Letters from North Korea

Letters from North Korea
By Michael Hirsh
NEWSWEEK
October 23, 2000
Tens of thousands of dancers performed to impress upon Madeleine Albright that totalitarian communism was alive and well. It was a scene that George Orwell, the master inventor of the totalitarian nightmare, couldn't have dreamed up on his best day.

AND NONE OF US accompanying Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on her historic visit to North Korea today was the least bit prepared for it. As the sun set over Pyongyang, the capital of this reclusive country, a group of reporters, myself included, was ushered past beige-uniformed guards packing holstered sidearms into a giant circular stadium. We had been told we were about to see a "gymnastics show." It was the latest in a series of events prepared for the most senior American official ever to journey to this drab, impoverished city-and intended to impress upon Albright that Pyongyang was anything but drab and impoverished, and that totalitarian communism was alive and well, if only in this lonely Asian outpost.

Inside, the stadium was packed with what North Korean officials later told us was more than 100,000 people. On the field, arrayed before us, were tens of thousands of performers dressed in brightly colored outfits and carrying red flags. Almost all of this vast multitude was strangely silent, like set pieces in a vast diorama, as if waiting for our arrival. Those of us who had been making tired wisecracks about maybe getting the World Series results up on the scoreboard-we reporters had arrived with Albright earlier this morning at 7 a.m, after 18 hours of travel-just shut up and gawked. We were seated at a specially prepared dais some 100 feet above the field.

A few minutes passed, and again there was only the noise of hundred thousand people breathing. Then, suddenly, in walked Albright and Kim Jong Il, the Mao-suited "Great Leader" of this communist nation of 21 million people. Kim is an odd-looking fellow, pudgy and bouff-haired, and not much taller than the diminutive secretary. But you wouldn't know it from the reaction.

Instantly loudspeakers began blaring the leader's soaring anthem and the entire audience stood and erupted into torrential applause and shouts, every black-suited Korean craning toward Kim, each trying to out-clap the other. As one, the performers on the field surged forward, cheering and jumping up and down in front of him.

Then, as if by the flick of a single master switch, the song ended, the cheering stopped and the lights dimmed. Kim and Albright sat down next to each other. What followed was at once awesome, a little terrifying, and probably the best halftime show in any stadium anywhere (I've seen enough Super Bowls to know). For an hour, some 100,000 acrobats and dancers performed-with a degree of precise synchronization that would have made Bob Fosse envious- themes from the 55-year history of their glorious "revolution." (This was actually the Soviet installation of Kim Jong Il's father, Kim Il Sung, in 1945, though few North Koreans know that.) Thousands of legs and arms moved in near-perfect unison; hundreds of petite, rouge-cheeked girls no more than seven or eight years old did multiple handsprings to the tune of such numbers as "The Leader Will Always Be With Us" and "My Country Under the Sunshine of the Party." Acrobats slid along ropes hundreds of feet above the performers, or were catapulted across half the length of the stadium onto nets. Barely anyone missed a step. "Perhaps there's something to be said for collective action after all," I thought. "Only a totalitarian state could bring this off."

At the far side of stadium, vast images of the great moments of the revolution flashed and shifted before us. It was only several minutes into the show that many of us realized that this entire portion of the stadium consisted of what officials later said was 50,000 performers, each holding a book of colored placards in his hand. By turning the placards in tight array per the instructions of a conductor, this multitudinous cast pulled off amazing tromp d'oeil feats. They created giant ocean waves and flashes of lightning in the "raging sea of difficulty" faced by the revolution. They depicted tractors plowing up fallow earth to defeat the 1997 famine, and a global map of the "54 occasions" that Kim Il Sung had to visit his erstwhile communist friends (almost all gone now) abroad. Thematically, it was ridiculous, of course; pictorially, it was brilliant, and in spite of myself I began to feel that the North Koreans were a pretty good bunch. "You should take this show on the road," I whispered deferentially to my official government minder, Li Wong Su.

During the performance-which has been put on for North Koreans three times a week since Oct. 10, the anniversary date-I was only about 40 feet from Kim, and watched him chatting amiably with Albright and Amb. Wendy Sherman, the Secretary's senior-most North Korea handler. Both Albright and Sherman applauded the performances along with Kim, including a paean to the nation's missile and nuclear program, which the United States has been trying to shut down in exchange for normalizing relations with the once-hostile nation.

