Ongoing #28

This is another, very short, piece about North Korea. It seemed to fit nicely onto a page where the doodle is demon.

Absolutism

Our master does not make demands,
Issue edicts or commands.
Our master does not order us
To show him any kind of fuss.
Our master's voice does not cajole.
Does not coerce, does not control.
Our master does not need these things
For we know what rebellion brings.

Ongoing 14

The next doodle has a group of people at the unveiling of a statue, well actually of a plinth - you are supposed to draw in the statue yourself. I started thinking about monuments and that led me to reflect on my trip to the DPRK which has probably got the largest per capita number of monuments of anywhere on Earth.

DPRK

I never saw a country as full of monuments
And as empty of hope.
I never saw a country as full of rhetoric
And as empty of scope.
I never saw a country as full of words
And as empty of truth.
I never saw a country as full of the young
And as empty of youth.
I never saw a country as full of the heretofore
And as empty of the hereafter.
I never saw a country as full of the absurd
And as empty of laughter.
I never saw a country as full of menace
And as empty of peace.
I never saw a country as full of the burden of life
And as empty of release.

DPRK: Postscript-rumours of war

Before I talk about my rather splendid final day in China, this is probably the appropriate place to put down my overall impressions of the DPRK. In the seven weeks since I was there the situation has changed. North Korea has conducted further nuclear tests to a chorus of World condemnation. They have stated publicly that they consider the ceasefire with South Korea to be at an end. The have launched more test missiles. Their stance has become harder and more intransigent. Right now I wouldn't seriously consider visiting the country, so it's just as well that I went when I did.
I don't propose to go into any political analysis of this. For one thing I'm not qualified. For another I'm sure that some Googling will find you any number of viewpoints better thought out, better researched and better presented than I could possibly manage.
What I will do is say how my impressions of the country impact on this new era of brinkmanship.
From what I saw, I am very scared by what is happening. I don't think the DPRK could win a sustained war but I don't think they would have to. The Dear Leader is a man who has built a Godhood for himself and somehow convinced the people of his country of his apotheosis. I didn't get to speak to many Koreans but those that I did, while in most respects perfectly normal people, all seemed sincere in the way that they had bought into this modern mythology. They have a world view entirely untainted by facts. Their entire modern history is based around a series of lies and a belief in their own military infallibility. The country, away from the cities and the ruling elite is one of the most impoverished that I have seen but the fervour - artificial or not - is quite truly alarming.
The scariest thing is that although many countries, some of whom are hostile to the western way of life, have nuclear weapons, when it comes to pressing the button I think they might hesitate. I don't think Kim Jong Il would hesitate for a moment if he saw some imagined advantage to the act, and even if he were out of the picture I don't think that the military who would probably take over would hesitate. If, as has been reported, his youngest son Kim Jong-Un takes over, it's unlikely to be any different

Because they are so unaware of anything beyond the narrow blinkered confines of their day to day experience I think the people, and of course the army, would be behind whatever action up to and including destroying the whole world, their leaders took.

Many things in the trip chilled me: the Memorial Palace, the Concrete Wall, the International Friendship exhibition. Two things, perhaps surprising things, chilled me more than any others. The first was that display of children's dancing under the watchful eye of the giant poster the Great Leader. It was a demonstration of passion and fervour for their way of life that was terrifying in its wrongheaded conviction.
The second was a combination of the phrasebook's emphasis on reunification phrases and a couple of very circumspect conversations about the division of the country. The people who live there have been indoctrinated into the absolute certainty that the people of the south would welcome unification with open arms. I have met and taught many South Koreans and never once have I met a single one who would want to give up the trappings of modern civilised life and be dragged back to the middle ages under the rule of the communist north. What I find chilling is that there would be absolutely nothing I could do or say to convince a single North Korean that this is the case.
Such unshakable belief is capable of destroying the world.

DPRK: Back to the border

And so we come to the last day in the DPRK. Our return to China was to be by train, a journey of almost twenty four hours, and though it lacked any sightseeing it was not without incident.
Straight after breakfast we took our usual bus to the station where we said our goodbyes to the guides. They goodbyes were sincere enough. Whatever the political situation in North Korea, they had been friendly and courteous and if everything they said was exactly in line with their government then who can blame them for that? I liked our guides, both the ones permanently assigned to us and the ones who had shown us individual things in the country,I didn't even doubt their sincerity. When your sources of information are so limited it's easy to believe the little you are being told.


