North Korea Undercover (5 page)

One dozen years on from the Hitch’s galactic quest, it felt the same, that we had travelled back in time or across unknown dimensions to somewhere other than the known universe, and a place and a time spitting with hatred. An officer winding up a vast crowd of North Korean soldiers screamed on state TV: ‘We will destroy the United States mercilessly.’

The reason North Korea is the most out-of-date-looking country on earth, the one whose rulers reject the modern world so utterly, is no accident. Throughout its history, Korea, especially the north, dominated by its savage mountains, has turned its back on the outside world. It used to be known as the Hermit Kingdom. Long after China reluctantly accepted foreign ‘treaty ports’ on the fringes of the Middle Kingdom, the Koreans held out, believing that the purity of the race must be defended at all costs.

Invaders like plains. They don’t like mountains and other geographical impediments to conquering, like islands. That means that long after the old believers on the plains have been wiped off the face of the earth, the religions, languages and prejudices of the people up in the mountains linger. That’s why Welsh, a language that by some yardsticks should have been at death’s door from 1282 onwards, still sticks to the hilly bits to the left of England; why Gaelic still survives in the islands of the far west of Ireland and the far north of Scotland; Ladino still prospers in the higher bits of the Dolomites 2,000 years after the Romans left; why Chechen
nationalism still pokes the Russian crocodile in the eye, one and a half centuries and more after Lermontov wrote his lullaby which goes something like this:

Tum-tee-tum,

Sleep, little baby,

Or the Chechen

Will come

Tum-tee-tum

And cut your throat...
⁵

North Korea is as wildly mountainous as Chechnya, and as wildly hostile to any invading force. The soil is not fertile, and there are no great gold or silver mines such as made the conquistadors risk the climb into Peru. So for sensible reasons the world left Korea well alone for centuries, almost as untravelled as the dark side of the moon.

The founding myth of the Korean nation is as credible or silly as the one that they tell you about Rome. In Korea, a bear made love to a god, creating a deity called Tangun. The myth continues that Korea has been around for 5,000 years. The reality is that for big chunks of those five millennia the difference between Korea and China was not vivid. ‘For much of the country’s long history its northern border was fluid, and the national identities of literate Korean and Chinese mutually indistinguishable,’ writes Professor Brian Myers.
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In the year 936, the Koryo dynasty was founded and China and Korea became clearly separate. In 1392, the Chosun dynasty took power, bringing with them Confucianism – and a rigidly controlled set of five castes, dividing society. At the bottom were the slaves or serfs, who continued to live miserable lives until the twentieth century. Above them were the inferior people, butchers and gravediggers and the like. Above them were the peasant farmers, merchants and trades people. Above them the translators, clerks and doctors and above them the ruling caste: the
yangban
or high officials of civic or military virtue, who enforced the Confucian ‘Mandate of Heaven’. Elitism and social stratification is hard-wired into the Korean soul, and this truth remains so in both North and, to a lesser extent, in democratic South Korea to this day. Confucianism also demands ancestor worship and filial piety, big-time, a point made amusingly by Michael Breen when he recounts how in 2003 some bosses at Hyundai, South Korea’s multi-billion-dollar mega-industrial complex, went to the company founder, Chung Ju Yung, to tell him in person that they had built the first road for tourists to travel into North Korea. At that point, Chung had been dead for two years.
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The ancien regime’s social layer-cakery resurfaced – if it had ever truly gone away – in North Korea in 1957, under Kim Il Sung, who introduced fifty-one layers, broadly dividing society into three: the core class, the wavering class and the hostile class. The core class encompasses the regime’s nabobs, ministers, secret policemen, senior army officers and top members of the Korean Workers’ Party and their families, the majority of people allowed to live in Pyongyang. Our minders would be core class; and as
foreign visitors, so, temporarily, would we. The waverers include other professionals, academics, potentially worthy citizens tainted in some way by some anti-regime toxins. The third, hostile class seems no different from the slaves of the Middle Ages: human cattle, to be driven hard and left to die, without compunction or compassion. The hostile class is held to be impure: anyone who istainted with foreign influences, ethnic Korean families in China or Japan; anyone with a Christian background – although this encompasses the Kim dynasty itself – or anyone with ancestral wealth or ‘noble’ blood. Hostile-class toxins can go back three generations, so perfectly brave soldiers or brilliant athletes can suddenly lose all privileges when a grandfather who spent time in Japan or ended up a prisoner for a time in South Korea is discovered in a background check.

