The Globe and Mail, Monday, March 5, 2001

North Korea marches against time in the Year 90

MIRO CERNETIG finds even clocks are controlled by the founder of isolated totalitarian state

PYONGYANG -- The sirens sound just before dawn, the daily wakeup call from Great Leader commanding the masses to rise from their slumber for another day of toil in the people's paradise of North Korea.

Within minutes, thousands fill the empty streets of Pyongyang, anonymous shadows shuffling through the unlit capital in eerie silence. Encountering a foreigner, adults avert their eyes and often turn their backs to avoid spiritual pollution; a small boy, wrapped in a ragged coat, runs away in fright.

This is Year 90 in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, a police state so removed from the rest of the world it marks time with a calendar in which Year Zero is 1912, the birth year of dictator Kim Il-sung. Although he died in 1994 and lies embalmed inside a crystal crypt, officials believe the so-called Eternal President still rules, making North Korea the only country in the world run by a dead man.

Proof of that can be seen along the edge of a crumbling sidewalk, where a women's brass band raises tarnished trumpets to strike up a rousing military march. It's an order from Great Leader, a North Korean official explained, to keep life from being too dreary in a country where people don't have enough to eat and children are so malnourished a 16-year-old often passes for a 10-year-old.

"The Great Leader is still with us and he wants to make the people happy, to raise spirits," explained the guide charged with ushering a group of Canadian diplomats and journalists on a rare, though carefully controlled, tour of the world's most hermetically sealed capital.

"But please do not talk to the people. They are very shy."

Canada, along with a growing number of other Western countries, is betting that Year 90 also marks a time when Kim Il-sung's son, Kim Jong-il, will accelerate the end of his country's half-century of isolation. As head of a regime linked to state-sponsored terrorism, assassinations, drug running and counterfeiting, many hope the younger Mr. Kim, known as Dear Leader, has realized the folly of such a record.

"There are signs of an opening up," said Howard Balloch, Canada's ambassador to China, who oversaw a historic trip last week to officially launch diplomatic relations with Pyongyang. "It is an important beginning."

But cracking the shell of the Hermit Kingdom, which shut itself off from most of the world after the Korean War ended in a bloody stalemate in 1953, won't happen quickly. During a five-day tour, it was clear that 22 million North Koreans are locked into their own version of George Orwell's 1984, where their are two Big Brothers: the elder Mr. Kim and his reclusive son.

Most regimes would have been crippled or faced revolt after what North Koreans have endured in the past five years. Catastrophic droughts and floods, combined with the end of subsidies from the former Soviet Union, caused a famine that killed hundreds of thousands.

A worldwide rescue effort, to which Canada contributed about $30-million since 1997, has ended the famine, said David Morton, who oversees the World Food Program effort here. But there are still widespread food shortages and diseases.

"It has been difficult," said a North Korean official, who asked for anonymity for fear of punishment. "The government now gives our women extra money and extra rations if they have more than one child. It is because our population has decreased so much after the famine. We need to build it up again."

Yet despite the destitution, worsened by a moribund economy, the hypnotic hold of the Kim dynasty endures. Nowhere is its power more obvious than the Kim Il-sung mausoleum, a massive alabaster building on Pyongyang's outskirts that is the epicentre of the Kim family's cult of personality.

When the Canadian diplomats arrived at the monument, they were ordered to empty their pockets of every object before their audience with the late Great Leader. They then had to stand on a moving sidewalk, which transported their shoes across mechanical scrubbers to clean off dirt, and exposed them to a full-body X-ray machine.

Mr. Balloch, the ambassador, was stopped and pulled into a cubicle by security men: he had carried in his Palm V, which the stone-faced guards confiscated until he left the monument.

Next came a 15-minute ride on two kilometres of moving sidewalks, a multimillion-dollar contraption Dear Leader Kim is said to have installed to keep the 4,000 daily pilgrims from catching a cold. The sidewalks led to a cavernous room where a funeral dirge played. A towering white marble statue of the Great Leader stood in the far end, bathed in red light.

