How everything in Kim’s crackpot kingdom is as fake and brutally controlled as this ‘joyous’ party
Crowds of sweaty-faced men dance in cheap suits and shiny ties. The women opt for bright dresses and wide smiles. Each time the music stops, everyone highfives and shares a round of ultra-vigorous applause.
By the end of the night, a few brave souls, with their shirt buttons coming undone, appear to be performing a conga.
This might look, at first glance, like the world’s biggest open-air office party, but peer closely at these images and you’ll soon realise that the public demonstration of fun is all a bit too – shall we say? – ‘organised’ for that.
The real giveaway is in the background, beneath the exploding fireworks: here you’ll see, draped on almost every building, the red, white and blue flag of the democratic People’s republic of Korea.
on saturday, Pyongyang had devoted daylight hours to military parades, with tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen goosestepping their way past the nation’s portly 30-something dictator, Kim Jong-un.
The massive parade, to which foreign media were offered a rare invitation, saw the regime showcase what it claims is a brand new, submarine-launched, intercontinental ballistic missile.
officially, the event was held to celebrate the day of the sun, the most important holiday in North Korea’s calendar, which marks the 1912 birth of its founder Kim Ilsung, grandfather of the current leader and North Korea’s ‘eternal president’. even in death.
It was after sunset that the ‘party’ started, with thousands of office workers and civil servants – the women waving plastic flowers and wearing traditional ‘ hanbok’ dresses – taking over public squares to perform extravagant dance routines.
There was nothing spontaneous about it. The clothes were colourcoded and the displays perfectly-choreographed after months of intense practice by the performers who had been required to spend evenings and weekends rehearsing with colleagues.
Like the soldiers who marched earlier in the day, the dancers’ footwork was helped by thousands of special white dots, painted a metre apart across a swathe of central Pyongyang, to ensure jackboots always fell in the correct spot.
To western observers the pageantry looked contrived, the smiles and applause a little forced; some even speculated that the “game changing” missile unveiled earlier may have been a cheap replica.
what no-one can doubt, however, is that the intensely- controlled nature of saturday’s spectacular in was entirely in keeping with modern-day North Korea.
It is, after all, an utterly-authori- tarian state where citizens have almost no contact with the outside world, and where almost every aspect of daily life from where you live (all homes are owned by the Government), to what you eat (food is rationed), how you earn a living (there is no private industry) and even how you style your hair (good citizens are encouraged to emulate Kim Jong-un’s pudding bowl and centre parting) is orchestrated by the regime.
Leaving your hometown requires a permit. Telephone calls are monitored and religion banned. Foreign music, books, and clothes are forbidden, with huge antennas placed on the border to block radio and television transmissions. In the online era, the country’s version of the internet, the ‘kwangmyong’, which is largely used by academics and civil servants, was reported last year to permit access to a mere 28 websites.
‘It’s Cold war East Germany, times ten,’ says writer Mark seddon, who has visited North Korea seven times.
‘All communication is incredibly difficult. The country is hermetically sealed, there is little public or private transport, and if you know nothing of the outside world what are you to make of life? Propaganda tells you it’s brilliant and everything else is terrible, so that’s what you believe.’
The regime’s iron fist reaches out long before birth, with society organised according to a complex hereditary caste system called songbun which rates families according to perceived loyalty to the Left-wing despot. It sees North Korean households divided into 51 different ranks, categorised in three major groups: the ‘core’, the ‘ wavering’ and the ‘ hostile’, depending on family history and conduct tracking back to the Korean war (1950-53).
The ‘core’, roughly a quarter of the country’s 25 million population, enjoy plum jobs in government and the ministry, and make up the vast majority of the capital city’s 2.5 million residents. The ‘wavering’ may include intellectuals whose absolute loyalty is suspect. Members of ‘hostile’ castes, meanwhile, are condemned to manual labour, in the fields, mines, or factories of the country’s impoverished provinces.
Please the government, and your family might move up a rank or two. Upset it, and you and your descendants will suffer forever.
Commit a real howler, such as telling jokes that mock Kim Jongun (the UPI news agency this week reported that a handful of soldiers who had been caught telling jokes that compared him to a child have
‘It’s Cold War times ten’
been arrested and face ‘severe’ punishment) and you will join at least 120,000 North Koreans in the country’s notorious ‘kwanliso’, or forced labour camps.
Here, according to a 400-page UN report published in 2014, which compared conditions to those in Nazi-era Germany, inmates work seven days a week, from 5am to 11pm, digging mines, laying roads, or building skyscrapers. Inmates are subjected to ‘murder, enslavement, rape and torture’, along with “prolonged starvation” with some forced to eat rats to survive.
one particularly gruesome punishment meted out to residents of the camps was known as ‘ pigeon torture,’ said a survivor. ‘Your hands were tied behind your back and you could not stand properly or sit down. This went on for days. It was called the pigeon torture because the more time you spent doing it the more your chest stuck out and your body changed.’