(This bit featured scores of sequined schoolgirls each tossing what appeared to be a red-ball "nucleus" in the air.) Afterward, Albright had only one thing to say, according to her spokesman: "Amazing."

It was an apt description of Albright's visit as well. Only several years ago, in 1994, North Korea nearly went to war with South Korea, a staunch U.S. ally, for the second time since 1950. Only a few months ago, U.S.and Korean contacts were limited to secret missions and third parties, and North Korean state media continued to describe the United States in harsh, Cold War terms. But today Albright carried a letter to Kim Jong Il from President Clinton, whose visit in the next two months she is trying to set up-a truly dramatic departure for a president who, at the beginning of his term, described the border between north and south as the "scariest" in the world.

The secretary, in a banquet toast Monday night, said that "the road to fully normal relations remains uphill" - the U.S. still lists North Korea as a terrorist-sponsoring state - "but as we are starting to discover through our visits, distance is no barrier to closer ties."

Indeed, perhaps the oddest thing about watching tonight's performance was to know (as the North Koreans don't) that the Great Leader Kim is, quite plainly, a desperate man. His Soviet and East Bloc friends are gone. His Chinese sponsors are pressuring him to open up. His million-man army is rusting away in a socialist wasteland where, only a few years ago, hundreds of thousands of people and perhaps more starved to death in terrible famine exacerbated by the shuttering of fertilizer plants, power and other industry. He has little choice, down the line, but to junk entirely the very themes that he was trying to impress upon his people in tonight's spectacle-"juche," or self-reliance, and the glories of Korean socialism.

North Korea is today an economic disaster. It is a nation kept afloat on a program of food and other international aid-including a $360 million emergency operation launched in July 1999 to feed some 8 million people. For all the moves Kim has made to buddy up to the U.S. and to South Korea, he has made only miniscule efforts to free up his economy. To do so, apparently, would mean to admit to his own people what the rest of the world already knows: that his glorious show tonight was just that, merely a show. And that hour-long entertainments inside a stadium provide scant escape to those suffering the reality of the revolution outside.

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Pyongyang Diary, Day 2
By Michael Hirsh
NEWSWEEK
October 24, 2000

Why North Korea, the world's most totalitarian state, isn't going to change soon. And that's fine with the United Sates.

October 24 - By Tuesday, the second day of my trip to Pyongyang with Madeleine Albright, I had begun to run seriously afoul of my North Korean hosts. As the day wore on their smiles-always forced-turned frigid and grew flatter.

I'D LIKE TO THINK THIS had little to do with their personal feelings toward me. I think it had everything to do with the fact that they are from Mars and we Americans are from Venus. For North Koreans and Americans, ending the Cold War and overcoming our language gap is the least of our problems: our brains are simply wired differently.

My first violation of the rules began with The Stroll. About mid-morning, while Albright was meeting privately with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il-the first U.S. Cabinet-level official to do so-a colleague and I decided to walk to a park and a train station a few blocks from the Koryo Hotel, where we were staying. It was quite pleasant, though the park had no grass, only packed earth, and the train station officials forbade us entry.

But while we were minding our business ambling about downtown Pyongyang others were minding it too. As we later learned, phone calls were made through a daisy chain of informants that began at the train station and, minutes later, as we were heading past the park toward a side street, we heard someone calling our names. I turned around and there, a few hundred feet away, was our government "minder," Li Wong Su, huffing and puffing toward us. A short, 29-year-old with thick black hair, my minder was wearing large sunglasses, presumably to hide the large contusion under his right eye that, one U.S. official noted, "he didn't have when we first got here." (I wasn't able to get a straight answer from Li about how he got it: "I fainted," he said at first, averting his face. Then later: "I bumped into a wall.")

Now, as he came upon us, Li was very nervous: "You are taking a very grave risk," he intoned in his excellent English. "You don't understand how much the Korean people resent Americans." What do you mean? I asked him. Were you afraid they would attack us physically? After all, Kim Jong Il was at that moment, in a series of meetings with Albright, pledging a new era of cooperation and friendship with the United States after 50 years of Cold War hostilities. Li paused. "I was just joking," he said. "You are here on a visit with Secretary Albright. You are here to cover that. You should just cover that."

