CINA

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Before y'day (11.20) during a press conference in Seoul a "North Korean defector" (according to AFP) and his supporters from Asia Press (JP) announced the launch of the ("underground") magazine "Rimjingang" carrying undercover reporting by (DPRK) citizens. Well, that's just the fact..

Secret journalists report on North (JoongAng Ilbo, 11.21)

 
The grainy video featured old women in clothes that hung from their thin frames scrounging for bottles in a market in Pyongyang that they planned to sell to recyclers.

Images like these have been seen before but this footage shown at a press conference in Seoul yesterday is different, according to a Tokyo-based journalist, because it was shot by the first independent reporters to ever work inside North Korea.

Ishimaru Jiru, of the Japan-based Asia Press International, said his group is also launching the first-ever magazine to print independent journalism by North Koreans and about North Koreans. Called Rimjingang, the bi-monthly magazine will be launched this month and distributed in both North and South Korea. It will also be translated into English and Japanese, Jiru said.

“Despite all of the limitations, we will go around every area of North Korea, and we strongly believe in reporting the truth,” he said.

Jiru, who speaks Korean, said he has visited the North Korea-China border more than 50 times and interviewed about 600 defectors. He said the project started out of frustration that he could not report what was happening inside North Korea.
“We wanted to find out what North Koreans thought, what they were doing inside North Korea and what their lives were like,” he said yesterday through an interpreter at the Foreign Correspondents Club. “I came to think we needed someone inside.”

Jiru put the word out and found a North Korean defector in China willing to risk his life to surreptiously shoot video and interview people inside his home country. “Because of the risks, I waited for someone to volunteer,” Jiru said. In 2002, he met a man who calls himself Lee Jun. Jiru explained his idea and Lee returned home to think about it.“The main goal for this reporter was to institute journalism in North Korea,” Jiru said.

Jiru taught his recruit about ethics, and the importance of accuracy. He told him not to accept bribes and he trained Lee on the equipment.

“In 2004, though he wasn’t completely ready, he filmed a marketplace [inside North Korea],” Jiru said. “At first, things weren't perfect. The reports were vague. But as time went by, he became a very good reporter.”

Lee has recruited five other clandestine reporters, Jiru said, and they get help from 10 more inside North Korea. Jiru has given them 30 cameras to use. Since these reporters could face imprisonment or worse if they are captured, they sometimes conduct interviews without telling the interviewees what they are doing, Jiru said.

He said he meets with the reporters when they cross back into China. Jiru said his group is very careful about what information is released, although they have gathered “a very large amount” in the past three years.

He said the North Koreans wanted to start the magazine to bring news to their own people. “It’s also important to let the North Koreans know what is going on in the outside world,” he said.

The magazine will include stories ranging from the general views of North Koreans to their thoughts about Kim Il Sung to crises such as the extensive flooding last August.

“Since the North Korean media is controlled by the government, there isn’t a way for the North Korean people to express themselves,” said Choi Jin I, a North Korean who defected to the South in 1999 and is working with the magazine. “I believe this will be the seed.”

Choi said the magazine will be written in Korean, but it might not be recognizable to Southerners. “We will use the exact grammar that North Korean people use,” she said. The version that gets distributed in North Korea will also be edited a second time for security reasons.
 

http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2883010

More detailed articles about it you can read here:

☞ Underground Magazine "Rimjinkang" Launched (DailyNK, 11.21)

☞ “北 지하 기자들 매체 만들고 싶어해” (DailyNK, 11.22)

☞ “정말 북한 주민 기자들이 씁네다” (Hankyoreh, 11.20)

For more informations about the project please contact:

rimjingang@asiapress.org

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Before and during Roh Moo-hyun's visit in the DPRK, on the occasion of of the "N-S Korean Summit" early October, it was highly disputed (mainly) in the S.K. (bourgeois) media if he should attend the Arirang Mass Games performance, scheduled by his N.K. hosts. Well, finally he "enjoyed" the performance.. Actually not surprisingly, not really.. Because, short before his trip to N.K., Roh (f.. stupid as he is!!) told the S.K. public that he sees no difference between the Arirang Mass Games and the participation of S.K. teenagers in TV shows, such as song contests, or stuff like that.

Today's Asia Times (HK) published following impressive report, written by Kim Hyun-sik (*) about the reality of Arirang Mass Games:

Bitter tears behind Pyongyang's games

Among the many tales of North Korea - anecdotes and observations from my own life as a professor at the Pyongyang University of Education for nearly 40 years - is North Korea's internationally famous mass games, a grand spectacle of rigorous gymnastics, elaborate group dance and dazzling flashing cards.

