able to seek refuge there and have a few beers until the hysteria died
down.
By way of compensation, we
revisers were able to down pens early on Thursday afternoon to be wheeled down
to Kim Il Sung Square to take our places on the tribune at a mass rally. We and
the socialist bloc diplomatic community and various other foreigners were
presumably meant to represent the progressive, peace-loving peoples of the
world who are looking on at the situation on the Korean peninsula with mounting
apprehension as the adventurist war manoeuvres of the US imperialists and the
fascist South Korean puppet clique exacerbate the tensions to the ultimate
extreme. Personally I was not complaining. It is always nice to knock off work
early and the whole spectacle was highly entertaining. A large gathering of the
working people of Pyongyang had been mobilised to attend the rally. They lined
up in orderly ranks like soldiers on parade and listened patiently as five
separate speakers made the same predictable noises. They were so predictable
that my interpreter eventually grew weary of repeating himself. By mutual
unspoken agreement he stopped translating halfway through the third speech. The
Pyongyang Times reported that the speakers were interrupted by frequent loud
shouts from the crowd. This was a distortion of the truth. The crowd was much
too well disciplined and polite to break into spontaneous expressions of
passion. They waited until they were cued in by a girl with a shrill voice.
Then they all extended their right arms and chanted their support for the
Supreme Commander’s communiqu and pledged to maintain themselves in a state of
vigilance and full combat readiness. Their responses were as stereotyped as a
church congregation chanting the litany.
At the end of the rally by chance I became detached from my
colleagues. I decided to station myself at one of the exits to the square where
the minibus was bound to pass by later. While I was waiting I was able to take
a good look at the people as they left the rally. I imagine that anyone who saw
a film of the rally and heard the speeches would have formed the impression
that these North Koreans are a pretty belligerent bunch. The contrast between
that impression and the cheerful, friendly, neatly dressed people I saw making
their way home could scarcely have been more marked. Once more a church
metaphor came to mind. I was reminded of a congregation of kindly Christian
souls coming out of a fundamentalist chapel on a Sunday morning, feeling
pleasantly smug and righteous after hearing a particularly satisfying
fire-and-brimstone sermon. Even as I warmed to them, I could not help
shuddering at the thought that there were armed troop loads of such sincere and
fanatical believers lined up all along the demilitarised zone, ready to lay
down their lives rather than submit to the forces of US imperialism - just like
people in our culture who would rather be dead than red. And when I thought how
easily border skirmishes can escalate into full scale conflicts, I felt
releived I was going far away from Korea for good in a few months’ time.
A wonderful thing happened to me in Pyongyang in early
April. I was out for a stroll one Saturday afternoon when I became aware that I
was too hot with my overcoat on. After so many months of bitter cold, fear of
the elements was deeply ingrained in me. It took me a minute or two to take
decisive action on my discovery, but eventually I did find the courage to take
my coat off and walk all the way home with it hanging over my shoulder. The
hours passed and I was showing no symptoms of hypothermia, frostbite or
pneumonia. This was it then. Spring had finally sprung in Pyongyang and I had
survived to greet it.
At around the same time, the sixth annual Pyongyang Spring
Arts Festival started. This is a twoweek extravaganza when dancers, singers,
musicians and circus artistes from all over the world converge on Pyongyang and
there are shows every evening in the various theatres scattered around the
city. In 1988, there were dancers from India, singers from Madagascar, jugglers
from Cuba and troupes from Siberia, Mongolia and China. For the first time in
many months the Koryo was like a real hotel again and not just a luxury hostel
for German engineers, and the eighteenth floor disco at the Changgwangsan was
crowded every night. Recordings of the shows were constantly broadcast on the
television during the festival. The same half-dozen shows may have been shown
over and over again, but at least they provided something else to watch than
propaganda documentaries and Korean feature films.
This isolated gala of international culture in the North
Korean calendar is timed not only to celebrate the coming of spring. It also
coincides with the most important national festival, the North Korean
Christmas, the birthday on April 15th of the great man himself, seventy-six in
1988.
On the Sunday before the birthday we were all taken out to
Mangyondae for the morning to join the queue of believers filing past the
nativity set and then to visit the funfair. On the following day preparations
for the festivities got under way at the factory next door. Icons were set up
in the factory yard. One which was typical consisted of a golden-hued painting
of the little house at Mangyondae and a poem in praise of the father leader
with the date 15:4 displayed in flashing red neon on top. The usual lunchtime
games of football and volleyball were suspended in favour of dancing. The
dancers form into pairs and stand round in a big circle. There are few mixed
couples. Mostly girls dance with girls and boys with boys. In the centre of the
circle are an accordionist and two girls who have already learned the steps.
When the music starts, the couples move round watching the two girls in the
centre in order to imitate their movements. The nearest analogy I can find to
contemporary North Korean dancing in my own culture is barn dancing, but this
is much more sedate and, it must be said, extremely graceful.
On the evening of the big day the workers return to their
factory in their best clothes this time for more dancing. On the day itself,
even in the midst of the two-hundred-day campaign to make September 9th, the
40th anniversary of the founding of the Republic, a great festival of victory,
the revolution and construction come to a halt. But the workers are still at
their workplaces before eight in the morning, as on the dear leader’s birthday,
for more dancing, tug-of-wars, volleyball competitions and three-legged races.
It is all good, clean fun of a sort which would excite derision from adults
elsewhere in the world, but these people love it. They start to disperse around
midday. They all go home and have a nice meal with the special foods that have
been issued to them for the occasion. They will also be able to have a drink
because alcohol will 90
have been released to the shops that week.
April 15th, 1988, in Pyongyang
turned out clear, warm and sunny. I went for a stroll around the construction
site to get more oxygen to my hungover brain in preparation for the afternoon’s
banquet at the Ansan Chodasso. For the first time, at any hour of the day or
night, on any day of the week, I did not see a flicker of constructive activity
on the whole site.
At the banquet we were honoured
by a brief visit from the director general of the publishing house before he
went off to attend a more lavish affair with the president. He opened the
proceedings with a speech. He said that this was the most important national
holiday of the Korean people. The president’s birthday had been declared the
greatest national holiday of the Korean people by the dear leader, Comrade Kim
Jong Il. Comrade Kim Jong Il had thus demonstrated his boundless loyalty to the
great leader. In the past the Korean people had suffered many misfortunes and
humiliations. It was only when they were blessed with a great leader that they
had been able to extricate themselves from misery and build a new life free
from suffering and oppression. I sat there wondering how a grown man could
bring himself to parrot such crap, let along believe it. I kept my thoughts to
myself and dutifully raised my glass to the respected leader’s long life in
good health.
After the meal, when everybody
was somewhat drunk, we had the obligatory round of singing. To ensure that
nobody missed a word of the director general’s speech, an interpreter was
present for each language group. These were all intelligent people. Each had
mastered at least one foreign language. Most had made at least one trip abroad.
But all of them, when it came their turn to sing, displayed by the quaver in
their voices and the moistness in their eyes as they extolled the fatherly
marshal’s virtues, that they had found nothing absurd or childish in the
director general’s address.
When the banquet was over, I took
myself off on another walk to clear my head again before the evening’s session
in the bar. It was a beautiful day still. The apricot blossom was out
everywhere and the citizens of Pyongyang were promenading in their best
clothes, and the children and students looked exceptionally smart because it is
in the run-up to the birthday that they are all issued with their new uniforms
for the year - gifts from the father marshal. Ordinary mortals receive presents
on their birthday. On his, comrade Kim Il Sung bestows presents on everyone
else. Such is the infinite magnanimity of the great leader who lives only to
dedicate himself to the service of his people.
In the evening by tradition there
is dancing by the young people in Kim Il Sung Square. In previous years the
revisers had always been invited to observe the proceedings from the tribune.
This time, much to Simone’s chagrin, we were overlooked. After supper she and I
decided to make our own way down to the square by public transport. It was
worth the journey. It was the same sort of dancing as I had been observing all
week in the factory yard, except on a much grander scale, and the girls looked
gorgeous in their traditional flowing brightly-coloured silk gowns. However, it
was all highly choreographed and dancing was evidently by invitation only.
There were security men on the perimeter ensuring there was no spontaneous
participation by unsolicited spectators. From the tribune the young people
would have presented a breathtaking spectacle. Watching from street level, I
was not convinced that they were actually enjoying themselves very much.
They don’t like people to stay
out too late in Pyongyang, so dancing finished at 8.25pm prompt. Simone and I
decided to go for a drink to the nearest hotel, the Taedong Gang. In the bar
Simone ordered a whisky. She was told that they did not sell whisky by the
glass. If she wanted a glass of Scotch, she would have to buy a whole bottle.
We laughed it off and decided to carry onto the next hotel, the Pyongyang, a
quarter of a mile a way. On the way we joked about how this was the sort of
thing you could only encounter in Pyongyang in what was purporting to be an
international hotel. It was no longer a joke when we got to the bar in the
Pyongyang only to be told the same thing. By this time we were both footsore an
weary and in need of a drink. The next watering-hole, the Koryo, was half a
mile away. Simone resigned herself to buying a bottle. That was not the end of
our difficulties. The girl behind the bar only had an English vocabulary of
about twenty words. It took Simone the best part of ten minutes to get her to
understand that she did not intend to drink the whole bottle there and then,
and would she bring the cap of the bottle to our table to enable her to take it
with her with she let.
This was typical of the niggling
little inconveniences one constantly ran up against in Pyongyang, and which
served to aggravate the general misery for the foreigners who had the
misfortune to live there. A few evenings before I had gone to one of the bars
in the Koryo. When I asked for a beer, I was presented with a bottle of the
Korean Ryongsong brand. They do not usually serve this to foreigners there, and
I had been expecting a can of imported German or Japanese lager. “Don’t you
have any other type of beer tonight?” I asked the girl.
“Two won,
sixty,” came the reply.
“No,” I tried
again “Do-you-have-any-other-type-of-beer-apart-from-Ryongsong?”
She looked
puzzled for a moment. Then she said, “Two won, sixty chen, sir.”
When I got back from Hong Kong, I
decided to send a thank you letter to the Chinese who had entertained me to a
meal on my journey to Guangzho. I went into the post office at the Potanggang
Hotel. It cost one won sixty to post a letter to England, so I naively assumed
it would cost no more than one ten for a letter to China. The girl told me I
needed one twenty. No problem. I went back the next day with exactly one
twenty. This time there was a different girl on duty.
“Where to letter?” she asked.
“China,” I replied.
“China Beijing?”
“No. China
Changsha.”
This evidently
confused her. “China?” she asked.
“Yes. China.
Changsha in China.”
“China Beijing?”
“No. China. But
Changsha. Not Beijing.”
She stood for a few moments in
perplexed silence. At last she asked me for one won sixty. I remonstrated with
her. I tried to explain that I had been in with the letter the previous day and
the other lady had assured me the cost was one won twenty. It was obvious she
did not understand anything I was saying, and eventually I gave up.
I was so cross I thought of
taking my letter to the International Post Office. On reflection I decided
against this. It was not her fault that she neither understood English nor knew
that there were any other cities in China than Beijing. And at least like
everyone who worked at the Potanggang she could normally be relied upon to be
friendly and courteous, something that could not always be said about the staff
at the International Post Office.
I made a third attempt to post
the letter a few days later. This time I had unlimited funds with me. The girl
who had served me the first time was there and the price had gone back down
again to one won twenty.
For the great national festival
of the DPRK, television closedown was extended to the unearthly hour of 11.15
pm. Consequently I was home in time to catch the last twenty minutes of the
highlight of the evening’s viewing, a recording of that evening’s show at the
Mansudae Theatre where the artistes who had been adjudged the outstanding
contributors to the Spring Festival gave a special performance in front of the
birthday boy himself. At the end all the artistes came on stage for the curtain
call. The camera panned to the president standing up and applauding. Then
audience and performers applauded together at the great man made his stately
exit, accompanied by his best friend, that other notable late twentieth century
proponent of hereditary monarchy, Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia.
It is amazing what constant
exposure to propaganda can do to you. Not for the first time I found that the
sight of the old man on the television was arousing in me something akin to the
emotion I used to experienced whenever Malcolm Macdonald ran onto the pitch at
St James’s Park when I lived in Newcastle.
I should add that I was not the
only foreign resident of Pyongyang who was susceptible to these responses, and
it was not just the weight of propaganda that accounted for them. However
cynical one may be about the grotesqueness of his personality cult, there is no
doubting the charisma of this extraordinary man who has survived in power for
the best part of half a century. I never met the man personally, but I met a
number of people who had. All without exception testified to his extraordinary
presence and charm.
The advent of spring and a few more people to talk to of an
evening certainly made life in Pyongyang a lot more bearable than it had been
in the winter, but Pyongyang is still Pyongyang, a silent, dreary city where
one feels to be living in a vacuum, cut off from the local community, isolated
from all the normal 92
pleasures and
amenities that we in the rest of the world call life, and where nearly
everybody who is not Korean feels to a greater or lesser degree disaffected and
depressed.
It was nevertheless ironic that,
having maintained my mental equilibrium quite successfully until shortly before
my sanity-saving trip to Hong Kong, I began to wobble at a time when life had
vastly improved and when I was counting down the weeks to my departure as
opposed to counting up the weeks I had spent.
There were probably a number of factors which contributed
to the decline in my mental state during the later part of April. Perhaps a key
factor was that I had dangerously relaxed the siege mentality I had adopted
months previously, so that the yearning for things that were impossible,
including quite mundane ones like kicking a football or getting behind the
wheel of a car, came flooding to the surface. Suddenly having new people to
talk and drink with, though very welcome in itself, may have contributed. The
people I would hang out with for a day or two, a week or two, even a couple of
months, seemed like embodiments of a better life to which they soon returned,
while I remained stranded. Another factor was the sheer erosion of the spirit
by excessive exposure to the Pyongyang experience, exacerbated by the continued
lack of information about friends and family. My excursion to Hong Kong had
been invaluable, but it had not been long enough to fully restore the
wellsprings of vitality and optimism. The week when we had to work seven days
in a row must also have played a part.[6]
Working seven days in succession
is wearisome whatever one is doing. But seven days sitting at a solitary desk,
hour after hour, revising insane propaganda, is not just exhausting, it is
downright unhealthy. The tiredness that ensues after doing a worthwhile day’s
work with the concomitant gratifications to the ego can usually be dispelled by
a good meal, a hot bath and a couple of pints. The torpor that comes from
engaging the brain in a futile exercise in buffoonery is not to be shaken off
so easily.
Absurdly, it was in a very
pleasant social environment, at the end of an oh so singularly full and
enjoyable day, that I found myself perilously on the edge of losing my grip.
The first of May is a great public holiday in the DPRK, as in all socialist countries.
It was disappointing that in 1988 it fell on a Sunday. There was no chance of
having the Monday off work instead in North Korea. However, it ill becomes me
to complain, because I was given a full day’s entertainment. At the rather
early hour of half eight in the morning we were loaded onto a minibus and taken
to Mount Taesong beyond the eastern boundary of the city, passing en route the
stately and imposing fac¸ade of the presidential palace - well you would hardly
expect him to live in a tent.
It was a perfect early summer
day, hot and cloudless, with just a hit of a breeze. In the morning there was
an outdoor entertainment of Korean singing, traditional dancing, and
acrobatics. The stage was the Oriental-style South Gate pavilion, not the original
- that was destroyed in the war - but a meticulous replica. I doubt if the
event will linger in the memory as vividly as the Rolling Stones concert in
Hyde Park, but it was pleasant and colourful and passed the time. It is unwise
to expect more than that in Pyongyang. Afterwards we were driven to the top of
the mountain for a picnic. The environment was perfect. The weather was ideal.
The view across the Taedong River valley, with Pyongyang partially submerged in
a heat haze, was stunning.
After a mellow afternoon drinking
in the sunshine, we were taken back to the Ansan Chodasso to sober up and
change as we were due to attend the state banquet at 5 pm. There had been some
protests from the diplomatic community about the early timing of the banquet
because Ramadan was in progress. This meant that the representatives from Iran,
Pakistan, Libya, the PLO et cetera would all have to sit there feeling
ravenously hungry while they watched other people gorge themselves. The Koreans
dismissed these protestations on the grounds that the banquet was being staged
for the benefit of the working classes and not Islam. So I took my place at the
bottom table below the Korean generals and politicians and the foreign
diplomats and other such typical proletarians, and partook of what, to my
pleasant surprise, turned out to be a fairly western-oriented meal. I actually
felt full up for the first time since I left Hong Kong.
Once again there was dancing in
Kim Il Sung Square. This time the revisers were on the guest list, so after the
banquet we went down there and took our places on the tribune. This time the
dancing looked to have a more spontaneous flavour than on the president’s
birthday. It looked far less choreographed. The dancers were more numerous. And
they were clearly having a lot of fun. But fun is a commodity to be strictly
rationed in the workers’ state. It is no good having people staying out late
and enjoying themselves when they have to be up bright and early in the morning
to build the revolution and construction. So once more the music stopped at
half eight, and everyone made their way home.
On the way back I had the minibus
drop me at the Potanggang where I found congenial company. It had been as
pleasant a day as one could ever hope for in Pyongyang. But as the evening wore
on I found myself overcome by acute feelings of unease and distress amounting
almost to panic. I noticed that I was drinking too fast and smoking too much,
and I judged that it would not be a good idea to let myself get too drunk in
the state I was in that night. Outwardly I must have been comporting myself
normally in spite of my inner turmoil up to the moment I decided to leave,
because I remember Berndt expressing surprise that I was leaving so early and
urging me to have another drink. I reacted to his kind offer as if he was
offering me a dose of some lethal drug and not a glass of Johnnie Walker. In
bed that night I quieted myself by saying, “Tomorrow I will tell them I cannot
cope any longer. They must fly me home without delay. They must understand. It
does not matter that I have not saved enough money yet. I have to go. I have to
get out of here. I have to get out of here.”
