North Korea Undercover (18 page)

The Romanians, the North Koreans’ close stallies in the Soviet bloc, brokered the deal. Seven years after his first arrest, on 27 September 1974, Ali was allowed to leave North Korea. On arrival
in Bucharest, the poet had to sign a letter swearing that the dire state of his health and the torture scars on his body were the result of captivity in a Venezuelan prison. The regime was trying to cover its tracks. Ali was in a terrible state. Thin, half mad, he had a tumour on his back and paralysis in his left leg that resulted from being forced to squat cross-legged for years. But the regime fattened him up before releasing him. In Berlin, Ali under went surgery on the tumour and the frozen nerves in his leg. In late December 1974, he ended up in London, where his Venezuelan family were living in Finchley. Carlos David, then fourteen, had to give up his bed for his uncle: ‘The grown-ups stayed up all night for three nights, talking, talking, talking. It was as if my uncle had come back from the dead.’ Which, in a way, he had.

His poem, ‘Pieta’, recalled from memory because to write it down would have been the death of him, told the truth:

Life, in the abstract, in its great coach – hownice;

But amidst vomit and outrage the real thing triumphs,

It flows, sewage and decay .. .

I suffer moons, hungers, cruel Christs of pus . ..

I give in bone the explanation of this, my misfortune.

Ali died on 30 November 1995. His friend Jacques Sedillot never made it out of North Korea, dying some time in 1976. Ali’s report for Amnesty in 1979 is a linein the sand, the first account by a Westerner, and a Communist to boot, of the true nature of the regime.

From that year on, no one could have any doubt that the North Korea gulag was a serious contender to be the worst place on earth; that Kim Il Sungs regime had nothing what so ever to do with advancing the brotherhood
of man; and that it used hunger asa weapon to ensure that its people obeyed.

Alejandro Cao de Benós of the Korean Friendship Association dismisses criticism of the North Korea gulag: ‘These are reeducation camps. With 23 million people, sometimes you may have a few criminals. We believe not in punishment but in rehabilitation. It’s a kindof psychological therapy.’
⁷

After reading Ali Lameda’s report for Amnesty and his poem, that is a sentence I would never utter.

¹
Bernd Schaefer:
North Korean ‘Adventurism’ and China's Long Shadow, 1966–1972,
Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center, Washington DC, 2004, p10.

²
Suh, p52.

³
E. Crankshaw:
Cult of the Individual
, Belfast, 1975, p 6.

⁴
Ali Lameda:
A Personal Account of the Experience of a Prisoner of Conscience in the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea,
Amnesty International, London, 1979.

⁵
Breen, p104.

⁶
Juan Paez Avila:
Ali: El Viajero Enlutado
, Ala de Cuervo, Caracas, 2003, p25.

⁷
Hume, ‘His dear leader: Meet North Korea's secret weapon – an IT consultant from Spain’:
Independent
, 21 January 2012.

10

Pissing on Marble

In December 1969 two Italian Communists set off to Pyongyang, on the first ever delegation of the PCI – the Italian Communist Party – to North Korea. The two men were both heroes of the Italian Left. Emanuele Macaluso is a Sicilian leftist senator who has spent his life challenging the morbid power of the Mafia in his home island and throughout Italy. His friend Antonello Trombadori was then a famous artist, who during the second world war had been locked up by Mussolini and then the Nazis before escaping. If Communism ever had a human face, Macaluso and Trombadori were it. The artist died in 1993, but Macaluso is still with us: a brilliant little gnome of a man, eighty-nine, whose impassive shrugs suggest a pint-sized version of Marlon Brando’s Godfather.

Their trip to North Korea took place at the height of the rift between the Soviet Union and China. That spring the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had attacked a Soviet position on a disputed island in a river of the far west of China, leaving fifty-nine dead, including a senior colonel. The Chinese also managed to capture a then-secret T-62 tank. Both sides had tested nuclear bombs, and the Communist world stood on the brink of a terrible internecine war. The shooting died down, but the ideological conflict continued. As the two great Communist powers clashed, smaller Communist parties tried to reach out to one another, to find common ground. Both the Italian and the North Korean parties were keen to show the Soviet Union and China that they could entertain independent relations between friendly socialist parties without the interference of either big brother.

