John Kampfner :: author, broadcaster & commentator

What is going on in the World's most secretive country?
Daily Express, 13th September 2004

Rousing music blares out each morning from loudspeakers as workers in their jump suits march out of identical tower blocks and merrily along the car-free streets. Radio sets are pre-tuned to government propaganda.

The great leader is five feet three inches tall, wears platform heels and permed hair. He is said to have written six operas in two years and to have a library of 20,000 Hollywood movies. On a train journey across Russia, one of the few times he has left the country, he ordered lobsters to be airlifted to him each day, eating them with silver chopsticks.

So joyous was the birth of Kim Jong-il, the son of the Great Leader, Kim il-Sung, in a log cabin on his country’s highest mountain, that the event was marked by a double rainbow and a bright star in the sky.

The fantasies of North Korea’s reclusive regime would be faintly amusing if it were not for the dangers. The most secretive country on earth is also one of the most dangerous. Four decades of absolute dictatorship have brought North Korea to its knees.

An estimated two million people have died as 10 successive harvests have failed. But there is one area on which its government does not spare expense – its nuclear weapons programme that is causing alarm across the world.

Fears have been heightened with reports over the weekend of a massive explosion and a possible mushroom cloud on North Korea’s border with China. The US and the South Korean governments yesterday tried to play down suggestions that it had been caused by a nuclear device, but that is still the most likely cause.

By chance, a British Foreign Office Minister, Bill Rammell, happens to be in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, for talks. He said yesterday eh was seeking an urgent explanation from his hosts. Nothing so far has been forthcoming – hardly surprising given that the authorities took three days to admit that anything had happened during the last major incident, a mysterious train explosion in April that killed 170 people.

This is what we know so far: the blast took place in the sparsely populated and mountainous Yanggang province as North Korea celebrated its National Day. The area is home to an underground military base known to contain medium-range missiles. According to the South Korean news agency that revealed the blast, it sent a cloud with a radius of up to two and a half miles into the sky.

The Americans suspect that the closed region may be where North Korea is conducting a uranium enrichment programme. But some experts wonder whether they would have tried something as provocative as this so close to China.

For a few years during the mid-1990s it seemed as if North Korea was tentatively coming in from the cold. Ever since its creation in 1948 this part of the Korean peninsula sought to turn itself into the purest form of a Stalinist state. The Soviet Union, as it then was, and China were the models, but the first Kim wanted more.

Under his personal “philosophy” of Juche, or self-reliance, North Korea deliberately turned its back on everything else that was happening elsewhere. As most of Asia accumulated wealth and some parts turned towards democracy, North Korea retreated into the dark ages.

When the USSR collapsed and the Cold War effectively ended, it was forced to think again. As its economy plunged further, North Korea agreed to start talks about its nuclear programme. Six-party negotiations began, involving both Koreas, the US, Russia, China and Japan. The Americans promised aid and security guarantees if North Korea agreed to dismantle both of the plutonium weapons that it admits to, and the uranium bomb programme that its neighbours are convinced it is developing.

Meanwhile, the North opened up briefly to visits from people from the South, whose families had been split up for 50 years since the Korean War. It allowed some Japanese who had been abducted all that time ago to go home, including the wife of an American deserter, Charles Jenkins, who has recently handed himself over to the US military. In 2000 the South Korean President broke ground by visiting the North where he was given a lavish welcome. The aim of the so-called “sunshine policy” was to encourage change through dialogue and economic aid. The policy appeared to be paying dividends as the new Kim appeared to be seeking a slightly more normal relationship with the outside world.

Much of that changed, however, when in January 2002 President George Bush famously linked North Korea with Iran and Iraq, linking these countries together as an “axis of evil”. Later that year the North Koreans expelled international inspectors and reactivated a nuclear reactor. Relations went back into deep freeze. The US administration argued it talked tough with North Korea because the situation was already acute. Its critics said the language drove the country back into its shell.

The irony is that while the Americans waged war against Saddam Hussein, even though it later transpired he had no weapons of mass destruction, they are confining themselves to international negotiations with North Korea – perhaps because they know the threat this time is very real and very dangerous.

One of Mr Rammell’s tasks over the next few days is to urge North Korea to rejoin the nuclear talks. He is also preparing to raise his hosts’ appalling human rights record. Reports have emerged of torture, public executions, slave labour, and forced abortions and infanticides. One human rights group estimates that there are up to 200,000 political prisoners.

Everybody is watched and reported on. Nobody speaks out of turn. Schoolchildren spend their time reciting propaganda like robots. On the streets, people are too scared even to talk to the few foreigners who manage to get in to the country. In any case, visitors are provided with “minders” to ensure that they see nothing and hear nothing untoward. Compare that with the affluent, outward-looking – although anything but perfect – situation in South Korea.

Nobody is expecting much from the British visit – the first official delegation ever to go to Pyongyang – but something has to be tried as the security and economic implications are increasingly desperate.

For all the absurdity of the regime, for all the eccentricities of the leader, North Korea is no joke. This totalitarian state has caused untold suffering to its own people. The world is watching with no little trepidation to see what evils it has in store for us.

This article first appeared in the Daily Express and may not be reproduced without permission.