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North Koreans exposed to foreign masses

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005

Asia Times
Andrei Lankov
11/23/2005

It was a fine night in Pyongyang in mid-October as I walked a deserted street under the unusually bright stars of the North Korean sky (no industry means no pollution), accompanied by a knowledgeable expert on North Korea.

“Well, I do not understand what the hell they are doing,” said the expert, a former student of mine. “You should not be here, frankly. And those South Koreans, they are even more dangerous. The commander-in-chief is making a mistake, but it will take months before they realize how destructive the impact of the Arirang Festival is for their regime.”

The North Korean capital from August to late October hosted the Arirang Mass Games, a pompous and kitschy Stalinist festival for which 50,000 participants (largely students) were trained for months. The festival was attended by an unprecedented number of foreigners and South Koreans.

Pyongyang’s international hotels, usually half-empty, were completely booked, and five or six flights left the city’s international airport every day. This might not appear a particularly large number, but in more ordinary times the airport, by far the least busy capital airport in East Asia, serves merely four to five flights a week.

There were many Westerners. But most unusual and striking, perhaps, was the powerful presence of South Koreans. For the first time since the division of the country in 1953, pretty much every South Korean who wished to do so could travel to Pyongyang for a short stay.

Seoul tourist companies widely advertised a two-day trip to Pyongyang for the equivalent of US$1,000. This is expensive for a two-day, one-night package. But in Seoul where the average monthly salary is about $2,500, it is certainly feasible. Hence, between 500 and 800 South Koreans flew to Pyongyang daily. In mid-November the South Korean unification minister proudly stated that “about 100,000” South Koreans visited the North this year, and it seems a large number consisted of short-time visitors to the Arirang festival.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il personally approved admission of the unprecedented numbers of foreigners. Nothing like this has been seen since the World Youth Festival of 1989, and even then no South Koreans (and only a few citizens of developed Western countries) were allowed in.

The reason for this openness is clear: tourists bring money. Obviously, earnings from the Arirang festival were very good, and Kim decided to use the opportunity to fill state coffers. The foreigners were allowed in without too many questions being asked, and the show was extended for a few additional weeks. It looked like easy money; the grandiose show would have taken place with or without fee-paying foreigners.

It is possible that Kim Jong-il was persuaded to open the doors so wide by officials who might have had hidden vested interest in the matter: the days of religious devotion to the official ideology are long gone, and bureaucrats are learning fast how to make their jobs profitable.

It seems, however, that in the long run opening the door will have serious political consequences. For me, on my first visit to Pyongyang in 20 years, it was quite clear that life in North Korea has changed, even if on the surface everything appeared almost the same as in 1985.

My first impression was that Pyongyang was frozen in time, remaining unchanged from the mid-1980s. Very few new buildings, all very moderate in size and design, have appeared over those two decades. Pyongyang still reminds me of a relatively poor Soviet provincial city of the 1970s and presents a striking contrast with booming Beijing, let alone Seoul.

Even the street crowd has not changed that much. Many people are still dressed in Mao jackets or worn military outfits, and there seems to be even less traffic than in 1985. The veteran expats say nowadays there are far more vehicles than in the late 1990s when the famine reached its height, but for me the reference point is 1985, not 1999. All visible changes were minor, such as the introduction of bikes, which until the 1990s were banned from the “revolutionary capital”.

The much-discussed private business was nowhere to be seen, since municipal authorities “cleaned” the city on the eve of the festival, driving away all private vendors along with their stalls and canteens. This was a part of the new political line of re-imposing state controls and cracking down on the non-official economy, but it also destroyed what might be the only serious visual difference between Pyongyang of 1985 and today. Markets continued their activity, but behind high walls and strictly off limits to foreign visitors (but not for expats).

At the same time, Pyongyang does not look destitute. It is a poor city, but not more so than many towns in the less-successful Chinese provinces. This confirms what defectors from North Korea often say. However, the defectors see this “moderate poverty” in an altogether different light, as “great prosperity”. As one recently said, “Pyongyang people are rich, this city lives very well, almost as good as some cities in [Chinese] Manchuria.”

The gap between privileged Pyongyang and countryside is wide. This was clear from a short countryside trip even though our destination was the city of Kaesong, a semi-privileged location. We traveled about a 100 kilometers on a relatively good highway that connects the two major cities, but encountered no more than two dozen vehicles. A couple of decades ago one could see mechanization in the fields, but now all work is done manually.

However, the impression that Pyongyang is “unchanged and unchangeable” is completely wrong. The material environment has not changed much, but the spirit is very different from what it was in 1985.

The most remarkable aspect was the relative freedom with which North Koreans talked to foreigners, particularly about their great interest in everything that happens outside the state borders. This does not necessarily mean that my North Korean interlocutors rushed to say something critical about the authorities – on the contrary, from time to time most of them murmured the ritual phrases about superhuman wisdom and omniscience of the commander-in-chief.

However, back in the 1980s no North Korean dared talk to a foreigner for more than a few minutes, and under no circumstances could the topics stray from the weather and, sometimes, the greatness of the leader. My impression of North Korea in 1984-85 when I lived there was that of a country where not everybody supported the government, but where everyone was scared to death to say otherwise. It would be an overstatement to say that nowadays the fear has gone, but it has certainly waned.