We were to change trains at the border but on both the North Korean and Chinese trains the set up was similar - four berth sleeper compartments. On the North Korean one I found myself sharing with Neil (our English tour leader), Ray (one of the other members of the group) and a Chinese man who was unconnected with our party and who spoke no English. Neil had some conversation with him in Chinese but I have no idea what it was about.
The train pulled away from the station and out of the city. The views were much as they had been from the bus when we went out to the mountains. Most of what we saw was scarcely even subsistence farming. It was little more than people scratching lines in the ground with sticks. Here and there, there were towns but as impoverished-looking as any I have seen anywhere in the world. The land looked bleak and barren. The occasional signs of industrialisation - empty roads, isolated railways, distant factories - simple added to the feeling of desolation.
We had lunch on the train, a difficult feat of coordination in such cramped conditions but a tasty enough selection of fare.
We played a couple of games of trivial pursuit.
We passed the time.
And then, in the early afternoon we approached the border.
We had been briefed about the procedures that we would encounter there but they were, nevertheless, rather alarming. Especially given what happened, literally five seconds before we stopped at the border station.
We were slowing down to approach; the train was already drawing level with a platform where what looked like a battalion of military police were waiting for us. As the train halted and the soldiers reached for the doors the Chinese man in our compartment quickly drew something from his bag and pushed it down behind my seat. I stared at him and at Neil and Ray. None of the three of us knew what to do. He put his finger to his lips and before any of us could think of how to react there were three soldiers in the train corridor and one in the room with us. What could we do? None of us spoke Korean. The Koreans didn't speak English. The Chinese man spoke neither. Neil spoke Chinese, but what could he possibly say? We did the English thing and did nothing.
The soldiers indicated that they wanted us to leave and wait in the corridor. We did so, waiting anxiously and peering back in through the open door. They called Neil back in and indicated that they wanted his bags. He opened them and they searched, very thoroughly searched, through his belongings. He had his mobile phone with him. As they are forbidden in North Korea, it had been wrapped and sealed at the airport. They checked the seals to make sure that they had not been tampered with and returned it. They took away and checked his passport. Ray and I soon followed, undergoing exactly the same procedures. The small plastic scoring devices from Ray's Travel Trivial Pursuit gave them some pause for thought - a fact which in itself indicates the level of their paranoia. Then it was the turn of the Chinese man. His "interview" was even more thorough than ours had been. Everything in his luggage was examined in detail; he was questioned at length (a process rendered difficult by the language barrier and his tendency to shrug at every question posed); his documents were all taken from him for verification. Then, to my horror, the soldier pulled the back of his seat away from the wall and felt down behind it. Of course there was nothing there, whatever he had hidden was behind my seat. What was it? If they found it, would they think it was mine? The soldier had now stood up and started looking around.
Suddenly there was a little commotion from further down the carriage, from another of the compartments. The soldiers from our compartment went down to check on what was happening and returned a few moments later. They seemed now to have decided that the Chinese man could proceed. He closed up his luggage and sat down.
Meanwhile another guard who had been progressing along the carriage examining everyone's cameras had reached me. She took my camera and indicated that she wanted to know how to review the pictures. I showed her and she started at picture number one, looking at each one. Given that there were over eight hundred on there it was going to take some time. Five minutes later she stopped and called over a more senior officer. She showed him a picture. He became quite belligerent, pointing at the picture and angrily demanding "Delete!"
I glanced at it. It was a picture of someone in uniform. I didn't even remember taking it. Quickly I deleted it. The woman went back to examining the rest. Five more minutes and she handed back my camera.
Eventually we were done and the train pulled out and over the bridge that would take us into the relative freedom and relaxed liberty of communist China - a thought that was voiced with irony by more than one of us. The bridge was marked and scarred by bullet and shell holes, deliberately left unrepaired since the end of the Korean War.
The Chinese man pulled out whatever he had hidden. It seemed to be some kind of poster written in Korean. I can only imagine that it was something subversive about Korea, perhaps something about the Great Leader. I didn't know what it was and I didn't really care. I was just glad that it was back in his possession.

DPRK: Flower Show

After the concert we moved on to the flower show. This proved to be the sole time in the whole trip that we were allowed to be out of the direct sight of our guides. It was a strange affair. We were escorted into the ground floor of the building housing the event. There we were told to take the escalator to the next floor where the main event was held and work our way through and round the exhibition until we reached the far doors where we would be met again.

It was certainly popular, filled with crowds of Koreans, mostly in their best clothes, all looking at the hundreds of displays. Of course the displays were what made it such a bizarre event. There were exactly two varieties of flower on display – the purple orchid known as Kimilsungia and the red begonia known as Kimjongilia. Here and there there were very small splashes of white but clearly set to show off the contrasting red and purple in front of them. The displays themselves ranged in size from tabletop to hall-filling but had a startling uniformity of theme. Probably ninety percent of them were models of the Great Leader’s birthplace, surrounded by oceans of those two flowers. The few that were different were models of the country's various revolutionary monuments surrounded by those two flowers.

I was first at the exit door, where I found one of our guides waiting. I asked him a few questions about the exhibition, questions which I also researched independently later. Everyone, I was told, expressed their great love of the two leaders by entering displays. The smaller ones were from companies and individuals working in DPRK, the enormous one in the middle (at least twenty yards long and twelve wide) would be from a combination of Government ministries and organisations.

Translated by my independent research this comes out as “if you are a company that wants to go on doing business in DPRK you had damned well better enter a stand” and “if you are a Government employee who wants to find himself moving up instead of out, ditto”.

By the time we got out twilight was falling and we had just time to drive out into Pyongyang’s main square for photographs of the square, the Study House and, across the river, the Juche Monument, before heading off for dinner.