Family names brand an individual’s identity. In the British Census for 1881, one researcher counted 400,000 separate surnames; in South Korea, more than half the population of around 50 million share five names: Kim, Lee, Park, Choi and Chong.
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The same is true for the North, too. The reason for Korea’s poverty of names is because it was only in the nineteenth century that freed serfs had to find a surname; very often they picked the name of a local ruling family. This must surely have an impact on the relationship between the mass and the individual, the caste and the single unit.

There is also a crazy geographical element to the caste system, which sees ‘hostile’ citizens shipped to the north-east of the country, close to the Chinese border. Time and again, you will read about
something dreadful happening in North and South Hamgyong provinces. This is where the famine of the 1990s hit hardest and where the regime made it hardest of all for outsiders – that is, foreigners – to monitor whether food aid was going to the people who needed it the most. This is where the most revolts and rebellions against the Kim dynasty happen – all, thus far, crushed.

One needs to look at the map of North Korea with the regime’s deadly serious mind-set of racial purity in mind: Pyongyang, to the south-west of North Korea (though, of course, in the waist of the whole Korean peninsula) is the bullseye of the core class, with cities like Chongjin in North Hamgyong being on the outer limits of ‘civilization’. Much of the double tragedy of the late 1990s, when immense amounts of American and South Korean food aid ended up in the hands of the regime’s haves, while the have-nots perished in their millions, was because of the foolish assumption that the government of North Korea wanted to keep all of its citizens alive. On the contrary, diminishing the power and numbers of the hostile class continues to be a real but unarticulated regime goal.

Most of the inhabitants of the gulag come from the hostile class, as do many defectors. The risks of getting out seem not so bad if you are at the bottom of the heap. That means that few defectors come from the core class or have ever visited Pyongyang: the ones who do are vivid exceptions, like the Kim dynasty’s top ideologist and the founder of Jucheism, Hwang Jang Yop, who defected to the South Korean embassy in Beijing in 1997. A few days later Kim Jong Il was reported on Radio Pyongyang as saying:‘Cowards, leave if you want to. We will defend the red flag of revolution to the end.’Hwang’s wife committed suicide; one daughter died in suspicious circumstances, ‘falling off a truck’; his other children and grandchildren were reportedly picked up and swept off to the
gulag. In North Korea, treachery is punished unto the third generation. Hwang seems to be torn in half between self-hatred, because of the consequences of his actions for his family, and honour, that he had to escape to tell the truth about the regime, to stop the lying. It is ahideous dilemma that confronts every single defector.

Korea remained isolated from the outside world longer than Timbuktu or Antarctica. In 1806 Mungo Park’s fated expedition passed Timbuktu; in 1841 Captain Ross, RN, discovered the Mount Erebus volcano on the edge of the frozen continent. Korea’s self-enforced removal from modernity was first properly challenged in 1866 when an American gunboat, the USS
Sherman
, a side wheeler, chugged up the Taedong river towards Pyongyang. She was ordered to halt by the young king’s regent, but the crew plugged on to the city, where, after a fracas, she hit a submerged rock and was left vulnerable to Korean fire-ships. The first two failed, but the third succeeded in setting the
Sherman
alight, and soon everyone on board perished. This triggered a reaction in Washington DC, newly belligerent about defending America’s standing in Asia. By the 1880s, the Koreans had been forced to sign a free trade deal with the Americans and the end of the über-isolationist dynasty was in sight.

But nationalist hopes of a stand-alone Korea died with the rise and rise of Japan. The land of the rising sun’s forces invaded Korea in 1904, sneakily marching north to challenge Russian occupation of Manchuria. The Russians fought and lost – the first significant defeat of a Western(-ish) power to Asiatic might in modern history. In 1910, the Japanese formally occupied the Korean peninsula, bringing a fascist cherry to top off the Hermit Kingdom’s Confucianist -‘obey power’ – cake. In 1945, the Japanese, thanks to the Americans, left Korea for good. In the South, they were
replaced by a series of foolish and bloody pro-American dictators who eventually gave way in the 1980s to a proper democracy. In the North, the Japanese governor was replaced by a cut-throat guerrilla boss who had ended up in Stalins embrace, Kim Il Sung – and the Hermit Kingdom’s ideology of total obedience to power, isolation, racial purity and rigid social stratification is still in place today.

