I visited North Korea as a tourist. Foreign journalists, including Australians like me, hardly ever get visas; even genuine tourists have great difficulty penetrating North Korea’s rigid isolation. And this is a particularly tense time. Washington and Pyongyang are locked in a bitter dispute over the North’s nuclear program. Some U.S. officials think North Korea already has the bomb; others say it is close to building one. The United States and its allies have set a deadline of Feb. 21 for Pyongyang to accept inspection of its nuclear facilities or face U.N. sanctions. Meanwhile, U.S. military commanders warn that Pyongyang has massed its army near the DMZ in what could be a prelude to invasion of the South. Last week a New York Times story, which was read all over Asia, said the Pentagon had a plan to counter any invasion by seizing Pyongyang and toppling the regime of Kim Il Sung, the world’s most durable Stalinist.
During my week in North Korea I saw no sign of preparations for war, and lots of circumstantial evidence suggested that the Communists are not capable of launching an all-out offensive, even if China, their only major ally, would allow them to do so. Of course, I did not question government officials or visit military bases; no tourist would ask to do such things. But there was almost no interference with my ramble through the civilian sector. From the DMZ to the Chinese border, I saw more of the way people actually live than I had anticipated. And my view of “the Hermit Kingdom” produced some surprises.
It is true, as outsiders say, that the country seems to have ground to a halt. It’s a land of smokeless chimneys, silent factories and cold, dark cities where most people get around on foot. Motionless construction cranes droop over abandoned building projects. Foreigners in the capital say the paralysis is due mainly to lack of Russian oil and former-East-bloc spare parts: North Korea’s old suppliers now want dollars instead of barter goods.
It’s also true that Big Brother is everywhere. Huge posters show President Kim Il Sung, 81, in his many roles as founder and protector of the nation. Giant statues of the man glitter in major towns. Slogans are inescapable: THE PEOPLE WISH THE PRESIDENT LONG LIFE AND GOOD HEALTH. And the chilling WHATEVER THE PARTY DECIDES, WE WILL DO. And yet North Korea is not the vast prison I had expected to see, a place so awful that nobody ever laughs. In Panmunjom, on the DMZ, I remarked to a tough-looking officer that North Korean soldiers are said to be relentlessly grim. Maj. Li Hong Sop put his arm around my shoulder, grinned broadly and said in Korean: “In your country, I believe you have an expression, “Seeing is believing’.” People everywhere cheerfully asked where I came from and readily agreed to pose for pictures.
I had heard of widespread hunger, but in the dozens of small villages I passed through, most houses had chickens, while some also had pigs, geese and even goats. In the cities, there are no food lines. People told me they lived mainly on the national dish, kimchi (homemade spicy, pickled cabbage), along with rice, corn and winter root vegetables. Meat, usually fish or chicken, is eaten once or twice a week. The children don’t seem hungry. You see them skating, sliding down icy slopes, throwing snow at each other. Starving children don’t play – certainly not in the freezing cold.
North Koreans are tough, stoical people. In Pyongyang one morning I spotted a group of children assemblign by a statue of Kim Il Sung. Ages 13 and 14, they were “thousand-li marchers,” about to emulate one of Kim Il Sung’s wartime exploits. They were going to march 250 miles – 1,000 li, as Koreans measure distance from Pyongyang to the Chinese border in a season of below freezing temperatures. “I don’t know how the North Koreans would perform as invaders,” said a diplomat in Pyongyang, “but they would be the toughest of guerrillas in their own country if they were ever attacked.”
Above all, North Korea seems to be a well-oiled dictatorship where everybody knows the rules and plays by them. Kim Il Sung has run the country since 1945. He plans to bequeath power to his son, Kim Jong Il, but the older Kim probably has a few more years left in him. Evangelist Billy Graham, who visited North Korea when I was there, lunched with the old man and said he seemed vigorous.
It isn’t clear why a consummate survivor like Kim is playing the nuclear game. He seems to be risking everything to develop a weapon the North Koreans could use only once. “It would mean the end of their country as they know it,” President Clinton warned last summer. There is no such thing as informed opinion in North Korea, but foreigners who work there think Kim is playing poker with weak cards. They believe he has nothing to put on the table but the threat of developing a nuclear weapon and the promise to allow inspection of his nuclear facilities. He’s using those cards to try to gain the trade concessions and access to international finance he desperately needs to keep his country from falling apart. Without the bomb North Korea is irrelevant, and outsiders have no need to make concessions.
Kim’s nuclear bluff may also reflect the fact that his conventional forces aren’t much of a threat. His armed forces are huge – 1.2 million men – but their equipment is out of date; their main battle tank is the Soviet T-62, which I saw American tanks and planes blow open like sardine cans during the Persian Gulf War. Shortages must also be hurting the army. If top officials can’t get fuel for their limos, and major factories don’t operate for lack of power, then the army must be suffering, too, even if it gets priority treatment.
I saw about 15 military vehicles in all the time I was in North Korea, and half of them were stalled at the side of the road with soldiers poking around in their innards. I saw quite a lot of men in uniform, but few were officers, and none were armed, and there was none of the tension in the air that I have experienced in many countries, from Vietnam to Saudi Arabia, that were in or near war. The few North Koreans who talked about war all told me that what they really feared was an American attack on them, and not a call to invade South Korea. Kim is playing a dangerous game of bluff with his nuclear program. But when you look at his country up close, its tigers seem to be made mostly of paper.