After dinner, I sat in the bar and wrote a poem about the Flower Show.

Flower Show

There are orchids of one type
And begonias of another
And they fill the halls with colours,
Though those colours number - two!
You may search from end to end
If you're looking for some other,
But this purple and this red
Are the only ones on view.
It's a flower show with a difference;
It's a duo of varieties;
One named for each leader
The Dear One and the Great.
A tulip or a daffodil
Would be an impropriety,
Such a thing in such a flower show
Would be to desecrate.
Kimilsungia, Kimjongilia
Which are counted by the ton
Surround models of the birthplace
Of the leader - Mangyindae
Or occasionally a statue -
A revolutionary one -
Being all that all the entrants
Are permitted to display.

DPRK: Korean State Symphony Orchestra

The Symphony Hall was a magnificent building constructed once more of marble, at least the reception areas were. The hall itself was acoustically splendid with a rounded construction and a wooden surfacing that lent a deep resonance to the music of the orchestra. And what an orchestra it was. Several of us independently estimated that there were between 130 and 150 people on the stage. The quality of their musicianship and the power of such a grouping was in no doubt whatsoever. They were quite simply the best orchestra I have ever heard. The program was another matter. While it was all very rousing stuff it was also all more of that vaguely militaristic pomp and bombast that we had heard so much of already. It was music that while engaging enough on a visceral level had no cerebral impact at all. The only part of the 75 minute performance that I could recall afterwards was a brief, surreal interlude when the orchestra suddenly launched into a spirited rendition of “Those Were the Days”.

Actually that isn’t completely true. There were two other things about the performance that stick in the memory. One was the woman who gave a brief, spoken introduction to each piece. The introduction was in Korean but she had the most extraordinary voice that I have ever heard. It swooped and dived as if she were overcome with the weight of a great emotion. It filled the entire hall with the feeling that at any moment she would burst into such tears that we might all drown in them. It was truly astounding.

The other thing was both comical and telling.

The hall was full and we had good seats, near to the door by which we had entered, so I witnessed this whole pageant play out. As I have said we were accompanied on the tour by an official cameraman, a tall, gaunt man who glided silently around filming but who always seemed to be there whenever you turned around or glanced to one side. He reminded me of Lurch in the Adams Family. Now, as the performance was beginning he tried to enter the hall with his camera and one of the officials, a woman, turned him away. They both went out into the corridor. Voices were heard. Then the music started, drowning everything else out. I though no more of it, except that he had perhaps met his match.

Then I noticed the door opposite, nearest the stage, open and in walked our man. He walked up onto the stage and in among the musicians and started filming. Officials around the auditorium ignored him.

At first I thought this rather comical but as he continued I started to wonder. Just how important were our guides? What kind of leverage did they have if on their say so a cameraman could do as he was doing? I know that they were showing us the country’s best face but were we, a motley band of tourists really important enough to warrant this? I didn’t think so but it showed the levels of power that were actually vested in the people showing us around.

DPRK: Various Monuments

The day’s itinerary was, as usual, laid out before us, but the weather made it less than appealing. We were to stop for a photograph of the Three Charters Monument, visit the Great Leader’s birthplace, visit an open air sculpture park, visit the Pyongyang Metro, visit the Great Leader’s monument (also in the open), go to a fairground to celebrate the Leader’s birthday. Not a promising list for such a day.

We did stop at the services and again for the Three Charters photo opportunity, miraculously in a very brief gap in the worst of the rain, but by the time we reached Mangyondae, the birthplace of the Leader, it was pouring again.

Clearly we could not miss out such an important place but our visit was as brief as it’s possible to be, a fifteen minute tour of the main bit with a guide explaining about Kim Il Sung’s early life and then back onto the bus.

It was still raining hard when we reached our next stop - the Pyongyang Metro. Anyone who hasn't seen this kind of overblown communist architecture might be wondering why on Earth we would want to visit the metro. I wondered myself until we got in there. We were allowed, accompanied of course, to ride the metro for one stop so we saw two stations. They were designed and built with an opera-house grandeur. There was more of that marble everywhere. There were rows of elaborate, multicoloured crystal chandeliers. There were massive murals of workers, of the Great and Dear Leaders, of revolutionary scenes. The metro itself on the other hand, though efficient enough could hardly be considered a model of modern comfort; the design of it, with it's hard leather seats and harsh lighting reminded me of the kind of buses and trains we had in the UK maybe forty years ago when I was at school.The weather had eased a bit once more by the time we reached the Great Leader’s statue. This is twenty three metres high and is, according to our guides, solid bronze. Given that a 10cm cube of bronze weighs about eight kilograms then a metre cube of bronze would weigh about 8000 kg and such a statue would, I estimate, weigh about two million kilograms.

I didn’t do that calculation at the time but, suspicious of this “fact” I did ask the question. I was told that the statue weighs “as much as the hearts of all the people of Korea”.

Actually the statue is, political ideology apart, extremely impressive. It isn’t just the statue of the leader, it is flanked by two enormous reliefs representing the flag of the country and the revolutionary struggle. There is no need for such an obvious and transparent fiction. It’s wonder enough without it.