By a strange coincidence, the
following day was one of those days that came along now and then when the
supply of work ran out. I divided the day by immersing myself in a trashy but
highly escapist spy thriller and directing a little psychotherapy at myself. I
made a list of all the problems I was experiencing in Pyongyang, starting with
vague, general ones like boredom and loneliness and moving on to more specific
difficulties like unease with people who do not speak my language and sense of
failure at having placed myself in such a ridiculous situation. I divided my
problems into permanent ones and transient ones. I rationalised to myself the
origins of the transient ones and made up my mind that, as I had lived the rest
of my life before Pyongyang more satisfactorily than not, I would be fine again
once I left Pyongyang, but that I would cope much better with life after
Pyongyang if I had some money in the bank. By the evening I had reconciled
myself to surviving another four months. I consoled myself with the thought
that in two days’ time I was due to go on my first trip outside the city.
Chapter 15
If I was having
my share of problems in the late spring, early summer in Pyongyang, I was not
the only one having a hard time of it in North Korea. With less than a third of
the two-hundred-day battle completed, rumours were rife that the populace was
already exhausted. I heard that in the universities lecturers were going into
their classrooms, setting the students some work to get on with, and retiring
elsewhere to sleep, an example soon followed by their unsupervised students. It
was proving impossible for people to teach and learn effectively when all their
spare time was taken up with lending a hand on the construction sites,
attending rallies, and other patriotic chores.
At the end of April, a party of
diplomats was taken on a conducted tour of the sites of the Angol Sports
Village and adjacent Kwangbok Street, another major building project scheduled
to comprise 25,000 high-rise apartment dwellings, a new Students’ and Children’s
Palace, and a new venue for the Pyongyang Circus. A Russian diplomat who went
on the excursion was quite distressed by what he saw. “You should have seen the
state of the workers, Andrew,” he said to me. “You could see the pain in their
eyes.”
I was prompted by his remarks to
take a walk out there one Sunday afternoon to take a look for myself. My
impression was that they were pretty weary, but not as bad as he had described.
It was the same with the workers who were building the nearby bridge. They were
clearly having an arduous time of it, but I did not actually see pain in their
eyes. What I most often discerned in their eyes in fact was amusement at seeing
me. Most of the workforce in Pyongyang’s construction sites had been imported
from the provinces - quite a few of them were soldiers. In the rural areas
foreigners are never seen. By this time they had grown used to seeing parties
of distinguished foreign guests coming round on guided tours of inspection. A
solitary, scruffy European wandering in their midst was a different matter
entirely. I was evidently a greater source of amusement to them than the
itinerant brass bands who were sent out in identical work clothes to the
builders to provide live on-site entertainment and raise morale. If the
builders still derived any pleasure from their performances, it certainly did
not show. On the other hand, their faces invariably broke into smiles when they
became aware of my presence.
It soon became apparent to me
that what was keeping the workers from the point of collapse was that, although
they were obliged to spend long hours on the construction site, for much of the
time they would be squatting on their haunches doing nothing due to a lack of
organisational efficiency, a dearth of essential tools like picks, shovels and
wheelbarrows, or a combination of the two. When they were in motion, activity
tended to be intense. It was common to see relays of wheelbarrow pushers
emptying their loads of gravel into the antiquated cement mixers, turning
round, and literally running back for more.
I have to say also that the young
workers in the factory next door seemed to be bearing up well and remained
cheerful as ever. It may be that as their jobs were in a light industry complex
they usually had less strenuous work to do, although often parties of them
would be loaded onto lorries at eight in the morning and carted off to lend a
hand on the construction sites.
I think that my Russian friend
over-dramatised the extent of the people’s suffering. Or it may be me who
underestimated it. What remains beyond dispute is that there can be no
justification except in times of war or natural catastrophe for asking people on
a low protein diet to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, week in week
out for more than half a year; particularly when their energies are being
squandered on prestige projects like the Angol Sports Village, that are quite
inappropriate to the country’s level of development and will hardly ever be
used.
I remember one afternoon around this time when I was at the
publishing house revising the Pyongyang Times. Whenever there was a protracted
lull in our conversation, while I concentrated on making my revisions, the
young translator who was with me kept nodding off involuntarily. He apologised
for this and I told him it was only to be expected as people were having to
work far too hard at the moment. “You do not understand,” he told me. “We
Koreans do not mind because it is for the good of the country. We know we have
to make sacrifices to make our economy strong to achieve the reunification of
the country.” I assume he was still living the dream that one day the oppressed
people South will see how well the lucky ones in the North are living, and rise
up against the US imperialists and the fascist puppet clique. “We have had
other campaigns before,” he announced proudly. “There was the seventy-day
campaign and the hundred-day campaign.”
I pointed out that there is a big difference between a
one-hundred-day campaign and a two-hundred-day campaign. He switched his tack
and asked me if I had seen the new 150,000 capacity Runguado Stadium that was
nearing completion on an islet in the Taedong River. “Is it not impressive?” he
asked.
“Yes,” I said. “It is half as big again as Wembley.” I felt
like adding that they already have the 100,000 capacity Kim Il Sung Stadium,
that apart from staging the opening and closing ceremonies of the 13th Festival
of Youth and Students they will have no real use for the new one, and that it
is an obscene waste of money, manpower and materials, but his sincerity was
touching and I did not have the heart. I returned my attention to my revising
and he duly drifted off into contented slumber again.
It used to amaze me how many of these translators, who had
access to foreign publications and must have had a pretty shrewd idea that
economically South Korea is ahead of the North, could not come to terms with
the fact that if the South Koreans ever do rise up, it will not be out of envy
for the prosperity of the North. And what hopes they pin on reunification! One
of my translators once said to me, “I do not have a car at the moment. But when
my country is reunified, then I will drive a Jaguar.” This from a Korean who
was so well informed that he knew about Jaguars, a species of car not found in
North Korea. I later learned that the better informed Koreans are currently fed
the line at party gatherings that South Korea is doing quite well economically,
but only with light industry. Its prosperity is therefore fragile because it
does not have a heavy industrial base and is dependent on other countries for
primary manufactured products, steel, cement et cetera, and in any case much of
the industry is owned by foreign nationals. The line is that there are only
comprador capitalists in South Korea. If you told these people about the likes
of Ssangyong Cement and the Daewoo and Hyundai Shipyards, or that the Seoul
stock exchange is closed to foreign investors specifically to retain the
ownership of South Korean industry in Korean hands, the chances are they would
not believe you.
Now that I was able to walk about freely again without fear
of frostbite, venturing further on my excursions, and spending more time
socialising in the hotels, I was becoming aware of new developments in
Pyongyang. While the bulk of the population were toiling away at their
two-hundred-day patriotic battle in exchange for subsistence rations, there
were indications of growing affluence and consumerism in some quarters.
Wherever I went, I seemed to discover new dollar shops. When I came to
Pyongyang I doubt if there were more than ten of them in the whole city. The
number had more than doubled by the time I left. These shops are not large
affairs. The two largest, the Pyongyang Shop and the Rakwon Shop, each have the
floor space of a provincial city Woolworth’s. The others have an equivalent
floor space of a typical High Street Rumbelow’s or Dolcis. The smaller dollar
shops are easily distinguishable from ordinary shops because they have net
curtains in the windows to conceal their contents from casual passers-by. There
had been no dramatic influx of foreigners to account for the sudden mushrooming
of dollar shops. Therefore it is safe to say that they were there because more
Koreans have more red won to spend. Michael once told me that when he arrived
in March 1987, there were still more foreigners than locals patronising the
dollar shops. This had been reversed by the time I arrived. By the time I left,
there were more than twice as many dollar shops, usually full of people, nearly
all of them local. To an extent the crowded shops could be misleading. Not all
the Koreans were in there making purchases. They love to stand and marvel at
all the exotic treasures from the mythical world outside, watches and canned
meat, Japanese TV sets and tape recorders, potato crisps and jewellery, bottles
of whisky and bright plastic buckets - the shops tend towards the eclectic in
their range of merchandise. However, if the shops were congested with
spectators, there were still plenty of people buying. Some of the shoppers are repatriates
from Japan who have brought their savings. There are others who have relatives
living in Japan or in other overseas countries who send them gifts of money.
There are Koreans who have been sent abroad on business, and brought back hard
currency. There are some, like taxi drivers or hotel employees, whose line of
business brings them into contact with red won. There are Korean restaurants,
the famous dog meat restaurant for example, where the prices are the same in
red money as in ordinary money. If a foreigner is taken to the restaurant by
his guide and pays in red won, it is a racing certainty that the waitress will
pocket the red won and substitute her own ordinary won for the price of the
meal. Or, if she is not in a position to do this, that her manager will. I know
that the girls in the Rakwon Shop are paid in red won. An interpreter was
paying court to one of them and explained that this was the reason why. It may
be that as Japan becomes more prosperous the Koreans living there are becoming more
generous in their donations to their relatives in the homeland, but I doubt if
this alone would account for the increased amount of red won in circulation,
which there must be or else the shops would not be there. It is not implausible
that at a time of economic crisis, the loyalty of high officials is being
secured by permitting them a more luxurious lifestyle. Another indication of
rising affluence for a small select minority was the increase in the number of
cars on the roads.
It is now thirty-five years since the end of the war. Yet
in 1988, the people were being asked to make possibly greater efforts and
self-sacrifices than in the desperate days of post-war reconstruction. I was
assured by old Korean hands, people from the socialist countries who had
learned Korean and studied at Kim Il Sung University ten or twenty years ago
and who have been coming back ever since, most of them in diplomatic
capacities, that although the people now have better clothes to wear and
consumer items like black-and-white TV sets, in other respects, e.g. food
supply, their living standards have declined. While the majority endure their
selfless toil in blissful ignorance that any other way of life than theirs is
possible, there are more and more in Pyongyang who do realise that there is
another world. In the past few years since the Koryo has been built and the
door pushed open a fraction, more people have been exposed to the influences of
the outside world. People have glimpsed the toys that the rest of the world
plays with and they want them too. For most of the population the war and the
Japanese occupation, no matter how often the newsreels from those eras are
shown on the TV screens, are not memories but history. They have never
experienced deprivation and they grow weary of austerity. It should not be
surprising then that some people should have become dissatisfied, particularly
when they see that for the elite everything is possible while they have
nothing.
Nevertheless I was very surprised at the rumours of
deviance and corruption that were circulating in Pyongyang in the spring of
1988. I heard of a diplomat’s wife who had her purse snatched while out
shopping. A diplomat told me that he came out of the Koryo one night and found
a Korean sitting in his car. There was a smell of what he took to be cannabis.
The man was in such a state that he did not seem aware of what was happening to
him, even when the hotel’s security men were taking him into custody. There was
a spate of slashed tyres and other acts of vandalism against cars parked
outside the Changgwangsan Hotel. A hotel guest was approached by the manager
and asked if his bill could be automatically reimbursed by his company when he
got home, and if so, would he like to pay more than the standard tariff and
split the difference with the manager. Incidents such as these were unheard of
six months previously.
Meanwhile more and more of the interpreters, guides and
drivers were scrounging more and more blatantly for cigarettes, alcohol and
other gifts. The scroungers were still a minority but they were an expanding
minority, and becoming more and more demanding. The standard line when I
arrived was, “I once interpreted for a man from your country. He was a very
kind man. When he left he bought me a bottle of brandy and two hundred
cigarettes.” Now many of the guides and interpreters were constantly asking foreigners
for things outright from the day they arrived. Some foreigners described the
continual harassment as a nightmare. False expectations may have been aroused
by those who had dealings with Japanese businessmen come to explore joint
venture opportunities. The Japanese have taken over from the Americans as the
world’s plutocrats and they tended to lavish gifts and hospitality on their
guides and interpreters, thus generating expectations that less wealthy
visitors could not meet.
I am not suggesting that Pyongyang is about to degenerate
into a hotbed of crime like New York or a nation of hustlers like Morocco, but
in 1988 the cracks in the strict Juche code of morality were visible.
Fortunately the disease did not
spread to the staff at the Ansan Chodasso. There our friendly and efficient
handyman typified the norm. Whenever I had to call upon him to mend my air
conditioner or put mosquito nets up at my windows, it was always necessary to
go through an elaborate pantomime of how offended I would be if he did not
accept in order to press a few cigarettes on him. Old hands assured me that ten
years ago all Koreans were like that.
It was shortly after midnight, a
few minutes into Thursday, May 5th, when I boarded the night train to Kaesong.
I had been in Korea for eight and a half months and, apart from my holiday to
Hong Kong, this was the first opportunity I had had to leave the confines of
Pyongyang.
A reasonable case can be argued
that North Korea’s transport regulations which forbid anyone to make a journey
within the country without obtaining a warrant from the local People’s
Committee is less of a gross infringement on personal liberty than a fair and
rational means of allocating scarce transport resources. I never saw a
passenger train in Korea that did not look pretty full. Some of the girls who
worked at the Ansan Chodasso came from outside Pyongyang. Every year they
enjoyed a week’s holiday at home for which they were issued with travel permits
and rail tickets. I have no doubt that in the event of one of their parents
falling seriously ill or some comparable family crisis, hasty arrangements
would have been made for them to make another visit. But for my part I never
again want to spend time in a country where it is not possible to put your hand
in your pocket and go wherever you want, whenever you want.
It should be added that
restrictions on travel and communication are a very effective means of social
control. Disgruntled elements in Pyongyang cannot share their disgruntlement
with disgruntled elements in Wonsan or Chongjin, or discuss ways to translate
their disgruntlement into political action, if it is physically impossible for
them to make contact with each other. Even if somebody has a car, and there are
very few of those in private hands, permits are required to drive outside
specified confines and there are security checkpoints on all roads.
As I have said, North Korean
trains tend to be full. The 12.15 am to Kaesong was not exception. Every
carriage was packed except for the one luxury sleeping car at the rear of the
train which had been laid on specially for the comfort of us foreigners and our
interpreters. When Michael had taken the train to Kaesong the year before, he
and his two interpreters had had a whole carriage to themselves. It is standard
practice for interpreters to escort foreigners in pairs, I expect so that each
can monitor the other’s behaviour. On my trip to Kaesong, the carriage was
relatively crowded. There was a lady from the Philippines who had been brought
over by the United Nations Development Project to advise the Koreans on
mushroom cultivation. And there was our party from the Ansan Chodasso,
consisting of myself, Holmer, Astrid and their daughter Linda. We just had two
interpreters between all of us, one English speaking, the other a German
specialist who had a fair command of English. The English-speaking interpreter
was a gentleman called Kim U No who had been living at the Ansan Chodasso as
resident interpreter since January. So most of us already knew and liked one
another, there was hardly any language barrier, and so we made quite a jolly
little party. We foreigners were all dying to get away from Pyongyang for a few
days. Our Korean friends who seldom in their lives have the opportunity to go
anywhere were delighted to be accompanying us.
The privilege of foreigners was
not confined to the provision of a special sleeping car. It was only as a
privilege that Linda was being allowed to travel at all, because at that time
there was a ban on travel for all people under the age of twenty-five. Such a
prohibition would cause a public outcry in most countries. In totalitarian
North Korea people accept it, and in fairness, it was another restriction on
personal freedom that had some justification. There had at that time been an
outbreak of cases of scarlet fever in the country. The authorities were anxious
to prevent an epidemic. They could not afford the drugs to treat the disease.
They did not want people having to stay at home to care for sick children or
young adults having to miss work through illness, particularly in the midst of
a two-hundred-day campaign. Was this ban a violation of personal rights or
sound and sensible policy on the part of a struggling third world country? That
it could be construed as anything but the latter did not enter the mind of the
person who told me, who would not otherwise have said.
Travel is not express in North
Korea. It is only 140 kilometres from Pyongyang, yet the journey takes nearly
six hours. Even allowing for the many stops this is slow going. We arrived at
Kaesong at six in the morning. At the station a minibus was waiting to convey
us to the hotel.
Kaesong is a lovely ancient city. In the middle ages it was
the country’s capital. It is actually below the 38th parallel, a northern gain
from the war. Eastwards it was the South which gained territory. Because of its
geographical situation, Kaesong escaped lightly from the bombing compared to
the rest of the country. Consequently Kaesong and its environs contain a large
number of historic buildings and monuments that are intact, and there are many
old houses in the traditional Korean style, tiled whitewashed cottages like the
ones that have been built in Pyongyang, but these older dwellings showed more
diversity in design and some were distinguished by attractive doors and window
frames. Holmer is of course an authority on Korea and had been to Kaesong on
several previous occasions when interpreting for East German delegations. On
the way to the hotel he started to point out all the sights to us. “Look,
there’s a pagoda from the Koryo period, that pavilion over there dates from the
Li dynasty.” I joined in, pointing to a mural portrait of the president on an
official building and saying, “And there’s an early Kim dynasty mural.”
Personally I thought this was quite a witty remark but it was received with a
resounding silence.
However, it had obviously been heard and understood. Later
that afternoon we visited the site of an ancient palace. There was little left
to see except the foundation stones. Kim U No began to explain how the palace
had been destroyed by the Yankee bombing until Holmer corrected him, informing
him that it had in fact been destroyed in a fire several hundred years ago. In
the surrounding fields Holmer and Astrid, with Linda’s assistance, were finding
shards of ancient celadon pottery. This seemed like a good game so I decided to
search too. I found a broken saucer and brought it to Holmer for inspection.
“That is no good,” he said. “That was made recently. Throw it away. Anyone can
see that’s an early Kim.”
The hotel at Kaesong was pleasant but basic. It was
conceived as nothing more than a base for sightseeing. There was not even a
proper bar, although it did have a counter where you could buy a can of beer or
a bottle of Russian champagne. In true North Korean style this counter was
always open when we came down for breakfast at eight in the morning, and closed
when we came down for dinner in the evening.
