Case Study #2: Inside North Korea - Ultimate Package Tour PDF

North Korea The strangest of all the very strange things about the strangest place on earth, North Korea, is that it's surprisingly easy to go there. Or at least, not as hard as it somehow ought to be. I'd always thought that it was only marginally less difficult than going to the moon or, say, Eto...

North Korea The strangest of all the very strange things about the strangest place on earth, North Korea, is that it's surprisingly easy to go there. Or at least, not as hard as it somehow ought to be. I'd always thought that it was only marginally less difficult than going to the moon or, say, Eton, but my amazing revelation is this: type "North Korea" and "tourism" into Google, and you'll find Koryo Tours, a British-run, Beijing-based travel firm. A couple of clicks and a certain amount of cash later, and you, too, could find yourself on a vintage Russian jetliner heading towards the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. It's impossibly exciting. And when Paul, the Australian sitting next to me, remarks, casually, that Air Koryo is considered unairworthy by the EU, it becomes, perhaps, just a little too exciting. But then some rousing martial music strikes up over a crackling intercom, and air stewardesses wearing what looks like jet-age vintage – white gloves, natty hats, red lipstick – bring around the in-flight reading material: the Pyongyang Times. The highlight of a recent ~Case Study # 2~ firework spectacular, I learn, was a sky-writing display that read "Down With Imperialism", although the top story concerns a visit by Kim Jong Il to the new September 26 Breeding Pig “Inside North Korea: the Farm. "The country's economy is growing remarkably through a series of big events in the Ultimate flame of the new revolutionary upsurge," he notes. Package Tour” But then the flame of revolutionary upsurge is burning strongly among us, too. There are 21 Page 1 of us, from all parts of the globe, most of us reasonably well-travelled, with the exception of Dan, a twenty-something Canadian, who has selected North Korea for his first ever trip abroad. ("No, Dan," I hear someone say, possibly myself. "In other countries, you are allowed to leave your hotel without being officially accompanied by a government guide."). And we're all as excited as puppies. Because barely 1,500 people a year visit North Korea. Or, to put this in context, several thousand fewer than make it to the British Lawnmower Museum. Collectively, we know more about a strimmer once owned by Joe Pasquale than we do about the nation that last May announced it had carried out a second successful underground nuclear test. And as we land And yet, for what the West calls a rogue state, and George Bush the most easterly point on the axis of evil, it doesn't seem ~Case Study # 2~ very evil. It takes a while to clear customs, not because our belongings are searched or we're interrogated about the purpose of our visit, but because, as becomes clear when we see the luggage carousel, we're the only passengers who've failed to “Inside North Korea: the pack at least two flat-screen TVs. And when we finally meet our guides by the departures board (there are none until three Ultimate Package Tour” days' time), they're smiling expansively: an older man, Mr Lee, and a pretty young woman in a fashionable coat, Miss Kim. Page 2 We trundle along empty roads towards Pyongyang, a "model" city of Soviet-style blocks and grandiose boulevards where only citizens with special permits can live or even visit. Miss Kim tells us the name means "flat land", and "the weather is neither too hot nor too cold with adequate precipitation". It's just getting dark when we reach our hotel, the 47-storey, 1,001 room, Yanggakdo, built on an island in the middle of the Taedong river. There are perhaps three or four rooms with lights on. But then this is more than in most of the apartment blocks we pass because, of all the things that North Korea is short of, it's most short of electricity. There's a famous satellite shot of the Korean peninsula at night, a dark puddle in a sea of light. Our hotel has electricity, but by 10pm, from the magnificent revolving restaurant, the city simply vanishes from view. Poof! Like a cheap trick in a pantomime. Now you see it, now you don't, although it's there again next morning, shimmering in the crisp winter light. The upside of having no electricity is that because there's very little industry, there's very little pollution, and as we travel south out of Pyongyang, towards the Demilitarised Zone, almost no traffic. It's a four-lane highway, the key route south. With no cars. We stop at a roadside service station and are mesmerised by the lack of traffic: a bicycle passes. And some time after that, a unit of soldiers marches past in what was meant to be the fast lane. Because if you want to go somewhere in the DPRK, you walk. Everywhere, criss-crossing the countryside, across fields and dirt roads, people are walking. Who knows where they're going? I scrape the ice off the inside of the bus window and peer out but the North Korean hinterland is an unknown, mysterious place. We know almost as little about North Korea as the North Koreans know of us. This state of affairs isn't helped by the fact that journalists are banned. The last two to enter the country illegally were imprisoned until Bill Clinton intervened last year and negotiated their release. I have special, rare dispensation as a travel writer because Nick Bonner, the founder of Koryo Tours, believes that the more the world engages with North Korea, the more North Korea will engage with the world. And because I've agreed in advance that I shan't write about North Korea's human rights record or in any way insult the Dear Leader. It's strongly impressed on all of us before we leave that if we misbehave, it's not us but our guides who'll bear the brunt of any "repercussions".  ~Case Study # 2~ “Inside North Korea: the What you get a sense of, most acutely, is the country's extreme isolation and paranoia, although after a few days in the country, it doesn't seem as paranoid as all that. "After President Bush named us as the axis of evil, Ultimate Package Tour” he attacked first Afghanistan, then Iraq. Are we next?" The relationship with the US affects everything: it fuels juche, the ideology of self-reliance, and its strategy of Page 3 songun, putting the military first, and explains everything from the lack of electricity to the "Arduous March", the famine in the late 90s when up to two million people died. It's not as bad as then, but the World Food Programme estimates a third of the population will go hungry this year without emergency aid. Our food, on the other hand, is plentiful and not bad. Even the dog soup is pretty good (half of us reckon it tastes like lamb; the other half, beef). The highlight of the trip is a visit to Kim Il-sung's mausoleum, an encounter that must qualify as the greatest touristic experience on earth. (The "International Friendship Exhibition" in Mount Myohyang-san runs a close second. It displays the 223,579 gifts given to Kim Il-sung, including a stuffed crocodile in bow tie and waistcoat serving drinks, presented by the Sandinista National Liberation Front of Nicaragua, and a Tolpuddle Martyrs plate from the British parliamentary Labour party.) We're in our smartest clothes. Miss Kim lines us up in rows of four and we march solemnly through a security scanner and on to a travelator that spans an endless marble corridor until we reach the inner sanctum, where we form two perfect rows, take three steps forward on Miss Kim's command, and bow to a statue of Kim Il-sung, march down more marble corridors, through a wind tunnel (to shake the dust from our clothes), and into a darkened room holding the embalmed body of Kim Il-sung himself. Here we form six rows and step forward three steps at a time, to bow solemnly, not once, but three times, from three different directions. Even then it's not over: in another marble chamber is an audio guide to the nation's reaction when the Great Leader died. "All people were rending their hearts! And weeping scalding tears that as they hit the ground fossilised and became glittering pieces of stone! It was as if the earth itself had died!" Outside afterwards, groups of Korean women line up to have their photographs taken in front of the palace, and we watch as more than one brushes tears from her eyes. Kim Il-sung was the father of the nation; in fact, he still is, described in the constitution as the "eternal president", and this emotion isn't faked. ~ Case Study # 2 ~ Page 1 “Now You See It” The monks followed us out to the parking lot. It was a cool autumn morning, and there was silence inside the Ryongthong Temple, a hillside complex of Buddhist shrines outside the North Korean city of Kaesong. Centuries ago Kaesong was home to Korea’s kings, and Ryongthong was a bustling religious center. But this morning the temple was empty. There were no ringing bells, no worshippers lighting incense—only two monks in gray robes walking through the complex with ostentatious serenity. Down in the city, loudspeakers on Kaesong’s empty main street were bellowing songs of praise for Kim Jong Un, the young man North Koreans now call the Supreme Leader. Photographer David Guttenfelder and I had come to the temple with our minders—the anxious government bureaucrats who accompany foreign reporters everywhere they go in North Korea. I briefly interviewed one monk, dutifully scribbling a few banalities in my notebook. “Buddhism helps people be clear, clean, and honest,” he said. A Buddhist temple in North Korea would seem a natural place for a reporter to ask about freedom of worship. Researchers say six decades of a one-family dictatorship have effectively crushed organized religion here. But if I asked, and one of the monks even hinted at any unhappiness with the regime, I knew he would go to prison, disappearing into a hidden gulag that human rights workers say holds between 150,000 and 200,000 people. So I didn’t ask, and we walked out shortly after. In the parking lot, though, as we slid open the door to the van that ferries us everywhere, the monks reappeared. A minder was beside them. All looked at us expectantly. Then the older monk spoke. “I know what you