It was important that my interlocutors were ready to ask thorny questions about life in other countries and in particular about South Korea. They asked about salaries in Seoul, about changes in the former Soviet Union after the collapse of communism (“Are people better off or not?”), about the fate of East German bureaucrats after the German unification (“They went to prison, did they?”), and about the reasons for Chinese success.

Sometimes it seemed some of my interlocutors suspected that the South was well ahead of the North in terms of living standards. This suspicion is dangerous to the regime whose claims of legitimacy are based on its alleged ability to deliver better standards of living. The actual gap between the two Koreas is huge. Still, North Koreans are told they are lucky to live in the North, in the prosperous state of juche (self-reliance), and not in the South, which is a destitute colony of the US imperialists.

Since the 1980s, an increasing number of better-informed North Koreans are uncertain about these official claims. However, in the past it would have been unthinkable to ask a stranger such dangerous questions after just a few minutes of conversation. It was also risky to demonstrate interest in the outside world, but this seems not to be the case any more.

One of the most unexpected and important encounters occurred when I was visiting the Chinese embassy. A small crowd attracted my attention. People were carefully studying something inside a large window on the wall; some finished and went away, only to be replaced by others. Of course, I went closer, only to discover that the people’s attention was attracted by pictures hanging in the embassy’s “information window”. The pictures were large and colorful, but otherwise absolutely unremarkable. The photos and captions were no different from the stuff cultural attaches across the globe put on the walls of their embassies – the usual boring fare about growth of shrimp production, new computer classes and state-of-the-art chicken farms. However, in North Korea of 2005 such mundane matters attract a crowd. Those pictures gave a glimpse of outside life.

This small episode was a sign of what now is in the air in North Korea: people are eager to learn more about the outside world. They are less afraid to show their interest in what once was forbidden knowledge, and they are increasingly uncertain about the future.

It seems the arrival of the foreigners has provided North Koreans with far more food for thought. Among the visitors there were younger South Koreans influenced by the left-wing nationalism, which has become increasingly popular in Seoul. These visitors were sometimes willing to cheer the anti-US slogans, and this was discussed in the right-wing South Korean media as yet another sign of North Korea’s ideological penetration. However, it seems that the actual influence is going the other way.

Obviously, the decision to open the doors wide was made suddenly, so North Korean police and security were caught unprepared by the sudden influx of South Koreans. I witnessed the arrival of a new South Korean group to the Yanggak Hotel, and could not help but be impressed by the scene. Remarkable was the lack of the usual North Korean regimentation and the absence of segregation, which is the basic principle in handing all foreigners, especially South Koreans. The unruly and noisy South Korean tourists, fresh from the airport, virtually stormed into the hotel where many North Korean guests (obviously of high social-standing) were staying as well. The chaos created manifold opportunities for short-time encounters. Such encounters likely took place with the North Koreans learning a thing or two about the South.

Most of the South Korean tourists were in their 50s and 60s, obviously many had some personal connection to the North. (Between 1945 and 1953 about 10% of entire North Korean population fled south, and a much smaller but still significant number of leftist South Koreans escaped to Kim Il-sung’s would-be socialist paradise, leaving family members back home). Those of that era are most likely to look for contacts, and also are far more realistic than the young intellectuals who have been brainwashed by the leftist-nationalist ideologues.

The scale of the tourist mini-boom meant that for the first time in their lives many thousand of North Koreans could observe South Koreans closely, even often getting the opportunity to talk to them. This might have grave consequences to the regime. In past it was possible to explain away the good dress and fat complexion of the few South Korean visitors by insisting that they came from the elite. But now North Koreans saw the well-dressed, well-fed, self-assured South Koreans coming to the festival in droves, day after day, week after week? This was what drivers, guides, sales clerks and other North Koreans saw. It was what participants in the Arirang festival saw as well when they had a few minutes to look at the audience.

North Koreans could not help but conclude that the South has an unusually large supply of rich capitalists. And their presence at the Arirang games obviously means that South Koreans cannot be badly off: after all, the “running dogs of the US imperialism” are not supposed to come to such events.

Of course, most encounters were necessarily short, but dress and looks speak volumes and sometimes a few casual words are enough to change a North Korean’s world view dramatically. It is easy to imagine a South Korean woman in her 50s, whose husband is a skilled worker, complaining that her family has been unable to change a car for more than six years – and even easier to imagine the impact such a matter-of-fact remark would have on a North Korean to whom private cars are a symbol of ultimate luxury, something akin to the role of private jets in Americans.

Of course, the people who interacted with the South Koreans and foreigners overwhelmingly came from the elite. Good examples were our three interpreters – the granddaughter of the founding father of the political police, the granddaughter of a prominent negotiator who dealt with the Americans, and a daughter of an ambassador.

However, the arrival of so many South Koreans meant that a large number of less-privileged North Koreans also had access to the visitors, and at least overheard them talk. By North Korean standards a bus driver working for a tourist company holds a good job. Such a man (women are never allowed to drive in North Korea as it is believed to be dangerous for the public) is by no means a member of the inner circle of power, but he has friends and relatives with whom he can share his experience.

So, was my former student right? Was opening the door so wide to foreigners a mistake by Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, a master of survival who felt the allure of easy money and forgot the number one rule of his own policy – “stability is more important than development”?

Or perhaps he was misled by some officials who pocketed some of the revenues? Only time will tell how dangerous the entire affair was for the regime, which survives on isolation and myth-making. It seems the first conclusions are an indication: North Korea decided in early November to close its borders to all tours from mid-December until probably mid-January.