The first stop on our itinerary was Panmunjon inside the
4,000 metre demilitarised zone, divided in the middle by a line of concrete
markers right across the country to denote the border between North and South.
Panmunjon is the place where the armistice that ended the Korean War was signed
in July 1953. A short drive from there we came to the hut that straddles the
demarcation line where the two sides from time to time engage in futile
dialogue. Beside the hut, in one of those ludicrous vignettes that sum up the
hopelessness of the human race, North Korean human beings in military uniform
stand to attention on one side of the line while American human beings in a
different colour uniform do the same thing a few feet away when they are not
busy taking lots of photographs of me for the CIA files. When we had been shown
round and were having a cup of insam tea, the officer asked if there were any
questions. I asked him whether, as the soldiers spend several hours daily
almost within touching distance of the GI’s, with whom they must become quite
familiar, any human contact ever developed, any exchange of greetings, nods and
smiles. He assured me that both parties carried on as if the other had no human
existence whatsoever. They ignored each other completely. However, he went on,
on the odd occasion when South Korean guards are present, then his men do try
to engage them in conversation and offer cigarettes to them. But should a South
Korean soldier make any response, he will not be seen again on that particular duty.
Two days later we were taken to the border again, this time
to an observation post on the North’s front line from which we could observe
the concrete wall which the South has built across the whole width of the
peninsula. Apparently the air is usually loud with the sound of artillery as
military manoeuvres are rehearsed, but we went on a Saturday. At weekends
silence and sunshine prevail. There was even a lull in the propaganda war. Both
sides are usually assaulting each other’s ears through elaborate loudspeaker
systems. I asked our guide what sort of things the South say to them. He told
me that they say that the North is a bad place to live and people in the South
have a much better standard of living. As I looked through the telescope he
directed by gaze to where they had mounted a cut-out of a car with an
attractive Korean lady in traditional dress in the passenger seat. The tell the
North’s soldiers that this is what they could look forward to if they came over
to the South. He shrugged his shoulders in magisterial disdain. I had to admire
his attitude, but personally, after eight and a half months in Pyongyang, I was
sorely tempted to make a run for it across the demilitarised zone right there
and then and bugger the minefields!
In between our two trips to the front we had the
opportunity to visit quite a number of other interesting places in and around
Kaesong. We saw a beautiful, thousand-year-old iron statue of the Buddha,
Shakyamuni, whose serene and humorous face is indelibly stamped on my memory.
There was apparently some reluctance to let us see this. But for Holmer we
would not have known of its existence. The statue is housed in its little
pavilion in a district of old tiled cottages. I would guess the official
concerned relented on the grounds that we were actually living in Pyongyang and
would already know that not everyone in North Korea resides in modern apartment
blocks. Soon they will be able to display this magnificent statue without
embarrassment as they are planning to move all the historical relics in the
area to be housed in the ancient buildings of Koryo’s mediaeval university
which they were in the process of renovating when we visited. I find this
rather a shame. It will make life easier for the tourists they are keen to
attract, but I like the idea of beautiful things remaining in their
time-honoured settings within the community. As well as the iron Buddha, they
will be transferring all the exhibits from the existing museum which we also
visited. The present museum is situated halfway up the hill from which the
mandatory towering bronze image of the great leader looms over the city. Our
guide informed us that it was the dear leader (born in 1942) who decreed that
there should be a museum in Kaesong. Ten minutes later she told us that the
museum had been set up in the days of the Japanese occupation.
We paid a visit to the tomb of King Kongwin and his queen.
He was a 14th-century ruler of Koryo, the feudal state that existed until 1392,
when the founder of the Li Dynasty seized power and changed the country’s name
from Koryo to Chosen. The twin tumuli are set on the top of a hill with tall
mountains in the background. The approach to the summit is terraced. On the
upper terrace stands a row of haunting statues of soldiers and courtiers
keeping guard over the tomb. It is a marvellous spectacle that deserves more
visitors.
On the second day of our excursion we were taken to a
well-known beauty spot, the Pagyon Falls, for a picnic. On a ledge to the side
of the falls were situated two picnic tables. One of them was fenced off by a
little chain link rail. Once the great leader and the dear leader had visited
the falls together. They too had had a picnic on this very spot at this very
table, which had henceforward taken on holy significance and was no longer
available for the use of mere mortals like us. We sat down and took our meal at
the table next to it. The view was just as good. We even had a free cabaret. A
part of elderly peasant women had also gathered there for a picnic, squatting
at the foot of the waterfall to eat their rice. When they had finished eating,
the old changgo drums were produced and they started prancing around with
graceless abandon. As far as I could tell, the drummers were just thumping
their instruments at random. My ears could discern no rhythmic pattern at all.
This deficiency did not seem to bother these geriatric gyrators with beatific
grins on their faces. I thanked Kim U No or his good intentions, but explained
that when I had been nagging him the night before to produce some Juche dancing
girls for my entertainment, I had something a bit different in mind.
After our meal we climbed up the steps beside the waterfall
and took a long walk along the banks of a stream through some of the loveliest
countryside of rugged green hills that I have ever seen, at Holmer’s insistence
straying far beyond the paved route normally designated for foreign visitors.
On the way we passed one of the rest houses that the great leader has set up
out of his warm solicitude for the working people’s recreation. It was deserted
at the time so we took a peek through the windows at the dormitory
accommodation. It contained proper beds so was probably accounted luxurious by
local standards, but as it contained nothing else and the beds were barely six
inches apart, it looked pretty spartan to me. We did not have a look inside the
outdoor lavatories. We could smell them well enough from outside. On our way
back we found a party of holidaymakers had now taken up residence. I asked
Holmer to enquire if they were all from the same factory. It turned out that
they all came from different factories. It was probably safe to assume then
that these were model workers who had been sent there as a reward for
overfulfilling their quotas. I have no doubt they were well pleased with their
reward, but I would have had something to say to the travel agent if I ever
ended up in accommodation like that.
If we saw one, we must have seen thirty amateur artists out
sketching watercolours of that countryside that afternoon. They had little tins
of paint such as we give small children for Christmas presents, and old tin
cans to put their water in. Some of them were very talented. It is the sort of
healthy, cultured leisure activity the party encourages and there is much to be
said for it.
Holmer knew these two ancient
Buddhist temples in the vicinity. The local peasants going about their business
were surprised to see Europeans straying from the usual tourist routes. They
were even more surprised when Holmer opened his mouth and asked them directions
in their own language.
We contrived to miss the first
temple on our way out. As a result we arrived at the second temple first. It
consisted of three buildings in a walled compound. Two of them were evidently
inhabited. I imagine people were allowed to live there in exchange for
maintaining the actual temple, which was just an empty pavilion but very clean.
Comrade U No, who has lived all his life in Pyongyang and hardly ever been out
of it, began to wax lyrical about how he would like to retire eventually to
live a simple contemplative life in such a remote but beautiful valley, far
from the madding crowd and all that, until I pointed out to him that there was
no electricity and it would not be a lot of fun in the winter trudging down to
the stream, pickaxe in hand, to break the ice in order to have a wash in the
morning. That shut him up.
We contrived not to miss the
first temple a second time on our way back. This was just as well because it
was a lovely one, dating from the seventeenth century, on the site of a
previous temple that had been destroyed by fire. It was memorable for the beautiful
patterns painted on the walls and ceilings and the three gilt Buddhas it
contained. We asked the caretaker if it was still in use. He replied that old
people still came there to worship, but no young ones were interested. There
was another statue of a Buddha in a nearby cave and a trough of water so clear
that you could not see it at all until you disturbed the surface with the
aluminium drinking bowl.
Apart
from having an extremely enjoyable trip, I came away from Kaesong with two
overriding impressions. The first was of the disparity between the propaganda
and the reality of North Korea. The disparity is also apparent in Pyongyang,
but there it is less immediately obvious than in the countryside.
Kaesong is a lovely old city. It
is clean and well maintained, but its wide roads have scarcely any traffic. You
are as likely to see a bullock cart trundling along the street as a motor
vehicle. Beyond the city the roads are in a dreadful state of repair.
For years the president has been
stressing the need to mechanise agriculture and free the peasants from their
backbreaking toil. For months I had been revising articles stating that this
will soon be achieved. The reality is that the most common form of tractor to
be seen in the vicinity of Kaesong was the truly Juche tractor, the one that is
made in Korea, fuelled by indigenous resources, and from time to time manures
the soil as it moves along. There are indeed a million of these sweet and
ponderous machines in operation in the DPRK. Although I believe that the
country’s achievements in irrigation are, generally speaking, commendable, I
did see one chap carrying water out to a small field in two buckets suspended
from a wooden pole across his shoulders. Although there were some
post-industrial-revolution type tractors and rice transplanting machines on
view, the fields were thronged with peasants all working jolly hard performing
their tasks by hand. It was not the picture of the Juche agriculture displaying
its might that the authorities like to paint.
My other overriding impression
was that when all is said and done, this was third world Asia and, viewed from
that perspective, the reality is nothing to be ashamed of. Everybody seemed to
be pretty cheerful and, unlike the adult population of Pyongyang, who
frequently stare at foreigners as if they are animals who have strayed from the
zoo, down there they all smiled when they saw you. Rather like the builders on
the construction sites. Whenever we went past in the minibus, they used to stop
work to wave at us and were highly delighted when we waved back.
In the countryside - and in
Kaesong itself really - the people were basically living the same simple
peasant lives as their ancestors, but because of those measures that have been
taken to improve the country’s agriculture, and because the Koreans seem to
have proved more adaptable to collectivised farming than the Chinese, the grain
supply is more reliable than was known in former generations. Also, under the
communist system the people have far more security in the event of illness or
other personal misfortune than they ever had in the past.
The two young womenI saw washing
clothes in a stream are not likely to have their photo taken like that for
Korea or Korea Today. Nevertheless, they possessed the same smart blue smock as
every other female child in the country. They were able to attend school, and
there they would acquire the rudiments of good personal care and routine and
probably become literate enough to read Rodong Sinmun and charming anecdotes
about the peerless great man, the worship of whom will fulfil all their
spiritual needs.
These
people exude contentment and bonhomie. Naturally it does help that they do not
know anything better. Even the world on the other side of the frontier just a
few miles away is a closed book to them. Lest those who own or have access to a
TV set should ever be tempted by curiosity to break the law and tune in to
South Korean broadcasts or, far more pernicious, American Forces Network, the
government comprehensively jams all transmissions from the South. I know
because I pressed every channel on the TV in my hotel room.
Kaesong itself has more of a rural than an urban feel to
it, in spite of its 100,000 population. The city has no heavy industry. We were
able to sample its light industry on a visit to the embroidery institute. The
institute’s products are on sale in all the dollar shops and hotels in
Pyongyang. I always found them quite attractive but people who know about these
things used to be disparaging of them and add that they were overpriced. We
were received at the institute by the director and a manageress. We were shown
two rooms where the embroiderers were at work. Usually I feel uncomfortable
when being shown round places where people are at work. I feel as if I am being
placed in a role of superiority which I do not relish. But these ladies seemed
so pleased to see us that for once I failed to feel embarrassed. Almost
certainly, like everyone else in North Korea, they will be working too long and
too hard - in their case at a task which I imagine is better performed in short
bursts of concentration. However, the working conditions were pleasant and the
atmosphere very amiable and relaxed. I was told that they worked on piece rate
and that the average monthly salary was 110 won, with one or two exceptional
workers earning as much as 250. I was assured that even the slowest was capable
of earning eighty per cent of the average.
Out for a walk, we came across a party of kindergarteners
enjoying a picnic lunch in an ancient pavilion. It was a charming, happy little
scene, marred only for me by a degree of embarrassment when one of the teachers
insisted I sample a Korean delicacy, a little sweet rice cake that was green in
colour because it had been smeared with grass. I knew it would be revolting,
and it was. I took a tentative nibble and could not go on. Comrade U No, who
seemed amused by discomfiture, assured me that no offence would be taken if I
threw it away which, having no alternative, I reluctantly did.
Another interesting place to which we paid a visit while we
were in Kaesong was a rather novel hotel that was under construction. The hotel
consisted of a complex of, if I remember correctly, seventeen newly-built tiled
cottages in the traditional style, except that there were fitted luxury
bathrooms suites and ornate wooden screen doors and little yards with high
walls where people could sit outdoors in privacy. A little footbridge over a
stream gave access to a main building which was to contain restaurants, bars
and other amenities. The concept was that people could enjoy a holiday living
in the traditional Korean manner, with all the appurtenances of modern living
thrown in, and doubtless this will hold considerable appeal for the Korean
expatriates coming over from Japan.
One can only assume that the two-hundred-day battle was
raging away behind the fa¸cades of Kaesong’s empty, sun-drenched streets for
there was no outwards sign of frenetic activity anywhere. The prevailing
atmosphere in the city of calm and tranquillity was evident in the attitudes of
the builders of the hotel who were going about their business slowly and
methodically - and looked as if they were going to make a damn good job of it.
In Pyongyang, when the workforce is not squatting around idly, everything is
done at a rush. Consequently the upper floors in the Potanggang Hotel are
uneven, the electrical wiring in the Koryo I am told would not pass safety
regulations in the West, and the finished buildings in the Angol Sports Village
looked less impressive than their design models.
It was evident in the summer of 1988 that the DPRK is keen
to develop its tourist industry. I realised this when I was called upon to
revise a number of leaflets from the Korean International Tourist Board. At the
moment tourism in North Korea is on a small scale and almost exclusively
confined to visitors from eastern Europe. These people simply do not have the
money to spend, so there is little profit in it for the government.
The Koreans are now so anxious to
attract hard currency spenders from the affluent capitalist countries that they
are advertising in their leaflets that anyone who has any difficulty in
obtaining a visa before departure can be issued with one on arrival at
Pyongyang airport. What the person who translated the text for the leaflets
actually put was that passports could be obtained at the airport. I felt this
was a little over-generous, so I took the liberty of amending it to visas. It
is quite likely that neither translator nor author would understand the
distinction between a passport and a visa even in their own language.
Typically the North Koreans, who
go round in a different orbit from the rest of the planet, are clueless as to
what is likely to appeal to the outside world, they have no idea how to market
their product, and they have not properly researched what other countries do to
promote tourism. They probably had not even thought where they were going to
send their leaflets once they were printed. Undoubtedly North Korea will
attract a trickle of visitors, people who want to go somewhere different out of
curiosity, but the Koreans will have to brighten their ideas up if they want to
turn that trickle into a flood.
I did my best to help them by
trying to make their leaflets more sensible. For example, wherever they
promised “three meals a day,” I changed this to “full board”. When they
exhorted, “Golfers, Come to Korea, and play a few rounds on the country’s brand
new and only golf course,” I changed the sentence: “The course has eighteen
holes, nine in and nine out,” to something on the lines of “It is a challenging
new course that winds its way through the most delightful scenery.” I had no
guarantee of course that they would not change it back again.
If the author of the leaflet was
so entirely ignorant of golf not to know that all standard golf courses have
eighteen holes, he did not reveal noticeably greater knowledge of his own
country’s indigenous pursuit, Taekwando, in the leaflet he composed for the
special Taekwando study tour they are offering. Another special holiday on
offer is a month in Pyongyang learning the new alphabetic dance notation which
a team of North Korean researchers has recently invented and hope will
revolutionise the study of dance around the world. The leaflet for this holiday
modestly claims, “As people once considered it the greatest honour in life to
go to the place where musical notation was invented [where was that?] to learn
how musical notes can be written down, so now they consider it the greatest
honour to come and study in Pyongyang, the birthplace of the world’s first
comprehensive alphabetic dance notation.”
It may be that the Koreans have
conducted extensive research and located a potential market but I cannot
imagine there are many wealthy people wanting to spend five weeks on the shores
of Lake Sijung having their “genital disorders” treated by mudpacks.
To be fair, they do claim that
the slimes of Lake Sijung are efficacious for many other ailments as well.
There is a set price for this holiday but it does not include the actual cost
of treatment. An application of a mudpack to a part of the body will cost 25
dollars. Applications of mudpacks to the whole of the body will cost 50
dollars. A full mudbath will sent the punter back 75 dollars a time.
Realistically, the country does
have some tourist potential on account of its scenery. There must be plenty of
people who would enjoy a quiet holiday somewhere unusual amid beautiful scenery
and lovely people. There is already an infrastructure of hotels: a luxury hotel
at Mount Myohyant and tourist standard hotels at Mount Myohyant, Mount Kumgang,
Kaesong and the coastal resort of Wonsan, but they will have to do something
about the bone-shaking roads if they are to satisfy the expectations of
sightseers who have paid a lot of money to come, and about the quality of the
food in the hotels. Other people assure me that the Korean cuisine in these
places is fine, but I always ordered European fare which was usually mediocre
or worse. At Kaesong, I ordered French fried potatoes. They were served me as
if they were an hors d’oeuvre at the start of my meal and they were stone cold
and greasy.
There are holidays on offer to
the celebrated centres of natural beauty and at quite reasonable prices. The
only thing is, transport to and from the country is not included in the cost.
Prospective holidaymakers have to make their own arrangements for getting to
North Korea and it is neither a particularly cheap nor easy place to get to.
The leaflets for the sightseeing holidays were also poor. They were probably
written by someone who had never been to any of the places he was purporting to
describe.
One group of visitors who will be
going to North Korea are the participants in the 1989 World Festival of Youth
and Students, an estimated 20,000 of them. Preparations for the event are so
far advanced that leaflets were already available in June 1988. The Koreans did
not have the sense to pass the English language ones to me for revision. People
who read them will be most amused by the quaintness of the expression, the bad
grammar and idiosyncratic phrases like “drastic drugs” and “sultry
publications” among the list of “Goods prohibited to take in and out”.