Logistically, however, they were stumped. The Italians had to fly to North Korea via Moscow, and the Russians were not keen on the PCI doing its own thing. So for three days they lay stranded at Moscow airport, the excuse being the weather. On the fourth day, the North Koreans, who had been growing increasingly impatient, made Kim Il Sung’s very own jet available to the Italians. As they embarked, Trombadori could not help but notice the similarities with the Pope’s personal plane, which he had recently travelled on as a journalist: comfortable large beds, elegant rooms for conversation, and excellent food. The Catholic Church and the North Koreans had different ideologies, but, as it turned out, the same tastein executive air travel.

The North Koreans held the Italians in high esteem. At the very least, the visit of the PCI delegation to Pyongyang meant that Kim Il Sung could claim to have friendly relations with the largest Communist Party in western Europe. Both Macaluso and Trombadori were thus received almost as if they were heads of state. Despite their familiarity with Soviet satellites, they soon realized that North Korea was a world unto itself. Macaluso had walked around Krakow visiting the churches. In Budapest, he’d enjoyed some of the admittedly meagre nightlife. None of this was possible in Pyongyang.

The Italians were escorted everywhere by an official of the Korean Workers’ Party. When they were taken shopping in one of the main squares of the city, they were amazed to see that everyone else had already been made to leave. No soldiers, no workers, no civilians walked across the square. The PCI delegation was shown the house where Kim Il Sung was born, the cradle where he’d slept and the desk where he’d studied. Macaluso, a Sicilian, no stranger to religiosity, said: ‘They showed us a shrine containing pool cues that had been used by the Great Leader as if they were a saint’s relics, all whilst he was still alive.’

The visiting Italians found the food ghastly. Macalusore called how even the most privileged North Koreans still kept all their vegetables and other food in brine because of the lack of fridges. He didn’t comment on this habit, just pulled a very miserable face.

Kim Il Sung, to the two Italians, was no saint. He was far more approachable than the cult of personality would have suggested, smart and sly and also, it seemed, more thana little paranoid. He told them about the attempts on his life that had been organized by Khrushchev. To the Soviets, Kim implied, for the North Korean leader to exercise independent relations with China was to be guilty of treachery.

Macaluso pointed out the contradiction between North Korea’s claim to political independence and its support for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, crushing the Prague Spring in 1968. After the translator had spoken Macaluso’s words, Kim Il Sung remained silent. The other officials in the room looked in disbelief at the Italian Communist. Several months later Macaluso received a publication in French from the North Koreans, which amended their position on the Prague Spring and the Czech demands for ‘socialism with a human face’, signalling opposition to Soviet force majeure.

The relationship between the Italians and the North Koreans, however, was not without tension. In Italy, the PCI had to compete at free elections with other parties who took human liberty as standard. The PCI delegation tried to discuss cultural and personal freedoms with the North Koreans, with very little success. The East Germans would listen to the Italians talk about liberty and counter-attack, pouring acid scorn on the PCI’s ideas. The North Koreans simply ignored them. Macaluso said their attempt to get Pyongyang to engage on political freedom was ‘like pissing on marble’.

Buzo analyses the marmoreal nature of the regime in his book
The Guerilla Dynasty
: ‘A particular facet of Kim’s personality which compounded the stultifying effect of ideology was his pervasive mistrust. The purges, the elaborate, multiple overlapping security agencies, the continuing high levels of repression... Kim clearly perceived the threat to his system posed by interaction with even other socialist countries.’
¹

No wonder the Italians found getting across their far more human version of Communism to their host hard work. Buzo asks why North Korea declined into economic backwardness in the 1970s:

The major part of the answer lies simply in the extent to which Kim Il Sung lost touch with reality. Physical isolation, paranoia, an overbearing, browbeating personal manner, the corrupting effects of power without accountability, the cumulative effect over decades of daily exposure to extravagant flattery, growing megalomania ... all combined to give Kim the illusion of control over events and deprive him of any real capacity for self-reflection and self-correction.
²

Kim Il Sung had become a delusional illusionist.

¹
Buzo, pp242-3.

²
Buzo, P245.

11

‘Would the Dear Leader not be offended by such a gift?’

The Kim Jong Il Museum of Gifts is housed in a fancy palace in the countryside about half an hour or so out of the Big Zombie. Outside the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, stood what felt like half the Korean People’s Army, but the crowd was only around 5,000-strong. They were in town for the big parade the following day, a parade we only got to hear about after the fact. Still, the massed ranks of Korean squaddies helped conjure up the awe and veneration constantly urged on us by our minders for the Leaders, Doris Day and Midget’s Turd. Thing is, by Day Five, we were becoming inured to their blandishments. Worse than that, some of our party were up for devilry.

The Kim Jong Il Museum of Gifts can be easily confused with the International Friendship Exhibition, which is a bigger effort, mostly dedicated to gifts to Kim One, housed in a colossal pagoda in the mountains three hours’ drive from Pyongyang. Both museums are the Kim dynasty’s version of an attic, where you bung
all those useless gifts various aunts have given you over the years. Or the drinks cupboard where you dump the sticky yellow booze you quite liked on holiday but tastes horrid back home in Blighty. The idea of venerating that kind of junk is frankly absurd.

This being the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, we were asked to do exactly that. First, we had to put white nylon over-socks around our shoes, lest we muddy the marble. Then we had to dump our bags and stuff, especially cameras, in a large cloakroom. I was excited by this tour because I collect tyrant kitsch. At home, up in our attic, we have a moth-eaten Saddam Hussein carpet – I put it up there after they hanged him; at the bottom of a pile of books at my desk is a copy of
Omagiu
–
Homage
– which I borrowed from the Romanian Communist Party Central Committee building on Christmas Day, 1989; in the Frontline Club, inside a glass case, is Udai Husseins snorkel mask, which fell into myhands.
¹

When it was my turn to dump my stuff at the cloakroom, I somehow forgot to hand over my Black Berry, complete with naff quality camera-phone. A few moments later, Mr Hyun kindly invited a Korean security woman with a hand-held metal scanner – playing the role of Franz Beckenbauer in the 1972 World Cup – to give me the sweep-over. Beep-beep went her machine, and Mr Hyun escorted me back to the cloakroom to hand over my phone. I felt like a naughty boy.

They wiped us all clean. But, somehow, Erica managed to smuggle her iPhone in. We hadn’t asked her to, but she had managed to get her iPhone in.

Our tour commenced with the obligatory local guide, a
gimlet-eyed lady with a frozen moue on her mush. First off, there was Kim II Sung, sitting on a big marble throne, ready and willing to accept posthumous presents, and then we started processing through engine sheds of junk, tat from all four corners of the globe. There were vases, naff oil paintings, military paraphernalia and what-nottery. On and on it went. Without cameras, it was hard to recall it all, and one is left a bit like a contestant on Bruce Forsyth’s
Generation Game
, having to remember the objects briefly revealed on the conveyor belt: a cuddly toy, a fondue set, roller skates. Standout nonsense included a mug advertising the Abba musical
Mamma Mia!
a
Mamma Mia!
badge and a Twin Towers fridge magnet. As Kenny Everett’s transvestite character Cupid Stunt used to exclaim: ‘It’s all in the best possible taste.’ We started to titter; our local guide became more and more cross.

The Hitch visited the bigger museum in the mountains. He, too, had found it hard to keep a straight face, confronted with a bear’s head from Ceausescu, a chess set from Gaddafi, a crocodile-skin suitcase from Castro, an old gramophone from Zhou Enlai, an armoured train from Chairman Mao and a VHS copy of
Space Jam
, donor unknown. The most famous objet d’art in the Kim II Sung Gift Museum is a stuffed crocodile, stood on its legs bearing a tray in its claws holding six goblets, for all the world like a waiter. It was a gift from the people of Nicaragua.

‘I began to get the giggles,’ wrote Hitchens, ‘imagining that Kim Il Sung had thousands and thousands of dotty aunts and batty uncles, and had solemnly resolved to keep every one of their rubbishy birthday and Christmas presents in case they ever came to call.’
²