After that it was back to the hotel where we had lunch in the revolving restaurant that sits at the very top of the structure looking out over the city. Lunch was excellent though for once my mushroom allergy got me the better deal. Instead of a vegetable soup (containing mushrooms) I was given a bowl of truly delicious pumpkin soup which was quite the nicest thing I had eaten in days.

In view of the weather we were also presented with a new itinerary for the rest of the day. After freshening up and changing into slightly smarter clothes we were to head out for the Sate Symphony Hall to see and hear a concert by the Korean Sate Symphony Orchestra, follow that with a visit to the annual flower festival celebrating Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, stop briefly for some more photographs of monuments then finish the day with a traditional Korean duck barbecue in a restaurant.

DPRK: Kaesong Folk Hotel

From the mountain we drove to our lodgings for the evening, the delightful Kaesong Folk Hotel where guests stay in traditional style rooms, sleeping on thin mattresses on the floor with hard blocks for a pillow. On the way we passed the town square where the children's festival was still going on and moments later drove into the car park of the hotel.
The complex is built across a small stream and the individual blocks contain several rooms around small courtyards.

We dropped our belongings in the rooms and went out to take a couple of pictures before a tasty but uncomfortable dinner, again in the traditional Korean style, seated on the floor. The only downside to the whole thing was that we were not allowed to leave the grounds of the hotel, not even by a few paces to take photographs in the street.
That notwithstanding it was a very pleasant place to finish the day.

Next morning, when we went down for breakfast, we also realised that we could see the distant statue of Kim Il Sung on top of the hill. Had we looked for it in the dark of the previous evening, after we had spent an hour or two in the candlelit environs of the bar - the power having gone off shortly after our arrival - we would also have seen it. The various monuments to the two leaders around the country are among the few things where power is most carefully maintained even through the frequent power cuts that afflict everywhere else.

DPRK: Kongmin Tombs

The other site that we had to get in wasn't very far away and a few minutes later we arrived there: the tombs of King Kongmin and his wife. These are a genuine ancient monument dating to 1372. They are located in a quite charming area and a short stroll up the stone steps brings you to the twin mounds of the tombs. Here there are a number of excellent statues, virtually free of restoration and a view of the strangely named "Oh My" Mountain.
The legend of the name is that King Kongmin had been seeking for some time the perfect site for the tombs to be constructed. He had consulted all the best geomancers in the land but didn't like any of the suggestions. In despair he said that the next geomancer to provide a location would be richly rewarded if he liked it and executed if he didn't. The site was selected and Kongmin went to inspect it. He told his soldiers that if he didn't like it he would wave a handkerchief from the top of the hill as a signal to kill the geomancer. When he reached the top of the hill he found that it was a perfect site. However it was a hot day and he unthinkingly took out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow. At the bottom of the hill they mistook this as the signal and killed the geomancer. When the king reached the bottom again they told him what had happened and he said "Oh My!". Since then, this has been the name of the mountain.

DPRK: In the news

There can't be many people who are not aware of the DPRK's nuclear test this week. It's been roundly condemned by pretty much everybody, though I doubt most of the DPRK general public are aware of that. External news sources are pretty much non-existent in the country. The opposite isn't true though. On the BBC we saw a clip of the DPRK state broadcast announcing the news. I have no idea at all if the translation was accurate but that wasn't what interested me. I was fascinated by the DPRK announcer's voice which was shrieking and hysterical and bizarre in a lunatic-on-helium way.
I have, as you'll see in a couple of posts time, encountered this weird way of speaking in the DPRK before, from the announcer at the concert I attended at the State Symphony Hall. It struck me as ludicrously demented at the concert, as a style for reading the news it is quite the most bizarre thing I've seen in weeks.

DPRK: Kaesong Children's Palace

Many things in the DPRK had reminded me of the China that I visited more than twenty years ago. The infrastructure of the country, the apparently unquestioning nature of the population, the disparity between those in the party apparatus and those not; all these things and more were similar. So when I discovered that the afternoon was to be a visit to a school, I thought that I knew exactly what it would entail. In that visit to China we had had just such a visit, in Shanghai, and I recall it to this day. We saw displays of expert dancing from groups of young girls and boys; we saw a group of students learning to create beautiful calligraphy; we saw a child of about six playing a complex piece of Bach watched by two beaming piano teachers; we saw displays of artistic, musical and gymnastic prowess that would have impressed anyone. We even saw a class of students assembling transistor radios. And at the time I recall remarking that I bet there wasn't a child in the whole showcase school that wasn't the son or daughter of a fully paid up party official.

This afternoon, I was sure, would be more of the same: the children of the elite (which of course doesn't exist in the DPRK) performing highly skilled routines in a school at Kaesong that the kids of those peasants toiling all day with their hands wouldn't ever have the slightest chance of getting near.


Under normal circumstances that's exactly what it would have been. In fact it started out that way. We stopped the bus some way from the school and walked towards it. There were large groups of uniformed school children laying flowers at the feet of a statue of the Great Leader. In the school we saw some displays of basketball and karate but it was clear that most of the children weren't there and we soon found out why.