Chapter 16
I returned from
the brief trip to Kaesong feeling slightly rejuvenated. I noticed that now that
the trees were all in leaf and the flowers were in bloom and the balconies of
the flats were decked out with potted plants, Pyongyang had shed the vast drab
council-estate aura that had enveloped it through the winter and was again the
attractive city I had seen when I first arrived.
I noticed that the workers in the
factory had turned the lower beds alongside the buildings into rivers of
colourful flowers. “I see the workers here are treating their workplace like a
palace,” I remarked to Comrade U No.
“I think,” he said, “you will
find most of the factories in North Korea like this one. The working people in
my country take a pride in their jobs.”
Perhaps it is pride, as well as
ignorance, that keeps them going. They certainly seemed to be bearing up well
as the two-hundred-day lunacy approached the halfway mark. Once I was going by
underground from the Taesong Gang hotel up to the Koryo at about nine-thirty
one evening when I saw the party secretary from the factory coming up the
escalator as I was going down. His tall shoulders were stooped. His face was
pale and drawn. His eyes were downcast and vacant. The next morning when I drew
the curtains at half past seven, there he was, bright as a button, out in the
yard, already mingling with the workers and demonstrating the prescribed Juche
popular work style and method with all his customary energy and enthusiasm.
While the workers next door were
doing their best to make their workplace a palace by planting pretty flowers
round the yard, the staff of the Ansan Chodasso, including the interpreters and
the young women who cleaned our rooms and waited at table, were out of doors
displaying the true Juche spirit of self-reliance by cementing over part of the
compound themselves under the direction of the manageress. If the spirit was
commendable, the results were disappointing. After heavy rain a pool of water
inches deep gathered in the middle where the concrete had not set evenly.
Around this time a regular
visitor to Pyongyang said to me, “I have never known a people who work so hard
or achieve so little. It doesn’t matter whether it’s handicrafts or bridges.
Everything they make is rubbish.”
As the two-hundred-day campaign
crept towards the halfway mark, I too embarked on my own more modest
hundred-day campaign. My campaign was to hang on to the last vestiges of sanity
for another hundred days and nights in Pyongyang. It may not sound like much,
but every monotonous day had to be ground out hour by hour, minute by minute.
My work was as pointless and uncongenial as ever. The food was no more to my
liking. Indeed the quality of the meat seemed to be deteriorating. Michael told
me there were meat shortages in the city’s restaurants. After the brief
flowering of international culture during the Spring Festival month, the
television was back to the routine grind of propaganda and banal feature films
in an alien tongue.
One night I decided to stay in
and remain reasonably sober for a change. Unfortunately the night I chose was
May 17th. May 17th is the anniversary of the notorious Kwangju massacre in
South Korea in 1980. On that date the people of the city of Kwangju took to the
streets in protest against the government’s imposition of martial law. Because
of the scale of the protest, the authorities sent in troops to restore order.
According to official figures, between the 17th and 23rd of May 191 people were
killed in the crackdown. The opposition claims the death toll was nearer to
2,000. Predictably the North Korean propaganda harps on about 5,000 dead and
14,000 injured. To commemorate this tragic event, on May 17th a mass rally of
students was staged in Kim Il Sung Stadium and broadcast later that evening on
both channels. I watched in fascination for a while as the next generation of
Juche high priests ranted out the clich´es in emulation of their elders with
rapt, fanatic expressions on their faces. There was the usual cued-in ritual
chanting of slogans from shrill-voiced groups of female students. After half an
hour I had had as much as I could take. I fled to the Potanggang to get drunk
again.
While their parents were all out
working their butts off to make the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the
republic a great festival of victory, in May the schoolchildren of Pyongyang
took to the streets in uniform red track suits to start practising skipping,
marching, gymnastics et cetera, sometimes until eight o’clock at night, in
preparation for the mass game scheduled to crown the September 9th festivities.
Koreans used to tell me the mass
game was an original invention of the DPRK. The Russians told me it was a
Soviet invention. They hold one every year in Pyongyang on one or other of the
festival occasions. In 1987 they held on April 15th in honour of the
president’s seventy-fifth birthday. In 1988 they held on September 9th.
Consequently I never saw one, which is rather a pity because everyone assured
me they are quite something.
The mass game is, as one would
expect, a celebration of the beauty and grace that mass collectivity can
attain, a grandiose spectacle in which no individual is allowed to shine but
each makes his anonymous contribution. By all accounts, even spectators who
regard the concept of the thing as rather vulgar cannot avoid being impressed
and strongly moved. The mass game is performed by children, thousands of them.
The average number of participants in a mass game is 50,000. It is doubtful if
many mentally and physically normal children in the DPRK go through school
without participating in at least one mass game, although it was once whispered
to me that the children of high officials sometimes use their parents’
influence in order to get out of them.
|
In Pyongyang the mass games have traditionally been held in the 100,000
capacity Kim Il Sung Stadium. From now on they will probably be staged in the
new 150,000 capacity Runguado Stadium. Mass games last for an average two
hours. They consist of a series of changing pictures. A background image is
formed by children who occupy the whole of one side of the stands and create
successive vast mosaics by holding up different sheets of coloured paper on
cue. Music is piped through loudspeakers. Out on the pitch, there is marching,
gymnastics, dancing, all choreographed la Busby Berkeley, but on a scale
Berkeley could only dream about. Apparently each game has a unified theme
running through it although there is no attempt at narrative.
All the interpreters I asked said
they had taken part in a mass game while at school. Most of them said the
preparations were hard work but the experience had been worth it. I cannot
imagine English children and teenagers giving up most of their free time for
months on end to rehearse the same mechanical actions over and over and over
again until they all move as one with the precision and synchronisation of
guardsmen on parade.
On the last Sunday in May I was
taken on an outing along with Holmer, Astrid and Linda to visit the West Sea
Barrage at the port of Nampo forty kilometres away. The West Sea Barrage is an
eight-kilometre long dam that stretches across the mouth of the Taedong River,
where it flows into the West Sea of Korea - known to the rest of the world as
the Yellow Sea. It contains three locks of various sizes. The largest can admit
the biggest of ocean-going vessels into Nampo Harbour.
The barrage has afforded the
Koreans a number of advantages, of which two are of prime importance. It
facilitates sea traffic in and out of Nampo, North Korea’s principal West Sea
port, negating the effects of the dramatic tide fluctuations that have frequently
left vessels stranded, and thereby also preventing flooding inland. In 1969 the
country suffered horrific flood damage as far inland as Pyongyang as a result
of violent tides forcing their way up the Taedong River.
The barrage, which measures
thirty metres in height from the sea bed, was built over five years from 1981
to 1986 by three divisions of the Korean People’s Army without any significant
foreign technical assistance.[7]For
a third world country it constitutes a very impressive engineering achievement.
Being North Korea it is a flawed achievement. Whether because the coffer dam
was not built high enough to take sufficient impact of the heavy waves, or
because they quite simply built it like everything else in too much of a
tearing hurry, it has required continuous renovations and repairs virtually
since the day it was completed. Along the top of it run a road and a railway.
The road is normally open but because parts of the track are always dug up to
allow repairs to the dam’s structure, the only time a train has ever run across
it was on the day it was formally inaugurated by the president.
In itself it was certainly worth
a visit, but the real pleasure of the outing lay in doing the sort of thing
that at home one takes for granted, i.e. getting in a car on a fine Sunday
morning and going somewhere. It was a glorious feeling just to leave Pyongyang
behind for a few hours and to be out in the countryside where everyone was hard
at work in the fields doing the rice transplanting. The rice transplanting
season at the end of May/beginning of June is a crucial time for North Korea’s
agriculture. There are not enough peasants to do all the work and so the whole
of the urban population, factory workers and office workers, students and even
schoolchidren, are motivated to lend assistance to the countryside. They are
transported each day by bus, train, or on the backs of lorries, except for
those assigned to help in the more remote areas who may have to live for up to
a fortnight in spartan village dormitories. Even our privileged staff at the
Ansan Chodasso had to take it in turns to go out and help in the fields for a
day. By all accounts it is gruelling work, but, being North Koreans, many of
the city-dwellers quite enjoy the outing and the change of scenery.
As we drew near to the barrage,
we found that the road was under repair. In any sensible country, when a road
needs repair, one carriageway is repaired at a time so that the other is left
open for traffic. Here, for a stretch of a hundred yards, they had dug up both
carriageways simultaneously, so that all the traffic had to edge its way over
broken rocks; a brief journey that probably put as much stress on the vehicles’
suspensions as 10,000 miles of normal motoring. It was while we were edging our
bone-shattering way across that I noticed something quite disturbing. Among the
toiling gang of female road workers shifting heavy stones were a couple of
toothless, grey-haired grandmothers. North Korea is such a strange country that
the possibility that these old ladies had not been mobilised for this work but
had volunteered for it out of patriotism cannot be discounted. Having said
that, they did not look as if they were enjoying themselves. I was used to
seeing stooped old women in Pyongyang doing manual jobs like sweeping the
roads, but this was something else again, and left a bitter, angry taste in the
mouth. The following week Michael made the same journey with Simone, and
reported seeing a young woman working there with an infant strapped to her
back.
At the barrage we were met by a
guide who delivered a set eulogy about it, peppered with the usual attributions
to the great and the dear leaders. Holmer excelled himself as a linguist by
giving a simultaneous translation from Korean into English, so that both Astrid
and myself could follow it. Our guide, however, was not given the opportunity
to run through her full agenda. We had an agenda of our own. Holmer had made
several previous trips to the barrage while interpreting for delegations and
knew there was a bathing beach underneath the lighthouse, and so we had all
brought our swimming costumes. If our guide felt at all offended by our cutting
short our inspection of the engineering wonder of the modern world in order to
go swimming, she was too polite to let it show.
It was not a particularly hot day
and the sea had yet to warm up after the long winter but, inspired by little
Linda’s fearless example, we all braced ourselves and took the plunge. It was
too cold to stay in for long but the air was clear, the water was clean, and
for a few delightful minutes we felt as free as anywhere in the world.
Chapter 17
In early June the
nation passed the halfway stage in the two-hundred-day campaign. In spite of
everything, whenever I observed the factory workers from my balcony or took a
walk round the construction site, they all looked to be bearing up quite well,
although obviously their lives had been reduced to an interminable routine of
eat, work and sleep. On the other hand, life in the DPRK does not offer a vast
deal else under normal circumstances.
One thing that it does offer is
education, albeit most of it education in the Juche idea. I saw the most
extraordinary sights. A man reading a book as he trudged across the
construction site with an A-frame basket of heavy rocks strapped to his back,
literally studying while working. A group of construction workers sitting
cross-legged on the ground around a tree to which a cadre had nailed a
blackboard, an instant outdoor classroom.
One night Sami and I were on our
way home from the Potanggang. As we mounted the dike that separated the grounds
of the hotel from the construction site of the bridge we saw about a hundred
people digging in groups of three, standard practice in North Korea. One person
holds the shovel. A length of rope is tied to the shovel. The other two members
of the trio each hold an end of the rope. The person with the shovel pushes it
into the ground. The ones holding the ends of the rope help him pull it out again.
In this way a hundred people would toil all night to accomplish what a man with
a bulldozer could do in half an hour. Sometimes they used to sing. Sami
produced his torch and we picked our steps across, avoiding the puddles. Then
we stooped under the barrier at the site entrance where there was a watchman’s
hut with a light outside it. On this particular night two young men were
keeping watch. There was nothing for them to watch out for. Criminals are
almost as rare as tigers in Pyongyang and everyone comes and goes at will
across the construction site. There is no potential shortcut anywhere in North
Korea outside the militarised zones that does not become a public thoroughfare.
In those days, though, it was advisable to take good note of your surroundings
as you made your way to the Potanggang in daylight, as the thoroughfare altered
daily with the advance of the construction. That way you reduced your chances
of disappearing down a hole or sinking ankle-deep in mud when you made your way
back again pissed up in the pitch darkness. These two watchmen were not wasting
their time as they kept watch over a public thoroughfare. Using the light on
the hut as a reading lamp, one of them was reading aloud from a book to the
other who murmured solemn assent to every sentence. I asked Sami if he knew
what was being read from. He told me it was a book of famous quotations from
the president. Bible study on the construction site at midnight.
The number of projects that were
being vigorously carried out during the two-hundred-day campaign was putting a
strain on the nation’s electricity supply. From time to time there were power
cuts. On the first Sunday in June, electricity and water supplies to our
district were severed for several hours. We foreigners were not at all pleased.
The people on the construction site, however, were overjoyed. They all had a
legitimate excuse to sit around idle in the sunshine for a few hours. There
were not many opportunities like this for them in the summer of 1988.
The following week a team of girl students in their green
uniforms appeared each day either in our street or on the path beside the river
to practise for hours on end a graceful marching routine with wicker baskets of
plastic flowers and strips of flowing pink chiffon under the implacable eye of
their instructress, who walked alongside them carrying a portable cassette
recorder. As the crocuses herald the spring, the appearance of these girls
marked the onset of preparations by Pyongyang’s adult population for the great
march past the tribune on the morning of September 9th before the children took
the spotlight for the afternoon’s mass games. I was unable to imagine British
undergraduates putting up with this sort of thing under public scrutiny. Even
those born and bred Juche students seemed to feel they had outgrown such
antics. Or perhaps they only felt embarrassed when there were foreigners around
observing them.
Earlier in the year the South Korean students had proposed
a meeting with their northern counterparts to discuss issues related to the
reunification question, like the North’s demand to co-host the Olympic Games
and a proposal to hold an athletics meeting between the students from both
sides. The North Korean students were keen to attend such a meeting and
received official encouragement. The date of June 10th was designated for
initial talks at Panmunjon. On that date the North’s representatives arrived there
at the appointed time and waited two hours. South Korean students were refused
permission to attend, but a number of demonstrators set out anyway. When they
came to the bridge that gives access to Panmunjon they were stopped by troops.
The North Koreans saw this as a propaganda coup. In my opinion, if the American
and South Korean authorities had had any sense, they would have let the meeting
take place. It might have given these passionate young activists in their
designer jeans and sweatshirts a jolt to encounter in the flesh their northern
peers, with their school uniforms and peaceful lives of simple virtue.
On a personal note, the most cataclysmic event in Pyongyang
in early June was an overnight doubling and in some cases trebling of the price
of liquor in the dollar shops. I was more glad than ever that I would soon be
leaving. About the only redeeming feature of living in Pyongyang had been the
availability of reputable brands of Scotch at five or six dollars a time. Vodka
was even cheaper. Presumably a side-effect of Mr Gorbachev’s crackdown on
domestic consumption, from early 1988 half-litre bottles of Stolichnaya were
selling in Pyongyang for just over a dollar. Suddenly, in a concerted hike by
all the shops simultaneously, a bottle of whisky that cost ten and a half won
one day was twenty-four won the next. The Stolichnaya jumped from two won forty
chen to four won eighty. Fortunately there were only a matter of weeks left
before my release date and, being a cautious sort of person, I already had half
a dozen bottles of Scotch and four of Stolichnaya in my cupboard. Also, the
hotels were rather slower to raise their prices. I immediately bought two
additional bottles to be kept behind the bar with my name on them at the
Potanggang before the disease of inflation infected my local. I suppose that
instead of responding to the crisis in this way I might have made it a pretext
to moderate my drinking. I have always entertained a fondness for alcohol and
there are probably three or four occasions in an average year when I go over
the top and cannot recall all that happened the night before. By this time this
was happening three or four nights a week, and there was not a single night
when I went to bed sober. But I never seriously considered cutting back. I
preferred the prospect of alcoholism to depressive psychosis.
The price of cigarettes also rose dramatically. A pack of
Rothmans or Dunhill jumped from one won fifty to two won forty. Rothmans
International leaped from one won seventy to four won fifty. Luckily these
rises did not affect me so much. The only time I used to buy imported
cigarettes was when I was taken on a trip. The rest of the time I made do with
the local grade II cigarettes I was given free each day as one of the terms of
my employment. As far as I know there are three grades of North Korean cigarettes.
If there are grade four or grade five cigarettes, I dread to think what they
are like. In the first grade are a range of cigarettes which are on sale in the
dollar shops and hotels to impress the foreigners. These are not bad, although
not of good enough quality to compete on the world market. The brand I used to
be issued with, Pak Ma (White Horse in English), were a grade two cigarette.
These are not generally available to foreigners. They are smokable and that is
the best that can be said for them The locals consider them a luxury cigarette,
and indeed they are in comparison to the working man’s Grade III untipped
cigarettes, which are vile.
To be fair to the North Korean tobacco industry, and to put
things in a proper perspective, Pak Ma are superior to the popular indigenous
cigarette of India, Charminar, and even the humble Grade III cigarettes are
preferable to a bidi.
It was around this time that rumours were circulating that
the supply of cigarettes to the locals had been curtailed in the interests of
public health. It seemed a cruel blow to deal to the working man in the midst
of his two-hundred-day carnival of toil.
I have stated how drastic the June price rises for alcohol
and tobacco were. I ought to add that I was referring to prices in red won. The
price increases for holders of the humble blue won were far, far worse. Our
Russian colleagues at the Ansan Chodasso were horror-stricken. Our Cuban and
East German friends 108
could only
console themselves with the thought that they were very nearly at the end of
their contracts.
Around the middle of June I
received another batch of comedy scripts to revise from the Monty Python crew
down at the Korea International Tourist Bureau.
Perhaps some joker from Planet
Earth had seen their brochure for the month-long medicinal mudbath holiday,
taking the slimes at Lake Sijung, and had rung up to make an ironical inquiry.
Whatever it was, something had inspired them to take the concept one step
further and offer a twenty-eight day package holiday for those wishing to
receive traditional Korean medical treatment.