One might assume that they will use this break from tourists to reeducate their tour drivers and explain to them that South Koreans only look rich while really they are poor. Will this work? I doubt it.

Posted in Bicycles, Civil society, Mass games, Tourism | Comments Closed

‘Unification Baby’ Seen as Omen by N. Koreans

Sunday, November 20th, 2005

Los Angeles Times
Barbara Demick
11/20/2005

A South Korean activist gives birth while visiting Pyongyang for an anniversary event. Some in the South suspect the timing was contrived.

While watching child gymnasts tumbling in unison across the field of Kim Il Sung Stadium in a performance heralding the miracle of the North Korean economy, Hwang Seon felt a sharp cramp in her abdomen.

Within minutes, the 32-year-old South Korean tourist was whisked by ambulance across town to Pyongyang’s maternity hospital. There, doctors delivered a 7-pound, 6-ounce girl who has become an instant celebrity and rare source of optimism in this often-forlorn North Korean capital.

The baby is the first born in the North as a South Korean citizen. Her birth Oct. 10 has been hailed as a mystical sign that the half-century-long division of the Korean peninsula is coming to an end.

“Our precious unification baby girl,” is how North Korea’s official KCNA news agency put it.

Hwang, who was more than eight months pregnant when she traveled to North Korea, spent two weeks recuperating in the maternity hospital, where she was treated without charge to around-the-clock nursing care. Her meals included seaweed soup, a Korean traditional postpartum treatment.

North Koreans suggested naming the baby Tongil, or “Reunification”; but that sounded like a boy’s name, so the parents instead opted for Kyoreh, meaning “One People.”

“Everybody said her birth was a lucky omen for the Korean people,” said Hwang, a left-wing political activist who favors rapprochement with the North.

Hwang and her daughter are the best-known South Korean visitors to Pyongyang recently. But from late September until early this month, visitors from the South came in unprecedented numbers to view mass games marking the 60th anniversary of North Kore&s ruling Workers’ Party.

During October, 7,203 South Koreans flew to North Korea on nearly 100 nonstop flights connecting the estranged neighbors.

For the first time, planes bearing the insignia of South Korea’s leading carriers, Korea Air and Asiana Air, became regular sights on the tarmac of Pyongyang’s seldom-visited Sunani airport; North Korea’s national carrier, Air Koryo, likewise was a frequent visitor to Incheon. Previously, there were only occasional charter flights between the airports for special events.

South Koreans in Pyongyang stood out in their colorful Gor-Tex jackets like exotic birds against the monochsomatic North Korean landscape. Almost all carried digital cameras, a rarity in the North.

While North Koreans trudged through the empty boulevards on foot, the South Koreans were transported in fancy tour buses, some of which sported color television monitors and video recorders.

The South Koreans were not permitted to go out unescorted and had to wear large nametags around their necks. At one point, a disoriented man in his 80s, born north of the border, tried to wander out of a Pyongyang hotel in search of his home village, but was blocked by a courteous but insistent North Korean doorman, said a South Korean visitor who witnessed the encounter.

Overall, the South Koreans said, they got the impression that North Korea was on a charm offensive. For example, when some tourists complained about a scene in the mass games that showed North Korean helicopter commandos battling what seemed to be South Korean soldiers, the material was promptly cut out.

The mass games were blatantly designed to tug at the heartstrings of South Koreans. Named “Arirang” after a popular Korean folk song, the program was replete with sentimental tunes and operatic skits about separated families reaching for one another across barbed wire. The show used more than 100,000 performers, many of them holding colored cards to make up intricate mosaics.

Keeping on message, the finale used a backdrop of doves with a message: “The last wish of the father [referring to the late North Korean founder Kim Ii Sung] is reunification of the fatherland.”

When North Koreans speak of reunification, their meaning is radically different from what Americans might think in recalling the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the absorption of the communist East by West Germany. Instead, the North Koreans describe a loose confederation under which their nation would keep its own system of government while receiving massive economic aid from the South.

“We don’t want what happened in Germany,” tour guide Pak Gyong Nam said as he showed visitors a 185-foot-high stone arch portraying two women in traditional Korean dress (one representing each Korea) touching hands across a broad thoroughfare known as Reunification Street. “We would be one country, but two governments.

“If Korea is reunified, South Korea will bring in technology and investment. We have great confidence in the future. If we are reunited, no problem.”

The sentiment explains in large part why North Koreans were so enthusiastic about the so-called unification baby.

“Have you heard about the South Korean woman who gave birth?” asked Kim Kyoung Kil, a North Korean lieutenant colonel who was escorting tourists at the demilitarized zone the day after Hwang and her newborn crossed on their way back to Seoul. “It means reunification is near. Only the Americans are preventing it.”

The reunification baby’s birth — which took place on the exact date of the 60th anniversary of the Workers’ Party founding — fits so perfectly into North Korean propaganda that many suspect it was contrived.

Hwang has issued a denial, saying that her due date was 20 days away when she made the trip and that she had scheduled a caesarean section in Seoul for the following week because of complications from a previous birth.

“Even my friends think it was planned, but it’s not so,” said Hwang, who lavished praise on the medical care and nursing she received. “They were very impressive…. Everybody was wonderfiul to me.”

Other South Korean tourists, most of whom were visiting on a two-day tour that cost $1,000, expressed mixed sentiments about their experience.

Student activists and union members who marched onto the field with a pro-reunification flag were greeted by wild applause from North Koreans in the audience.