The Canadians were told to bow for a moment, and then ushered through an air-lock into the room in which the Great Leader lies at rest. There, North Koreans filed past his body without a word, bowing three times and brushing away tears.

In the Hall of Lamentation, citizens stood at attention in front of extravagant bronze plaques that showed the peoples of the world collapsing to their knees in grief at news of the dictator's death.

"But he is still with us," one official said. "He is our sun."

Later, in the People's Grand Study Hall, hundreds of North Korean students and soldiers thumbed through yellowed books, studying the guiding principle of the Kim dynasty: Juche, best translated as a philosophy of socialist self-reliance.

At one table, a soldier sat with his girlfriend, both studying English. "Our country is divided in two by U.S. imperialism," said Kim Hai Yong, 24, explaining why he bothered to learn the language. "We must learn English to know more about our enemy."

Many observers see this place as a country whose people have been brainwashed into obedience. But the fact that increasing numbers of outsiders are being allowed into the isolated state is a bold move, according to experts on North Korea. And the isolation is eroding in unexpected ways -- like the arrival of its first casino, backed by Macau's gambling industry.

Late one night, three journalists shook the security men and visited the casino, on an island in the middle of the Taedong River, which snakes through the city. Inside, Chinese croupiers waited at empty tables that offered a maximum $4,000 (U.S.) payout a hand -- a fortune in North Korea.

"We don't have any guests right now and North Koreans can't enter the casino," said one employee. "But we get guests from South Korea, Japanese businessmen and Chinese, a lot of them officials with lots of money."

The casino's sauna, which offers private rooms for customers wanting the $100 (U.S.) "honorary guest massage," is now planning on bringing in 80 women from China. "They are very, very beautiful," a worker promised. "You will surely be content."

The Globe and Mail, Saturday, March 10, 2001

A reflection on North Korea

Visiting one of the last Soviet-style police states can get a little surreal, MIRO CERNETIG says

PYONGYANG -- Check into the Koryo Hotel, the hotel for foreign guests in the North Korean capital, and you'll notice something odd about Room 2708: A massive mirror fills an entire wall, offering a full reflection of the room, its twin beds and a bit of the washroom.

There's an identical mirror, measuring 2½ metres by 2½ metres and just as strategically placed, in the room next door. And an equally gargantuan mirror graces the hallway just before you enter each room. If you pause to look, you'll notice that between the three mirrors there seems to be a cubbyhole, just big enough for someone to secretly watch your every move.

Is there someone on the other side of the looking glass?

"It's North Korea," said one European aid worker, who has made the Koryo -- which can best be described as past its heyday -- his home away from home for the past few years. "Of course you are being watched. Everything you do here is watched and listened to, all the time. Everything."

At that point in our discussion in the hotel lobby, a North Korean man in his late 30s walked into the area, clearly unhappy that the aid worker was communing with another foreigner.

"Say hello to my shadow," said the European, who asked not to be named and is one of about 90 foreigners working in North Korea.

"Everywhere I go, he goes. When I check into a hotel, he checks into the room next door to me."

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Stalinist-inspired satellite states around the world seemed to be bound for the dustbin of history. East Germany is now part of democratic Germany. Albania and Romania, while still fledgling democracies, are less frightening than they used to be.

But the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea -- a place so afraid of outsiders that border police seize your mobile phone the minute you enter the country and search luggage for contraband like People magazine -- remains a chilling reminder that individual liberty isn't an inevitable outcome in the post-Cold War world.

Asia now appears to be the last holdout for Soviet-style police states. As The Globe and Mail's Beijing correspondent, I live in a police state, though a mostly enjoyable one, where most of us forget that there are surveillance cameras on the lampposts. Still, there are reminders of China's hard edges. In my first week, I was picked up in Tiananmen Square for taking a picture of Mao's portrait after a protester threw dirt at it.

At Tiananmen and at Beijing airport you often notice secret police lounging around sporting black shoulder bags, with notches cut to accommodate their camera lenses. Reporters are still sometimes tailed for weeks on end. In China, most correspondents assume their phones are bugged.

It's much the same in Vietnam, where police are told the minute a journalist checks into a hotel.