In principle this need not be as
ridiculous as it at first sounds. When I was in Hong Kong I read that the
people there, who are nobody’s fools, use the public western-orientated health
services for some ailments and the private traditional Chinese medical sector
for others. I myself was treated effectively, if slowly, largely by eastern
methods. Astrid once sprained her ankle. The only thing a western-trained
doctor can do for a sprained ankle is to bandage it up tight and tell you to
try and keep off it for a few days, while Doctor Time works his course. Astrid
was taken to the Foreigners’ Hospital for one treatment of acupuncture. It was
all she needed. Relief from pain was instantaneous. And within twenty-four
hours the swelling had entirely subsided and she was on her feet again as if
nothing had ever happened.
There must be plenty of well-off
people in the world whose lives are blighted by chronic health problems that
are not responsive to conventional methods of treatment. In principle it ought
not to be too difficult for the chaps at the Tourist Bureau to get in touch
with an expert on Korean medicine and find out what precisely are the ailments
which are more responsive to traditional Asian than to modern western medicine
and what traditional methods can realistically offer specific illnesses in
terms of cure or relief, and then use the information to turn out an
intelligent leaflet or brochure and work out where to target it.
If, say, arthritis is less
intractable when treated by traditional Asian methods than by western drug
treatment, they could target a leaflet at associations for arthritis sufferers
in the West and offer free trials initially to a small number of patients in
order to gain publicity and establish credibility for future commercial
ventures.
In practice they do not have the
slightest idea about marketing their products to the outside world, and
probably would not know the term marketing if they read it in Korean. They
probably have no clear idea what they are to do with their leaflets, how and to
whom to distribute. I do not suppose it ever occurred to them to go and talk to
a doctor about what Korean medicine genuinely has to offer. As far as these
chaps are concerned, all the propaganda that has been churned out about the
wonders of traditional Korean medicine in recent years since the country can no
longer afford to import decent quantities of modern drugs is absolutely true.
So they turn for their information to their internal propaganda, and proudly
announce that if you receive “manipulative [hand] treatment” only once or
twice, “invertebral synarthrosis, myositis of lumbar nerves, spondulosis,
deformative spinal arthritis, brachial plexitis, scapular polyarthritis,
intercostal neuralgia, lung and various muscular pains can be cured completely”.
Of course some ailments take a little longer to clear up. It takes forty days
to get rid of those “acute pains from blood vessels” under the famous
“Nanchinai Treatment” and a full sixty days for the same treatment to do the
trick for “arterial sclerosis and presbyopia”. Pity the holiday is only for
twenty-eight days.
No price is quoted for this
holiday. Perhaps the price is dependent on the nature of the illness and the
requisite treatment. They are evidently not expecting visitors to be too
incapacitated, however, because in addition to receiving treatment, a full programme
of outings is included in the package. The ailing tourist gets to visit the
International Friendship Exhibition at Mount Myohyant, the Pyongyang Maternity
hospital, the zoo, and even to get bounced around like a beach ball on the
bumpy road to Panmunjon.
The other new inspiration from
the chaps at the Korean International Tourist Board was the Wedding Tour, as I
rechristened it, the Honeymoon Package. So if you are thinking of getting
married soon and you have not yet seen the leaflet, this is what North Korea
has to offer you.
Itinerary 1
(five days and four nights)
First Day: Arrival in Pyongyang.
Warm reception with congratulatory flowers. First meal served with champagne in
the hotel room.
Second Day: Tour of Pyongyang.
Visit to the old home in Mangyondae where President Kim Il Sung was born. Relax
in the Mangyondae Pleasure Park.
Third Day: Visit to the Pyongyang
Metro, a crche and a kindergarten. Relax in the Taesongsang Pleasure Park.
Visit to a Koreans’ wedding hall.
Fourth Day: Relax at Moranbong
Park. Visit to the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital. Boat trip on the Taedong
River. Watch circus performance.
Fifth Day:
Return home.
A snip at 723 dollars a head even
if you do have to make your own travel arrangements to Pyongyang. If the
prospect of a visit on your honeymoon to the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital and a
ride on an oriental tube train has whetted your appetite for more, you can pay
945 dollars a head and have:
Itinerary 2
(eight days and seven nights)
First Day: Arrive in Pyongyang.
Warm reception with congratulatory flowers. First meal served with champagne in
hotel room.
Second Day: Sightseeing tour of
Pyongyang. Visit to the old home in Mangyondae where President Kim Il Sung was
born. Relax at Mangyondae Pleasure Park. Watch artistic performances.
Third Day: Relax at Moranbong
Park. Visit to the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital, a cr`eche, and a Koreans’
wedding hall. Depart for Mount Myohyant by train.
Fourth Day: Visit to the
International Friendship Exhibition. Visit the Sangwon Hermitage on Mount
Myohyant. Sail in a flower-bedecked boat on a lake. Have supper on the boat.
Fifty Day: Visit to the Pohyon
Temple. Rest or visit the beautiful Manpok Valley. Depart for Pyongyang after
dinner.
Sixth Day: Relax at the
Taesongsan Pleasure Park. Visit to Pyongyang Metro and the Pyongyang Students’
and Children’s palace.
Seventh Day:
Visit to the West Sea Barrage and the Pyongyang Handicraft Institute.
Eighth Day:
Return home.
If you are looking forward to
having suppler on a lake in a flower-bedecked boat, do not go between the end
of October and the beginning of April or you will be boating on ice. If you go
in July or August, watch out for the monsoon. Needless to say, the author of
the leaflet did not consider such details worth mentioning.
No religion would be complete
without its quota of shrines, relics and holy places. If the nativity set at
Mangyondae is the Mecca of the Juche religion and the Museum of the Korean
Revolution its leading cathedral, the manipulators of consciousness in the DPRK
have been assiduous in establishing other holiday shrines across the country to
help strengthen the bonds of religious servitude.
The most famous outside Pyongyang
is the International Friendship Exhibition at Mount Myohyant. This is where the
gifts which visiting heads of state and delegations and notable fans from
abroad have presented to the leadership are stored and displayed. But there are
many others: the secret camp on Mount Paekdu, the Pochonbo Revolutionary Battle
Site, the Ponghawa Revolutionary Site dedicated to the legendary revolutionary
activities of Kim Il Sung’s father Kim Hyong Jik, and the Chilgol Revolutionary
Site dedicated to the memory of his mother, Kang Bong Sok. Until recently Kang
Bong Sok rejoiced in the title of Mother of Korea. From now on she will have to
settle for being the Grandmother of Korea, as her erstwhile title has lately
been usurped by the president’s late first wife and mother of Kim Jong Il, Kim
Jong Suk, who has her own statue, museum, revolutionary site, straw thatched
nativity set, and sundry other sacred relics installed in her native town of
Hoengong.
More recently a number of
monuments and revolutionary sites dedicated to the dear leader have been
established. As yet these are not being advertised to foreigners, but I did get
to hear of one in Pyongyang city so I took a ride out on the underground one
Sunday morning to Ryonmotdong overlooking the main road from Pyongyang to
Ryongsong to take a look.
This site is associated with the
historic widening of the road in 1961, a task entrusted to the students at Kim
Il Sung University when Kim Jong Il was in attendance. According to Kim Jong
Il’s official biography this was a time when, “inspired by Kim Jong Il’s
personal example, many of the students performed exemplary and laudable deeds.
When, by accident, there was a leak in the sewage pipe during excavation at a
work site, the men plugged the hole with their bodies, singing a revolutionary
song and competing with each other in the struggle.” (Kim Jong Il, The People’s
Leader, Vol.I, p.288)
110
The site features the humble cottage where Kim Jong Il
lived while leading his fellow students in the construction work and a
kindergarten to which he once paid a visit during that period. The kindergarten
is now a museum. One room contains nothing but a circle of tiny wooden chairs
on which it is said the children used to sit, but one of them has a specially
upholstered cover because it is the one upon which the dear leader sat as he
gave dazzling on-the-spot guidance to the kindergarteners. The other room
contains photographs and drawings of the young Kim Jong Il mingling with the
workers and students. One of the photographs has had Kim Jong Il’s head
superimposed on the original so clumsily that it was obvious even to my
untrained eye. There are also such sacred relics as the plastic coat which he
took off one stormy night and gave to a soldier who was helping on the
road-widening project insisting, out of his magnanimous spirit of boundless
self-sacrifice and warm solicitude for the people, that it was he and not the
soldier who should endure the scourge of the elements. There is also the
original bucket that he took from an old lady and insisted on filling with
stray scraps of coal from the construction site for her.
By a happy coincidence it was on Mount Maeng, a picturesque
hill just on the other side of the road, that Kim Jong Il used to engage in
military manoeuvres during his military service. Miraculously preserved there
among other marvels is the sniper’s emplacement which he occupied while
leading, guiding and inspiring his comrades. There need be no confusion at to
which emplacement was Kim Jong Il’s. It is the only one there. All the rest
have been washed away by the elements over the years.
If all this sounds as silly to you as it does to me, I
ought to add that the party of Korean women who were being herded round while I
was there all seemed to be taking it perfectly seriously.
I do not know whether the country was anticipating trouble
with the run-up to the Olympics, or if it was just becoming more
combat-conscious as June 25th, the thirty-eighth anniversary of the outbreak of
the Korean War, drew nearer. For whatever reason, our pretty doll soldiers, the
people’s guards from the factory next door, seemed to be out in the street at
some point during every day now, doing bayonet drill. It has to be said they
were somewhat lacking in ferocity, but they were very graceful and balletic.
They seemed to find it all a bit of a giggle but maybe they were just
embarrassed when the foreigner joined the regular audience of junior
schoolchildren who sat along the kerb watching them.
When the little samurai returned to their sentry posts,
alternative street cabaret would often be provided by the burgeoning array of
female undergraduates, sometimes as many as fifty of them, marching up and down
the road learning their complicated routine with their baskets of artificial
flowers and pink chiffon streamers under the steely eye of their martinet
instructress.
While the people’s guards prepared to safeguard the
revolutionary gains at the cost of their blood and the youth and students
rehearsed endlessly for the September 9th celebrations, and the rest of the
population were absorbed in the two-hundred-day campaign, corruption was
becoming rampant among those privileged and informed enough to become
disillusioned. It was less than three months since foreigners had started
returning to the hotels again in any numbers after the winter closedown, but
more and more visitors had more and more complaints about guides, interpreters
and drivers sponging off them on a scale that would have been quite unheard-of
less than a year previously, when I first arrived. People were being bombarded
with demands for gifts all day long. South Koreans were ordering alcohol and
cigarettes from hotel or restaurant and putting the charge on their client’s
bill without his knowledge.
One businessman from the Middle
East arrived with a couple of dozen watches and Parker pens he had picked up
cheaply in Dubai to distribute as a goodwill gesture. This proved to be a
dreadful error. The people he was dealing with immediately formed the false
impression that he had a bottomless bank account. Consequently, from the day he
arrived his wallet was under continuous siege. The Koreans were quite shameless
about begging from him. One to whom he had given a ladies’ watch told him the
next day that his wife liked it very much, and asked if he could have another
one for his daughter. One evening he entertained some of them to dinner at the
Ansan Club. He was shocked at the end of the evening to be presented with a
bill for six hundred dollars. He was puzzled that an undistinguished meal in a
third world country could set him back a hundred dollars a head. I asked him if
any of his guests wee carrying away parcels when they left that they had not
had when they arrived. He replied that they all were. I explained to him that
each of them, and probably the driver too, would have screwed him for about
fifty dollars’ worth of cigarettes and alcohol. I also dispelled any hopes he
might have had that the largesse he was distributing, both wittingly and
unwittingly, might exert a positive influence on securing a favourable
contract. One of the frustrations that foreign businessmen encounter in dealing
with the DPRK is that the people they are physically negotiating with are not
empowered to make decisions, but have to report back to others for
consultation. The valid reason for this otherwise absurd practice is that it
stops officials making injudicious contracts because they have been bribed.
It is customary for a visitor to
North Korea to be entertained to a banquet on his last night before departure.
The vultures who beset this unfortunate gentleman lied to him and told him it
was the custom for the visitor to treat his hosts to a dinner. He accepted
this, and so the vultures were able to enjoy their banquets and share the cost
of the meal which the state authorities, unaware that the foreigner had already
paid for it, would later pay over to the hotel manager. They also tried to
purchase more drink and cigarettes on his account after the meal, but he was
now wise to what was happening, and when the girl brought him the bill for
this, he refused to pay it.
The initial contract the Koreans
had drawn up for his consideration for purchasing much-needed equipment from
him was unrealistic. Nevertheless, having ventured thus far, he had been
considering a return visit for further negotiations. After they screwed two or
three hundred dollars out of him on his last night - and tried for more - he
knocked that idea on the head. He left the country determined never to return.
He had decided to write off the whole bad experience as a sorry waste of time
and money. Half a dozen Koreans had eaten well for a couple of weeks and built
up a healthy stock of imported booze and cigarettes for themselves, and left
the country no further forward. It would be wrong, however, to think of these
Koreans as crooks and swindlers. They are more like naughty children. The
trouble is that even up to quite a high level - one of the culprits in this
case was the director of quite an important state enterprise - the North
Koreans are so unsophisticated and so ignorant of the outside world that they
simply have no idea of the value of money. They do not have a clue what
constitutes a lot of money to a foreigner and what does not. I very much doubt
if these people would have been as greedy and irresponsible if they had been
capable of gauging the implications of their actions; but they were not.
It is only fair to record that
although this sort of behaviour was becoming more and more common and more and
more outrageous over the summer of 1988, it was still by no means universal. In
the same week that these events were taking place, another overseas businessman
was telling me what a pleasure he was finding it to do business in North Korea,
where the people were so honest and industrious.
Chapter 18
On Saturday 25th
June 1988, the thirty-eighth anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War,
bloodthirsty sermons were preached to a packed congregation by assorted Juche
priests and bishops in Kim Il Sung Square. Fortunately I was not there to hear
them. I was on my second trip outside Pyongyang, on this occasion to Mount
Kumgang.
As usual we left Pyongyang by a
night train. There were a party of us, myself, Michael, Holmer, Astrid and
Linda, and two interpreters. Originally only Michael and I had been scheduled
to go the week before. However, I made remonstrations that the request of
Holmer and Astrid, who were due to leave Korea on July 7th, to visit Mount
Kumgang was being overlooked. As was usual there, if you made a fuss you got
what you wanted. The trip was deferred for a week and then off we all went
together.
It had been glorious weather all
week in Pyongyang, but when we arrived in the West coast port city of Wonsan on
the Friday morning it was pissing down. We took breakfast in the hotel in
Wonsan and then set off in two ancient Volvos for the mountain. The journey is
only one hundred and twenty kilometres, but the road is in such a bad state of
repair that it takes three hours. From time to time we passed gangs of
construction workers toiling with their bare hands or the most basic of tools
to renovate and widen parts of the road. It was a pretty hopeless, patchwork
exercise. Once we were delayed for several minutes until a lorry could be
brought to pull a bus that was blocking our path out of the mud where it had
got stuck.
In this area, as around Kaesong,
the mechanisation of agriculture evidently still had a long way to go. The
paddy fields were full of peasants bent over in the rain, weeding. They were
wearing thin plastic-hooded coats like the one in the museum that Kim Jong Il
gave to the soldier. For ever tractor we saw, we must have seen thirty draft
animals. Still the villages and townships we passed through looked clean and
well cared for. The children all worse the standard navy blue uniforms and
doubtless had schools in which to wear them. On our way back two days later in
the sunshine, I noticed that all the adults out here were as well groomed, and
wore the same clothes, as the people in Pyongyang. Everybody smiled and waved
as we drove past and were suitably delighted if we took the trouble to wave
back. I began to feel a bit like the queen.
If the Koreans are serious about
attracting affluent tourists from the West, they ought to do something about
the state of that road; like tearing it up and burying it under a new one. They
could also do with ensuring a more adequate hot water supply to the hotel at
Mount Kumgang. It was barely tepid while we were there. Other people who have
stayed there said we were fortunate to find it that warm.
Whether as a reprisal for my
insisting that Holmer and Astrid came on the trip, or a routine pennypinching
measure on the part of the publishing house, Michael and I were assigned a
shared room. This reaffirmed my conviction that if there ever had been a good
time for anyone to be a foreign language reviser in Pyongyang, it was now over.
Sami and Simone recalled a time when the Koreans were anxious to take the
revisers on trips every few weeks. Now it was necessary to pressure them to get
anywhere at all. Yet it is difficult to complain when you know that for a local
to go to Mount Kumgang is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It was, for example,
the first visit our English speaking interpreter had made there, and would
quite possibly be his last. Also it has to be said that if you do put pressure
on the locals, these delightfully kind people really to prefer to meet your
wishes even though they cost money.
The rain poured down incessantly
all Friday afternoon. We became despondent. It is by no means uncommon once the
rainy season is under way, which can be any time from the end of June, for it
to pour for three days consecutively. We need not have worried. Saturday and
Sunday were both beautiful days. We spent a day and a half roaming some of the
most beautiful scenery I have ever come across, jagged cliffs, cascading
waterfalls and emerald pools, and swimming in the still, warm waters of a
beautiful lagoon, Lagoon Samil. Even Lagoon Samil has its religious
association. There is a red marker buoy to mark the spot where that indomitable
communist woman revolutionary, Mother of Korea and crack marksperson Comrade
Kim Jong Suk, is alleged to have potted a wild duck with a pistol at two
hundred metres.
There were some other people
about that weekend: a party of Chinese tourists, a Hungarian delegation and a
group from the East German Embassy. Sadly, although there were plenty of empty
rooms in our hotel and more vacant accommodation in another, older hotel and a
couple of rest houses nearby, the only Koreans to be seen were guides,
interpreters, drivers and compatriots visiting the homeland from Japan.