And so it went for much of the day. According to the rules worked out between the State Department and the regime, one North Korean "minder" - a government cadre who monitors your every movement-was assigned to every three or so visiting journalists on the Albright trip. But with more than 50 reporters here to cover the secretary of State's historic visit-including more American and Western journalists than had ever been permitted into the country at one time-the minders were in serious danger of being outmaneuvered. It was a true contest, a clash of aggressive Western journalistic practices, which know no boundary, and rigid totalitarianism, which knows only boundaries.

Later, I committed my second violation: The Shopping Expedition. While waiting for another Albright meeting, another colleague and I slipped out to peek into the state-run department store on the corner (there is no private enterprise in North Korea, save for some farmers' markets). My minder came striding after us: "No, no, please," he said. We impressed upon him the innocence of our aims-and kept on walking. He tagged along, repeating behind us, "No, no, please." When we actually got to the store, he stopped pleading and simply followed us. The store was a dank, dark, socialist horror where the goods, all made in North Korea, are musty Soviet-style relics.

Because of "shortages," I was told, the toys are few (I was shopping for my two young sons). I bought two toys, a crudely wrought plastic bus and ocean liner. Might there be a shopping bag, perhaps? There was a quick exchange with the frightened counter girl: there were none. "It's near the end of the day," Li explained.

Then there was The Picture. A group of us was taken on an expedition around the city to visit some of the grandiose monuments to the founder of the Revolutionary Workers Party, Kim Il Sung. At one stop, a pavilion capped by a 100-foot-high statue of the "Great Leader" (Kim died in 1994; his son, Kim Jong Il, is now the "Great Leader"), a reporter friend asked me to take a picture of her in the pose of Kim, who had his arm raised in a benevolent gesture to the masses. As I prodded her to adjust this way and that, a Japanese reporter made the mistake of laughing at our antics. Suddenly we were the cause of a minor diplomatic incident that left U.S. State Department officials buzzing worriedly. The Koreans shooed us away from the monument, and Li was furious. He lectured us yet again. "You people in the West don't understand how we feel about this man, how we revere him!" I nodded sympathetically: You're right, we don't.

This is all by way of explaining that I have never experienced a totalitarianism so all-embracing as what exists in North Korea. Indeed, I don't believe such a system exists anywhere else on earth, and perhaps hasn't since Stalin died (and with him a personality cult very much like that which surrounds the Kims). I have spent time in other police states in the past. Iraq and Burma were pretty bad, run by regimes whose secret police might be lurking in any corner, ready to pick up any overheard indiscretion and with gulags aplenty to handle the violators. But even in some of the most vicious totalitarian countries I have seen, an undercurrent of dissent ran like a subterranean stream through the back rooms of restaurants, bars and private meeting rooms.

When pressed, Iraqi cab drivers would glance around and spit out their hatred of Saddam Hussein, and Burmese dissidents would whisper their fealty to democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. In Vietnam, Saigon residents would raise their eyebrows and snort at the central planners in the North. In China, after Mao's death, there was a reappraisal of his policies, and the Communist Party ultimately allowed that some elements of "Mao Zedong Thought," like the disastrous Great Leap Forward of the '50s or the Cultural Revolution of the '60s, had not been successful.

But in North Korea, six years after Kim Il Sung's death and long after Stalinism has become a yellowing chapter in the history books elsewhere, there is little evidence that dissent exists at all. Very few people yet seem willing to question whether Kim Il Sung's policies might be to blame for an economic slide that took the North from parity with South Korea, as recently as the 1960s, to one of the highest rates of malnutrition in the world and the death of hundreds of thousands from starvation. (Pyongyang, in all its slab-like, Stalinist dreariness, is a good object lesson for anti-globalization protesters, who should be bused in here in mid-cry to confront the real alternative.) Questions that would seem to us natural second-guessing meet not just with silence, but with the utter bafflement that comes from never having imagined the query. "Our problems were the result of a natural disaster, and your sanctions," said one Pyongyang resident when I pressed him on this point.