want to ask,” Zang Hye Myong said. Suddenly it was obvious why the monks had followed us. Minders do not introduce journalists to dissidents, and Ryongthong was no enclave of political critics. It was, as I should have known all along, a temple of totalitarian fakery, a movie set in which the stone steps and ornate wooden doors were barely worn. The monks were actors in a theatrical performance about North Korea’s religious freedom…..We were the audience. So I grumbled the question they were waiting for: “Are you free to practice your religion?” The monk looked victorious. “Westerners believe it is not allowed to believe in religion in my country.” He shook his head sadly. “This is false.” He was proof, he said, of the freedoms given to Koreans by the “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung and now protected by his grandson Kim Jong Un. He looked directly at me to make his final point, as if he’d been practicing the line: “I want you to take the truth to the world.” But the truth is rarely simple in North Korea. How to make sense of a country where the leader embraces basketball bad boy Dennis Rodman and a week later threatens to let loose an atomic firestorm on the United States? This is a country where the reality of everyday life is kept hidden behind carefully created facades, and most visitors see nothing but a few perfectly paved roads and a handful of monuments to the family—father, son, and now grandson—that has controlled life in North Korea for 65 years. It’s a country where reporting often feels like a series of strange, bloodless battles. Sometimes—like that morning at Ryongthong—the government wins. But if you stay long enough and look deeply enough, there are days when you learn more than you expected. It’s why we keep coming back. Over the past year David and I have been part of a small team of Associated Press journalists who have been able to visit North Korea regularly. We’ve traveled to collective farms, attended ~ Case Study # 2 ~ “Now You See It” Page 2 Our main minder is a pleasant but purposefully distant man named Ho Yong Il. He is with us at the Children’s Department Store and during rallies in Kim Il Sung Square. He goes with us to restaurants and factories. Mr. Ho (he is always Mr. Ho to me) is our translator, our guide, and the man charged with never allowing us out of his sight. If we tried to slip away from him—something we have never tried to do—no doubt our visas would be revoked. I spent far more time last year with Mr. Ho than with some of my closest friends. Yet after many attempts to get him to open up, here is what I know about him: He studied English. He once saw part of the movie Gone With the Wind. He likes Charles Dickens. His wife is a homemaker. He is also a patriot. Though he is interested in the larger world, curious about American slang and how David and I work, his reverence for his homeland is obvious. To spend time with Mr. Ho is to see North Korea through the eyes of a believer. He clearly enjoys talking about his country’s history, its leaders, and its monuments. But requests to see something unexpected—to visit a car dealership or watch a university history lesson—are usually met with Mr. Ho’s warning “That might be difficult.” Most of the time that means no—though it’s rarely clear who actually makes the decision. It’s hard to know how much of what Mr. Ho allows us to see is real. One day he takes us to meet a pair of working-class newlyweds in their new three-bedroom Pyongyang apartment, with its 42-inch flat-screen TV. The apartment is in one of the city’s showcase housing complexes, its outer skin a grid of blue and white bathroom tiles. These upscale towers near the Taedong River were built for the minuscule elite of the long-ruling Korean Workers’ Party, or KWP. But Mr. Ho wants to prove that they’re open to everyone. The couple, we are told, were given the apartment because the wife, Mun Kang Sun, had been declared a Hero of the Republic for her astonishing productivity at a textile factory. Mun, a demure woman in her early 30s who looks much older, sits quietly as her husband speaks. “All the people of my country are like one big family with the leaders as our parents,” says Kim Kyok, a technician at the same factory. He says his apartment shows how the regime cares for its people. But as he speaks, he picks nervously at his fingers. A trio of people—two minders and a tall, scowling man no one bothers to introduce—is listening to everything. In a country where meeting foreigners without official permission is illegal, the pressure on the couple is clearly immense. Always there are questions I can’t ask. Do the couple really live in that apartment? If they do, are they required to keep it constantly ready to show to foreigners, a living diorama of Kim Jong Un’s promises to bring prosperity to a people accustomed to poverty and famine? Are their neighbors all from the party elite? If reporting inside North Korea sometimes leaves David and me with as many questions as answers, it can still offer a rare view into the long-isolated world the Kim family has created. Piece by piece, we are assembling a collection of fragile and