But some of the southerners were dismayed by what they saw as an unabashed celebration of totalitarianism.

“Rather than being impressed by the extravagant brightness and precision of the mass games, I was shocked at how mechanical those people were and realized how oppressed they are,” said Lee Yong Hoon, a 62-year-old businessman from Suwon. “I realize we can’t rush into reunification until North Koreans can accept concepts of freedom and individuality.”

More than 1 million South Koreans have visited North Korea since 1998, but most have gone only to Mt. Kumgang, in a border-area enclave open to tourists.

The visits last month were the first mass influx of tourists to the North Korean capital. They coincided with a period of rapidly accelerating economic and cultural exchanges between the Koreas.

South Korea’s national assembly is expected Dec. 1 to approve a humanitarian and economic aid package for the North worth $2.5 billion — nearly double last year’s allocation. And the two announced this month that they might field a joint team for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

South Korea’s largesse has come under some criticism because of the North’s nuclear program, the subject of six-nation talks. The Bush administration, along with the conservative establishment inside South Korea, has taken the position that rewards should be deferred until the Pyongyang regime dismantles its nuclear weapons.

“Our government is in collusion with North Korea, creating the false illusion that all is quiet on the northern front, when it is not,” said Lee Dong Bok, a former South Korean intelligence official and assemblyman. By allowing its citizens to visit Pyongyang for mass games, he said, “South Korea is helping North Korea promote its propaganda.”

Technically, South Koreans need waivers from their country’s National Security Law — which prohibits support of North Korea— to visit Pyongyang.

Hwang Seon, the baby’s mother and a former student radical, served 34 months in South Korean prisons largely because she made an unauthorized trip to North Korea in 1998.

“The last time I came back [to South Korea] from North Korea, the National Intelligence Service was waiting for me to arrest me,” Hwang recalled. “This time, I held my baby in my arms and was welcomed back with flowers.”

Hwang’s husband was not able to meet his wife and new daughter upon their arrival home. He is in hiding, wanted by South Korean authorities on charges of pro-North Korean activities.

Posted in Mass games, Maternity Hospital, South Korea, Tourism | Comments Closed

An Employee from the Emperor Hotel in Rajin Out to Do Business in a Market Place

Monday, November 14th, 2005

Daily NK
Kim Young Jin
11/14/2005

Employees from the Emperor Hotel in the city of Rajin in North Korea are said to make their livings by doing business in market places. The hotel is well known for its casino.

On the 13th day of this month I had an interview with a manager of the hotel, who I will call Kim Myung Chul (alias, 42 years of age) for the sake of his safety. “The hotel has had much difficulty paying wages to its employees since it closed its casino in February,” he said. “It laid off about half of its 300 employees, and even some of the remaining half had to open restaurants near the hotel or start business in market places for their livings.”

The Emperor Hotel is a five star hotel founded by the Emperor Group in Hong Kong that invested about 24 million dollars in it. It is well known for the finest casino in North Korea.

For the last two years, two high raking Chinese officials have lost a large sum of government money to the casino and the Chinese government complained to the North pressing it to close it. Thus, it was closed in February, and the hotel lost many Chinese tourists. The number of Chinese tourists had been almost 20 thousands a year before. Virtually the hotel is out of business now.

Chae Moon Ho, a former head of Traffic and Transportation Office of Yanbian Autonomous Prefecture in Jilin, China squandered 3,510,000 yuan (more than 434,000 dollars) of government money in the casino and was sentenced to 8 year imprisonment at the first trial. Mr. Wang, a former superintendent of highway construction, wasted 870,000 yuan (about 107,000 dollars) of government money in the casino and was taken into custody.

After these incidents, the Chinese government had prevented travel agencies around Yanbian area from holding North Korean tourism in March this year. It lifted the ban last September.

The following is some excerpts from the interview.

– When did you start to work for the Emperor Hotel?

I have been working in the hotel since 2000. People in Rajin call it Bipa Hotel or the Five Star Hotel. When the hotel was first opened, it was run in a capitalistic way. Even hostesses from Russia and China were recruited. But they have all returned now because they could no longer get paid. It took 3 years to complete its construction. I heard that it had been intended to be a 30 story building, but it is 7 stories high because the Emperor Group cut spending. Visitors were usually foreign gamblers and those Chinese who enjoyed fish and other seafoods.

– How is business now?

Business situation became very tough after the Chinese stopped coming. Usually thousands of Chinese people visited for the summer, and Russian and Chinese gamblers constantly came and went. But since the casino was closed and the Chinese stopped coming, it has been difficult for the employees to be paid. The hotel even laid off half of its employees. At frist 300 people were recruited, but there are less than 150 employees now. Among them, less than 50, mostly janitors, cooks, Karaoche coordinators, massagists, come to the hotel to work.

– Does the owner not pay the employees?

I do not know. Even though the owner is Emperor Group from Hongkong, the employees are controlled by the Administrative Committee of Rajin city. I suppose that wages must be distributed by the civil authorities. Anyhow, I have not been able to be paid since last spring.

– What kind of people are employed in the hotel?

High ranking people were eliminated from the recruit lest they be contaminated by capitalism brought in by foreign gamblers. For example, Kim Il Sung University graduates, partisans, workers involved with law and national defense and their family members were all eliminated. Mostly tall and good looking people from Rajin were accepted.

– How are the employees paid?