The games - also known as the Arirang mass gymnastics games - represent the sum total of North Korea's ideological and aesthetic expression. The performance, which involves the participation of 100,000 Pyongyang City students, is not only a composite blend of art with gymnastics, but aspires to aesthetic perfection by employing the highest degree of human athleticism and creativity. But beneath the outward grandeur flow the blood, sweat and tears of children...

I wish to tell the world that the Arirang mass games .. is nothing but an elaborate show. It is an act to show off the North Korean people's loyalty, solidarity and iron will in serving their Kim Jong-il...

..(the world) should be keenly aware of the bitter tears that Pyongyang's young students and their parents shed from their participation in these mass games. Almost all the elementary, secondary and college students living in Pyongyang, totaling 100,000, participate in the games.

The background (cards) section alone requires some 20,000 participants. Participation in the mass games is not voluntary; rather, it is unconditional and mandatory, in accordance with the orders of the Workers' Party. The students move together in unison according to the military command system. All students are transported for practices and performances by hundreds of military trucks that are also on call to carry heavy artillery in case of war.

The mass games take place in a stadium in Pyongyang for several months, beginning with Kim Il-sung's birthday (also known in North Korea as "The Day of the Sun", April 15). During this period, all classes are suspended. The participating high school seniors suffer lower scores on their university entrance exam. To remedy this problem, the North Korean authorities have even instituted a system of free additional points to the students' test scores to compensate for their participation in the performance.

The students that physically and mentally suffer the most are the 20,000 who are in the cards section of the performance. These students must quickly fold and unfold the heavy cards at the flag signals with undivided attention for the entire duration of the three-hour performance. Since they must remain alert and cannot go to the bathroom during the performance, the male students urinate into the plastic bags at their seats and the female students have no choice but to wait or to urinate on the floor. As a result, a number of female students suffer from chronic cystitis throughout their lives.

Those students holding the cards containing pieces of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il's faces and body parts on them must be particularly careful throughout the three hours of the performance. Even one mistake results in punishment for the student, as well as his or her parents and classroom teacher. One time, my daughter was the teacher of a student who made a mistake during a performance. The student's parents as well as my daughter were summoned each night to the department of National Security, where they came under fierce ideological criticism for the student's mistake and were forced to write a letter of self-criticism.

From the following day, my daughter was ordered to lie down right below the student bench in the stadium to make sure that the errant student would pay attention throughout the performance. Many students fall to the ground due to the heat from the sun, extreme hunger, and high nervous tension and exhaustion. However, the spirit of the ideological struggle still makes them stand back up on their feet.

It is impossible for the student participants to fill up on the one roll of bread that the authorities distribute for lunch. So their parents can't help but bring home-made vegetable soup and feed their children so that the soup can supplement their sons' and daughters' daily ration of bread.

Since the mass games require tens of thousands of students to move together in unison like a machine, these student participants suffer all kinds of hardship and indignities. The flashy and impressive performance ... is borne with cursing, merciless beatings, harsh ideological indoctrination, self-criticism writings and group punishments meted out by the teacher and the authorities...

 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/IK08Dg01.html

* Kim Hyun-sik, former professor and dean of the Foreign Language Education Research Department, Pyongyang University of Education, North Korea and a former private tutor to the family of leader Kim Il-sung. Kim Hyun-sik was a visiting professor at Yale University from 2003-06 and is currently a research professor at George Mason University.

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AVAILABLE SOON
IN PYEONGYANG!!!
 

Yeah, what a "progress"!! Just read following stupid story (well, it must be a bad joke!):

Fried chicken franchise goes North (JoongAng Ilbo, 11.03)

 
..a South Korean fried chicken franchise will open the only foreign-run restaurant in North Korea, targeting family dining on special occasions...
 
Choi Won-ho, who runs Matdaero, a 70-store fried chicken franchise in the South, said yesterday he would open a restaurant in a joint venture with a North Korean state-run trading company, near the Arch of Triumph in central Pyongyang on Nov. 15.
 
The restaurant will both receive walk-in customers and deliver chicken and draft beer to homes. Such places are common in South Korea, but it will be the first chicken joint of its kind in North Korea.

Choi has invested 500 million won ($551,000) in the restaurant’s cooking facilities, interior decoration and delivery scooters. He will split the profit 70-30 with the North Korean firm.

