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A tour guide erupts in anger when asked about the physical condition of “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il. “That is all foreign propaganda and lies on BBC and CNN,” says Oh Keum Suk, dismissing with an angry wave the notion that Kim, said by the United States and South Korean intelligence sources to have been partially paralysed by a stroke, is in anything but great health. “He is fine, excellent.”
It is the height of the tourist season in Pyongyang, when foreigners are admitted on scrupulously controlled visits.
Those whom visitors get to see are primed to present an image of normalcy, of progress and success, in the face of dark forces swirling about the country.
“Let us open the door of great prosperity and a powerful civilisation,” says the huge lettering emblazoned across one side of the stands by thousands of young people holding placards that shift from one scene or slogan to another.
“Enthusiastic and optimistic era,” says the next sign as thousands of costumed performers prance and pirouette below in the May Day Stadium.
At the annual Arirang Festival, tourists witness an astounding display of synchronised energy involving nearly 100,000 people. The show goes on four nights a week for three months — each performance a 90-minute tribute to triumphs in war and development, all attributed to the leadership of Kim and his father, “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994.
The show assumes more significance than usual this year. On either side of the stands, in lights, are the years 1948 and 2008: It is the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s formal name.
The fact that Kim Jong Il did not attend the parade marking the event, even though he was present at the 50th anniversary, is a detail that goes unnoted, at least publicly.
Publicly, the country focuses on yet another date, April 15, 2012 — the 100th birth anniversary of Kim Il Sung. Anticipation of the date appears to have motivated a wave of construction in a city.
The empty boulevards of shops that appear to be virtually empty of products or customers (from the vantage of a tourist van that stops at none of them) and the reports of periodic crackdowns on free-marketeering and of pervasive bureaucratic meddling and spying, belie the appearance at the spectacle.
Choe Jong Hun, a senior guide and an officer in the cultural exchange department, adopts a carefully modulated view when asked about reports warning of a crisis on a scale, in some parts of the country, with the famine of the 1990s. “We face economic problems,” he says. “There is a shortage of food, electricity.” But he reverts quickly to a more roseate view.
“As you see, our city is dignified, beautiful and calm,” he insists. “That is the difference between European cities and our city.”
Beneath the calm, Western diplomats say they have seen little real change in the official outlook over the past two or three years. “The regime is about survival,” an ambassador says. “Everything is done to perpetuate its existence.”
Towards that end, he says, the regime has reversed a limited experiment in free enterprise, shutting down markets where farmers sold goods. Women under 50 are said by foreign diplomats and aid workers to be banned from some markets, for fear they will aggressively demand the right to buy goods for their hungry families.
In June the government appeared to have adopted a more open attitude towards efforts of the World Food Programme to channel food to those who needed it most. “We had excellent cooperation and access,” says Jean-Pierre DeMargerie, director of the programme in Pyongyang.
But lately he has discovered more bureaucratic resistance, even as food supplies dwindle.
One reason for the shift may be official anger over the refusal by US President George W.
Bush to remove North Korea from the United States’ list of state sponsors of terrorism until the North agrees on a protocol for verifying all it claims to have done to end its nuclear weapons programme.
“It’s Bush’s responsibility for not keeping his word,” says guide Oh Keum Suk. “It’s not our problem if the US says we are a terrorist country.”
He is less forthcoming about whether the North has resumed developing nuclear warheads, as officials have been saying. “We must discuss problems in an international way,” he says.
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