At first, we were well paid. We were not rationed but received wages. Until 2000, I received 300 yuan a month. At that time, 1 yuan($0.1237) was equivalent of 25 Chosun(NK) won($0.0125), and rice was quite cheap. Hence 300 yuan made a sound pay. Moreover, we were fed three times a day and allowed to sleep in the hotel, which was considerable benefits for us. But while business was getting difficult, employees were being turned into 8.3 workers one after another. Finally, payment started to be incomplete from last February. We could just take three meals a day thanks to the money the 8.3 workers gave to the hotel.

– What is 8.3 worker?

The hotel forced some of its employees to earn money all by themselves and to give some part of it to the hotel. 8.3 worker is called so because Kim Il Sung ordered the system during a factory visit on a third day of August.

– How do 8.3 workers earm money?

Some workers opened restaurants near the hotel, and others merchandize in market places. There are people like me who are out here in China and do business with old customers. Chinese tourists like to eat fish and other seafoods in Rajin. That’s why 8.3 workers like to open seafood restaurants near the hotel calling them branch restaurants of the hotel. There are more than 10 such restaurants near the hotel. There are also a few souvenir shops. If they earn money, they give some of it to the hotel. Those who merchandize are just like that. If you give some money to the hotel every month, you are not required to go there to work.

– Does the money go to Emperor Group?

No. It goes to the Administrative Committee of Rajin city. The hotel is just a Work Place: we are not under the owner’s control. We are required to take permission from the Administrative Committee to work outside the hotel.

– Do 8.3 workers make much money?

It is advantageous for business to be an employee for the hotel. We do not pay such heavy taxes as ordinary merchandizers do. It is also easier for us to occupy stalls in market places than for ordinary merchandisers.

– What is people’s life like in Rajin recently?

Outsiders envy Rajin and Seonbong because they compose the free trade zone, but the situation is on the contrary. The government takes more from Rajin and Seonbong because of the free trade. Rice is also more expensive. They are good places for the rich to live in but not for the poor.

Posted in China, Economic reform, Foreign direct investment, Gambling, Hoteling, Labor conditions/wages, Rason Economic and Trade Zone (Rajin-Sonbong), Tourism | Comments Closed

Often-gloomy North Korea shows a sunnier side

Monday, October 10th, 2005

Herald Tribune
Choe Sang-Hun
10/10/2005

Here in the North Korean capital, where ubiquitous slogans posted on deserted boulevards and carved into mammoth towers give the city the look of an off-season theme park dedicated to a bygone ideology, one message is conspicuously absent these days.

There is no mural showing muscular North Korean soldiers stabbing American troops with bayonets, as there once was. No longer is there a billboard depicting a North Korean missile slamming into Capitol Hill in Washington. And there are no shrill slogans exhorting North Koreans to prepare for “a final battle with American imperialist aggressors,” as they did in the past.

“It is true that we have removed anti-American slogans,” said Hong Sung Chul, one of the North Korean officials who recently escorted a group of South Koreans on a tour of the North. “We hope the Americans reciprocate our good will.”

Hong said the removal of anti-American slogans was part of North Korea’s effort to cultivate a favorable atmosphere amid six-party talks aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. A new round of negotiations is scheduled for November.

But it is still a toss-up as to whether the banished imagery was part of an official campaign to recast the most enduring feature of North Korean psyche, the fear and loathing of Americans, or just a publicity effort for visitors.

Either way, the revamping of propaganda in North Korea’s showpiece capital was as much a sign of change here as the busloads of foreign tourists rushing through the once-forbidden city. These modest indicators offer a glimpse into a country that is gradually regaining confidence after years of famine and after tentatively increasing its contacts with the outside world.

Pyongyang is not a mirror of the rest of the country. The government stocks the city with politically reliable citizens and keeps its living standard much higher than elsewhere. But in the sales pitches and bargaining of store clerks and the relaxed manner of Communist minders escorting visitors, eager to polish their government’s image, a new measure of optimism was palpable among the country’s elite.

The government minders, part tour guides and part public relations officers for the regime, talked about the importance of rebuilding the North Korean economy and attracting foreign investment with the same rehearsed spontaneity that North Koreans once recited anti-American diatribes.

As North Korea prepared to celebrate Monday the 60th anniversary of the ruling Workers’ Party, throngs of students and citizens have been mobilized daily to rehearse for a massive outdoor rally. Streets were festooned with red-and-yellow party flags emblazoned with the images of a hammer, sickle and calligrapher’s brush.

For almost two months, the authorities have also brought thousands of people into Pyongyang in North Korea’s version of a pilgrimage to Mecca. Here, the faithful were treated with an “Arirang” extravaganza, the closest thing to an Olympic opening ceremony in North Korea, but one with a decidedly totalitarian flavor.

In an unusual gesture of openness, the North Koreans this year opened the show to outsiders, accepting hundreds of them daily, mostly from South Korea, in a scheme driven not simply by a desire to educate outsiders on North Korean socialism, but also by commercialism.

For these outsiders, the trip was an occasion to witness the country’s cautious and clumsy steps into the outside world even as the North is still burdened with the ideas of an outmoded era. Unwittingly or not, North Korea, by opening itself to well-fed South Koreans wielding digital cameras and bursting with U.S. dollars, was casting itself as one of the world’s weirdest tourist destinations.