Choi, 48, who has been a chicken entrepreneur for 15 years, said there should be sufficient demand despite North Korea being one of the world’s poorest countries, because he plans to offer lower prices to locals.
 
“I will charge about $3 for a whole chicken for North Koreans (*) and at least $12, the same price as in South Korea, for tourists from the South and other countries,” Choi said yesterday by phone. “One whole chicken will be enough for a four-member family, so the price of $3 will not be too burdensome for special occasions.”

The store will hire about 20 North Koreans to take telephone orders, fry the birds and make home deliveries. It will have seating for 50...

http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2882297

☞ Fried Chicken Shop to Debut in NKorea (AP, 11.02)

* According to experts who are familiar with the NK society the average monthly income for "ordinary" workers -  "The Heroes of the Paradise of the Working Class" - is between 3000 and 5000 NK Won.

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According to S.K. media during the "N-S Korean Summit" last month Kim Jong-il complete refused to use the words "openness" and "reform" for the future of the D.P.R.K. (and after Roh Moo-hyun's visit in P.Y. even the S.K. gov't agreed to avoid this words in connection with a possible future of N.K.^^).

But now - surprise, surprise!! - "Kim Jong-il has expressed intention to model after the Vietnam-style economic reform and openness policy, dubbed Doi Moi", Yazhou Zhoukan Weekly (亞洲週刊/HK) reported in its y'day's edition.

So y'day also Yonhap, like other S.K. media, reported following:

Kim Jong-il expresses intention to follow Vietnam's Doi Moi

   North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has expressed an intention to benchmark Vietnam's two decades-old reform and openness policy "Doi Moi", a Hongkong local weekly magazine reported Sunday..

   Vietnam has pursued the reform and openness policy since 1986 to introduce a market economy, including liberalization of trade and finance with foreign countries to a certain degree, and is enjoying rapid economic growth.

   Kim made the remark while meeting with Nong Duc Manh, secretary-general of Vietnam's Communist Party, in Pyongyang last week, the weekly Yazhou Zhoukan said in its Sunday edition, citing an interview with Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Gia Khiem who accompanied the Vietnamese secretary general to the North Korean capital.

   "Chairman Kim Jong-il highly evaluated the achievements Vietnam's Doi Moi has made in the past 20 years while meeting with Secretary General Manh," Khiem said..

   The ongoing visit to Hanoi by North Korean Prime Minister Kim Yong-il aims to prepare for Kim Jong-il's visit to Vietnam, the magazine said..

   Diplomatic sources here said it is remarkable that Kim Jong-il expressed interest in Doi Moi, although North Korea is unlikely to closely follow the program of reform and openness having been pursued by Vietnam.

   North Korea might want to adopt the reform model of Vietnam amid reports that China has shown a lukewarm attitude to North Korea's efforts to build special economic zones near the North's border with China, analysts said..

Harrharr, "dear" Kim Jong-il: "openness" and "reform" are the basics of the rapid (of course capitalist) economic development in Vietnam (almost the same like in China). But "openness" and "reform".. that's exactly what you (f.. idiot!!) want to avoid!!! Some more questions???

Related:

☞ N. Korea Eager for Economic Modernization (K. Times)

☞ "북한": 재미있는 발달

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N. Korea - a real-life Truman show

A rare and remarkable dispatch from inside the secret world of Kim Il Sung

(Daily Mail/UK, 10.8)

The summit between the leaders of North and South Korea was hailed as a step towards world peace because North Korea is portrayed as a member of the "Axis of Evil" with plans to develop nuclear weapons.
But, as Peter Hitchens found when he evaded the Marxist(*) state's ban on foreign journalists, it is a nation to be pitied rather than feared...

P. Hitchens, the author, and "Great Leader"..

If this is a showcase, then what can it be like in the parts they do not want us to see? North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, is closed to all but the most favoured citizens. Only friends of the regime may live here.

Yet in this citadel of privilege, every face I see is thin, every belt tight, every garment worn and faded, every child and adult under-sized, most windows unlit.

For the ordinary poor, who cannot even leave their towns without a permit, Pyongyang is almost as inaccessible as New York or Paris. How thin and ragged are they?

Those considered unreliable must live out their chilly, pinched lives amid the dreary spoil-heaps and miserable townships of the coalfields. How wretched can they possibly be?

As for those who offend the regime, a chain of labour camps, stretching from Yongchon on the west coast to Onsong in the far north east, is hidden in the northern mountains, where no foreigner penetrates and where people die of hunger and despair, unrecorded.

