Abstract
Although all North Korea’s media remains state-controlled, there is a growing number of exiles, defectors and brave residents who are striving to get information out. Looking beyond censorship and sensationalism,
In March, 100 per cent of voters used their ballots to kiss the Respected Marshal by proxy and endorse Kim Jong Un’s rule as always- for every Kim has scored 100 per cent. Unfortunately, this show of faith couldn’t dissuade the United Nations from publishing a report showing how the North Korean government had been committing crimes against humanity against its own people for decades. This time the UN Security Council was urged to bring North Korea’s leaders to justice at the International Criminal Court, and more sanctions were applied.
How the North’s leaders would be brought to book wasn’t really explained – and nor was the difference new sanctions would make when the regime had already survived decades of sanctions that had played a role in killing a tenth of the population by famine.
Above: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un poses for a picture with senior military staff in Pyongyang earlier this year
Credit: KCNA/Reuters
Unfortunately, too often the world’s “free” press reverts to sensationalism in covering North Korea, reporting that Kim Jong Un has demanded that all men have their hair cut like his, or that his uncle was executed by being eaten alive by dogs. Yet there is an ever-growing corps of agencies and think-tanks providing real insights and analysis on North Korea, and as close to real-time news from inside the country as is possible. Since 2012 the Associated Press has had an office in Pyongyang. While outside North Korea there is a score of agencies, think-tanks and analytical groups fielding insights not just from academics, diplomats and Pyongyangologists but also from an ever-growing and vocal global network of North Korean defectors and exiles, and some incredibly brave souls in-country who insist on getting information out – among them NK News, the Daily NK, North Korea Economy Watch and North Korea Leadership Watch. For all that, there are still Western reporters who, when allowed into North Korea on short chaperoned trips, become infantilised and come out all gleeful with little more than footage of Kim Jong Un’s dandruff. Others sneak in as tourists to do “undercover exposés” from guided tours that everyone knows are Potemkin exercises, but are nevertheless so frayed that guides have to ask tourists not to photograph the poverty in plain view.
There are some incredibly brave souls in-country who insist on getting information out
Tourists can now bring in zoom lenses and video cameras, even mobile phones that they can use if they sign up with the indigenous Koryo mobile network, albeit digitally segregated from the millions of local subscribers. (There are millions nonetheless.) There’s more economic activity than you might think. While the capital was recently so dark and quiet at night you could track single cars crossing town, now the lights are on all night on ever more new buildings, and there are traffic jams. The list of cities foreigners can visit is increasing. You see people looking better dressed and better fed than a decade ago, but mostly you only see, rather than speak to, them. They smile and wave more than they did but they still keep their distance from foreigners. Most of the country remains off-limits for foreigners, but in the bits you are allowed to see, every square inch of soil is planted with crops. Agriculture remains terrifyingly precarious, with grain shortfalls of hundreds of thousands of tons a year. The official guides talk openly about it, though they would never suggest that precious state funds spent on ski resorts and weaponry could go on food instead.
After Jang’s arrest was broadcast, all state news reels and articles were cleansed of his presence
When the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il died in 2011, there were hopes that Kim Jong Un would blow the winds of change into the Stalinist autarchy, bringing the fresh air of democracy and liberal economics from his schooling in Switzerland to the mountains of North Korea. Instead he seemed to have learned how isolated militarised elites can survive on the furtive alchemy of making money out of thin air. He rapidly fired some missiles, test-blasted a nuclear bomb and reasserted the economic priority of meeting the military’s needs, embedded by his grandfather in the 1960s.
When I visited Pyongyang’s museum of the Korean War, lavishly renovated in 2012, we were greeted by a statue of Kim Il Sung, depicted in his youthful prime. His resemblance to his grandson Kim Jong Un is startling, and we wondered if the resemblance is being played up, as if to bridge time back to the glory days of his grandfather, who is 20 years dead but is still the Eternal President. In his half-century in power, Kim Il Sung led his half of a divided country from under Japanese colonial rule, through the Korean War, to become a rapidly industrialising power and, fleetingly, one of east Asia’s richest countries. The period from the 1960s to the early 1980s were the best years, and postcards from that era depict brightly coloured city views and lush hotel interiors. You can see the same views today, only they’re now heavily stained with the rust and dust that gathered under Kim Jong Il, whose shorter reign left the country’s hillsides cirrhotic with the mass graves of famine.
The state narrative may want to frame the very young Kim Jong Un against the bounteous days of the young Kim Il Sung. Kim Jong Un’s self-assertion has involved purging his father’s backers in the military and civilian government, including the violent expunging of his uncle-by-marriage, Jang Song Thaek, in body and in print (although not by dogs). After news of Jang’s arrest was broadcast last December, all state news articles and news reels (and in North Korea all media is state-owned and directed) were “cleansed” of his presence. Soon after, outside observers monitoring the Korea Central News Agency (www.kcna.kp) and other associated outlets saw tens of thousands of articles, all from before October 2013, simply deleted. It was a classic act of old-school Soviet censorship, but with the technology of the web making it instant and globally visible.
Many people believe change will be prompted by China. But Beijing doesn’t want its buffer ally of 60 years to collapse – not with the huge US military presence in South Korea. Meanwhile, the joint US-South Korean war games went ahead this year as they do every year, and as ever they irritate the North. Each side cites the other’s military excesses to justify its own massive arms piles. The six-party talks aimed at ending the North’s nuclear program start and stall, diplomatic breakthroughs are followed by missile tests, and it’s predicted that later in 2014 Pyongyang will do another nuclear bomb test.
But none of that will register in Pyongyang, where the massive images of the Kims beam down from all around, reassuring everyone that all is as it should be and shall remain. The revolution continues – and everything keeps coming back to how it was.