It goes without saying that prisoners are sent to the camps without trial. occasionally, three generations of a family can be punished for one person’s perceived wrongdoing, meaning a dissident is responsible for both his parents and children being incarcerated, sometimes indefinitely.
Proper indoctrination, in this despotic system begins in kinder-
garten, according to the same report, with a programme designed to instil unswerving devotion to the ‘Supreme Leader’ along with deep-seated hatred to the United States, Japan and neighbouring South Korea.
‘The milk would arrive and we would go up one by one to fill our cups,’ recalled Lee, a defector quoted in the report. ‘The teachers would say: “Do you know where the milk came from? It came from the dear leader. Because of his love and consideration, we are drinking milk today.”’
Children’s books on the syllabus include The Butterfly and the Cockerel, a story about a violent chicken (representing the US) that is outwitted by a small, heroic butterfly (North Korea).
Aged seven, all youngsters must join the Children’s Union, a youth wing of the Communist party, and a year later are required to start attending Saturday ‘self-criticism’ sessions in which they confess the ways in which they fell short of the ‘ten principles’ underpinning the country’s ideology, which include studying the ‘revolutionary ideas of the supreme leader’. As teenagers, they move into the Socialist Youth League.
In High School, the syllabus involves 81 hours studying Kim Jong-un, and another 160 hours learning about grandfather Kim Ilsung, the ‘Father of the Nation’ who seized power in 1948 and cemented his status after the Korean War, ruling until his death in 1994 and creating a sort of hereditary Communist dictatorship.
Despite turning North Korea from one of the wealthiest nations in Asia to one of the poorest, he’s still regarded, according to a press release put out yesterday by the official Uriminsokkiri news agency as: ‘The iron-willed commander and legendary great man unparalleled in history.’
Another 148 hours are spent looking at the current leader’s father Kim Jong-il, who after tak- ing over the reins of the country (and losing Russian aid following the end of the Cold War) presided over the late 1990s famine in which around 2.5 million of his citizens perished.
A famous lover of Western movies and fine food, who is said to have kidnapped his favourite Japanese Sushi Chef Kenji Fujimoto and forced him to work as his private cook, he had foie gras, truffles and kobe beef flown to Pyongyang during the famine, and travelled the country in a 21carriage personal train containing lobster tanks, a collection of vintage claret and cognac, a cigar humidor, and (allegedly) a harem of prostitutes. According to defectors these women were virgins given six months’ training in sexual techniques, and required to write a pledge of allegiance in blood, though – amazingly – this fact doesn’t feature on the official syllabus.
But we digress. After finishing education, all Korean men and women are conscripted into the armed forces, for around a decade. Early years are spent in military training. Later, they are often tasked with helping build roads, or gather harvests.
Having completed national service, they are free to get on with life. Many choose this moment to settle down ( marriages must be sanctioned by the State), and move into the stateowned home where they will generally spend their entire life, sharing space with portraits of the Kim family, which are mandatory in all homes and workplaces. Their careers are generally assigned according to caste.
Though the snapshots of North Korea shown to the outside world are primarily from Pyongyang (where the military and civil service elites live) the vast majority of citizens spend their time in rural areas.
Here, as in Communist-era Russia, they must work on collective farms, though families are also assigned a ten metre by ten metre plot of land to cultivate for their own use. Funnily enough, these tend to be highly productive.
‘When you drive past, you can see corn climbing above the two-metre fence,’ says Daniel Pinkston, a Seoul-based North Korea expert with Troy University. ‘ In the surrounding fields crops were maybe half or two thirds that size.’
Produce from these fields is sometimes sold on the black market, allowing families to squirrel away cash.
But selling it’s fraught with danger: each local communities is effectively run by an ‘imnimban’, a sort of neighbourhood watch scheme in which between 20 and 40 households keep an eye on each other’s comings and goings.
An imnimban is typically run by a middle-aged housewife, who is expected to know intimate detail about its members, from how many pairs of chopsticks each family owns, to where they spend each Sunday (a day off when patriotic Koreans are supposed to socialise with their family).
They authorise overnight stays by friends or family members from elsewhere in the country, who can only visit for major events such as weddings or funerals, and are expected to report even the most minor infringements to authorities.
Sold as a sort of security measure, the imnimban is therefore just another means for the state to peer into everyday life. Here, as in almost every other aspect of a person’s existence in North Korea, it’s all about control.
‘The iron-willed commander’