The hidden nation
David Torrance
One imagines it's a standard work, held by libraries all over the world, but somehow this worn volume – 'The Poetical Works of Robert Burns' – still looked out of place. Not only was its spine hand-written but it belonged, not to a library, but in the Grand People’s Study House, an imposing building overlooking Kim Il-Sung Square in Pyongyang.
Welcome to North Korea, or as our guides preferred to call it, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). After all, it’s their country, and what a country it is. I had assumed it wasn’t open for tourism, but it seems around 2,000 Westerners visit each year, courtesy of tour companies operating out of Beijing. My tour, although excellent, was quite unlike any other I've joined.
Most travel is superficial. Even those who spend months in a foreign land, aiming to discover the real country, can only scratch the surface, and in the DPRK even doing that is difficult. If you come to North Korea, you do so on its terms, and those are pretty strict. The DPRK does not do off the beaten track. The tourist trail is well trodden, and often bizarre.
As was the Grand People’s Study House, which claimed to house 30 million volumes. Perhaps it did, but as someone with a feel for libraries, I somehow doubted it. There we witnessed 'ordinary' North Koreans browsing catalogues and withdrawing books, but something didn’t feel right. No one flinched as flashbulbs popped and members of the tour group whispered. In the National Library of Scotland there would at least have been a tut.
But then it was a showcase, rather like the rest of Pyongyang, contrived to show sceptical Westerners that the DPRK is not the closed, austere communist state we’ve been led to believe. Often our hosts laboured this point a little too heavily. Guiding us through Moranbong Park on Liberation Day we were literally accosted by dancing holidaymakers and invited to join in. Of course this could have been genuine, but our cynical minds went into overdrive.
Food was also plentiful, so much so that one couldn't help feeling Western reports of a starving population had compelled the authorities to take corrective action. Eggs, chicken and boiled cabbage were staples, accompanied by surprisingly good local beer. We stayed at the foreigner-only Yanggakdo Hotel on an island in the middle of Pyongyang, nicknamed Alcatraz by a previous visitor.
Two things pervade. First the late Kim Il-Sung, founder of the DPRK. Images of a benign-looking great leader are everywhere, as are statues, before which tourists are compelled (not asked) to bow. We even saw the man himself, lying in state at a sprawling mausoleum on the outskirts of Pyongyang. The choreography was impressive. Seemingly endless moving walkways transported us to the inner sanctum, by which point it was very difficult not to feel overawed. We also gazed at the great leader's birthplace, the Mangyongdae Native House. It looked very new.
'I hate the United States' was the apparently spontaneous declaration of our museum guide, an indelicate remark considering half the tour group comprised Americans, although by that point they were battle hardened.
Also ever present is the Korean War, dubbed the 'Forgotten War' in the West but to them – understandably – a defining national experience. The DPRK’s version of events is, of course, not immediately recognisable. The USA were the aggressors rather than the liberators, the South Korean government nothing more than a 'puppet' regime. At the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, full of elaborate panoramas of key events in the conflict, the treachery of the imperialist aggressors was relentlessly emphasised.
'I hate the United States' was the apparently spontaneous declaration of our museum guide, an indelicate remark considering half the tour group comprised Americans, although by that point they were battle hardened. ‘Koreans love all people in all countries,’ added another guide hastily, but the point had been made. Later we wandered round the USS Pueblo, a spy ship seized by the DPRK in 1968, of which the government remains inordinately proud.
Underlining Kim Il-Sung’s personality cult is a belief that he was beloved around the world, as well as in the Korean peninsula. The International Friendship Exhibition – a series of subterranean exhibition rooms housing gifts from foreign leaders and organisations – demonstrates just how deep the affection was, although one looks in vain for anything of substance from beyond former Eastern European states and the National Union of Mineworkers. Another guide asked me if the Queen had received as many gifts. I didn’t know but it was hardly the point. Such trinkets illustrated little about Kim Il-Sung’s geopolitical influence; they were just baubles, the kitsch currency of international diplomacy.
Only occasionally did we glimpse the reality of life in the DPRK. In the countryside ox carts passed for modern farming methods, while citizens were constantly engaged in menial tasks: tidying grass verges by hand, sweeping constantly swept roads and digging holes. Touring the Friendship Exhibition we also encountered large groups of ordinary workers. Their faces were etched, not with fear or incomprehension as one might have expected, but just blankness. Many were barely more than four feet in height, a legacy of nutritional deficiency stretching back generations.
All of this was fascinating, although retaining a sense of perspective was often difficult. It was easy to sneer at their devotion to the great leader, giggle at persistent references to imperialist aggressors and poke fun at the official Juche ideology, a sort of crude nationalism that replaced Marxist-Leninism in the early 1980s, the brainchild of Kim Jung-il, the still serving dear leader and son of Kim Il-Sung.
But in all of this there were more prosaic factors at play. It's not difficult to see why North Koreans are so vehemently anti-American. The war, whoever started it, remains a traumatic memory, while they’re hardly alone in perceiving the US as imperialist war-mongers. Accounts of the population’s hysterical reaction to the death of Kim Il-Sung in 1994 also bear an uncomfortable resemblance to that of the UK to Princess Diana’s three years later.
That said the DPRK is a deeply strange place. Strange not just because it still adheres to what most would consider an outdated ideology, but strange because it’s so close to the market socialism of China and the rampant capitalism of South Korea. That it hasn’t succumbed would be impressive were it not for the fact that most accounts – based upon defector testimonies – point to rather harsh realities we, as mere tourists, were not allowed to experience. 'That man to man the world o'er,' wrote Burns, 'shall brothers be for a' that', although I suspect the bard would have found little comfort in this particular part of the globe.