Tomorrow, April 15th, was of course the celebration of the birthday of the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung and today, out in the town square the students were having a celebration in song and dance. Our English tour leader asked the Korean guides if we could stay and watch some of it so we went out to the square where it was just getting underway and sat down on the floor, with the assembled crowd to watch. It was fascinating. It started with a group of teenagers dancing on roller skates accompanied by a full orchestra which, while not perfect was certainly quite amazing for school musicians. They were followed by the pupils of the school performing a great variety of dance routines, song performances - both solo and as a choir, an accordion group, acrobatics and gymnastics. And all of it was performed with a breathtaking degree of skill. And all of it was performed in front of the giant smiling beatific portrait of the leader in whose honour it had been conceived. We stayed there for about an hour, quite literally enthralled by it, until our guides insisted that we had another site to visit and needed to be moving on.


It was only later that a comparison occurred to me. In the film Cabaret, there is a scene where a group of people go out to a cafe and while they are there, members of the Hitler Youth perform the song "Tomorrow Belongs To Me". Beginning with a solo singer it mounts to a sinister and triumphal crescendo. It's one of the most chilling moments in the whole film, especially when Michael York remarks, as they are leaving, "Do you still think you can control them?"

DPRK: The Concrete Wall

The sense of reality though was rather quickly dispelled when we left the DMZ. We drove for some time through land that was more fertile than we had seen in the north and villages that were a little more substantial but the overall standard of living and the complete lack of modern farming methods (by which I mean from the last six centuries) was unchanged. We were on our way to something called "the Concrete Wall". One of our group was a political historian with a special interest in Korea and he had never heard of this edifice. Nor, it transpired, had anyone else on the bus. To give the DPRK viewpoint I will quote from another leaflet that I picked up.

"The Korean people are a homogeneous nation of the same blood that has lived for many centuries in the same territory, using one language.
Over their 5000 years of history, they have created a brilliant culture and enjoyed a harmonious life. However since the end of the Second World War, when US troops occupied the south area of Korea in 1945, the Korean people have been living in a country divided for over half a century...
...The concrete wall, which runs from east to west, was built by the south Korean puppet clique at the instigation of the US imperialists, their masters, in order to divide the nation into two for ever.
It is 5-8 m high, 10-19 m wide at the bottom and 3-7 m wide in the upper part., and fitted out with pillboxes, lookouts and other military establishments. It is 240 km long"

Before I give my opinion about the wall, let me continue for a moment to describe what we saw and the circumstances in which we saw it.

We drove away from the DMZ for around forty minutes and arrived at a car park in the middle of nowhere at the foot of a small hill. We walked up the hill into a dull and functional military-style building. Behind the building, in a dugout trench, a row of binoculars and telescopes were mounted on fixed tripod bases, looking out across a barren and empty stretch of ground. In the very far distance there was a road visible with some traffic on it. Halfway between us and that road was a stretch of what looked like wall, though it was hardly visible without the use of the binoculars and telescopes. Here and there were things that might have been military observation towers.
The details of the walls construction were explained to us and the evils of the American overlords who had demanded it made clear. Comparisons were made with the Berlin Wall.

There are, as even the most determinedly non-militaristic can see, a number of problems with all of this. First and foremost is that the question "who gains" is ignored altogether. Coming from the west and having taught English to any number of South Koreans I can state absolutely that I have never met a single one who wanted to be reunited with the North, especially if that meant giving up the high standard of life that they have now to join a regime ruled by such a dynasty and essentially hurl themselves back to a repressive feudalism. Whether they are right or not is irrelevant. It is in their interest to encourage defectors from the North, to make it easier, not harder, for such people to enter South Korea. (Of course the DPRK position is that everyone there is happy in paradise so there are no defectors, in the same way that they need no prisons because there are no criminals.)
Secondly there is the construction of the wall. It has, they say a north facing, vertical wall of up to 8m and a south facing sloping wall. In what way is this an effective fortification? Sure it would prevent the immediate advance of tanks from the north but it would also prevent the advance from the south. An eight metre vertical drop wouldn't be very easy to negotiate, would it? Then there is the manpower and the effort and the time that would have been required to build as opposed to, say, laying a minefield.
Of course there is that Berlin Wall comparison to look at as well. That was built by the East to keep their people in, rather than by the West to keep them out. This tends to be far more typical of such measures.


Then of course there is another set of questions to be asked. If it really is across the whole length of the border then why did we need a forty minute drive to get to it when we were already at the border? Truly I had no idea where we were. We could have been at the border of fifty km away from it for all any of us knew. We were also looking at it through binoculars from a kilometre away. It could just as easily have been made of polystyrene as concrete.
All in all there was nothing convincing about it, either in concept or execution, though it was rather creepy to hear the North Korean descriptions of it, delivered with every appearance of sincerity.

A brief note

A larger version of the DMZ panorama in the last post can be seen by clicking on it. It's well worth a look.