In between visits to Communist monuments, tourists were ushered into souvenir shops where smiling beauties sold everything from mushrooms to “adder liquor,” a leaky bottle of fiery alcohol with a dead snake in it. The women extolled the concoction’s purported effectiveness as an aphrodisiac and only accepted euros and U.S. dollars.

The South Korean tourists spent profusely, buying goods whose main attraction was neither quality nor prices, but rather the flimsy packaging and outdated design: perfect I-have-been-there mementos from the world’s last remaining “socialist paradise.”

North Korea demands that all visitors start their trip to Pyongyang by bowing before the 23-meter-tall, or 75-foot-high, brass statue of Kim Il Sung, the first ruler of North Korea.

On a recent trip, however, South Korean tourists stood upright before the statue, some with hands in pockets, some clicking digital cameras, as an official solemnly bid them to bow. If North Korean minders were enraged, they did not show it.

But questioning revealed the minders’ unique take on their country’s problems with the outside world.

“People in South Korea and the rest of the world don’t understand us,” complained Hong. “We know some countries ridicule us for our economic difficulties. We want to rebuild our economy fast. How good will it be if we can use the money spent for our nuclear weapons to buy rice for our people. But we can’t.

“We saw what the Americans did to Iraq,” Hong continued. “What option would a small country like us have but to build nuclear weapons when a big bully is determined to strangle us and gang up on us?”

Park Man Gil, a North Korean official, stressed his country’s desire for greater contact with its neighbor. “We want more economic cooperation with South Korea,” he said.

The North’s desire to make connection to the outside world was confirmed – vigorously, in fact – by a South Korean executive.

“You always hear two voices here. On one hand, they lash out at the United States; on the other hand, they are conciliatory,” said Park Sang Kwon, president of Pyeonghwa Motors of South Korea, which runs an auto-assembly factory in North Korea. “As a person who has dealt with the North Koreans more often than any other from the outside, I can say with certainty that the North Koreans really want to be accepted by, and live with, the Americans.”

Posted in Civil society, Mass games, USA | Comments Closed

A striking glimpse of North Korea

Friday, September 2nd, 2005

Globe Staff
Ty Burr
9/2/2005

The West has so successfully demonized North Korea in recent years that the notion of normal teenage girls living normal teenage lives in the capital city of Pyongyang comes as a shock. Only when the shock wears off do you begin to see at what cost that normality is maintained.

“A State of Mind” is the British documentarian Daniel Gordon’s second film about the country he calls the “least visited, least known, least understood” on the planet, and it’s a quietly wrenching eye-opener. The rare Western filmmaker allowed north of the 38th Parallel, Gordon focused on athletic achievement in 2002’s “The Game of Their Lives,” about the 1966 North Korean World Cup team. Here he uses athletic achievement to make striking and subtle points about daily life in a paranoid dictatorship. Take your teenagers.

Each year the city hosts the Mass Games, a sort of epic three-day pageant of gymnastics, music, and placard flipping that suggests what Busby Berkeley might have come up with if he’d been hired to choreograph the Nuremberg Rally. “A State of Mind” zooms in on two young girls practicing for the 2003 Games, but it quickly ducks under that thematic wire to offer fuller portraits of their lives and families.

At 13, Pak Hyon Sun has a bit of the rebel to her she drolly confesses to playing hooky from the required two-hour Games drills until she was busted, and she carps about having to learn a particularly tough routine. Kim Song Yun groans about having to wake up for school like any other 11-year-old. This is about as defiant as they get, because everyone in “A State of Mind” kids, parents, grandparents, teachers lives in ideological thrall to the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Il, and to the memory of his late father, Kim Il Sung.

There is no resistance; there is, instead, a complete and almost touchingly childlike faith in the divinity of “the General” and, by extension, the evil of his enemies, America chief among them. (The film points out that this has been so ever since the devastating US bombing of the North during the Korean War.) If you want to know what a successful state cult of personality looks like, here it is.

The director never pounds the point home, though, and he doesn’t have to. He mostly observes this society at work, occasionally dropping patient narrative points about the Games’ usefulness in subordinating individual will to the needs of the group. The film makes clear that those living in the capital are better off than the peasants in the country, and it shows that “better off” is a relative term. The Paks and the Kims are from different classes the former are blue-collar, the latter academic intellectuals but their living quarters are similarly cramped high-rise apartments, with grandparents and siblings sleeping on floors. Each person is allotted one chicken and five eggs per month.

And these are the good times. “A State of Mind” lets the older generation talk candidly of the “Arduous March,” the period after Kim Il Sung’s 1994 death during which the country fell into a famine whose scope has never been fully calculated. Outside commentators have blamed North Korea’s outmoded agricultural policies; the Paks and the Kims blame America, as they do for everything, including the nightly electrical blackouts. But you might, too, if you had a state-installed radio in your kitchen that could be turned down but never off.

A co-production of the BBC, French public TV, and New York’s WNET, “A State of Mind” slightly overstays its welcome, and its use of Beth Orton-style techno-folk under the Mass Games routines is an odd if catchy creative choice (what’s wrong with hearing the music the girls actually performed to?). That said, the film’s most remarkable aspect is its depiction of casually loving family relations and giggling girlishness proof of the resilience of smaller human freedoms in the face of almost constant mind control.

The girls, of course, consider Kim Jong Il their spiritual father. Song Yun goes so far as to say, “Other kids get to play in the bright sunlight, but we train to perform in front of our dear General.” When the Games finally arrive and they are an epic display of state kitsch the two wait in vain for Kim himself to attend one of the shows. He never does, but the notion of a Kafkaesque void at the top is lost on the subjects. “A State of Mind” implicitly insists we can only truly understand what we can see for ourselves, and that goes for the West’s view of North Korea as well as the girls’ view of their dictator.

Posted in Mass games | Comments Closed

Against the odds, North Korea begins race for sports sponsorship

Wednesday, April 13th, 2005

AFP
4/13/2005

In the last global outpost of hardline Communism, North Korea’s athletes have begun competing in an event they seem destined to lose under their current manager — the race for international sponsorship.

After being shut out for decades from the lucrative spin-offs of capitalist economics, officials in North Korea say dictator Kim Jong-Il is now urging sports chiefs to find major global brands to bankroll their national teams.

“We want to do what all the countries around the world are doing. We want to find sponsors,” the chief executive officer of North Korea’s Sports Marketing Group, Jon Chol-Ho, told an AFP journalist in Pyongyang.

The government set up the Sports Marketing Group in 2000 to find sponsors ahead of the Sydney Olympics but Jon said, after some initial success, global brands had shown very little interest.

“I have sent messages to many people around the world but there is no answer, no reply,” Jon said.

North Korea’s initial ventures began well when they secured Italian sports apparel company FILA to sponsor their national teams.

But when FILA was sold to a US company in 2003, Jon said the days of the partnership were numbered and the sports firm did not renew the contract when it expired last year.

Other brands, such as Adidas, Mizuno and Asics, have taken a minor interest and helped teams for the Athens Olympics and other major events, but Jon said the deals were generally only for uniforms and equipment, not big cash.

“For Athens, we did that very much the hard way… this is not so good,” he said. “I want to make one big contract with one big company. The problem is just to find one company.”

Jon said Kim, who has opened up tiny sections of North Korea’s stagnant economy over recent years despite his virulent anti-Western ideologies, was behind the push for international sports sponsors.

“It is very important for people to know this. Our great General Kim Jong-Il is very interested in developing our sports,” he said to emphasise that foreign companies would be welcomed onto North Korea’s sporting fields.

“He is very interested to give us everything we need. That’s why I’m confident if a company asks if anything is possible, I can answer yes, as long as it is not against any law.”

However two sports marketing executives with extensive experience in North Asia said that simply having Kim’s blessing was not nearly enough to entice major brands into investing in such a poor nation with a closed economy.

“There are virtually no commercial activities in North Korea so it means there’s almost no chance for a company to generate income there through sponsorship,” a senior executive with a global sports marketing firm in South Korea told AFP by phone from Seoul.

“If there’s no profit for them in that domestic market, companies will continue to stay away.”

Richard Avory, who was one of the pioneers of sports marketing in China and a former senior executive with global industry giant IMG, agreed that one of the biggest obstacles for North Korea was that almost no-one there could buy the goods of potential sponsors.

“The basic problem lies with the fact they don’t have much of a market… there is no consumer demand,” Avory, who is now president of China Sports and Entertainment Group, said by telephone from Beijing.

However Avory said there was some hope for North Korea simply because they have some world class sports teams and athletes.

The men’s football team is one of eight left in Asia still in the race for next year’s World Cup, although they have lost their first three matches in the final qualifying round and their odds of getting through are slim.

Their female counterparts are also one of the best teams in Asia and four North Koreans won silver medals at the Athens Olympics, including Hyang Mi-Kim in the women’s table tennis and featherweight boxer Kim Song-Guk.

“Being good at sports is very important… obviously any firm that sponsors a team wants that team to be good,” Avory said, adding companies would be willing to back North Korean athletes if they had a stronger international presence.

“If they (the men’s football team) could qualify for the World Cup, that would be a huge boost to them from the viewpoint of companies wanting to be involved.”

The Seoul-based marketing chief, who did not want to be named, said another potential sponsorship avenue was through South Korean firms looking to boost their domestic image by helping out their “brothers” in the north.

“Some companies already supply some products from a humanitarian standpoint… that may create good PR in South Korea and help their sales domestically,” he said.

The Seoul executive said North Korea’s reputation in the West as an “axis of evil” and an “outpost of tyranny”, as US leaders have described the nation, has played only a minor role in keeping international sponsors away.

“It’s more an economic issue. It could create some bad PR (for Western firms) but politics and the business of sponsorship are generally different issues.”

Posted in Finance, Sports | Comments Closed

N Korea football violence erupts

Wednesday, March 30th, 2005

BBC
3/30/2005

North Korean soldiers and riot police had to step in after violence erupted when the home side lost a World Cup qualifying match to Iran, say reports.

Bottles, stones and chairs were thrown on to the pitch in Pyongyang after a North Korean player was sent off.

Violence then spilled over outside the stadium and thousands of angry fans reportedly prevented Iranian players from boarding the team bus.

North Korea, which lost 2-0, is bottom of its World Cup qualifying group.

It has already lost to Japan and Bahrain and must win its three remaining matches to stand a chance of making it through to next year’s World Cup finals in Germany.

Wednesday’s violence erupted in the second half of the match at the Kim Il-sung stadium, which was broadcast on international satellite television.

North Korean players and fans became upset when one of their players was blocked by an Iranian defender and fell near the goal, Japanese news agency Kyodo reported.

Demanding a penalty, they rushed Syrian referee Mohamed Kousa, who instead gave a North Korean player a red card, according to Kyodo.