It is too simplistic to attribute this mindset to a mere fear of repression or self-censorship. Yes, according to State Department human-rights reports and the few defectors to make it out of North Korea, there are gulags in remote areas for the wrong-thinking. But on the whole, there seems little in the way of independent thought to censor. There are few troops or armed police on the streets, and apparently no patrol cars. One foreign resident of Pyongyang, when asked if he had ever seen any evidence of dissent-even over drinks with North Korean associates-responded: "Never. Nothing." This seems to be totalitarianism in pure form: a nation of 21 million lives given over to the party, unadulterated by divergence of any kind. It is perhaps the closest any society has come to what Orwell called, in "1984," the literal inability to conceive an unorthodox thought. If one sets aside the fact that North Korea is an economic sinkhole, and that its freedom-loving enemies are crowding in upon it from every side, it may even be called the most successful totalitarianism in modern history.

The natural response of Americans is to say that this must and will change. That the clash of sensibilities I experienced on the streets of Pyongyang, between the minders and the mindees, will result, inevitably, in the triumph of free thought over oppression. That after enough reporters and other foreigners come to Pyongyang, and enough questions are asked, dissent will take hold. That people like me will, some day, outmaneuver and overwhelm people like Li Wong Su, my frazzled government minder. After all, this is the phenomenon that, in the 1990s, toppled almost every other absolutist regime around the world.

But that is to underestimate the peculiar staying power of North Korean totalitarianism. There is a reason why the regime of the Kims survives while, all around it, the Soviet bloc disintegrated and the Chinese opened up and reformed. The North Korean regime's ideology, called juche, is often simplistically defined as Korean self-reliance and ridiculed in the West.

But to the North Koreans, juche is a powerfully intoxicating brew of traditional Korean xenophobia and nationalism, Confucian respect for authority and utopian Marxism-Leninism. The party embodies all of these ideals-nationalism, filial respect, utopia. The collective consciousness it represents is not an abstraction here; instead it is the "I," or ego, that is. Exploiting this confluence of philosophies and experiences, Kim Il Sung and his son have created "an impermeable and absolutist state that many have compared to a religious cult," says longtime Korea observer, Don Oberdorfer in his 1997 book, "The Two Koreas." Are the North Korean people hungrier than they need to be? Yes, but here hunger is like a national fast; it is a consecrated hardship.

To expect much change is also to overestimate the aims of the U.S. government in the region. Madeleine Albright may have championed democracy and freedom in other parts of the world-especially her native Eastern Europe-but, as she showed on this trip, she isn't particularly eager to take on that struggle here. It wasn't just that Albright treated Kim Jong Il with the greatest deference, even expressing her admiration of "Kim Jong Il-ia," a flower developed especially to honor the Great Leader.

When it comes to Northeast Asia, Washington is mainly interested in stability, not democracy. It seeks to engage the North Koreans diplomatically in order to shut down Pyongyang's nuclear and missile program, which might lead to an arms escalation by the Japanese, South Koreans and Chinese. But that is about all. Washington, in fact, isn't especially keen to see democracy come to North Korea, a development that would lead much more quickly to reunification of the two Koreas. For, while U.S. officials deny it, this would eliminate a ready enemy, raising fundamental questions about how long it will be necessary to maintain 37,000 U.S. troops based on the Korean peninsula. It would also mean that the U.S. military presence in the region would have just one potential adversary left-China-and no one in Washington wants to unsettle the Chinese. The irony is not lost on U.S. security planners: more democracy in the short run on the Korean peninsula could roil the bigger Asian picture in the long run.

So Washington is in no hurry to oust Kim Jong Il, America's soon-to-be Stalinist partner. Twice in the 20th century, Oberdorfer writes, Americans hung Korea out to dry: first in the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905, when Teddy Roosevelt ceded Korea to the Japanese as part of a peace agreement between Japan and Russia; and again in 1945, when FDR ignored calls for its independence and permitted the Soviets to occupy it (they later installed Kim Il Sung). And once again, at the opening of the 21st century, the welfare of the Korean people has been left to other, larger considerations.

"We are a peace-loving nation," Albright told Kim in a toast Tuesday night, "and desire to take steps with you that will ensure peace for generations to come." If that sounds a bit strange, it should: Americans typically describe themselves as a freedom-loving nation. But not here, not in this part of the world, and not at this moment.