DPRK: The DMZ

You might think that the Demilitarized Zone would be another of the unsettling experiences of the tour, but in many ways it is far less so than the Memorial Palace or the Friendship Exhibition. For a start, it seemed to me to be much more honest. We had spent the whole morning driving along completely deserted highways; wide, well-maintained, perfectly straight routes that had absolutely no traffic on them. Long distance travel, it seems, is something that doesn't happen in the DPRK. I suppose, had I asked, I would have been told that when everyone is happy where they are they have no need to move. Given that I know that you need permits to travel in much of the country and special permits to enter or reside in the capital, I suspect the truth of the matter is rather more sinister.


We broke to stretch our legs and have a cup of tea at something that was a bit like a very small motorway service station. Only a bit like it as the staff had clearly set up five minutes before we got there and would equally clearly be shifting everything away five minutes after we left. We were the only people there. Hardly surprising as, as far as I could tell, we were the only people on the road. Almost everyone walked out into the middle of the deserted highway to take pictures. When would that ever happen on one of our major routes?
We arrived in the late morning at the DMZ and, after some formalities and hanging around, were driven down a narrow road - with clear points where concrete blocks could, at a moment's notice, be used to render it impassable - to the DMZ itself.


We've done the history lesson that resulted in the creation of this strip of land separating North from South, so we don't need to do it again.
Inside the DMZ you can see the hut where the armistice talks took place, a small and comfortable place; the larger, colder, less friendly hall where the agreement was signed (and an array of photographs and exhibits from the period); the Joint Security area where the actual border is marked by a line across the concrete the neatly bisects the group of blue huts that straddle the border.


You can actually walk around a table in the hut, under the watchful eye of the guards, thus entering South Korea and then re-entering North Korea. This is the one place that you can visit from both countries. (Or from the DPRK perspective, from both halves of the single country.)


A uniformed officer shows you around, explaining everything in Korean, for your guides to translate. He'll even let you take his picture, or pose with you in the one place in the whole country where such a thing is permitted.
There is a fine irony in the name DMZ, given that it is the most heavily armed border on Earth and given that, under their respective flags, the fortress-like buildings that face each other are clearly so heavily armed and protected.
Nevertheless, in its own brutal way, it is much more honest than almost anything else we had seen. Name aside, there is no real pretence here that everything would be fine if only the Americans would stop the brothers in the South from pursuing their desire to join with the North. This is a military base and nobody claims otherwise.

DPRK: Korean State Circus

As with many experiences in the DPRK there was a kind of hybrid Lewis Carroll-Franz Kafka feel to our visit to the circus. It began when the bus pulled up on a rain-swept, deserted car park in front of the large and impressive building where the circus is held. We were escorted in, into an foyer that was as large as any theatre I have previously seen. Once again the predominant building material was marble. Marble staircases swept up and down from this grand entrance. Those of us wishing to, ahem, use the facilities, after our long drive were escorted down one of these into the basement where the equally impressively built and decorated toilets had no running water. Once we had been escorted back up we were placed in a waiting room. This was a large rectangular room with armchairs lined up around the sides for us to sit on and portraits of the two leaders hung upon the walls. Why we had to wait there never did become clear, though a random assortment of Koreans and non-Koreans entered or left over the next fifteen minutes until finally we were led out, upstairs and into the auditorium. It looked like any other circus. There was a circular performing area in front of a stage. High above it in the roof were what were clearly trapezes. Rows of seats were banked steeply around one the side opposite the stage. We were led to our, rather good, seats. Strangely the place was very busy, if not actually full. I had seen no signs of life on the car park and could only imagine that there was another, less grand, entrance for the locals to use.

Soon the acts began. In many respects they were completely normal circus acts. There were wire-walkers, trapeze artists, tumblers and acrobats, trampolinists and trick cyclists and even a couple of entertaining and inventive clowns to fill in the gaps while the equipment was being set up or taken down behind them. There was one moderately unpleasant animal act involving performing bears but otherwise it was a well-performed and entertaining circus.
Except for one thing.
It was clearly the right place to use that phrase from the book.
“Sasang-yesulsong-i nopsum-nida.” – It is of high ideological and artistic quality.

Let me illustrate with just one example, the wire-walkers. They were a group of extremely skilled artists: racing along the wires – slack or tight – on foot or on unicycles, alone or in acrobatic groups. The wowed the audience with their practiced and flawless routines. So what was ideological about it? Well two things. First it was performed in front of a backdrop projection of glorious revolutionary workers building power pylons and the routine was clearly designed to mimic this heroic activity. The “workers” ran up the wires, erected imaginary pylons and generally created a spectacle of good comrades at work.


Other acts were performed in a similar way and in front of similar projections. One of the routines from the clowns involved two working men with a (styrofoam) telegraph pole. Another had the hapless, but honest, worker making a fool of the wily, but unscrupulous landlord.



When it was all over we were led back out through a busier foyer but into a still deserted car park.

