North Korea Undercover (13 page)

¹
Alejandro Cao de Benos's website is available here: http://www.korea-dpr.com/business.html

²
Stanislas Roussin and Cesar Ducruet: ‘The Nampo-Pyongyang corridor: A strategic area for European investment in DPRK’, Seoul National University, 2007.

³
Ahn Mi-Young: ‘Slow boat to North Korea’,
Cargo News Asia
, 7 May 2001, http://cargonewsasia.com/timesnet/data/cna/docs/cna6106.html

⁴
http://freekorea.us/camps/12-2/#sthash.lZfwljB1.dpuf

⁵
Lee Jun Ha’s Prison Tales: ‘The Humiliation and the Sadness’, Daily NK website, 16 September 2009, http://www.dailynk.com/englishJread.php?catald=nk02800&num=S031

6

Pyongyang Zoo

In 1991, Osijek in old Yugoslavia – new Croatia – was fullof blood. One day photographer Paul Jenks and I walked in the back door of the town’s hospital, becausethe Serbs were raining down artillery shells on the main entrance, and found ourselves in the morgue. No power, not much light. Flies gorged themselves on the blood of twenty dead men, their ribcages zipped wide open for post-mortem, like so many blood-pink human butterfly wings.

Sick of the killing, we went to the zoo, empty of people but still full of animals. The front line was the wild goat enclosure. Paul and I convinced Rose, an impossibly sexy zookeeper-cum-warrior, to feed the animals. I still have Paul’s picture of Rose feeding a giraffe a biscuit, her Kalashnikov on her shoulder. The war between Serbs and Croats stopped, but a few days later Paul was shot dead in strange circumstances.
¹
Three years on, I returned to
Osijek, to investigate who had killed Paul, and I went backto the zoo. It was snowing, and the zoo looked entirely empty. Then, hopping into vision, came a crowd of wallabies. It was a magical moment. Since then, in times of war or places ruled by fear, I go to the zoo.

Baghdad Zoo in Saddam’s time was one of the most melancholy places I’ve ever been to: the animals mangy, the creatures’ loss of liberty no different from the humans’. There was even a photograph of Saddam in the aquarium, so the guppy could pay homage to the big man with the moustache. But even there in Baghdad Zoo under Saddam, I didn’t have a minder who followed me around from cage to cage. At Pyongyang Zoo we had three: Mr Hyun, Miss Jun and a new local guide, who spoke a smattering of English and greeted us at the entrance.

Zoos, I know, are not good because they restrict animal freedom. But in many parts of the world, free-moving, free-living animals get shot for their ivory, their skin or their meat, or because they are in the wrong place, and I fear that my grandchildren’s generation will only know the great animals through trips to the zoo, or places like them. And there is the fascinating anthropology of the zoo: looking at them looking at us. My addiction to zoos is partly because they remind me of the time when my children were little and every moment with a five-year-old staring at a gorilla picking its bottom is full of low comedy; partly because, brilliant as David Attenborough’s natural history documentaries are, you can’t smell an elephant on the telly; and partly because zoos are No Man’s Land, where people can think about what makes us human and them animal, and what combines all of us living creatures, where politics stops.

But not, of course, in Pyongyang.

Somewhere around were a brace of chimps presented by General Suharto of Indonesia, and a warthog, a gift from Robert Mugabe. Hitchens tells the story of a friend who goesto Pyongyang Zoo and finds the animals half starved, stunted. He inspects a parrot, who looks at him with a beady eye.
²
He looks back, morose. And after a short interval the parrot opens its beak and says:‘Long live the Great Leader Kim Il Sung.’

Our tour started with homage to Kims, Major and Minor. The local guide, dressed in hunting pink, told us how the zoo had been built thanks to the wise and inspired guidance of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. After a while you zone out. The praise to the Great Leader and the Dear Leader slides over the surface of the mind like those darker globules of vinegar slide among the olive oil in fancy restaurants. Something like this must happen inside the minds of the North Koreans too. You listen to it, but your thoughts are elsewhere.

The aquarium came first: dimly lit pools of green, mouths opening and closing behind thick walls of glass. Sturgeon, big mothers gulping at not very much, then Siamese sharks, who are not proper sharks but fish, box jaws, big fins, nasty teeth, piggy-eyed, and some of the ugliest creatures I’ve ever seen. The tour cameraman has a nice shot of Alex filming them. I was keen, no, impatient to get to the elephants.
³

Marching along we saw a bunch of soldiers digging a great hole in the earth by hand, their earthworks planted with nine red and blue Korean flags. Coming the other way were two old men
carrying immense bundles on their backs – fodder for the elephants? Chickens for the lions? Anywhere else in the world, zoo staff would move supplies around on little electric trucks. In North Korea, the trucks have human axles.