We rode into the city along a wide road, the surface comically bumpy, so that we bounced around inside the coach as if we were taking a cross-Channel ferry in January.

Mr Hyun and Miss Jun formally introduced themselves with a mixture of jokes and dangers, just like tour guides do in Rome or Paris. But not many tourist guides in the forty-minute ‘transfer’ between airport and hotel raise the possibility of thermo-nuclear war between the host country and the United States.

Mr Hyun and Miss Jun were yin and yang, gloom and sun. She seemed to be more open than Mr Hyun and certainly more sparky and feisty, and somehow she seemed to be better plugged into the movers and shakers in the DPRK. Miss Jun was always fashionably dressed and her English was more natural; Mr Hyun’s accent was thicker and he wore a dark suit, white shirt, black tie, black glasses, suggesting that had he lived in the West he would have made a natural undertaker. His melancholy bent broke every now and then into a series of infectious giggles, making him oddly likeable. Both were excellent ambassadors for their country and never once said anything critical of the regime. They were messengers for a nation out of synch with the rest of the world, and that’s not an easy place to be.

It would not be quite true to suggest that there was no traffic what soever. A few army lorries with canvas roofs, a big black Volga from
Soviet times, the odd petrol tanker; every now and then a hideously overcrowded bus chugged along; also a series of fancy-ish saloons shot by, accommodating the elite. But the ordinary traffic you must struggle through in an ordinary poor country – the tuk-tuks of Thailand or their equivalents in Bangladesh, the patched-up old bangers that should have died years ago you see on the road in Uganda – it didn’t exist. Evidence of absence means something: that the law is, if you are poor, you cannot runa vehicle, still less take it on the grand road from city to airport.

My all-time favourite ‘Pyongyang traffic’ story happened back in 1995, and was told by Alexander Frater of the
Observer
, who had gone to North Korea as a tourist. One evening in the Koryo bar, Frater was accosted by a middle-aged Danish engineer.

‘Have you heard the news?’

‘What news?’

‘There’s been a traffic accident!’

I stared at him. This was a statistical impossibility.

‘It’s true!’ he cried.‘An Egyptian diplomat ran into a truck!’

‘Is he all right?’

‘Well, the doctors are still very excited but, yes, I gather the prognosis is good.’
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The bumps could not be ignored. Being tossed and turned, as if inside a washing machine, suggested that the people who ruled North Korea had a soft spot for the grandiose and a weakness for detail. Why build a motorway if it makes everyone who drives along it seasick?

The big road carved through a canyon of multi-storeyflats. Concrete seemed a popular construction choice; grey a popular colour. After a while, it became apparent that concrete and grey came as standard. Many of the blocks of flats boasted large slogans in red letters, but written in Korean I couldn’t make out their precise meaning. They weren’t selling Coca-Cola. We passed an enormous painting of Kim the First, smiling girlishly out of a red background. The Korean was later translated for me:‘The Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, will always be with us.’

It’s an old trope, mocked by Shelley in hispoem ‘Ozymandias’:

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.’
Nothing beside remains.

Never have I seen such monotonous homage to tyranny.

On we bounced, past more grey blocks, noting that the ground-floor apartments featured heavily barred windows – suggesting that the crime of burglary in the DPRK is not unknown – past a traffic policewoman in a blue uniform, standing in a painted white circle like awitch in some pagan doodah. The traffic-witch directed thin air with balletic aplomb. Onwards we went, past the Pyongyang Arc de Triomphe, deliberately a few feet taller than the real thing in Paris, before we came to a stop at ourhotel, the Haebangsan. Above the hotel, in Korean, a sign proclaimed: ‘Hail the light of Korea’ smilitary first-ism, General Kim Jong Un!’ It sounds weird and clunky in Korean, too, just like George Orwell’s Newspeak has a tin ear for lovers of the English language.