DPRK: Arch of Triumph: Drive to Mt Myohyang

After we had been back to the hotel to change our clothes and have a lunch of the Korean delicacy of cold noodles that was so unpalatable that I was incredibly grateful that I couldn't manage to pick them up even with a knife and fork and was thus spared the need to actually eat them. Then it was onto the bus for a long drive out to the mountains where we were to stay for one night to give us a chance to go for a walk in the beautiful scenery, visit a Buddhist Monastery and Museum and then spend the following morning in the Friendship Exhibition.

We stopped off at the Arch of Triumph in Kaesonmun Square on the way to take a few pictures. It's quite an impressive structure which is 60 metres high and 52.5 metres wide. Once again I can quote from a leaflet picked up at the hotel.
"The Arch of Triumph stands in Kaesonmun Square... a historic place where the Great Leader President Kim Il Sung delivered a speech on October 14, 1945 upon his triumphal return to Pyongyang after he led the twenty-year long arduous anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle to victory"
While it may be impressive I would rather have turned my camera in the opposite direction to where a very large group of people were practising their singing and dancing in preparation for the Kim Il Sung birthday celebrations but when I asked permission I was told that I couldn't photograph people in the capital and so I had to content myself with the monument and a picture of a nearby stadium.



The drive to the mountains was through a drab, flat landscape that looked anything but fertile. Here and there, there were workers in the fields. They appeared to be doing everything by hand with no agricultural implements, however primitive. Only once did I see as much as a simple Ox-drawn plough.



We arrived in the late afternoon at our hotel, a strange looking pyramid shaped structure where we dropped our luggage and went off for that walk. The walk started out up a concrete road that soon turned into a wide dirt road. However before we had progressed very far we were forced to stop. After a conference with some men coming down the hill, our guide informed us that we needed to wait as there was blasting going on ahead. About ten minutes later there was an almighty explosion from further up the track and soon we were able to continue. The walk became steep. Parts of it followed the banks of a stream, others had had slippery steps carved into the stone. About half way up I stopped and said I'd wait. My knees were starting to ache a little and while that would make little difference on the way up I was anticipating the potential trouble on the way down. A couple of others stopped and waited with me.



Around half an hour later we were on the way back down from our short and, frankly, not terribly interesting walk. And an hour after that we were having another dinner in the hotel, this time rather more palatable than the lunchtime noodles had been - though still with bowls full of kimchee.

DPRK: Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetery

From the Palace we took a short drive to the Revolutionary Martyrs' Cemetery which is located on Mt. Taesong. The cemetery contains rows of busts of soldiers who died in the liberation of Korea from the Japanese.

You approach it up the hill, with some members of the group being required to lay flowers, all the time surrounded by more of that stirring music from speakers mounted around the cemetery. A couple of quotes from a leaflet that I picked up in the hotel may give more of a flavour of the experience.



"The cemetery contains the busts of the anti-Japanese revolutionary martyrs who devoted their lives to the liberation of their country, to the freedom and emancipation of their people and to the victory of the cause of Juche."

"It was built in Juche 64 (1975) AND EXPANDED IN Juche 74 (1985) thanks to the warm affection of President Kim Il Sung and leader Kim Jong Il."

DPRK: A poem

A nod to the new God

The room is high, and long, and cold,
And there, in the centre, the coffin holds
The body of the country's God,
And silently across the floor
They approach him, four by four
To circle, genuflect and nod.
For all who see him there must bow
At feet, at sides, at waxen brow;
An act of worship, seeking grace.
They do not see that this is creed,
If not in name, then sure in deed,
To look upon the saviour's face.
So what is it, if not true faith
To sanctify the leader's wraith
With trappings of a holy writ?
Raise marble temples in his name,
Accord him immortal, true, acclaim
And to his memory submit?

DPRK:Kumusan Memorial Palace

Until now I had been finding the DPRK a little unnerving but not tremendously so. In any war, especially a war that ends indecisively, the two sides are bound to have different versions of events to tell. True, I didn't trust much of what I'd been told in the DPRK, but I have a deep distrust of my own Government's ability to tell me the truth. The war in Iraq when we were given several different sets of reasons for the invasion, all of which turned out to be false, proves that our leaders are perfectly willing to lie to us. So I accepted that the United Nations/United States version of events in Korea while probably more accurate than the DPRK version was likely to contain its fair share of misleading information and half truths. That's that "first casualty of war" stuff again.

