Dispatches from N Korea, the world’s ‘worst Gulag’

JAIPUR: Recent UN sanctions against North Korea may have pushed it to look for allies, but the state ensures its people know little about what goes on in the world outside and vice versa.

In a session titled Undercover in North Korea: Facts and Fiction, investigative journalist Suki Kim spoke about her experience of working as a teacher at a North Korean university in 2011. Her book, Without You There is No Us: My Time With The Sons of North Korea’s Elite (2014) is about constant repression and fear in North Korea.

Kim, who was born in South Korea, and has a decade of experience reporting on North Korea, had visited the country, previously as a journalist. But traditional reporting methods failed, she said, because all foreign visitors are accompanied by minders who monitor what they see.

“Everything is scripted,” she said. North Korea has no religion except worship of the Great Leader (currently Kim Jong-un) and proselytising is a crime.

In 2011, posing as a missionary and teacher, Kim went to Pyongyang University of Science and Technology set up by Christian missionaries, to teach English to sons of the country’s elite.

The evidence she gathered at great personal risk reveals North Korea to be “the world’s worst Gulag”. The session began with a recording of the North Korean song dedicated to the deceased Great Leader Kim Jong-il, which her students sang twice a day. “The portraits of the Great Leaders are everywhere. All books are written about the Great Leader or are by the Great Leader. ”

The state newspaper carries articles about the Great Leader and students have to wear pins bearing his images. “If you drop one or stepped on it, it is a great crime,” she said.

The university had 270 boys, handpicked from among the brightest in the country’s universities. Kim says their lack of general knowledge and technological backwardness was astounding. “There were computer majors who did not know about the Internet. The university was a military guarded compound. Every lesson we taught had to be approved beforehand.”

This Orwellian state enforces students to sing daily odes to the Great Leader. What they say and do is monitored and students report on each other every week. As a result, critical thinking has been obliterated from the education system.

“This tragedy should not be allowed to continue,” she said of North Korea. “The country has existed in darkness and isolation for 70 years.”