I am not sure how we can live our prosperous lives, knowing these wretches exist. Here in the alleged paradise city of Pyongyang, the buildings are blistered and stained, the paint faded and cracked. Except for a few main processional ways - and even here there are signs of decay - the shabbiness and gloom are overwhelming.

At dusk, when a normal city would begin to sparkle, an almost total darkness falls in the long interval before the first lights come on.

Later, when the government considers bedtime has arrived, the power is cut off from a million homes, whose occupants will be wakened at 5am by plonky music leaking from loudspeakers, and ordered to work by a siren at 7am, every day but Sunday (and sometimes even then).

Now, in the early evening, silence is almost complete. I can hear a drunken man singing from what feels like half a mile away. Yet we are at the heart of a city of perhaps three million people.

And the lights, when they do come on, are so feeble that I am suddenly reminded - poignantly - of the austere British townscapes of my own childhood in the early Fifties.

Except that even they were never as austere as this. Nor were they sinister and mad, as this place is.

If all politics is a sort of mental illness that gets worse as the politicians' power increases, then this is the locked ward where absolute power has brought absolute insanity.

Brooding over the deranged cityscape is the ugliest building in the universe, a 1,000ft pyramid, already a ruin though it has never been finished and never will be, perhaps because the money has run out, perhaps because it is so jerry-built that nobody would ever have dared stay in it.

Official guides pretend not to notice it though it is by far the tallest structure in Pyongyang.

This symbol of overweening ambition is by a strange coincidence the exact shape and size of the Ministry of Truth, the chief source of official lies in George Orwell's prophecy of just such a state, and just such a city, in 1984.

It is almost as if North Korea's rulers have taken Orwell's novel as a handbook rather than a warning.

But where Orwell's ministry was a glittering white, the abandoned Ryugyong Hotel is a dingy dun-brown, its hundreds of glassless windows like sockets gazing at what its maker, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, has wrought.

And what he has wrought is hopeless failure, a long, grim joke that has yet to reach its punchline.

Kim's city is the capital of a state that is far more of a danger to its own people than it is to the rest of the world.

It may be - I think the evidence is sketchy - that North Korea has a nuclear bomb. What is certain is that it has almost nothing else.

It cannot any longer even fake success at its very heart. Its great propaganda festival, the Arirang Games where thousands of young Koreans create vast pictures with eerily synchronised movements, is a pathetic remnant.

It is the only show I have ever been to where the cast is far bigger than the audience. The colossal May Day Stadium was three-quarters empty the night I went.

The performance, in which Joseph Stalin meets Walt Disney, was less confidently militaristic than in past times and most of the "soldiers and sailors" were attractive young women in pert skirts, none looking very menacing.

Sometimes it descended into circus, with platoons of dancing children dressed as boiled eggs, and a motorbike on a tightrope.

Every machine in the country is close to breakdown. This even affects parts of the system that are on show.

I was there as a tourist, arriving in a Soviet-built Tupolev from the age of Yuri Gagarin, which shuddered and strained into the sky and was prudently kept clear of terminal buildings at the Chinese airport from which I began my journey.

My tour bus failed (its fuel tank sprang a leak that the driver tried to plug with chewing gum) on the way to a museum of gifts given to Kim Il Sung.

Our guide pedalled off for help on a borrowed bike but the bus that eventually rescued us also breathed its last, forcing us to walk the final few hundred yards to an unscheduled break for lunch.

We never arrived at the museum.

While the first bus was broken down, we were prevented from moving more than a few yards away from it - probably because we would then have been able to look closely at the nearby lorryload of runt-sized troops, part of the supposedly fearsome North Korean army.

The weapons they carried were ancient, probably more dangerous to their users than to their targets.

Vehicles everywhere were decrepit, clothes shabby and faded from much washing, in the greys, browns and greens that dominated our streets in the years before cheap and colourful fabrics.

The soldiers looked universally undersized and underfed, usually with prominent cheekbones. And the 'military-first' policy means that they get better food supplies than most civilians.

How do the ordinary people fare? We cannot tell.

But here is one possibility. Some years ago, the leading American expert on North Korea, Bradley Martin, had an accidental and obviously unintended glimpse, in a remote district, of a train bearing ordinary North Koreans: "They were a ghastly sight.

"Their clothing was ragged and filthy, their faces darkened with what I presumed to be either mud or skin discolourations resulting from pellagra. There was no glass in the windows of their train."

Yet much of the country is hauntingly lovely, willow-fringed fields in which peasants stagger under heavy sheaves, villages that are picturesque from a distance but squalid at closer quarters.