So what, I wondered, would the situation at the Kumusan Memorial Palace, add to my understanding of the DPRK?
We all assembled in the hotel reception in our smartest clothes. The rules for the visit were clear. Smart clothes, empty pockets, no cameras, no outer jackets, no inappropriate remarks or humour, lots of respect.
At the memorial palace, which is certainly more of a palace than a memorial, there was a long queue of Koreans. It was clear to see that this was a place that everybody comes. There were groups of soldiers, groups of businessmen, groups of ladies in traditional dress. The queue was at least several hundred yards long. After a few minutes of waiting around, we were marched straight to the front of it and into the buildings. It felt a little uncomfortable but the people waiting seemed to accept it as part of the way things are. Inside we were led through what felt like miles of marble-lined corridors. Automatic devices cleaned our shoes, we were searched and X-rayed, more automatic devices blew the dust from our clothes. Periodically we were asked, for no apparent reason, to line up in three columns, or four columns, or two columns, or single file. As these groupings were inevitably shuffled into some new arrangement the only reason I could come up with was that it was simply to show us who was boss. From this enormous room we were led, this time in fours, into another equally large room. At the far end of it was a statue of Kim Il Sung. The tuneless but vaguely uplifting martial music that had been playing throughout the experience was louder in here. The wall behind the statue was lit with pastel lighting. It reminded me of something and for a moment I couldn't place it. Then it came to me. It was very like the statue of Christ that I had seen in the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City. The statue, the lighting, the music were all designed to produce the same effect. From that room we were led to another, with another statue and this time we were given audio sets to listen to. It was very hard to listen with a straight face. If the rhetoric on the Pueblo had been overblown this made it sound restrained. Imagine someone with a deep voice, loaded with gravitas, perhaps Orson Wells or James Earl Jones, solemnly intoning "When the Great Leader was taken from us the hearts and souls of the people were filled with a great grief and sorrow and with one voice they rose up and demanded a memorial be built to honour his name."
Now imagine about ten minutes of it.
After another trip through a wind-tunnel to clean us up we were led into another hall, this time with a glass coffin at the centre in which the body of the Great Leader lay. We lined up in fours again and walked to the coffin, circling it and bowing three times to show our respect. After that there was a museum showing all of the honours and awards bestowed upon Kim Il Sung from leaders and universities of the world. Most of them seemed to be from dodgy Central African republics or other Communist countries. The dodgier the source the more elaborate the award. In another room we saw a bullet proof car and a train.


Afterwards we were led back through the corridors and out into the fresh air where we were allowed to retrieve our cameras and take a couple of shots of the outside of the building.
I had found the whole two hour experience deeply disturbing. They may say this is respect for a man, that this is politics, but I know religion when I see it. This isn't hero worship; this is plain and simple worship. It has the trappings and rituals of religion. It has a God figure. It has blind faith. It's a religion.

DPRK: Another brief history lesson

Hands up if you've heard of the Pueblo Incident.
No, me neither, but I'm not American and I was only eleven at the time so it's hardly surprising.

The Pueblo was a United States spy ship that was captured by the North Koreans on 23 January 1968. One crew member was killed in the action and the others were captured. They were held for eleven months. Eventually the United States apologised for spying and the captain signed a confession and the crew were released. After the release the US and the captain recanted their words. The Pueblo was kept by the DPRK who now have it moored in the river in Pyangyong and take tourists around it.

So much for the bare facts. There are all sorts of other disputed "facts". The US say that it was well outside DPRK waters, the DPRK say it wasn't. The US say that the crew were kept in bad conditions, endured torture and mock executions to make them confess and were generally mistreated. The DPRK say there was no torture, the crew were kept in good conditions and the confessions were genuine.

After our visit to the War Museum we went to see the Pueblo. We were shown around the ship by the same guide that we had had at the museum and given the North Korean version of events. It was a rather eerie experience that reminded me a little of the trip around a captured U-boat that you can do in the Science Museum in Chicago. They have done very little with the ship apart from painting red circles round every bullet hole and shell mark on the ship to draw attention to the effects of the battle. Every area of the ship is paraded to the public to show what the DPRK claim the Americans were up to. We saw the electronic surveillance equipment, the arms lockers, the gun deck guns, the code room and so on. We were also shown a video about the incident. It was actually quite hard to keep a straight face during this as it was delivered with a stirring musical background and an overblown pomposity that undermined the message it was trying to give. We would come across more examples of this kind of misguided rhetoric later. Someone really should explain to the people who produced these videos for them just why they would achieve a better result with a less theatrical style.

On the dockside there is also a glass case containing a spy-torpedo packed with electronic equipment, allegedly captured some years later.

After our visit to the Pueblo we were informed that our luggage was now in the DPRK and waiting for us back out at the airport. This meant that any other activities planned for the day would need to be abandoned while we fetched it all. I don't think anyone was too bothered by that, so we climbed into the bus, and drove out to the airport.

I'd been expecting a long-winded process but all we had to do was pick them up and sign for them and we were on our way. The drive to the airport took forty minutes, the drive back another forty and the actual collecting of the luggage no more than two. This meant that we had time to visit the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Monument as a coda to our day of military sightseeing. This monument consists of a large area paved in white flagstones with rows of bronze statues along each side depicting heroic military figures engaged in battle with the DPRK's enemies. At the end of the park is a large statue of another, single heroic figure. Unfortunately the pose makes the soldier look as if he is about to burst into a quick rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" which rather undermines the dramatic gravity of the memorial.

By the time we saw the memorial, twilight was falling and the park was empty and we could only spend a few minutes there before we had to hurry off to another meal, then back to the hotel for a shower and a change of clothes, and a couple of beers.
It was fortunate that we had our luggage back. Tomorrow we needed our best clothes, smart trousers and shirts, and - if we had them - ties. We were going to visit the Kumusan Memorial Palace, the Mausoleum in which Kim Il Sung lies in state.