According to the Korean Review,
“Mount Kumgang, which has been developed into a pleasant recreation ground for
our people, is visited by a large number of working people, youth, students and
children for sightseeing and recreation every year” (p.248). Unfortunately,
this particular weekend and, I suspect every other weekend in 1988, they were
all too busy building the revolution and construction to come and enjoy it.
The only disappointment with this
trip was that it was far too short. It used to be that the trip to Mount
Kumgang was a five-day tour. But times are tight these days in North Korea and
the foreign language reviser has become a devalued species. After lunch on the
Sunday we had to set off on the bumpy road back to Wonsan. We did have one
further treat in store for us, though. We broke the journey for an hour or so
to sunbathe and swim in the East Sea of Korea (known to the rest of the world
as the Sea of Japan). This very pleasant beach, situated behind a tea-house for
the use of foreigners and cadres, is one of the few places where there is a
break in the five-foot-high electrical fences that run the length of the
country along both East and West coastlines. It is doubtful if these fences
would hold up an American invasion force for more than five minutes, or even
deter a South Korean spy or saboteur determined to gain entry to the country.
What the electrical fence does do, apart from wasting valuable electricity, is
remind the local population that the war is not yet over so they had better
tighten their belts and put their faith in the great leader if they want to
survive it.
Chapter 19
It was strange,
especially in a place as peaceful as Pyongyang, to have a policeman guarding
your residence twenty-four hours a day, to have to say anyon kosinmiga to one
every time you went in or out. I often used to wonder about them, whether they
ever questioned the futility of their occupation and whether it ever bothered
them. I used to wonder even more when the good weather came and there would
often be all three of them hanging round the entrance to the compound together,
one of them on duty, the other two there because they had nothing better to do.
Jean-Jacques, who knew them well, assured me that they were quite content. I
expect he was right, although I can never quite apprehend how people can adapt
to such uneventful and unstimulating lives. For months I used to feel sorry for
the interpreters at the Ansan Chodasso, two young men having to share a room
and with nothing much to do, but having to be there most of the time in case of
some unexpected contingency. Later I came to realise that a stint in residence
at the Ansan Chodasso was a much-coveted situation; a break from the inexorable
round of hard work, an opportunity to converse with people from different
cultures, the regular offers of cigarettes and coffee or a glass of beer.
Like our interpreters, our
policemen were usually cheerful. The policemen may have been unproductive. They
were not always idle. Like most Koreans, they were both very affectionate
towards and very natural with children. They used to like playing with the
children who lived in the other two apartment blocks in our compound. They used
to help the older ones with their homework. They helped the residents in the
garden, planting maize and potatoes and sunflowers. Sometimes I would see one
or other of them reading the day’s edition of Rodong Sinmun, just like a real
person in a real country reading real newspaper. The worrying thing was that of
course they thought they were. As mentioned previously, they did not neglect
their studies either, and two out of three of them qualified for university
places while guarding us against miscreants.
I do not think I will ever be
able to convince myself that the year I spent in Pyongyang was anything other
than a mistake. However, it could have been a lot worse. The winter that nearly
destroyed me was very mild by Pyongyang standards. When summer came, the hot
water supply to our district was not cut off until the 28th June, and only from
that date did we have to bathe in cold water. In previous years apparently it
had been switched off near the beginning of the month.
It was around that date, just
after the outing to Mount Kumgang, that my supply of work virtually came to a
standstill. Up until then there had always been the occasional day, about once
a month on average, when there would be no texts for me to revise. Now I
entered a period when I was more often idle than I was occupied. Apart from the
staple fare of the three periodicals, there was absolutely nothing else coming
through except for the occasional abysmal essay from the Academy of Juche
Sciences. Not only that, but the English translators on the periodicals,
steadfast Juche revolutionaries to a man, had been so assiduous and shown so
much talent in studying my revisions and improving the standard of their
English that the texts that were coming through were taking me less and less
time to correct. This was a mixed blessing. Uncongenial as the work had been,
it had given me something to do. Pyongyang has little to offer in the way of
amusement or recreation to the man with time on his hands.
It would be inconsistent with
North Korean philosophy for me to be paid a lot of precious hard currency to
sit around doing nothing. Nor was it likely that the translators would be
loafing about at their desks at the publishing house in the midst of the two-hundred-day
campaign. I could only assume that many of them had been drafted temporarily to
help out on the construction sites and that was the reason there were so few
translations for me to revise. One thing was for sure. Nobody was about to tell
me the reason why, and by this time I had been there long enough not to waste
my breath asking.
I had been coming round to thinking that I really ought to
be putting some sort of brake on my alcohol consumption. Now, with so much time
on my hands, this was out of the question. As well as the time spent actually
drinking, the stupefaction of hangovers was proving at other times the best
antidote to boredom.
Another mixed blessing was that for some reason the month
of June saw a very marked improvement in the quality of the food at the Ansan
Chodasso. It is always pleasant to eat nice food, particularly when life does
not have a lot else to offer, but I had already been getting fat as a result of
my unaccustomed sedentary existence. By the end of July I weighed nearly a
stone and a half more than I had ever weighed in my life before.
To pass the time I took to wandering about aimlessly even
more than before. Again I was lucky for, although the monsoon had arrived, it
was of modest proportions. My colleagues recalled occasions from previous years
when the rain had bucketed down for days at a time. 1988 had its share of heavy
rain but there were few days when it was impossible to get out at all. The
natural scenery along the Potang River was lovely, and there was usually some
ludicrous human activity going on in the vicinity.
If the construction workers on the bridge were short of
tools and implements, the students, who had been mobilised at this time to dig
up and relay the paths through the Potang River Pleasure Park when they would
have been much better employed applying themselves to their studies, were even
worse provided for. Every day there would be literally hundreds of them
squatting in groups along the river bank doing nothing. There would be a few of
them active with picks and spades, and I suppose everyone took a turn during
the course of the day, but for the most part most of them just sat and
chattered, simply because they had no tools to do the work with. Some of them
brought their books with them but these were mainly used to sit on to keep the
seats of their pants clean. One day someone did find something that they could
all do at once. Once of the official national obsessions is that nothing should
ever be wasted. Once they had dug up a path, they had to break the tarmac down
into powder so that it could be reprocessed. Hence one day I came across about
two hundred of them all gathered together in their habitual squatting position,
only this time the sound of childish laughter was replaced by the dull tapping
of stone against lumps of tar. I could scarcely believe my eyes. They were
literally using lumps of stone to break up the lumps of tarmac. Only one girl
was making swift progress in the work. She was the privileged one who had been
awarded the solitary hammer.
It would be wrong of me to give the impression that the
great socialist construction was uniformly stranded, literally, in the Stone
Age. It was around this time that brand-new push-button automatic gates were
installed at the entrance to the factory next door. These caused a sensation
for the first few days. All day long the people’s guard dolls were inundated
with requests from the workers to give a demonstration of this miraculous
innovation. They had read in Rodong Sinmun and heard on television and radio
about the mythical robotisation and computerisation of Juche industry. Now
before their very eyes the myth was being translated into reality, in their own
humble factory. One could imagine them as they watched the gates glide open and
shut at the press of a button, saying to one another, “If only our compatriots
in the South could see how advanced we are becoming. Then they would be
astonished and rise up as one to oust the puppet clique and drive out the US
imperialist aggressor in order to share in our prosperity. But Chun Doo Hwan
and Roh Tae Woo tell lies about us and keep the people in darkness.”
Although the young workers at the
factory looked as bright and enthusiastic as ever as they attained the
two-thirds stage in the battle after over four months of continual toil, and
still had enough energy to spare for their noisy games of soccer and volleyball
every lunchtime, not excluding the days when it was teeming down with rain,
they are only flesh and blood and they must have been feeling extremely weary
at times. I expect it was in an effort to boost morale and raise flagging
spirits that my hero, the party secretary, organised the factory brass band to
stand at the gates each morning and pipe the workers in with stirring tunes,
while a girl, selected for her piercing tones, shrieked out revolutionary
slogans in between numbers and a cast of extras stood around shaking plastic
flowers. From then on there was hardly any point to me setting my alarm clock.
I imagine it was for the same reason that he had them all up on the top floor
of the central building after work each day for hymn singing. Their sweet
voices wafting across the yard never failed to lure me out onto my balcony. It
was absurd, I told myself, contemptible, a deliberate perversion 116
of the human
spirit. Only the moistness in my eyes acknowledged that I was in the presence
of something lovely.
Meanwhile the dancing girls with
their baskets of plastic flowers and strips of pink chiffon had transferred
their theatre of activities to Chollima Street on the square besides the Sports
Palace. Their place in our street was taken by troops of students and workers
practising the goose step and shouting “Manse!” (pronounced man-say, the Korean
version of hooray!). Sami told me they were rehearsing for a march of as many
as a million people through Kim Il Sung Square on the morning of September 9th.
This would precede the mass game in the afternoon. As if the people did not
have enough to contend with already, working twelve hours a day every day, they
now had an hour’s marching practice after work several evenings a week. Perhaps
the frisson they would experience for those brief moments on the big day when
they went through their paces under the benevolent gaze of the father leader
himself would make it all worthwhile.
Sami had also heard from his
student translators to whom he gave lectures at the publishing house that they
had been learning new dances for the soir´ee that was to be held in Kim Il Sung
Square on the evening of September 9th. A couple of days after he mentioned
this, we saw a number of the girls from the factory excused labour to pirouette
around the yard all afternoon in the charge of a dance instructress.
I was sorry I would be missing
all the great spectacles of September 9th, but not sorry enough to put up with
a few more weeks of trying to live in that lousy country just for the sake of
that.
By this time I was having great
difficulty in maintaining a clear distinction in my mind between hating my life
in the country and hating the country itself. Apart from having been there for
far too long, what was really alienating me was mounting anxiety about my
family at home. I had been allowed to receive one letter from them in November
and a postcard in December. Michael had brought a letter back from England with
him in January. In March I had received a postcard. Since then, nothing. I was
being woken in the night with nightmares about nasty things happening to them.
Although I never interpreted my bad dreams as portents of disaster in the real
world, they were something I could well have lived without.
A couple of days after the
contingent of English and German revisers departed Pyongyang Central Station
for Mount Kumgang, the great leader President Kim Il Sung set off from the same
place with rather more of a fanfare for the People’s Republic of Mongolia on
one of his rare state visits. When the news of his intended visit to Mongolia
had been first announced on TV, our redoubtable chambermaid Kum Sing, as
true-hearted a Juche revolutionary as ever was, had happened to be visiting
Sami. On hearing the news, she became quite concerned for him. It was too much,
she said. Such a long train journey at his time of life. Already he has done so
much for the working people, yet still he will not allow himself to rest and
take things easy.
She need not have worried. The
old man has nothing if not endurance, and the royal train looked sufficiently
well appointed to ease the rigours of the journey. He travelled northwards
through Manchuria and then turned left for Ulan Bator. He had cordial and
constructive talks with Comrade Jamryn Batmunkh, General Secretary of the
Central Committee of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party and Chairman of
the Presidium of the Great People’s Khural of the Mongolian People’s Republic.
They discussed a wide range of issues and reached a full consensus of opinion
on all of them. What issues did they discuss and what conclusions did they come
to? The media supply no answers to such questions in the DPRK, where the
working people are fully fledged masters of society and state power.
He made his return journey
through Soviet territory, stopping off at Khabarossk for talks with Vsevolod
Murakhovski, First Vice Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, and
other senior officials. It was not disclosed what they talked about either, but
for the next few weeks after the president’s return home on July 6th, footage
of his journey clogged all TV channels. For the first few days after his return
the film of his visit was shown every night. On Sunday, 10th July, it was
broadcast at eleven in the morning, three in the afternoon and seven in the
evening - and, for all I know, it may have been shown again after the nine
o’clock news.
We viewers were treated to lots
of shots of him strolling along red carpets with his curious rolling,
splayfooted gait, while hordes of Mongolian citizens went into well-rehearsed
hysteria. We saw him bestowing kisses on bouquet-bearing children, attending
banquets, and hosting conferences of distinguished visitors aboard the royal
train. And was it the cunning focusing of the Korean cameraman or just that
enormous and undeniable personal presence that enabled him to dominate every
scene and reinforce the image that the North Korean public has of him as the
spiritual emperor of the times to whom all the progressive people of the world
pay spontaneous homage?
Meanwhile his less photogenic
progeny was out in the sticks, keeping up the dynastic tradition of on-thespot
guidance in North Pyongan and North Hamgyong Provinces. His activities were
extensively reported verbally on the television and in the newspapers, but his
image was modestly withheld from public scrutiny.
Chapter 20
Earlier in the
summer Jean-Jacques had bought a car, a twelve-year-old Toyota Crown, for two
thousand dollars from an Algerian diplomat. One gorgeous Saturday afternoon
when the sun was blazing down but the humidity levels were relatively low after
a deluge the night before, we took a drive out to the DPRK’s much vaunted new
golf course. It turned out to be a well maintained and interesting course, set
amid some very appealing scenery. It contained several challenging dog-legs to
be negotiated as it wound its way round the shores of a reservoir. I would have
loved to play a round on it, but at seventy-five dollars a time it was way
beyond my means. If they had charged something more reasonable, it might have
been well patronised by the foreign residents. As it was, the prohibitive cost
made it the exclusive preserve of a handful of visiting businessmen from Japan
and the Egyptian ambassador, a man of independent wealth as well as a career
diplomat. Jean-Jacques and I had to content ourselves with a swim in the tepid
waters of the lake.
The North Korean countryside is
always an edifying spectacle. Everything is so neat and orderly. The grass
verges on the roadside are always well trimmed. The cottages are well cared for
too. However, all that could be seen of them on this day was the roofs.
There are two types of collective
farm in operation in the DPRK. There are those that still operate on the
co-operative system of profit sharing. Then there are those on which the state
pays each peasant a fixed wage, like an industrial worker. For ideological
reasons the government wants the latter model to eventually become uniform
throughout the country, so these types of farm are better supplied with
fertiliser and machinery to give them the ascendancy. On either type of farm
the individual peasant family is allotted a small patch of garden around their
house to cultivate for their private benefit. They can sell the produce from
their garden at markets that are held in discreet places in the urban areas.
Thus it was that there was
scarcely a cottage to be seen for the stalks of maize taller than a man’s head
that thronged every garden.
On Thursday, 14th July, I took
the evening train to North Korea’s premier tourist resort, Mount Myohyant. It
was less than three weeks since I had returned from my last trip to Mount
Kumgang, but I was not complaining. My capacity for coping with Korea was
exhausted and I was in need of another break.
This time my own companions were
two Koreans. One was An Yan Mok, who had replaced Mr Min as head of protocol.
Mr Min had disappeared from view some months previously. This was a source of
some sadness to Sami and Simone. They had known him for several years and
entertained a lot of affection for him. They were saddened not only by the fact
of his departure but at the manner of it. He simply disappeared from view. It
had not even been possible for him to call at the Ansan Chodasso and say a
brief personal farewell. It is highly unlikely that there was anything sinister
about his disappearance. He may well have been promoted. It was just typical of
the extent to which foreigners are denied knowledge of the most mundane of
Korean affairs, and how Koreans are discouraged from developing relations with
foreigners that extend beyond the requirements of courtesy and protocol.
Direct communication between
myself and An Yon Mok was somewhat limited as his foreign language was Spanish.
However, my other companion, Chang Yang, who had taken U No’s place as resident
interpreter at the Ansan Chodasso in May, did sterling work interpreting
between English and Korean. Chang Yong had come to work as a translator the
hard way. On leaving school he was not recommended for a university place by
his teachers. Undeterred, he had in exemplary fashion studied English for three
years in his spare time while employed as a labourer on construction sites
before being taken on as a trainee at the publishing house.
Mount
Myohyant vies with Mount Kumgang as the North’s outstanding area of natural
beauty, and boasts the added attraction of the International Friendship
Exhibition. Therefore it has the most developed facilities for tourism. The
road surfaces are smooth and there are at least four hotels, including one
reserved for Koreans from japan and one for senior cadres. For foreigners there
are the country’s other hotel, apart from the Koryo, of international standard,
the pyramid-shaped Hyangsan Hotel, and a small hotel further up the valley,
where we stayed. The Korean translators always prefer to stay at this little
two-story hotel of no more than a dozen rooms, I think because they find it
less impersonal and less daunting than the Hyangsan. The hotel epitomised all
that is best and worst about North Korea. The staff were all charming and
friendly, while the manager in his dealings with them displayed a suitable
popular work style and method. But when I wanted to buy a drink it took a
quarter of an hour to find a girl to serve me, and it was forty-eight hours
later before she could give me my change because they had run out of red won.
In my bathroom a rim of black mould was settling above the bath, the stopper in
the sink no longer functioned, and when I pulled my towel from the plastic
towel rail, the rail snapped in half because it was not properly secured to the
wall. One of the two screws that held it in place had fallen out, and no-one
had bothered to replace it. Personally I did not mind these inconveniences,
although I might have felt differently if I had been paying the bill and not
the publishing house. What did make me very angry was when we came back from
the Hyongsang Hotel, to which we adjourned in the evening because our hotel did
not run to a proper bar, only to find ourselves locked out at ten past
midnight. While I ranted on about how the manager seemed to think he was
running a Children’s Union camp, not a hotel, my Korean friends, who did not
seem to see anything particularly untoward in our situation, scrabbled out in
the dark, trying to find some means of access. It was fully fifteen minutes
before they succeeded in locating a lighted room at the read of the building
where a few of the staff were playing cards. By the time they appeared at the front
door to let me in, my patience had snapped. I was trying to draw attention to
my presence outside the locked door - and venting my frustration in the process
- by singing raucously at the top of my voice, as a result of which I received
some evil looks from the half-dozen other guests at breakfast the following
morning.