This month the roads are lined with flowers growing riotously in the verges, a hint that beneath the weight of despotism, Koreans seek freedom in ordinary things.

One of my five days in the country was a public holiday, an ancient festival of ancestor worship too powerful to be suppressed, when the whole country went picnicking in hilltop country graveyards.

But on a working day, in a 200-mile drive, I saw just two tractors in operation in the fields ? probably because there is no fuel for them.

In five days of travelling by road, I saw miles of electrified railway, but only four moving trains, and they were rolling slowly and hauled by diesel locomotives, suggesting the current is erratic or just switched off.

My allegedly luxury hotel in Pyongyang had its power cut off each morning as soon as the tour parties had set off on their various pilgrimages to the many shrines of the Great Leader.

Sometimes it was if we were witnessing a sort of Truman Show, in which even the casual passers-by might easily have been rehearsed actors pretending to be real people.

A promised visit to Pyongyang's underground railway consisted of a trip between two stations, during which ordinary travellers were cleared from our carriage.

Many passengers stared at us with shock that we were there at all. Even in Pyongyang, a foreigner is an event.

As we descended the immensely deep escalators, a party of women on the upward staircase were singing a song about how they couldn't manage without their Dear Leader.

A similar hymn drifted from the loudspeakers.

Genuine? Accidental? Or staged?

But not everything could be arranged or controlled. A number of incidents lifted the veil without meaning to.

Richard Jones, the intrepid photographer who accompanied me, raised his camera towards an ancient, 5ft gentleman in a Mao cap, trimming the grass on a Pyongyang boulevard.

The old man, possibly a veteran of the Korean War, snarled and raised his sickle as if to strike.

Having been taught from childhood that Westerners are wolves in human form, he intended to defend the fatherland against the imperialist spy.

On another occasion, we arrived at our pre-booked restaurant to find a drunk ? or possibly a corpse ? sprawled outside.

Seeing us approaching, loyal citizens immediately formed a human barrier to shield the sight from alien eyes.

The trouble is, even if everything we saw was what we were meant to see, the impression given is of a society in an advanced stage of decomposition, held together by a fragile web of lies.

The cult of the Great Leader is much like that of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito before 1945.

In fact it is probably modelled on it, since all Korea was under Japanese rule until 1945 and the people were compelled to worship the emperor as a god.

But it has other elements, too. Confucianism demands respect for ancestors, perhaps the origin of the red-and-white obelisks in every town proclaiming that the Great Leader is "always with us".

But there may be other roots for this. Kim Il Sung as a teenager played the organ in his father's Protestant church and seems to have liked it. When American soldiers captured his offices in the Korean War, they found a sizeable organ, of all things, installed there.

Kim was bored by Christianity, preferring (by his own account) to go fishing than to church. But he was paying attention, and many have wondered if the worship of father and son ? Kim Il Sung and present leader Kim Jong Il ? is a blasphemous copy of Christianity.

In any case, it seems to work. As we barrelled down the long, straight, empty motorway that leads to the closed border with South Korea, our guide asked merrily if we knew how the Korean War had started.

I said, cautiously, that our imperialist history books said that it had been started by the North.

The poor man's face fell as if I had wounded him. It is an essential part of North Korea's founding myth that the war was started by the Americans and the South.

Even a mention of any other version of history upset him, an intelligent person with a sense of humour, judging by his behaviour the rest of the time.

He took it as a British person of my generation might take a claim that Britain was the aggressor in 1939.

It was to avoid upsetting or scandalising him that I later made a shameful obeisance to the Kim Il Sung image, laying flowers and offering a perfunctory bow.

I feared that if I didn't, I would be treading on a real, living personal faith, not just showing disrespect to a cold, dead cult.

And I think I was correct in this judgment. For this really is - as Eastern Europe and Russia never were - a wholly closed country where a large majority more or less believe the state propaganda.

East Germany tried to stop its people watching West German TV, but abandoned the effort because it was just too difficult.

Powerful transmitters - the BBC, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe - broadcast to Russia and her empire so successfully that in Prague in the Seventies people would come up to me in trams to pass on their thanks for the existence of the BBC Czech service.

But not here. Every radio and television has its tuning dial soldered so that it can receive only North Korean signals.

Inspectors visit frequently to check that nobody has tampered with this mental barricade. And, while a few brave souls defy this (resoldering the dials when an inspection is due), most are too frightened, or so loyal, that it would never occur to them to do so.