‘Severe punishment’

The unrest continued after the final whistle, and match officials were unable to leave the pitch for more than 20 minutes as objects were thrown at them.

As the violence continued outside the stadium, riot police stepped in and managed to push the crowd back so that the Iranian team could leave.

“The atmosphere on the pitch and outside the pitch was not a sports atmosphere,” Iran’s coach Branko Ivankovic was quoted by Reuters news agency as saying.

“It is very disappointing when you feel your life is not safe. My players tried to get to the bus after the game but it was not possible – it was a very dangerous situation.”

A North Korean defector and former football official told Reuters that his homeland had an organised society and such behaviour was unlikely to be tolerated.

“I have never seen anything like this myself,” he said. “The people responsible are likely to be tracked down and severely punished.”

Posted in Alcohol, Civil society, Football (soccer), Sports | Comments Closed

Ex-N Korea football coach defects

Thursday, March 11th, 2004

BBC
3/11/2004

The former coach of North Korea’s national football team has defected to the South, according to the Yonhap news agency.

It reports that the South Korean intelligence service has had 56-year-old Mun Ki-nam in protective custody since he arrived in Seoul in January

He coached the North Korean team from 1999 to 2000.

An unnamed government official said Mr Mun escaped from the North in August last year, along with his wife and four children.

He reportedly took refuge at South Korea’s embassy in Beijing in mid-January.

Mr Mun was also involved in coaching a pan-Korean side which took part in a youth football championship in Portugal in 1991.

Another North Korean football coach, Yun Myong-chan, defected to the South in 1999.

Posted in Civil society, Emigration, Football (soccer), Sports | Comments Closed

Koreans unite for student games

Wednesday, August 20th, 2003

BBC
8/20/2003

More than 200 North Korean athletes, officials and journalists have arrived in South Korea for the World Student Games, after days of political wrangling.

The North Korean delegation flew south for the games at Daegu, after reversing a decision to withdraw from the event over a recent anti-North flag-burning protest in the South Korean capital Seoul.

The row erupted at a delicate time for inter-Korean relations, just a week before crucial talks on the North’s nuclear weapons programme are due to get under way.

In a further sign that relations between the two sides are thawing, both Koreas have agreed in principle to field a unified team for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens.

The agreement was announced on Wednesday in a joint statement by the two delegations attending the Daegu games.

Athletes from North and South Korea marched behind a single “Korean Peninsula” flag for the first time at the 2000 Sydney Olympics but they competed as separate countries during the actual competition.

North Korea also sent a large delegation to last year’s Asian Games, participating for the first time in a major sporting event hosted by South Korea.

The BBC’s Charles Scanlon in Seoul says the North’s participation in those games was seen as an important symbol of warming ties.

But he says the next big test will come next week in Beijing, when the North Koreans sit down with their Asian neighbours and the United States for six-party talks aimed at putting a stop to Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions.

Triumphant arrival

The North Korean delegation arrived in the South on Wednesday waving their hands and smiling at supporters waiting for them at the airport.

“Brothers in the South, we are happy to see you,” said Jon Guk-man, head of the North Korean delegation.

Reuters news agency said South Korea was paying all the expenses for the North’s team, which organisers consider a major draw in an event short on big sporting names.

North Korea’s about-face over its decision to boycott the games came after South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun expressed regret for last Friday’s anti-North protest, describing it as “inappropriate”.

Mr Roh’s government has been struggling to maintain good relations with Pyongyang, despite signs that the North is pushing ahead with the development of nuclear weapons.

His conciliatory remarks contrasted with comments by US President George W Bush on Monday, who said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il was a “dangerous man” who loved “rattling sabres”.

Pyongyang has repeatedly warned that the US must change its “hostile policy” towards the North if forthcoming Beijing talks, which will also include Washington, are to make progress.

Posted in Civil society, Sports | Comments Closed

The game of their lives

Tuesday, October 15th, 2002

From the BBC:
10/15/2002

Seven survivors of the North Korean World Cup team that beat Italy in 1966 have arrived in England to revisit the scene of their triumph.

Against all the odds, the North Koreans reached the quarter-finals having been adopted by the people of Middlesbrough where they played their group matches.

North Korea arrived in England unknown and unwanted.

In 1966 there was only one place in the finals for the whole of Africa, Asia and Oceania.

Africa boycotted the finals because there was no guaranteed place, leaving Australia and North Korea to contest the spot.

With no diplomatic ties, the qualifiers took place in Cambodia, with North Korea overwhelming Australia 6-1 and 3-1.

Horror then admiration

The British Government was aghast and even considered not issuing visas to the winners, but relented.

The Koreans lost their opening game 3-0 to a hard Russian side, but earned the love and respect of the people of Middlesbrough.

Those fans were even more delighted with a 1-1 draw against Chile.

The deciding match was against the might of Italy.

Five minutes before half-time, a ball headed out of defence found Pak Doo-ik, who took the ball off Giovanni Rivera and hit a powerful shot to beat the goalkeeper.

Sensational games

It was the biggest upset in 36 years of the World Cup.

More sensations followed when North Korea took a 3-0 lead against Portugal in the quarter-finals.

But in the end their naivety let them down, and Eusebio scored four in their 5-3 defeat.

North Korea went home as heroes, the Italians were pelted with rotten tomatoes, and the impact of that defeat still survives.

Posted in Football (soccer) | Comments Closed

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