For all its luxurious fittings, the Hyangsan was hardly
more efficient. The first night we arrived there were a few guests having a
drink at the little bar in the lobby. For some reason the management of the
hotel did not want us to drink there. They offered instead to open up another
bar on the first floor for our convenience. At first I refused to accept this
arrangement because I suspected that we were being classed as too low-caste,
coming from the little hotel up the road, to rub shoulders with guests of the
Hyangsan. I changed my mind when I discovered that the only cold beer on offer
in the lobby bar was the Korean Ryongsong brand. So within no more than thirty
minutes of our arrival they had opened an upstairs bar, found a girl to serve
us, and we finally had a drink in our hands. In the end it was quite a pleasant
evening. We were served by a sweet girl of twenty-one who told us that her
ambition was to get married, have five children, and bring them all up as fine
Juche revolutionaries. When we left, she asked us to come back the next night,
which we did. On this occasion there was nobody using the ground floor bar so
they told us we would have to use that one, as the first floor bar had that
very day been closed for renovations. Then we had to wait a quarter of an hour
while the girl went upstairs to fetch down some chilled cans of imported
Japanese lager for me to drink
The International Friendship
Museum is an extraordinary phenomenon. It has been established protocol for
many years that any official visitor to North Korea presents the great leader,
and latterly the dear leader as well, with a gift as a token of esteem and
friendship. According to the Korean Review the president has now received over
28,000 valuable gifts from “heads of state, parties, governments, revolutionary
organisations and people from all walks of life in 146 countries”. Some years
ago the International Friendship Exhibition was built on Mount Myohyant as a
museum for all these gifts. Putting the gifts on display for the public was
intended to serve a twofold purpose: first of all, to reinforce in the minds of
the people the concept of their country as a marvellous success story, and more
especially a success story made possible only through the incomparable
leadership of president Kim Il Sung, whom the rest of the world regards with
reverence and looks to for guidance. In the words of the Review (p 213), it
“reflects the profound respect and reverence held by the revolutionary peoples
of the world for the great leader President Kim Il Sung”. The second purpose
was educational: to let the people see interesting and beautiful things and
learn a little about the art and culture of other countries.
The second purpose has in practice been overlooked.
Visitors are herded through the sixty rooms - plus the annexe containing the
donations to the dear leader - as if they were on a conveyor belt. They only
have time for a passing glance at the gifts on display. The lights in each room
are on a time switch so anyone who lingers too long is plunged into darkness.
Visitors are not expected to examine the gifts, only to marvel at such
irrefutable evidence of the great leader’s global popularity. This is a great
pity because there, jumbled among Rolex watches, tape recorders and other
mundane bric-a-brac, are many beautiful and valuable antiques and art objects.
Some Asian and African countries have been particularly generous. I made rather
a nuisance of myself by insisting on having a good look at some of the items.
The staff reacted to my eccentricity with good humour and tolerance. If the
lights went out before I had finished looking, they turned them back on again
for me.
Needless to say, individuals are not free to wander into
the Exhibition unescorted and take a look round whenever they feel like it and
happen to be in the vicinity. They are taken round by prior arrangement in
large parties. It is one thing for a single Englishman, accompanied by two
interpreters, to hold up the conveyor belt because he actually wants to examine
the objects on display. This would not be feasible for an individual Korean who
was part of a group of thirty.
Mount Myohyant, like Mount Kumgang, was as beautiful as the
feature writers for Korea Today said it was, a rare instance when North Korean
self-publicity corresponded to reality. Another nice thing I saw on Mount
Myohyant was that there were actually some Korean people in evidence, out
enjoying themselves, who were not escorting foreigners. We were otherwise lucky
with the weather but on the afternoon of our second day there was heavy rain.
Yon Mok and Chang Yong decided that weather conditions were too inhospitable
for sightseeing. They settled for staying in the hotel playing pool, a game
which Koreans love but which they only get to play when they have access to the
haunts for foreigners. I borrowed an umbrella from the hotel and set off alone
to follow the path we had taken the day before through the Manpok Ravine. I
told my friends later that their trouble was they had earned their trip to the
mountain too easily simply by virtue of knowing foreign languages. For that
afternoon the Manpok Ravine was thronged with Koreans. I guessed that many of
them were staying at a lodge which Holmer and Astrid had told me about, which
consisted of a kitchen and two bare rooms in which a hundred people at a time
squeezed together to sleep on the floor. These were people who had probably won
their once-in-a-lifetime trip to legendary Mount Myohyant by overfulfilling
their quotas for the two-hundred-day campaign in less than a hundred and fifty.
For some of them it would be the first time they had ever had the chance to leave
their native places. They were not going to squander their golden opportunity
sheltering from the monsoon. If anything the torrential rain had enhanced their
festive mood. While the older generation picnicked and sang songs under the
shelter of overhanging rocks, the young people took the attitude that if they
were going to get soaked, they might as well do it properly. I saw people
waving and splashing in the mountain pools and taking showers under cascading
waterfalls. It was one big party in the monsoon and the mountain. The hilarious
arrival of an umbrella-bearing, pot-bellied white man with short fat hairy legs
protruding from cut-off denim shorts, an absolute outrage against North Korean
standards of modesty, was all they needed to make their day complete.
Earlier that day on another stretch of the mountain, Chang
Yong and I had come across a vestige of the old world. We came upon a little
temple that contained a beautiful bronze statue of Shakyamuni. In the temple’s
other rooms lived an old man who looked after it. He showed us in and even
performed a little chant for us. He did not know his exact age but said he was
over sixty. He told us he lived alone in the temple and devoted himself to
prayer and meditation. I asked him how many years he had lived there. He did
not know, but said the Japanese were still occupying the country when he
started living there. He was not a monk. He was dressed like an ordinary Korean
worker. He accepted the offer of a cigarette. People still came to worship, he
informed us, mainly old people but some young ones. He was a memorable man, our
hermit of Mount Myohyant. If he had not yet attained nirvana, he had an aura
that suggested he was well on the way. If I had thought at the time, I should
have asked him if the local party secretary had been round to tell him to put
in a few extra hours of prayer as his contribution to the two-hundred-day
campaign.
We found further evidence that
Buddhism is not yet extinct in the DPRK the following morning when we visited
the Pokyon Temple. The Pokyon Temple was an important centre of worship for
many centuries.
If our little
hermitage of the day before was like a bijou country church, the Pokyon Temple
was a cathedral. It was a partly mined cathedral, as several of its buildings
had not survived the war. However, being a Far eastern centre of worship, it
consisted of a number of small buildings instead of a single edifice like our
cathedrals in the West. The buildings that remains were well worth seeing and
contained some memorable statues. They also contained a community of seven
Buddhist monks. Those monks are a recent innovation. Although as far as I can
ascertain, the communist government has never actively repressed religion, it
has actively discouraged it. The reintroduction of monks to the Pokyon Temple
would seem to indicate a desire on the part of the government to encourage a
vestigial Buddhism in order to preserve the country’s cultural heritage now
that the authorities feel secure in the belief that Buddhism no longer poses a
serious threat to Juche as the creed of the working masses.
Another guest at the small hotel
on Mount Myohyant while I was there was a young lecturer from the Sorbonne. He
had been invited by the DPRK government to spend three months at the Academy of
Juche Sciences instructing the people there in the philosophies of other
countries.
I had always been intrigued by
the Academy of Juche Sciences. Located on a campus about thirty kilometres from
Pyongyang, it was a community of intellectuals composed of the cream of North
Korea’s non-scientific academics. The only member I ever met was a young man
who was interpreting for a delegation from the Korea-Denmark Friendship
Society. I was very impressed by his flawless command of English. Yet the
articles in English translation on economics, politics and philosophy emanating
from the Academy that came my way to revise were quite appalling. I am not
exaggerating when I say that an English undergraduate turning out such drivel
would not have survived a university course. Why were people who must have been
possessed of considerable intelligence incapable of mounting a logical and
coherent argument?
The young Frenchman explained
that even at this elite centre of learning there was a pitiful dearth of
foreign literature available to supplement the national intellectual diet of
speeches by the president and his son, supplemented by inane propaganda. Of the
foreign literature that was available at the Academy, little had been
translated and published in Korean. The academicians were therefore obliged to
wrestle with a limited quantity of literature in the original foreign language.
They are not only starved of good literature to stimulate their minds; their
cognitive abilities are further stultified by another factor. It is not
permissible for them to address any issue in a spirit of honest and open
enquiry. Instead, a specific mission has been ordained for them by the dear
leader. They are to write: “books and articles which give profound explanations
of the Juche thought and theory . . . and strengthen the struggle against
reactionary bourgeois ideals and all kinds of opportunist ideological trends and
staunchly defend the purity of the Juche idea” (On the Juche Idea, p.84).
They are to “make the great Juche
Ideatheir firm belief and should ensure that all scientific and theoretical
activities are geared to studying and propagating, defending and materialising
the Juche thought and theory; they should also explain and disseminate the
greatness and validity of the Juche Ideabroadly and profoundly” (On the Juche
Idea, p 85). It can be safely assumed that failure to do so will result in
instant ejection from the comforts and privileges of the ivory tower to join
the ranks of the sweaty labourers in the two-hundred-day campaign.
The Frenchman also informed me
that the groves of Juche Academia were not immune to the plague of corruption
that was sweeping Pyongyang in the summer of 88. Things were so bad there that,
although he had a car and a driver at his permanent disposal, he seldom
ventured into the city because such excursions were proving too expensive by
the time he had had to ply his driver and interpreters with cigarettes, meals
and refreshments. He told me that his driver would just pull up outside a hotel
unbidden, and then the interpreters would say to him, “Now you will buy us all
a meal.”
On Mount Myohyant I relaxed in
between excursions with a fortnight-old copy of the International Herald
Tribune which I had borrowed from Jean-Jacques. On the front page of the
Singapore edition for July 2nd-3rd was an articled headlined “A Shift in Policy
for Seoul”.
“President Roh Tae Woo,
enunciating a major shift in policy, said Friday that South Korea would no
longer seek to isolate the communist North but would ask the United States and
other allies to help integrate North Korea into the international community.”
It seemed that Roh Tae Woo had now decided that given South Korea’s
incomparably greater economic prosperity, the general easing of East-West
confrontation on the international scene, and a rising tide of anti-American,
pro-reunification sentiment at home, the time had come for rapprochement on the
Korean peninsula. The same article quoted the chairman of the Daewoo
Corporation expressing willingness to set a precedent by being the first South
Korea company to build a factory in the North.
I had seen no mention of a
radical shift in South Korean policy in the Pyongyang Times. I asked my Korean
friends if they had heard anything about it. They had not, and so did not
believe the Herald
Tribune’s story.
They did know that there had been
a recent proposal from Roh Tae Woo to hold top level North-South talks which
their government had turned down. They explained to me that it would be a
betrayal of the heroic struggle of the South Korean people to oust the tyrant
Roh Tae Woo, if the North were to enter into negotiations with him.
Chapter 21
My final weeks in
Pyongyang’s timeless grip slipped by sluggishly. I remained semi-employed. Most
weeks I only received enough texts from the publishing house to occupy me for
two or three days. I went for walks, read books and drank heavily in the evenings.
I was fortunate with the weather. It was a hotter summer than usual with
temperatures consistently well into the eighties and few days of heavy rain.
Around me the two-hundred-day
campaign drew towards its close. In the early evenings there were more and more
people out on the streets practising marching for an hour after work, this on
top of their already protracted working day, in preparation for September 9th.
I was allowed to have one more
weekend excursion before I left Korea. Sami had often told me how much he liked
the northern industrial city of Hamhung and mentioned that a trip there always
incorporated a day on the beach as well as guided tours of major factories such
as the Ryongsang heavy Machine Factory and the February 8th Vindon Complex. I
couched my request to go to Hamhung in terms of desire to see something of
North Korea’s brilliant heavy industry in action and, although I had already
had more excursions than any other reviser that summer, I was able to go to
Hamhung as well.
For some strange reason, once I
got to Hamhung, the only factory I was taken to see was the Ryongsong Heavy
Machine Factory. I can only speculate that the North Koreans have recently
woken up to the fact that their industry is now lagging behind the rest of the
world, and they have come to realise that taking foreigners to see their
industrial installations is likely to give them an adverse rather than a
positive impression of the country. Certainly the Ryongsong heavy Machine
Factory, which is one of the country’s most important industrial bases,
presented a sad spectacle of well maintained plant and machinery which would no
doubt have been quite impressive for a third world country twenty years ago,
but is now obsolete. The official who showed us round admitted as such. All the
machines, he said, had been built in the sixties and seventies. However, he
assured us, in three years’ time they would be using these machines to make new
machines which would take their place.
As very little had been arranged
for me on this trip I spent quite a lot of time randomly wandering the streets.
As in Pyongyang, and I imagine every other town and city in North Korea, the
town was built to a pattern of modern apartment blocks fronting the main
thoroughfares and concealing warrens of traditional cottages behind. There was
far less traffic on the roads than in Pyongyang, but more than in Kaesong. As
one would expect of a centre of heavy industry, Hamhung was a greyer, shabbier
place than Pyongyang, but for me the most striking difference between the two
cities was that here the people did not stare at me nearly as much, not even
when I was roaming among the traditional cottages, although Europeans were
obviously a far rarer phenomenon here than in Pyongyang. I was particularly
grateful for this aspect of the people of the Hamhung area on the Sunday, when
we went to the beach twenty kilometres away. This was not a beach reserved for
high officials and pampered foreigners. It was a place of recreation for
thousands of Korean families on a day’s furlough from the two-hundred-day
campaign, and I was the only white man on it. It had a lovely day sunbathing
and swimming, which could easily have been married if the people had stared at
me as if I had just escaped from a zoo.
The Saturday evening was
interesting. Instead of staying in the hotel, I bought cans of beer and went
off with my interpreters to the local park. In their society which offers so
few pleasures, one thing that Koreans love to do is to sit out under the stars
on summer evenings. We climbed up to a pretty wooden pavilion, overlooking the
city, and sat among the local people gossiping in the balmy night air,
attracting I dare say a little envy at our cans of Japanese beer. On our way up
we passed the city’s principal statue of the great leader. The bronze statue
was illuminated by floodlights. A number of young devotees were gathered around
the statue and studying the thoughts of the prophet by the beam of the
floodlights in the presence of his brazen image. This is indubitably extremely
silly, but when you are actually there it is also rather touching. I found it
so anyway. “Do people in your country stand under statues of Margaret Thatcher
and study her works?” asked Chang Yong ingenuously.
I was promised that before I left
I would be taken to visit a number of places of interest around Pyongyang. I
asked to visit a school, a kindergarten, a factory, and to see one of the
rehearsals for the mass game. None of these outings were ever arranged but I
did get to see the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital and the Students’ and
Children’s Palace.
The Pyongyang Maternity Hospital
is the jewel in the crown of North Korea’s national health service. Its
importance is attested to by the number of plaques commemorating occasions when
the fuhrer or his heir have been round to deliver on-the-spot guidance.
Needless to say, I was not taken to the actual wards where the patients were.
What they wanted me to see was the jewel-inlaid mosaic floor in the entrance
hall and the hi-tech hardware that they had there. I was shown the
closed-circuit TV system on which visiting husbands could see and talk to their
wives. I said it was very impressive but would it not be easier for the husband
just to go upstairs and visit his wife and new-born infant on the ward? Oh no,
that would be unhygienic. I asked if fathers could be present at their
children’s birth. The doctor who was showing me round was aware that this is
now common practice in the West. He replied that such an idea was so alien to
his culture that although it would be permissible, no father had ever yet made
such a request.
I was then escorted round the
theatres and laboratories which contained some sophisticated-looking obstetric
hardware, much of it bearing the imprint of Siemens of West Germany. A very
embarrassed pregnant lady was obliged to expose herself to me to demonstrate an
electronic scanner which the doctor said could determine the sex of an unborn
infant and show if the foetus was imperfect in any way. I asked what happened
if the scanner did detect a deformed infant. Then, the doctor told me quite
blithely, the pregnancy would be terminated. I inferred from the tone of his
response that the mother was given no choice in the matter.
When I inquired about the
incidence of post-natal depression, the doctor replied that he had never seen
an instance of this condition. Naturally I was somewhat sceptical about this
statement until I was shown a ward full of babies without a mother in sight. He
explained that some women preferred to rest after giving birth and to leave the
care of their infants to the nurses. Presumably if they still do not feel able
or willing to look after their offspring when they leave the hospital, they can
pass on the responsibility within the extended family. It can be assumed than
that, unless there is a fully fledged puerperal psychosis, depressed mothers
are perceived merely as tired rather than ill, and do not feel the full
consequences of their condition because they can evade the pressures of
actually having to try and care for the child.
Pyongyang’s Students’ and
Children’s Palace is a huge building in which students and children can pursue
a wide range of worthwhile hobbies, from music, dance and drama to physics and
electronics, under expert supervision. From what I saw the standards of
achievement attained by the children in the various fields were very high.
There are similar, smaller establishments in all the DPRK’s main centres of
population.
I would have been much more
impressed than I was if Chang Yong had not in his naivety told me that the
Students’ and Children’s palaces were the exclusive preserve of the honours
students and that, as a lazy, underachieving schoolboy, he had been envious of
the youngsters who had access to these facilities. He also told me that for the
same reason he never went as a child to the Children’s Camp on Mount Myohyant.
It had never occurred to him that such discrimination might be regarded as
other than entirely fair and reasonable. Consequently he was astonished when I
told him about a text that I had revised in which the president criticised such
practices and maintained that all the children of the capital should be given
the opportunity to go to Mount Myohyant, so that all should feel that the
Party’s love was extended equally to everyone.
Chapter 22
I believe it was
as early as April when Comrade An Yon Mok came to see me and asked me when I
would be leaving. In August, I told him. On which date? he asked. Did I have to
stipulate a precise date so soon? Oh yes, he replied, everything must be booked
well in advance. I asked if it would be possible for me to travel back as far
as Moscow by train. The train journey from Pyongyang to Moscow takes a week.