In Cold War days South Korea used to float radios across the border on balloons, but few dared use them even when they got through.

There is no internet access here for ordinary beings. On a trip round a vast "people's study centre", we were shown North Koreans supposedly working at computers.

But when one of us tried to reach the Google search site, he could get nowhere. The screens had no link to the outside world.

A librarian boasted of her stock of English-language books but, asked if she had a copy of 1984, had plainly never heard of it.

A supposed economics expert, likewise, did not seem to have heard of the free-market economist Milton Friedman - and there was much consternation among the guides when I asked about these things.

North Koreans live under a thick blanket of darkness, with a hopelessly distorted or restricted picture of the outside world.

They have never seen pictures of the terrorist attack on New York's World Trade Centre.

They are vaguely aware of The Beatles (I was proudly offered the chance to listen to a rare tape of Ob La Di, Ob La Da in the People's Study Hall).

One of my guides claimed to have heard of The Rolling Stones, but couldn't name any of their songs.

It is easy to understand why North Korea does not want "I can't get no satisfaction" echoing round its darkened avenues.

But this skewed, half-blind view of the world has its serious side. It is a judicious mix of truth and outrageous lies.

Heaven knows what is taught in schools (we were not allowed near any) but the authorities have produced an English-language version of a propaganda pamphlet called US - The Empire Of Terrorism, which is the local answer to American accusations that North Korea sponsors terrorist groups, and to George W. Bush's accusation that North Korea belonged to an 'Axis of Evil'.

Some of its charges against America are truthful. But these are mingled with unhinged fantasies and lies.

After a relatively factual attack on the United States' treatment of the Native Americans, and on seizure of Mexican territory, the pamphlet declares: "In April 1968, the US administration organised the assassination of Martin Luther King, a black Baptist leader who advocated freedom and equality of the blacks.

"Enraged by this, the blacks rose in a revolt that swept across 46 cities simultaneously. It was an act in self-defence. However, the administration retaliated by going on a spree of white terror...

"Black survivors of white hooliganism and terror are now confined to Detroit, Appalachia and the delta of southern Mississippi, where they live a dispirited life. For fear of racist terrorism, the 22million black population hesitate to go to schools, theatres, restaurants and even public lavatories..."

I am not making up this rubbish, nor did anyone try to conceal it from me.

The bookstall attendant, in a pleasant mountain resort, who sold it to me (for $1) was delighted by my purchase.

One of Pyongyang's unexpected treasures is an American warship, the spy vessel USS Pueblo, which is moored as a trophy on the Taedong River, and is perhaps the last place on Earth where the Cold War is kept alive.

It is extraordinary to walk into the most secret rooms of this ship, where the ultimate espionage technology of 40 years ago is on open display (including decoding machines marked 'NOFORN', which means that their products could not be shared with the British MI6).

It still looks surprisingly modern.

An angry propaganda video records the ship's capture in January 1968, and the dismal humiliation of her captain and crew in an incident rather similar to (but much nastier than) Britain's recent experience in the Persian Gulf.

If only, the North Korean government must wish, the Cold War could be brought back. As a Soviet ally, Pyongyang received the aid that allowed it to build this concrete show city and sustain its unyielding regime with food for the loyal and brute force for the rebellious.

Now the concrete crumbles and there is no money for food or bullets. North Korea, desperate and destitute, is accused of everything from drug-running and money-laundering to forging dollar bills to stay alive.

It reluctantly seeks food aid from the outside (and gives most of it to friends of the regime).

Last October's supposed nuclear blast (which experts still dispute) may well have been the leadership's infuriated response to the freezing of its accounts in a Macau bank, accounts allegedly used to buy luxuries for the loyal elite who dwell behind police barriers in tree-shaded Changgwang Street near the old Soviet Embassy, venturing out in black 4x4s with tinted windows.

Certainly the unfreezing of these accounts has been a key part of the talks that reopened after the bomb went off.

Here, too, is "office Building No 15", headquarters of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il who took over from his father in 1994.

The younger Kim, short, podgy and unimpressive, has spoken in public only once and has been careful not to usurp too much of his father's prestige.

The old man was, after all, a guerrilla leader in the war against the Japanese and is revered by older citizens who remember their country rising out of the flattened ruins of the Korean War before it was surpassed economically by the capitalist south.

Much effort was devoted to keeping him alive, for fear that his successors would fail to maintain his magical hold over the people.

Doctors at the Kim Il Sung Institute of Health and Longevity prescribed a special diet of extra-long dog penises (minimum length 2.8in) to keep the Great Leader well.