But the truth is that after the first few days and weeks in most police states, you get used to Big Brother watching. You can even make friends with your minders, or at least reach a mutual understanding. In Vietnam the secret police may know you're in town, but unless you start hanging out with dissidents they're happy to let you sip your French-style coffee in peace.

And China, although it has developed a security apparatus that may be the most sophisticated anywhere, has long ago left behind its Mao-inspired paranoia. When a Chinese security man seizes your camera film he might even say sorry. I once had a senior officer develop it and return to me the photos the state didn't want; he said those were my personal property.

But five nights in Pyongyang's Koryo Hotel, in the centre of a city where soldiers guard the train station with AK-47s, is something else.

North Korea is a palpably xenophobic land whose people seem to truly believe that deceased dictator Kim Il-Sung and his son and heir, Kim Jong-Il, are deities.

A few days here is like being plopped into Cold War scenes from The Manchurian Candidate or a John Le Carré spy novel. People are afraid to look at you.

Take my neighbours in the Koryo. Every morning, without fail, the door of the room next to 2708 cracked open a few inches. As I walked past, along the frumpy corridor, one of two men who lived inside opened the door wider, stuck out his head and, after making fleeting eye contact, slowly closed it with a quiet click. When I returned at night, their door would be slightly ajar. As I slid my key into the lock, one of the men would again stick his head out and, without a word, watch me enter.

Late one night, I went into my room and shut the door. Then I quickly opened it and stepped back into the hall. The other door opened as suddenly and I found myself face to face with one of the men, who grunted at me and stared until I retreated back to Room 2708. But I had enough time to peek inside their room: Another man was at a desk, facing a mirror and taking notes. It was 2 a.m.

Experienced visitors to North Korea warn that the Koryo's walls have ears. Some say that if you stand in the middle of the lobby, with its grey marble floors, microphones can pick up a whispered conversation. From a terrace above, security officers look down on the visitors, watching who goes in and out the front doors. Often, they follow and ask where you're going.

"I assume, every day, in every part of the Koryo, that I am watched or listened, too, or at least might be," said another veteran visitor to North Korea, who also asked for anonymity. "But I don't care any more, they can look through my underwear drawer if they like."

Other long-time foreign residents advise you to hold your tongue while travelling through Pyongyang in the fleets of Mercedes that the government supplies to foreign guests as they whiz around town. Along with a guide, usually English-speaking, the cars are said to be equipped with a microphone-laced curtain in the back.

"You should always assume that someone is listening," said another frequent visitor. "And whatever you do, don't make any jokes about the Kims. That could be big trouble."

But even in North Korea, it's impossible not to start liking the men who are spying on you. They had lunch with me and other Canadian journalists every day during our visit. After a meal and a few litres of beer -- lunches are plentiful and generally of the liquid variety in the Koryo Hotel, despite the food shortages plaguing ordinary citizens -- our minders would stretch out and become unusually verbose, giving rare insights on life in their insular country. One described his fetish for the Kim Il-Sung badges on his lapel, which he carefully put over his heart each morning. "It's to show our love," he explained, eyes gleaming. "I have five -- each day I choose the one that is correct."

One of his comrades confessed he thought we journalists were spies or agents of the Canadian government -- after all, we had arrived with the Canadian envoys. On our first day, when the North Koreans proposed a limited tour for the reporters, Canada's ambassador to China and Korea, Howard Balloch, fought vigorously for us to have wider access.

"Frankly, I thought you were working with the government," said one of the minders. "Otherwise why would His Excellency work so hard on your behalf?"

There's a mood of black humour in the Koryo about the constant surveillance: Don't bother hanging out the Do Not Disturb sign, people say. At the Koryo Hotel they always know when you're in the shower.

But such humour masks the bitter reality. As we were leaving Pyongyang, we wanted to give a gift at the airport to some North Korean friends. When we handed it over, they immediately asked for a bag in which to hide it and tried to use their bodies as a shield because they didn't want others to see them accepting something from foreigners -- a potentially dangerous political error under the Communist regime. The sad truth is, we could check out of the Koryo Hotel. Twenty-two million North Koreans can't.