One travels more or less due North through Manchuria to join the Trans-Siberian
for the long haul across Soviet Asia. It is said to be a tiring journey through
much barren and monotonous scenery, but at least I thought it would be an
experience, and I wanted to salvage as many memorable experiences as I could
from my year in Pyongyang.
From then on I assumed that it
was all settled, and in late summer I would be making an epic overland journey
through the mysterious hinterland of China and the Soviet Union. I was looking
forward to it immensely. Once again I was to be reminded that nothing in North
Korea should ever be taken for granted. It was less than a month before I was
due to depart when An Yon Mok came to see me again and announced without any
explanation that it would not be possible for me to go by train after all. When
would I like to fly to Moscow? I gave him a date and an alternative date in
case the flight was fully booked, and he said he would arrange it. Two weeks
later he came back and told me that it was not possible for me to fly on either
of those dates. I would now be leaving the following Monday. By then I was past
caring. All I wanted was to get away.
I arranged to pay a visit to the
bank with Chang Yong. For some months the publishing house had been paying a
large part of our salaries in small denomination notes of twenty, ten, five and
even single dollars. I took in a fat wad of these notes to the value of $2,300
dollars and asked for twenty-three $100 notes in exchange. The clerk told
me this could not be done. She said they did not have any $100
notes in the bank. I pointed out to her through Chang Yong that this was the
International Trade Bank of the DPRK, one of the key financial institutions in
a country of 20 million inhabitants, and it was inconceivable that there were
not twenty-three $100 bills in the whole building. I knew that foreign exchange
shortages were a perennial problem in North Korea. Work had had to be briefly
suspended on the cement factory on more than one occasion because they had run
out of foreign exchange with which to pay the West German company. The same was
happening with the hotel that was being built as a joint venture with a French
company. But I refused to accept that things were this bad. After about half an
hour of argument, the clerk agreed to go and consult the manager. Before she
did she asked Chang Yong what my position was in Pyongyang. In view of this
question, I would imagine that if I had been an ambassador or an important
visiting businessman, twenty-three $100 bills might have been forthcoming.
As it was, she came back with a compromise offer: she would exchange $1,300
worth of my small denomination notes for twenty-six $50 notes. When I
demanded to speak to the manager personally, I was told that he had “just gone
out in a car”. At this point I gave up. It was just another typical little
tribulation of life in Pyongyang.
The evening before my departure I
was given the customary farewell banquet at the Ansan Chodasso. One of the
Deputy Directors from the publishing house presided. He asked me if I would be
able to find someone to replace me when I got back to England. I was able to
inform him that at that very moment a likely candidate was actually present in
his country.
On my visit to the Student’s and Children’s palace a few
days earlier, I had made the acquaintance of the secretary of the Korea-England
Friendship Society who was on a visit to the country and staying as a guest at
the Academy of Juche Sciences. When I told him what I was doing, he said he
would love to have the opportunity to work in Pyongyang as a reviser. He was an
educated man, a librarian by profession, and would have almost certainly been
eminently suited for the job. I relayed this information to the Deputy Director
and told him that he was not due to leave Korea for another four days. One
might have expected the Deputy Director’s response to be that he would contact
him by telephone at the Academy the very next day to arrange an immediate
interview. However, normal reactions are not the norm in North Korea. To take
such an initiative there would be to fly in the face of bureaucratic procedures
that run on such rigid tramlines through every aspect of the society that it
never occurs to anybody, not even a man of the standing and undoubted
intelligence of this Deputy Director, to try and circumvent them. He responded
to my information with pleasure and urged me to try and get in contact with
this man when I got home.
At the airport the following afternoon I embraced Chang
Yong and An Yon Mok with genuine affection. I soon felt rather less well
disposed towards them when I discovered that the flight they had booked me on
was a small Korean Airways passenger plane of comparable size to the ones that
are chartered to convey package tourists to Europe. My flight from Moscow to
Pyongyang on an Aeroflot Jumbo a year earlier had taken eight hours. My return
flight took twelve. There were two stops for refuelling, at Beijing and at
Novosibirsk. At Novosibirsk we were not permitted to leave the plane so we
could not stretch our legs properly. It was a damnably uncomfortable and
wearisome journey. By the time I had passed through customs, including a
tedious delay while all my small denomination bills were laboriously counted
out, I was feeling pretty ragged. My mood was not improved on finding that
there was no-one from the Korean Embassy waiting to greet me and escort me to
the embassy as I had been promised. Fortunately Comrade Li Jong Bin, Third
Secretary at the Embassy and an English speaker, was there although he was not
expecting me. He had come to meet a contingent of Korean students who had been
sent to Moscow to master Russian and a party of assorted foreigners who had been
on a study visit at the Juche Academy. I sought him out and explained who I was
and he readily accepted that I was his responsibility. He packed me with the
others onto a congested coach with our luggage clogging the aisle.
The rations on the plane had been shamefully frugal and I
was looking forward to getting something to eat and drink on our arrival at the
Embassy. We were not provided with so much as a cup of tea, and were assured
that there was nowhere nearby where we could purchase refreshment at what was
by then quite late in the evening. Worse still, there was barely sufficient
accommodation for all the foreigners. An Indian man and woman, who were neither
married nor in any way related to each other, were obliged to share a room for
the night. I had to share with a Tunisian university student who, fortunately
turned out to be a thoroughly amiable and easy-going companion. He had only
been in Korea for a couple of weeks but he was nearly as relieved to get out as
I was. But then he had been a victim of the scrounging and harassment that I
had somehow avoided.
Li Jong Bin said he could arrange for me to fly on to
London in the morning, and wanted me to do so. I refused. I had been promised a
few days in Moscow as a guest of the Korean government, and I was determined
not to be denied my opportunity to see this famous city.
The North Korea Embassy is one of the largest in Moscow, a
testimony less to the importance of its relations with Russia - after all, the
DPRK is not and never has been a Soviet client state - but to Kim Il Sung’s
inflated expectations of the importance his country and his own Juche
philosophy would assume in the communist world. Like its brilliant heavy
industry, North Korea’s Moscow embassy is in a state of premature decay. The
wing where foreign guests are accommodated is no more than twenty years old, but
the carpets and furniture exude that characteristic musty scent of cheap
hotels, the televisions in most of the rooms have broken down, and cockroaches
have taken up residence in the bathrooms. However, the hospitality of the
Korean domestic staff who, after my inauspicious arrival, could not do enough
to make me feel at home, more than made up for the deficiencies in the
accommodation.
My overriding impressions of Moscow were of its beauty and
of the queues in the shops. The heart of Moscow remains unscarred by the
depredations of speculators and property developers, intent on profit and
careless of the architectural heritage. Prince Charles would be impressed.
Having said what a lovely
unspoiled city it is, it is not a city I which I would like to live. Muscovites
seem to spend half their lives standing in queues. They have to queue up to buy
quite basic foodstuffs and I saw long queues for very mundane articles of
clothing. Outside all the restaurants there were people queuing for tables. I
am told that the people of Moscow are relatively lucky. They have to queue up
to buy. 127
Elsewhere in the
country, there are no things to buy.
Chapter 23
At the time of
writing it is four months since I returned from Pyongyang. I entertain no
nostalgia for North Korea whatsoever. I spent a difficult year there and I have
no desire to return. Although I liked the people very much, the nature of the
society prevented me from forming really close relationships with any of them.
There were a few with whom I became as friendly as was possible under the
circumstances. However, even if I did return, it is not certain that we would
be able to meet at all.
It was not the type of society of
which I would ever wish to be a member. That is not to say that I do not hold
some feelings of respect towards the society or some regrets that it has fallen
into what is probably an irreversible decline. I am inclined to believe that
Kim Il Sung was a genuine idealist who set out to create a new society that was
fundamentally fair, decent and humane. Up to a point he has been successful.
After all, North Korea is a third world Asian country that was decimated only
thirty-five years ago. Things could have been a lot worse for the people, who
have been living simple but peaceful and secure lives devoid of undue hardship.
The social values that Kim Il Sung wished to promote have been instilled in the
consciousness of the people who, it cannot be said too often, are as sweet and
good-natured and comradely a species of humanity as one could ever wish to
encounter. Everywhere I sensed a commitment to the collectivist ideal, even
among those who felt frustrated and disenchanted at their country’s failure to
sustain economic progress over the last fifteen years. There are no reasons to
think that high standards of civic morality are notably indigenous to North
Korean culture. In an address to the central committee on 15th December, 1952,
when the war was at its height, we find Kim Il Sung complaining that “the
Ministry of Public health does not take good care of the medicines imported or
received as relief from foreign countries. As a result they are spoiled in the
ministry’s drug warehouse while local hospitals go short. That is not all.
Medicines worth tens of millions of won are stolen from the warehouse.” (CW,
Vol.7, p.341-2)
It is understandable that Kim Il
Sung, confronted by this sort of selfishness, incompetence and corruption, plus
an internal power struggle, tackled the daunting task of post-war
reconstruction in the aftermath of the Americans’ scorched earth bombing campaign
with a policy of rigid and centralised physical and psychological control over
the people. His policy may be justified by the fact that the country did
recover quickly during the fifties and sixties. The current official Chinese
view of the similar approach adopted by Chairman Mao after the Chinese
revolution is that it was correct for the time, but became counterproductive
when persevered with after the problems of primary deprivation and political
instability had been largely resolved. The prominent Chinese economist Huan
Xiang argues that “the eventual consequences of overcentralisation are: the
more centralised, the more rigid; the more rigid the economy, the lazier the
people; the lazier the people, the poorer they are; and the poorer the people
are, the greater the need for centralisation, forming a vicious circle.” (From
his essay Urban Economic Restructure, included in the Chinese government
publication Progress in Urban Reform, p.9.)
The reluctance of the Kim regime
to follow the post-Mao Chinese example and liberalise can be attributed to a
genuine desire to maintain ideological purity and a commitment to preserving
the traditional Korean way of life and protecting it from the corrupting
influence of the decadent western way of life, a frequent target of Kim Il Sung
polemic. Moreover, just as a Time magazine correspondent could argue that “the
US must proceed more cautiously [towards democratisation] in South Korea”
because “there a more open government is also needed, including freer political
activity and direct presidential elections, but the menacing proximity of the
frantically Stalinist regime in North Korea makes liberalisation a much more
difficult and dangerous proposition” (Time magazine, 12.5.81) - so until
recently an apologist for Kim Il Sung could similarly maintain that
liberalisation in North Korea is made hazardous by the menacing proximity of a
US imperialist129
backed puppet
regime in Seoul.
Unwillingness to liberalise his
country’s economy, i.e. liberalisation entails less central control, more
individual freedom and more exposure to outside influences, all of which could
serve to undermine his personal authority. Ironically the threat that
liberalisation poses to the Kim dynasty becomes greater the longer
liberalisation is postponed, because without reform the economy will continue
to stagnate, the people’s quality of life will continue to deteriorate, their
living standards will fall further and further behind those of the South
Koreans, and their ideological commitment to Juche values will become more
brittle. Necessity has scarcely forced the North Korean door open a couple of
inches in recent times, and already standards of personal conduct have tumbled
among those privileged enough to feel the draught. Without foreign investment
and technical expertise, the people must toil in two-hundred-day campaigns
merely to maintain their current frugal living standards; the news from
Pyongyang since my return is that a mere three weeks after the end of the
two-hundred-day campaign, on September 9th, the government in desperation gave
the order for the people to embark on - you guessed it - another
two-hundred-day campaign. But how is the people’s faith in Kim Il Sung and the
Juche Ideato withstand the inevitable realisation that must come, if ever wind
of the wide world outside is allowed to blow North of the 38th parallel, that
the picture of the world with which they have been presented is an illusion, a
joke?
This is a harsh dilemma for the
great leader and his heir. It is one of the great advantages of the
parliamentary-style democracies that loss of power for the elected rulers need
not be synonymous with personal calamity. All that happens to elected rulers
when they are voted out of office is that they go into opposition. For Kim Il
Sung or Kim Jong Il, the likely alternatives to power are exile or execution.
The fact is that the Kim dynasty is trapped. They may well wish their people to
lead better lives, but they dare not take the necessary measures. Yet they
cannot go on indefinitely driving the people like slaves. Even the staunchest
Juche revolutionaries are only flesh and blood. They become exhausted. They
will become disillusioned. The Juche era is doomed. The only question is, will
it end with a bang or a whimper?
Nevertheless, the Juche era has
not been an altogether unsatisfactory period in the lives of the North Korean
people. Even now the rural population, the majority, enjoy a quality of life
that compares favourably with that of peasants in other Asian countries, indeed
compares very favourably with that of the army of homeless and dispossessed
people in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. I can imagine a future scenario when the
thriving South has reassimilated the stumbling North, and the people of the
North are enjoying higher material standards than ever before, in which many of
them will look back with nostalgia to the old certainties, the security and the
solidarity, that pertained in the reign of the great leader.
An objective perspective on the
achievements of the Juche era can be derived from the November 1987 edition of
South Magazine, which featured a strategic survey on all the countries of the
southern hemisphere that charted for each country the population projection for
1990, gross national product expressed in US dollars for 1985, the size of the
regular armed forces in 1986, and a score on a Physical Quality of Life Index.
The magazine described its Physical Quality of Life Index as “an innovative
concept developed by M. D. Morris at Brown University. The PQLI consolidates
three indicators: life expectancy, infant mortality, and literacy to measure a
country’s achievements of basic human requirements on a scale of 1 to 100 -
excluding monetary variables.” The statistics from which the index was compiled
were derived from the Overseas Development Council’s 1988 Agenda. This is how
South Korea, North Korea and Malaysia, generally regarded as a fairly stable
and prosperous developing capitalist country on Asia’s Pacific rim, measured
up.
North
Korea South
Korea Malaysia
|
22.8 |
43.5 |
17.4 |
|
19,700 |
83,123 |
28,955 |
|
840,000 |
601,000 |
110,000 |
|
85.06 |
88.27 |
80.97 |
Population projection (millions),
1990
GNP in US dollars (millions), 1985
Regular Armed Forces, 1986
PQLI Some examples of other
PQLI scores were:
|
China |
Singapore |
Bangladesh |
Afghanistan |
Saudi Arabia |
Venezuela |
Australia |
|
79.90 |
91.32 |
43.25 |
20.86 |
56.31 |
86.61 |
99.97 |
130
These statistics tend to support
the view that, in terms of delivering the basics, the DPRK government has not
been doing too badly up to now. However, it is only a matter of time before
Asian capitalist countries like South Korea and Singapore, Malaysia and even
Thailand, which are creating more wealth but distributing it less equally, are
outstripping North Korea even on this criterion.
I hasten to add that in drawing
attention to the long-term failings of North Korea’s overcentralised system, I
am not endorsing laissez-faire capitalism as appropriate to either developing
or developed countries. I reserve my admiration for countries like Sweden and
Denmark which have shown the world that a balance can be struck between
capitalist economic dynamism and a socialist commitment to universal welfare
and equality of opportunity.
I also think it does not do to be too simplistically
dismissive of North Korea and other communist countries on the grounds that
people are denied political freedoms and the right to hold and promulgate
whatever views they choose. Indeed, one eminently respectable western academic,
B. F. Skinner, in his wellknown book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, has made out a
plausible case that in today’s technologically advanced and concomitantly
dangerous world, the values of freedom and dignity may be overrated and that a
more controlled social order may be appropriate as long as people are subjected
to sufficient “contingencies of reinforcement” to maintain them in a contented
frame of mind. It should also be remembered when conservative politicians
justifiably castigate communist countries for violating human rights in
punishing people who declare dissident political beliefs that there are other
sacrosanct human rights, like the right to a home and the right to occupy a
meaningful place in society. I saw no shopping-bag ladies in Moscow. There is
no unemployment in North Korea. There are more homeless people in Great Britain
that there are political prisoners in the Soviet Union. One can only speculate
as to how many political prisoners are rotting away in prisons and labour camps
in the DPRK. I suspect rather few - the people are too wellcontrolled
psychologically as well as physically - although the numbers are bound to rise
as discontentment will inevitably increase with continuing economic failure.
For, whatever moral perspective one adopts towards Kim Il Sung’s working
people’s paradise, the fact remains that the inhabitants of North Korea lead
narrow, frugal lives and the quality of their lives is currently deteriorating
as the second two-hundred-day madness lurches along. And, while ever the
present rigid system stultifies and infantilises the population, denying the
people the information and resources they need to develop their understanding,
and suppressing the wellsprings of imagination and initiative, nothing is going
to get any better.
ANDREW HOLLOWAY
December 1988
©Ross
Holloway 2003. All Rights Reserved. ross.holloway@virgin.net
[1] The workers are
transported to the fields as and when required.
[2] The DPRK is recognised by
all the communist countries, most of the developing countries, and among
advanced capitalist countries by the Scandinavian nations and Austria.
[3] It will be a sad day when
traffic lights become the norm in Pyongyang. Already they have some in place,
but as yet they cannot afford the electricity to run them.
[4] They catch plenty of fish,
but these they generally prefer to export.
[5] With greater or lesser
resignation, the worker put himself into cold storage when he clocked in in the
morning and resumed himself when he clocked out at night.
[6] The president’s birthday,
which in 1988 fell on a Friday, is such a momentous event in the DPRK calendar
that the public is given the following day off as well. Then they have to go to
work on the Sunday to make up for it. On this occasion the revisers were
required to work the Sunday as well.
[7] It is said that the dear
leader took a close personal interest in this project but, as it has actually
been built, the engineers evidently paid little heed to his advice. For,
according to the June 1988 edition of Korea Today, “He advised that in order to
finish the barrage construction in a brief span of time they should disregard
establish practice and formulae and carry out the designing, the surveying of
the sea bed, and the construction, simultaneously.”
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