Maybe it was this regime that kept him going until he was 82, perhaps helped by the "Happy Corps" and the "Satisfaction Corps" of attractive young women recruited to serve in the chain of secret palaces and mansions inhabited by Kim Il Sung and his far-less-impressive son and heir, Kim Jong Il. Female beauty is a passport to preferment in North Korea.

 
The Dear Leader is still rumoured to choose Pyongyang's famously attractive traffic policewomen who, clad in fetching uniforms, control the sparse traffic with strangely provocative robotic gestures.

But the succession, a laughable breach of Marxist dogma, surely cannot go any further. The Younger Kim was 65 in February and is said to suffer from diabetes and to have recently undergone unnamed major surgery.

He looked unwell when he appeared in public for Tuesday's summit with the South Korean President, Roh Moo-hyun. His eldest son, Kim Jong Nam, is an unlikely heir, though he is already 36 and was educated in Switzerland and China. Inconveniently, he was caught in 2001 travelling to Japan on a false Dominican Republic passport, with two women (neither of them his wife) and a suitcase full of cash.

The passport was in the name Pang Xiong, Chinese for "fat bear", a name that rather suits him.

The world needs to work out - quickly - how this murderous black comedy can be brought to an end that is not too painful. The obvious answer would be reunification with South Korea.

But South Korea and North Korea alike are terrified by the example of Germany, where unity devastated the East and nearly bankrupted the West.

It also left the old East German elite jobless and humiliated, and pursued by the courts.

Economic experts believe a merger of the two Koreas would ruin the South. As for the Dear Leader, he presumably thinks it safer to cling on than risk being strung up like Saddam, locked up like Slobodan Milosevic or hounded to death like Augusto Pinochet.

North Korea's new version of nuclear blackmail is just that, crude extortion by people who have no honest way of supporting themselves.

Give us aid and money, they demand, or we may do something terrible. If they do fulfil their threats, it is hard to know who will be most badly hurt.

Pyongyang's Taepodong rockets are wildly unreliable and as likely to fall into the sea or strike the wrong country as to hit their intended targets.

Their nuclear technology is crude and possibly faked.

Meanwhile, increasing numbers of emaciated North Koreans are fleeing across the Chinese border or working abroad.

The long-hidden truth about the outside world filters back from them to their friends and families.

And the Dear Leader and his loyalists have no idea how they can secure the succession of the world's first Marxist-Leninist(*) hereditary monarchy, a problem that looks rather urgent.

Quite soon, it will have to be admitted that neither Kim Il Sung nor Kim Jong Il are the godlike beings they are made out to be.

Quite soon, the entombed, defrauded North Koreans will realise their fatherland is not a great power and that it is bankrupt and backward.

It will be a hard moment for them and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

It is our responsibility to try to see that there is nothing worse.

Pretending that North Korea is a terrifying great power, when it is in truth a crippled nation stranded between two worlds by the end of the Cold War, and made increasingly irrational by poverty and pain, will not help.

It is a country to be pitied rather than feared.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=486079&in_page_id=1811

*Of course NK(aka the D.P.R.K.) has nothing to do with Marxism, or M-L (even in P'yang it's complete impossible to buy books written by Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao..)!!!

Related:

☞ The Juche on North Korea (Ghosttreemedia, 10.23)

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Among a lot of (f..) nonsense and trash(*) there are some few impressive/interresting documentary movies about the D.P.R.K./NK on Youtube.

 
Following stuff - in my opinion - you should/must see:

☞ North Korea - The Parallel Universe (Journeyman Pictures, 2007.07)

☞ Inside N. Korea (English, incl. Chinese subtitles, #1/第1..)

☞ Inside N.K. (..#2/第2..)

☞ Inside N.K. (..#3/第3..)

☞ Inside N.K. (..#4/第4..)

☞ Inside N.K. (..#5/第5..)

* One - in fact funny - example for trash (Please, you must see the audience here!!! Just enjoy it!!^^):

☞ BABY V.O.X in North Korea (music video)

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☞ DPRK Photo Essay

(published by ghosttreemedia, 9.19)

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WELCOME TO NORTH KOREA

A Documentary Film
by P. Tetteroo and R. Feddema (NL, 2001)

Related:

☞ A Daily Life in NK (al-Jazeera documentary video)

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"Inside North Korea", a short documentary video by J. Watts, has been published last week (9.11) in The Guardian (UK).

You can watch it here:

☞ Inside North Korea

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Well, last Friday (9.07) the world's most informative news agency - DPRK's KCNA - was forced to report about following incredible story:

Spirit of Defending Leader with Very Life Displayed in Flood-hit Areas

The recent unprecedented heavy rains triggered off flood and landslide in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, causing heavy human and material losses.

But the flood-victims directed attention to protecting the portraits of President Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il than their families.

The torrential rains on August 9 submerged the township area of Hoeyang County. Over a thousand families there were evacuated to safety places. They came there, carrying not their properties but the portraits of the President and the leader.

Students of Koksan County School for Agricultural Skilled Workers and people in the county defended the picture of smiling President from the downpour.

Ri Chun Hwa, a worker of the Changdo County Clothing Factory, brought over 1,500 books carrying the images of the great men of Mt. Paektu, from the County Publication Circulation Office to a safe place through torrents of water at the risk of her life.

Many people including People's Security officer Choe Myong Gil in Ichon County and teacher of Ichon Middle School No. 1 Hwang Myong Ok rushed in public buildings and dwelling houses without hesitation to save portraits, realizing that they would soon crumble.

Among such people are peasant of the Jongdong Co-op Farm in Phyonggang County Cha Hyang Mi who handed over portraits to rescuers and went to the bottom of the torrent water, peasant of the same farm Pak Jong Ryol who lost his wife and child by landslide but saved the portraits and worker of the Ichon Foodstuff Factory Kang Hyong Gwon who firmly took portraits in his hands in flood though his five-year-old daughter slipped down from his back.

After the flood, corpses were dug out of the silt. Found out in their bosom were portraits wrapped with vinyl sheets to prevent them from being spoiled by water.

It is the just outlook on life of the Korean people to enjoy their existence, dignity and happiness in the effort for defending the leader at the cost of their lives.

http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2007/200709/news09/08.htm#13

*****

큰물피해지역에서 높이 발휘된 수령결사옹위정신

(조선중앙통신, 주체96년 9.07)
 
최근 조선에 례년에 보기 드문 무더기비가 내렸다.

큰물과 산사태로 많은 인적, 물질적피해가 발생하였다.

그러나 피해지역 인민들은 가정보다도 자기 수령, 자기 령도자를 옹위하는 길에 남먼저 뛰여들었다.

지난 8월 9일 무더기비가 내려 회양군 읍지구가 갑자기 물에 잠기였다. 읍지구에서 안전한 지대로 소개된 1,000여세대의 주민들은 자기 집재산은 한점도 건지지 못하면서도 가정들에 모시였던 위대한 수령 김일성동지와 위대한 령도자 김정일동지의 초상화만은 자기들의 품에 안고 있었다.

곡산군농업기능공학교 학생들과 인민들은 세차게 쏟아지는 폭우속에서도 긴장한 전투를 벌려 김일성동지의 태양상을 보위하였다.

창도군 옷공장 로동자 리춘화는 생명의 위험은 아랑곳하지 않고 사품치는 물속을 헤치며 군출판물보급소에서 1,500여부에 달하는 백두산위인들의 영상도서들을 안전하게 모셔내왔다.

이천군 인민보안원 최명길, 이천제1중학교 교원 황명옥을 비롯하여 한순간이 지나면 공공건물과 살림집이 무너져내린다는것을 알면서도 서슴없이 위험속으로 뛰여들어가 초상화를 모셔내온 사람들은 수없이 많다.

사람들이 내민 구원의 손길에 초상화를 부탁하고 휘말려 드는 물결속에서 더는 솟구치지 못한 평강군 정동협동농장 농장원 차향미, 안해와 자식을 산사태에 잃으면서도 초상화부터 모셔내온 같은 농장 농장원 박종렬, 물속에서 5살난 딸애가 등에서 미끄러져내리는 순간에도 초상화만은 손에서 놓지 않은 이천기초식품공장 로동자 강형권을 비롯하여 수령결사옹위에 생명과 가정을 바친 사람들도 있다.

이번에 피해지역에서 물이 찐 다음 흙과 모래에 묻힌 사람들이 발견되였다. 그런데 그들의 품속에서 나온것은 하나같이 물 한점 스며들지 않게 비닐로 싼 초상화였다.

이것이 바로 오늘 자기의 존재도, 값높은 존엄과 행복도 수령결사옹위의 길에서 찾는 조선인민의 인생관이다.

http://www.kcna.co.jp/calendar/2007/09/09-08/2007-0907-011.html

Finally, I think there's no further comment necessary!! Or what??