 | Home |
| What's New |
| Speeches & Articles |
| Newsletter - Sep 2008 |
| Biography |
| Diary |
| Contact Information |
| Photo Album |
| Parliamentary Highlights |
| Publications |
| Links |
| MEPs' Transparency |
| Conservative Party |
| Latest News from Conservatives.com |
| Conservative Party Website |
 |
|
North Korea: Five Days in the Workers' Paradise
Monday 18th July 2005
With impeccable timing, I was actually in Pyongyang, NK, with an EU parliament delegation, when these developments occurred. We had eleven MEPs and four staff members on the delegation, and when news of NK's return to the talks came through, someone suggested we should declare a victory and go home. In fact US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, in the region at the same time, seems to have played a rather larger part than we did. We had flown to Beijing on July 8th, where we met with EU diplomats and dined in the Great Hall of the People with the VP of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the People's Assembly, and his colleagues. In the EU meeting, a range of views emerged about China's role on the sensitive negotiations with the NK regime. At one end of the scale was the view that China had done a commendable job in seeking to resolve NK's nuclear stand-off. It had put on the line its reputation as an emerging super-power, with its commitment to peace and stability in the region. Certainly China is very concerned at the prospect of millions of starving refugees flooding across the Yalu River if NK were to go into melt-down. But it is also keen to avoid seeing US forces on its border, and it may well have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. On this analysis, it could well be happy to treat NK as a sort of arm's-length agent provocateur, to keep the US off-balance. It could even be seen as colluding with the NK in keeping the on-off talks going indefinitely. I incline to the latter view. NK is enormously dependent on both food and energy (and a measure of diplomatic protection) from China. It seems to me that if China seriously chose to apply pressure, NK would fall into line. Against that view, it is argued that given the obstinate and truculent stance of the NK régime, Pyongyang might use such threats as an excuse to dig in further. Certainly NK has been very successful in diverting attention from the nuclear programme itself, to the six party talks - so much so that many commentators rejoiced at the return to talks as a "breakthrough", when it may be no more that a delaying tactic. We need results and action, not just interminable negotiation. The dinner with our Chinese colleagues took place in an enormous room, decorated with vast semi-reliefs in wood and marble. Each must have been fully twelve feet tall by twenty wide. Overhead were massive chandeliers and myriad other lights. But in terms of communication, the lavish event set the tone for the week. It was long on conventional courtesies and compliments, short on substance. In particular, one of my colleagues asked a direct question on the existence of NK's claimed nuclear weapons. Did the Chinese believe that NK really had these bombs, or not? The enigmatic response amounted to "China is committed to peace and stability in the region". Which means more or less: "Either we don't know, or we're not saying". Next day we took an Air Koryo (NK) scheduled flight to Pyongyang, and ran straight into NK's wall of propaganda. The routine flight announcements were interspersed with praise for the Great Leader and criticism of the US imperialists. The Pyongyang Times, a cheaply printed 8 page English language newspaper, was thick with paranoid ranting against the US. The first two pages were devoted to a joint statement from the Workers' Party and the Central Military Commission, which I read through in a spirit of enquiry. It consisted of an interminable series of short exhortations, in a style curiously reminiscent of church liturgy or of the Psalms. One verse is enough as an example: "Let us resolutely frustrate the US imperialists' heinous schemes to stamp out our socialist system, and achieve the final victory in the show-down with the US!". A few subsequent headlines give the flavour. "Homage paid to Kim Il Sung". "Kim Il Sung's memoirs in Romania". "Kim Il Sung's idea and cause are immortal". "US evacuation drill an attempt at pre-emptive strike". These predictable headlines were interspersed with others of a more environmental character: "Arboretum gets denser", and "More animals found in Lake Chon". On arrival in Pyongyang, our hosts greeted us warmly, lined us up for a group photo, and confiscated our mobile phones. These were not returned until we left five days later. Quite why they took them is a mystery, as there seems to be no GSM cover in NK in the first place. The next day, Sunday 10th, we set off in a chartered Antonov, an aircraft of great age and uncertain provenance, to the northern airport of Samjiyon, and then by bus to Mount Paekdu, an enormous volcanic mountain with a vast crater lake, on the northern border of NK, close by China. This mountain is beloved by Koreans and a place of pilgrimage for the NK régime. Sadly, the weather at the summit was raining and misty, and we caught only glimpses of the lake. The roads we took were in appalling condition, and the ride was bone-crunching. I found myself wondering why I had ever voted against the EU's Vibration Directive! After an hour and a half on the road, a colleague pointed out that we had seen not a single powered vehicle coming the other way - fortunate, perhaps, as the road provided few opportunities for passing. On the way back we visited the two wooden huts where "the three Generals" (including the Great Leader) had planned their resistance to the Japanese, and we were informed, with straight faces, that it was here in these huts that the Great Leader's son, Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il, had been born. Of course everyone knows he was born in Russia, but hey, if the Queen of England can have an official birthday, surely the Dear Leader can have an official birth-place? Close to the airport we visited the Samjiyon monument. A vast, paved rectangle as big as a football-pitch was surrounded by 20 foot high statues of peasants and soldiers in heroic poses. Behind those on the right was a double-size figure in white stone, with a flowing robe forming a backdrop to the smaller bronze figures. And dominating all in the centre, an enormous statue of the Great Leader, fully a hundred feet high, gazing wisely into the distance. As we watched, a coach-load of soldiers and workers arrived in a bus. They stood respectfully while a young lady in army uniform, arm outstretched, made a rousing address, and then several went forward, heads bowed, and laid small bouquets at the Great Leader's feet. They say there are 30,000 statues of the Great Leader in NK. Often they are surrounded by neatly-manicured lawns and shrubs - about the only well-kept areas on public view. I was particularly struck by one such site in Hamhung, our next stop after Samjiyon. The burnished statue of the Great Leader looked out across the road from his perfectly manicured lawn, proud and confident. On the other side of the road was a vast, derelict industrial site. Roofs fallen in, girders stark against the sky, blackened areas suggesting fire damage. The contrast between the pride of the statue and the industrial dereliction was dramatic. I was reminded of the savage irony of Shelley's sonnet Ozymandias: "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair". The heroic statuary theme was everywhere. Every street corner and factory seemed to have a huge stone tablet with the words of the Great Leader inscribed, or an obelisk. On the way in to Pyongyang from the airport, we passed under the NK's Arc de Triomphe - bigger than the one in Paris. We also passed the so-called Cholima statue, of a winged horse leaping skywards, raised on a mighty stone plinth. Two figures ride the horse, a man, erect, arm stretched skyward holding an open book. And cowering behind him a woman, incongruously clutching a sheaf of grain. Apparently the statue was supposed to commemorate one of NK's regular productivity drives. It seems it never occurred to them that the winged horse, like NK productivity, is a mythical beast. I was struck by the under-utilisation of almost everything in NK. Broad communist boulevards were almost devoid of traffic. Traffic lights were not operating (perhaps because of power-cuts). Instead, petite uniformed girls, batons in hand, signalled and pirouetted in the middle of road junctions with military precision, a happy marriage of parade ground and ballet-school, directing what little traffic came by. Hotel occupancy seemed derisory, both in the forty-five storey Koryo hotel in Pyongyang (where I exited the lift on the 21st floor in total darkness and had difficulty finding either a light-switch, or my room), and in the guest-house in Hamhung (where I found the bath in my room filled with water - only after I had emptied it did I realise that this was for flushing the toilet when mains water was off). A bank of twenty computers at the Grand People's Study House (a splendid building housing a sort of cross between a library and a college) stood idle in the middle of the day. At a factory in Hamhung (the Honourable Soldiers' Plastic Daily Necessities Factory) a few desultory workers were cleaning static machinery with oily rags, while others were assembling a few plastic garments. Many work-stations were empty. We were told apologetically that "many workers were on holiday". Still there was no escape from the propaganda and the relentless, paranoid attacks on the US. The Hamhung factory sported a vast mural showing heroic NK soldiers in attack mode - plus a huge stone tablet celebrating the Great Leader's visit years before. Billboards showed Americans crushed underfoot. Yet these are the people who demand "respect" from the USA. They need to learn that respect has to be earned - and also that it is a two-way street. NK's economy is in dire straights. For twenty years it has been in decline. Substantial investment from the Communist bloc after the Korean War built extensive heavy industry, and in the sixties, NK was somewhat ahead of South Korea in per capita GDP. Now NK is 6% of the South in per capita terms, less than 3% in absolute terms. Factories have ground to a halt with the absence of markets, inputs, skills or maintenance. NK's infrastructure is falling apart. The roads are desperate. The national power grid, effective twenty years ago, has declined to "regional islands" of electricity distribution (a problem for the power supplies promised by the South). Although new work is being done on gravity-fed irrigation systems, the distribution system for potable water is in a bad way. Both power and water supplies are intermittent. NK agriculture is another disaster area. The country can only produce around three quarters of the grain it needs. The other million tons is made up, if at all, by donors. The WFP plans to provide 500,000 tons this year, although funding is not confirmed. Meantime repeated production campaigns, efforts at double and triple cropping, and excessive use of fertilisers (also provided by donors) has lead to soil exhaustion and declining yields. Attempts to cultivate marginal land on hill-sides have lead to erosion. NK is living, almost literally, from hand-to-mouth and any down-turn could lead to famine. And with NK's crumbling infrastructure, it is estimated that a third of the food NK manages to produce is lost in storage and distribution. This is not new. There was a disastrous famine in the late nineties, resulting from natural disasters. Credible estimates suggest that as many as three million people - one in eight of the population - may have died ether of starvation, or of diseases related to malnutrition. The WFP report for 2004 shows that 37% of children under six suffered from malnutrition and stunting - a slight improvement, as a result of WFP programmes, on 2002, but still disastrous in human and economic terms. On some measures malnutrition amongst mothers (a key factor in child development) had worsened. I noticed that air hostesses on Korean Air (South Korea) were on average several inches taller than those on the NK airline. Twenty years ago NK agriculture was substantially mechanised. Now, we see few tractors. Most agriculture is done by hand, as it was 1000 years ago. With few trucks, many goods are transported on hand-carts, on bicycles, or on the backs of workers. We saw few draught animals and no horses. There is a danger of a substantial transfer of population from towns to the countryside, not as a matter of policy, but merely for subsistence as industrial jobs dry up. The biggest employer is the army, estimated at 1.2 million. In relative terms, NK has the biggest army in the world, and the heaviest military spend as a percent of GDP. Yet the army is heavily employed in building, infra-structure projects, and as needed, in agriculture. In a sense, it is a militarised government work-force. NK human rights record is one of the worst in the world. Citizens are totally cut off from the outside world. Radios and TVs are pre-tuned to government channels, with severe penalties for unlicensed sets, or for tampering with tuning. The media are totally controlled by the state, and primarily contain propaganda, not news. (The famine in the late nineties was never mentioned in the NK media). Any dissent from the party line is harshly treated, with offenders (and often their families) seized in the night and taken to forced-labour camps. Although several of these camps have been closed (reportedly because of food shortages), credible estimates suggest up to 200,000 could still be detained, without due process or appeal. While information is hard to confirm, we saw reports from several reputable human rights organisations including Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. These were based on extensive interviews with hundreds of escapees, and were depressingly consistent. Treatment in the camps is execrable, with arbitrary and extensive torture at the whim of the guards, punishment by confinement in cells no bigger than a washing machine, chronic malnutrition and overwork, and occasional summary execution. The NK regime is based on a lie. Even the name of the country is a lie. They call it the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). But it is clearly not democratic. It is arguably the least democratic country in the world. The term "People's Republic" is tautological. My dictionary defines a Republic as a state where ultimate power resides with the people. In NK, the people have no power at all. They even lack the knowledge of the world that would enable them to exercise power if they had it. Not so much a republic, more a feudal despotism. And of course NK is not Korea. It is half the land area, a third of the population and 3% of the economy. But the biggest lie is the quasi-religious ideology of "Juche", or self-reliance. NK is dependent on donor nations for a quarter of its food, much of its energy, and for huge help with infrastructure, health and other projects from a range of NGOs and charities. It is perhaps the least independent country in the world. It is a beggar at the door of richer nations. In Pyongyang we had a meeting with the NK Vice-Minister at the Ministry of Foreign Trade, Mr. Kim Yong Jae. He blamed NK's dire economic performance on external factors - the collapse in 1989 of the "socialist economies" in Europe, the US embargo, natural disasters. I asked him whether he should not (in the spirit of Juche) ask whether there were also internal causes, and I pointed out that down the years command economies have comprehensively failed to perform as well as market economies. He replied that NK was entitled to determine its own political and economic system. Indeed it is. But donor countries will ask how long they are expected to continue subsidising self-inflicted failure and poverty. What is NK's game-plan as it re-enters the six-party talks? It seems to me that either they intend to spin out the talks indefinitely, using nuclear blackmail to help donor countries overcome their compassion-fatigue. Or else they have realised that the game is up, and are prepared to abandon their nuclear programmes, but want the maximum concessions in return. Which of these ideas is correct will determine the failure or success of the talks. My colleague Labour MEP Glyn Ford hopes that NK may eventually adopt the Chinese or Vietnamese model, allowing substantial market reforms while maintaining the stability of the regime. I don't believe this is possible. The régime is too extreme, too controlling, to allow the necessary loosening without collapse. So they face a Catch-22. If they liberalise the economy, the régime will fail. If not, the economy will implode. They can sustain the régime, or sustain the economy, but not both. But if the economy implodes, the régime will fail anyway. So either way, the Dear Leader is toast. The problem for the rest of the world will be picking up the pieces. NOTE: This article reflects the views of the author. These are not necessarily the views either of the European Parliament, or of its Korea delegation • Photographs from North Korea |