often confusing moments into a picture of a country that works hard to make itself difficult to understand. We’ve learned that what we see in passing is often more revealing than our destination. We’ve found that unguarded moments can be captured in photographs taken from bus windows and that wrong turns can provide revealing details. Like the time our bus driver accidentally veered off a perfectly maintained Pyongyang street onto a narrow, dusty road pocked with potholes and lined with unlit buildings. Or when we spotted a moldy tower of apartments one evening, each room lit by a single naked bulb casting a sickly yellow light. We have ventured outside the relative prosperity of Pyongyang to cities without modern high-rises, where dimly lit stores contain half-empty shelves. It is necessary to go outside the country—to South Korea, Britain, or China—to find the only North Koreans who can speak freely about the realities of totalitarian life: the ones who have left. “Looking back, I wonder now why we had to live such sad lives,” says a former North Korean coal miner, who fled to Seoul in 2006 because his father was politically suspect. Refugees describe a ~ Case Study # 2 ~ “Now You See It” Page 3 Overwhelmed by this benevolence, she says, “I have made up my mind to do my duty to help build a prosperous, powerful state.” It is easy, after many such encounters, to believe in the caricature of North Koreans as Stalinist robots. The challenge is to find the far more elusive—and more prosaic—reality. Sometimes that takes stumbling onto a subject that gets North Koreans to open up a bit. Like Gone With the Wind. This nation revels in the 77-year-old novel, finding echoes of itself in the tale of civil war and the ruthless, beautiful woman who vowed never to go hungry again. More than one million North Koreans are estimated to have died or gone missing in the Korean War, and hundreds of thousands more died in a 1990s famine that tore deep into the country. The government, for reasons never made clear, had the book translated in the mid-1990s, when North Korea was struggling to survive without Soviet aid and the mass starvation was under way. In a country with few entertainment choices that have escaped the propaganda bureaucrats, the novel gripped the capital. Today it’s hard to find an adult in Pyongyang who hasn’t read it. A guide at the Grand People’s Study House, a musty Pyongyang monolith, sees the book as proof that American women are poorly treated. A Kaesong bureaucrat, a haughty man with a fading blue-striped tie, sees the book as a Marxist morality tale. A woman with a troubled marriage tells me she discovered strength in Scarlett O’Hara’s cold-blooded tenacity. The book is entertainment and solace and inspiration. It’s a window into America. It’s a celebration of a people who, like the North Koreans, are fiercely proud of fighting the Yankees. You can see that North Korean toughness in the middle-aged women sitting on the ground on a frigid night, seemingly comfortable in cheap cotton overcoats as they watch a fireworks display. You can see the longing for knowledge in Pyongyang, where electricity often disappears without warning and where a late-night drive can find dozens of people downtown, standing under streetlights with newspapers and schoolwork. Even after the bizarre mass rallies and the pledges to die for the motherland end, there are informal gatherings with surprising echoes of small-town America, as gossiping old women and flirting young people fill the streets. Sometimes, though, the truth about ordinary North Korean life is hidden right inside the Potemkin displays. Like the dancing. I first saw it on a Sunday evening in Pyongyang, in a clearly orchestrated show of uniformity and loyalty, when nearly 500 couples danced in the shadow of three stone fists thrust into the sky. Each fist wielded a tool—a hammer, a sickle, and a pen—that together formed the symbol of the KWP. The men wore short-sleeve shirts and ties. Women wore the filmy polyester dresses that pass here for traditional clothing. They twirled in well-practiced circles and between songs stood silently in pairs. Few people smiled. Most had the blank expressions common at mass rallies, where boredom, resignation, and patriotism often mix together. Officials rushed around, barking at anyone who fell out of step. That night I couldn’t imagine anyone celebrating life with the stiff dances of that staged event. But a few nights later, at about 2 a.m., I opened my hotel-room window to look out over the city. The streets were empty. There were no security convoys, no movements of soldiers, nothing unusual. I heard music somewhere in the distance. Leaning out, I could see lights blazing at a small building a couple of blocks away. It was a party. Looking through binoculars, I could see dozens of people gathered in the building’s courtyard. Bottles were being passed around. I could see the orange glow of cigarettes. Many of the people were dancing. It was the same dance I’d seen a few days earlier, but with the swing and sway of people enjoying themselves. Listening hard, I heard snatches of the same music wafting through the night.