Miss Jun wanted to slow me down: ‘Professah! Professah! Not so fast.’ I liked her, but the lack of freedom to go for a walk on your own, the inability to escape made my teeth grind. One felt infantilized.

The big cats lived in a terrace of iron cages. A lion trotted up and down his scruffy patch of concrete morosely, but he was trumped by a magnificent white Siberian tiger, lean and mean in a cage constructed of criss-crossed wire that didn’t look that strong.

‘I’ve never seen one before. In this respect,’ I told Miss Jun, ‘North Korea is superior to Britain.’

‘DPRK,’ whispered Miss Jun. The regime hates being reminded that it is one of two geographical halves, and both Miss Jun and Mr Hyun would always correctus if we used the phrase ‘North Korea’.

Alex was filming us. ‘Could we feed one of thestudents, maybe Alex, to the tiger?’ I suggested. ‘Alex, I think it would be a useful sacrifice.’

Tyger, tyger, burning bright, smacked his chops and looked like he fancied a bit of Welsh rarebit el Greco. The snack unforthcoming, Tyger washed his whiskers with a greatpaw, and rolled his back against a spot of concrete warmed in the sun. As we were about to move on, Alex’s camera caught a plaque, saying in Korean, then English: ‘The animals presented by the DearLeader Kim Jong Il, on September 22, Juche 99 (2010), Korean Tiger
Panthera Tigris Altaica.’

Juche 99 is a result of the regime’s decision to create a new
calendar, with Juche Year Zero starting on 15 April, Anno Domini 1912 – the date on which Kim Il Sung was born. The Juche revolution is so powerful it can turn backtime. Or so they would like to have us believe. In Juche Time, 2013 is Year 101. What is striking about every single attempt by an authoritarian state to reset the clock is not success, but failure. The French Revolutionaries did it, renaming 22 September 1793 as the beginning of Year II. The months got new start dates and lovely new poetic names, so that late October, often foggy, became Brumaire – the foggy one – and the next month Frimaire, because it is frosty in late November. Napoleon scrapped the whole thing because it was silly and didn’t work. Pol Pot in Cambodia reset his totalitarian clock to Year Zero in 1974. That experiment in blood and time lasted but four years.

The Juche Year Zero, although backdated to 1912, actually commenced operation in 1997 after a governmental decree. On our trip, for all practical purposes, it was never used and very rarely alluded to. Some of the regime’s propaganda which used the Western calendar before 1997 has been cast in bronze or stone or even chiselled into high peaks up in the mountains. Take, for example, the dates on the Arc de Triomphe lookalike in down-town Pyongyang. On one leg of the arch is written‘1925’, ‘the year in which Kim Il Sung set out on the road to national liberation’, and on the other ‘1945’, commemorating the year of liberation from the Japanese. Surely, these dates should be converted to Juche Time? But would people, especially foreigners, guess the significance of‘13’ and ‘32’? Or would worshippers of the Douglas Adams cult believe that‘32’ was a typo for ‘42’ – the answer to life, the universe and everything?

The cost of airbrushing these dates to the new calendar must be so astronomical no one has bothered. So Juche Time lingers on, an
embarrassing experiment in time travel, but not one that bites very hard on ordinary or even official life. Just how long will Juche Time last? Either not a second longerthan the regime, or nuclear Armageddon, whichever happens first.

Our tour continued. It turned out that the big cats had a big back garden at the rear of their terrace of cages, and we could look down on them from on top of an elevated concrete walkway. A lion and a tiger were mixed up in the same paddock, but seemed to be getting along nicely. Well, they weren’t eating each other. The zoo was turning out to be far more impressive – or, to be exact, far less pitiful – than, say, the Heavy Machine Complex. Perhaps that’s because the zoo animals and the children who come to gaze at them are core class; the factory workers not.

The elephant house seemed top notch, the elephants living behind a wall of glass, presumably to keep the heat in during the bitterly cold Korean winters. But the light was natural and beginning to die as dusk approached, so we could only make out some grey myths in the gloom and, closer to us, the unmistakable grassy cannonballs of elephant poo.

At this point it emerged that our local guide in hunting pink had met the new leader, Kim Jong Un. I pronounced it Kim Jong Oon, but Miss Jun corrected me – the Un rhymeswith Bun. The zoo guide’s face lit up at the very mention of his name. When? On 26 May 2012, a date forever great in her memory. ‘It was the happiest moment of her life,’ translated Miss Jun. The guide hadalso met Kim Jong Il, in 2008. Which was her favourite, I asked, a question which caused Miss Jun to gasp. You could seethe unease on their faces begin to grow. The local guide replied: ‘If you have a daughter and abeautiful wife, which do you love the most?’

I replied: ‘I am sorry for my foolishquestion,’ and Miss Jun buckled, laughing with relief. On the other side of theglass, a young Asian elephant tucked into some juicy grass, oblivious to the human follies going on behind him.

The zoo was hardly busy, but there were a good number ofschoolchildren around, most of them in fancy-ish Chinese-made puffa jackets. Pyongyang is the home of theelite, who number some 200,000, maybe more. Part of the solidity of the regime is that they know their lives ofrelative privilege will be over if the dynasty falls. Its different in, say, China, where there is no nation state of'South China’ that will take over the whole shooting match if the Communist Party falls from power. Thevery success of South Korea means that it is harder for those who have a stake in the regime to welcome change. Change means takeover by South Korea; change means the end of privilege, and perhaps the end of life. So thecalculation by members of the outer circle of the elite in Pyongyang is different to that of their counterparts inBaghdad under Saddam or Tripoli under Gaddafi. After Saddam or Gaddafi, the big players would, with a bit of luck, stillbe big players. If Kim Jong Un falls, then Pyongyang’s privileged will end up in a new wholeKorea, run by the South, ignorant, backward, poor and utterly discredited. And the consequence of that lack ofhope means, thus far, no rebellion.

The snakehouse was the tackiest show in the zoo. Insepulchral light, the snake keeper, an old lady of indeterminate age, dressed shabbily, walked into a largeglass box and picked up an enormous Burmese python, caressed it, then shoved its head a few feet from ours, though we were on the other side of the glass. Snakewoman had looked after the snake for thirty years, but last yearshe also met Kim Jong Un. As the great snake slithered and coiled in front of us, its forked tongue flashing in andout, I asked: 'What did she
think of Kim Jong Un?’ The coinciding of thequestion about the young deity with the snake freak show was too much, and the conversational temperature between MissJun and me dropped 20 degrees. I changed the subject, fast – ‘Is she not afraid of thatsnake?’ – and we moved on to look at the creatures that creepeth upon the face of the earth. As ever, they wereditch water dull. Lizards flicked their tongues; insects did their insecty thing, the usual.

The plaque outside the snakehouse-cum-aquarium said:‘To the Dear Leader, Comrade Kim Jong Il, by Mr Jonas Wahlstrom, Director of the Skansen Aquarium, Sweden.’ I wondered to myself how many creatures in the zoo had perished in the bleak winters during the famine whenNorth Korea could no longer heat or feed or provide power and light to its people. Quite a few, I would imagine. The story goes that even in the Central Committee office in Pyongyang – the dead centre of powerfor the Korean Workers’ Party – the water in the fish tank froze to ice, entombing the goldfish therein.

On we walked around the zoo. No litter underfoot, becausethere were no kiosks flogging ice cream or sandwiches or coffees. It was forbiddingly tidy. On the way out, ourguide opened a door and we were given a special treat. The white tiger was munching his way through a chicken, every bone going down with a sinister crunch.

Our last stop of the day was a bookshop in town. Therewere countless books by Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il; in short, nothing worth buying.

¹
Dying For The Truth
, Hardcash Films, 1994, tells the story of Eduardo Rozsa Flores, the man who most likely ordered the killing of Paul Jenks. Flores was himself gunned down in Bolivia in 2009.

²
Hitchens on North Korea: at 6.00 in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8-Vr_r36Fg

³
I like ‘nature's great masterpiece’, as John Donne described the elephant, so much I've written a novel about them called
Elephant Moon.

7

The Scariest Place on Earth

Day Four: It’s good morning Pyongyang, until we switch on the TV news. A newsreader in Barbara Cartland pink shrieks something in Korean. It doesn’t sound like there’s been a royal wedding, Kim dynasty style. Her delivery is extraordinary, comic-opera aggressive, to myear profoundly, almost mockingly, silly. It’s only when we get back to London and get the tapes translated that we realize what she’s saying. It’s not good news: