Progress Report 27.1 (North Korea Special)

Anyong hasseyo, shitbird.

Wha g'wan?

Yeah, well I'll tell yer. While I've been out of touch, I've managed to be on telly, have a birthday AND visit North Korea. What have you done, eh? Eh?

Yeah? Well, that's quite impressive, I suppose... And that too... Really?! 'Kin 'ell, eh?

Listen, I didn't mean to get off on the wrong foot coming in here all full of myself and that, but I've got a lot to tell you about and I was just a bit over-excited. Can we start again? Yeah?

Okay.

Reader, I've been to North Korea. Just over four weeks ago, myself and the T-Dog (that's our friend and colleague Mr Tyrone Maxey for those of you unfamiliar with his work) threw off the shackles of capitalism and joined our indefatigable comrades north of the border to assist in the furthering of the tripartite ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood and the creation of a true republic of the people run according to scientific principles and cleansed of the class divisions that have held back the hegemony of the proletariat. For one weekend, we were made aware of how true freedom really feels as our limited world-view was shaken to its core by the achievements of our North Korean brothers and sisters, and we were literally moved to tears to see their staggering feats in the fields of fence-building, border patrolling and relentless propagandising - all completed in accordance with strict Marxist-Leninist principles as interpreted by the Great Leader, and then by the Dear Leader, Kims Il-Seong and Jung-Il.

How is such a feat possible? How were we able to visit the world's most closed nation, and how were we able to access it across the world's most policed border?

It was thanks to the tireless work of the Hyundai Corporation, and in particular, its founder, Comrade Chung Ju-Yung, who himself rose from lowly rice farmer to CEO of an $80 billion multinational, Korea's wealthiest man and the de facto owner of the oiled-with-the-blood-of-the-workers machinery of capitalism if ever anyone had a claim to the title. But the hows and the wherefores will be seen to later – first, let me talk you through the weekend in an unscientific and indulgent fashion befitting my petit-bourgeois standing.

When I say that me and T visited North Korea, apart from being grammatically offensive, I am also exercising a creative accounting of the facts. What we in fact visited was a very small corner of North Korea, fenced off and shielded from the nation proper, and home to a range of mountains known as Kumgangsan, or the Diamond Mountains. They nestle just slightly to the wrong side of the DMZ on the east coast of the Korean peninsula, and so have existed as a dreadful tease to the South Koreans for the fifty or so years that the kingdom has been divided. But they are a tease no longer, for access has been most gracefully granted by the powers in Pyongyang, and so those South Koreans sick and tired of tramping up and down their own tedious mountains now have a further option open for their weekend betterment.

They take this option most enthusiastically, as T and I witnessed as we were shepherded into the immigration centre at southern side of the DMZ. It was 7am on a Saturday morning and we'd had no sleep having set out from Seoul at 11.30 on the Friday night prior, but with anticipation we queued at the airport-style departure gate – we, 20 other Westerners and about 2,000 Koreans, mainly middle-aged, mainly middle income and to-a-man decked out in the Korean regulation mountaineering get-up: 100% synthetic fibres, sun hats and baseball caps, and poly-carbon alloy walking sticks.

The south-side reception centre was modern, spacious and sedate, not unlike an airport belonging to a small city with big hopes. The northern side was a tent.

It wasn't a bad tent, but it was a tent nonetheless. After the journey through the DMZ, which, in the dawn light, was nicely appointed with its watchtowers, lookout posts, pillboxes and razor wire, our convoy of buses pulled to a stop and we were directed through the dirty white marquee, whilst to our left, a couple of soldiers stood ramrod straight atop a high mud mound, keeping an eye on the proceedings. We had our passports and visas checked, and then milled on the other side, waiting for the stragglers who were held up by the excessively pernickety entry process. As we had passed through, we had also been checked for recording equipment, binoculars, telescopes and cameras with zooms beyond 10x, for, as it was to become even more apparent, North Korea is parsimonious when it comes to what it will show you.

As we waited, we were greeted by some poor unfortunate in a joyless bear costume - a half-arsed mascot for this special administrative tourist zone. Here also were more North Korean soldiers, lean, efficient and bored, looking morosely down-at-heel in their scruffy uniforms and weathered caps. The lean look was to become increasingly familiar as the weekend wore on – more telling in the men than the women (who seem to wear it and bear it a little better) – along with the regulation Kim Il-Seong lapel pin, required by law to be worn by all Northerners at all times.

Once we were all through, we were ferried in the same buses to the Kumgangsan resort – two charmless hotels, an auditorium and a range of restaurants and shops. Within the bounds of the resort, we were permitted to wander within certain areas and excised from others, and we certainly weren't allowed to leave the resort unescorted. Leaving the resort in convoy, however, was one of the first things we did, having dropped our bags at our hotel and missed out on breakfast.

We were driven to the first peak of the weekend, where a two-hour climb awaited us. It was quite an easy ascent and had some charming views, but most fascinating was the propaganda carved into seemingly every available rock face. A lot of it was unintelligible to poor non-Korean-speaking me, but I was able to pick out the Hangul word Juche making regular appearances (meaning 'duty towards self-reliance', a principle devised by Kim Il-Seong as an addendum to the annals of Marxism-Leninism), along with Songum ('Military First', his son Kim Jong-Il's contribution to the theory book), and what appeared to be a number of hagiographic tales of the Kims and their accomplishments. I don't know if these carvings where placed here for the tourists or if they were here before the Kumgangsan tourist zone was opened up, but it is a totalitarian tactic worthy of noting, should you ever find yourself in control of a nation: Let your propaganda be written upon the very rock and foundation of your land, so that nature herself has decreed your people's destiny. (Or something like that.)

It was on top of this first peak that I first got a proper peek at some North Koreans in close up. Two girls in tracksuits were waiting at the summit to assist climbers in turning around and going back down, and possibly selling them apples at a US dollar a pop. These two were youthful, pale and feline and possessing a look that would find echo in every other North Korean female that we encountered on the trip. They had no doubt been hand-picked for sporting this traditional aesthetic and a full set of front teeth, but if this mountain work was special duty that spared them backbreaking toil in the fields and factories, they showed little sign of enjoying it. They seemed uncomfortable in the company of their South Korean counterparts and were even more so with Whitey. I decided to try and get a photo.

I approached the matter with appropriate tact and sensitivity (I believe my words were: “Oi, Lunchless! Give us a smile!”), but they rejected any attempt at digital capture like I was chasing them with a bowl of caviare. I found that even the most charming of entreaties found no purchase, so I settled for having them take a picture of me (don't I spoil 'em?). A fellow traveller later explained to me that North Koreans whose photos had been taken and put on-line found their families disappeared and themselves interned in re-education camps, a story which stinks of myth to me, but one whose subtext I interpreted to mean that North Koreans want anything but attention, not for the sake of modesty but for the sake of their safety.

And how I found it to be so. North Koreans must have to number among the world's most awkward conversationalists. They are civil and polite and will answer any question that their job requires them to answer, but beyond that, it's a no-go. It's almost like they don't like you, like they would rather not have anything to do with you; as though you disgust them. It was a strange feeling to experience such a casually hostile reception outside of the city of Hull (a city, incidentally, which is crying out to be twinned with Pyongyang), and it left me a little disheartened, having becoming used to the openness and amiability of the South Koreans.

Back down the mountain and back at the resort, hungry and knackered and feeling the strain of a night without sleep, we ate bibimbap, perused the souvenir stores and bought tickets to the acrobatic show, much vaunted as a spectacle beyond compare. Finally allowed to check in to the hotel, we freshened up, took in the view and took in a little telly. It was standard South Korean issue, except for one NK channel, showing a lady in hanbok singing Korean folk tunes to the accompaniment of thick black bands of static. Pretty dispiriting stuff.

Spirits were lifted however, by the acrobatic show, which was the spectacle that was promised and then some.

'Acrobatics?!' I hear you sniping. 'Did they have a fucking Punch and Judy show too?'

Reader, climb down off your urbanite highbrow high horse, for this was indeed an acrobatics show, but one of such skill and daring that I was reduced to a clapping and hollering rube. Girls dangled by one heel from swings revolving above the audience; performers stood three-high on each other's shoulders, skipping with three ropes; trapeze artists sailed through the space above our heads, tossing each other hither and yon. I watched partly through parted fingers, so fearful I was of a weak joint working loose leaving its owner to plummet onto the stage or into the crowd. It was an awesome sight, and a clear demonstration of what can be achieved when you start them young enough and give them no choice.

After the show, the evening was spent in predictable Saturday fashion: Beers, then bed. An early rise for breakfast (a paltry, peasanty affair consisting of kimchi, millet pancakes and eggs, but still head and shoulders above anything that has ever been served at a Travelodge) segued into the second peak. This was a much tougher climb, but the effort was worth it. At the summit, the views afforded were majestic. A dramatic, rocky valley barrelled down toward the horizon on one side, steep smooth slopes and clear mineral lagoons nestled on the other. And all around was the carved propaganda; totalitarian graffiti to affront and pervert man's communing with nature.

After the descent (which seemed to take around six weeks on my now exhausted legs), we made one final visit to the resort for lunch and then it was back to South Korea. Along the road back to the border and behind the endless bright green fence, farmers were at work in the fields. Oxen pulled ploughs, peasants pulled at oxen, and some were going at the scrubby crops by hand. Guards stood to attention in sentry posts, others marched two abreast to other assignments. Villages sagged into the earth in the background, with roofs fallen in and no windows. Workers close enough to the road when our convoy passed rose to give full arm waves, and then returned to their labour.

Before breakfast, I had watched from the balcony of my ninth floor hotel room the comings and goings in the rear courtyard. Two old ladies laboriously swept the car park with hand brooms, other staff came and went, walking military-fashion. A uniformed man stood patiently to attention by his old truck until another came to help him change a tyre. (This they went at briskly and with practised efficiency, like they were at work in a pit lane.) The sun was rising and was beginning to beam over the peaks to the east, and the scent of the pines that climbed the slope behind the hotel grew with the late summer warmth. It was a beautiful Sunday morning, but there was a joylessness at work way beyond the creeping emptiness of a specifically-for-tourists hotel.

It is a sense of desolation that pervades the whole of Kumgangsan Special Tourist Region. There is a sadness about the people that is nothing so trite as wanting to be rescued from their national misery. There is a ruthless coldness to the grey concrete hotels amidst mountains inscribed with agit-prop. The doorman greets you with disconnected humility. The K-Pop piped through the speakers in the resort's main square sits ill-at-ease, like forced jollity at a funeral, or a theme park gone to seed. On the mountains' paths, regularly-placed pairs of girls sell juice and snacks without smiling and without shyness. They seem like some circuit within them has failed to engage.

The sense of background misery must have been in the heads of the creators of this venture when it was conceived – they either discounted it as an unfortunate imperative or welcomed it as highlighting the plight. Perhaps you can decide this for yourself as we look at how the whole enterprise came into being...

As you may remember, the first inter-Korea summit was held back in the year 2000. The ice between two embattled heads of state was finally broken when South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung and North Korean dictator Kim Jung-Il met in Pyongyang and embraced each other as old friends. They jawed, bantered, argued and griped until they eventually emerged with an agreement – the June 15^th North-South Joint Declaration, in which it was stated that both states would work towards “promoting mutual understanding, developing inter-Korean relations and achieving peaceful unification.”

Part of this historic – but ultimately say-nothing – declaration was that a road and rail route to the Kumgangsan Special Tourist Region would be created, to symbolically link North and South (the area had previously only been accessible by cruise ship and the enterprise was haemorrhaging money), and tours to the mountains would be exclusively run by Hyundai Asan, part of the Hyundai Sinister-Fucking-MegaCorp until it was split in three smaller organs after the 1997 financial crisis made it prudent to do so.

Hyundai Asan had already been involved in other North Korean projects (such as the administration and development of Kaesong Industrial Park, in which South Korean manufacturers take advantage of peanuts-cheap northern labour) and was the first South Korean company to successfully do so.

Hyundai founder and chairman Chung Ju-Yung was so taken by the spirit of co-operation between the two Koreas shown at the summit that he sent 1,001 cows across the DMZ as an act of charity towards his repressed communist brethren, and it was a gesture for which they were no doubt grateful. The actions of his company, though, might have left them a little less ebullient.

You see, as the world was witnessing the handful of teary, rending reunions of families 50 years parted that coincided with the summit (arranged by the Red Cross, agreed by Pyongyang), behind the scenes, things weren't quite so euphorically fraternal. The Joint Declaration may have won Kim Dae-Jung the Nobel peace prize, but the practical benefits that it held for the people of either republic were limited. Its negative impact may, in fact, have been far greater. Business, however – and specifically Hyundai – came out of the summit doing very well indeed.

I'll tell you for how in a moment, but first let me further introduce Mr Chung Ju-Yung.

Chung is as close to a folk hero as modern South Korea has; a self-made man, the eldest of eight children, and whom destiny seemed content to set to farming rice in Kangwon Province (the North Korean home of Kumgangsan), until he sold one of his father's cows and high-tailed it to Seoul with the proceeds in order to make his fortune. He was still a teenager when he took his first job in a rice store and so impressed his boss that when he became too ill to run the business himself, he signed it over to Chung as his own. The store became so successful that the government acquired it – hard luck for Chung but anything but indicative of his future fortunes as far as the government was concerned.

Having had it with rice, he moved into motor mechanics. He opened a repair garage, quickly developed it into a thriving concern and was soon working military maintenance contracts for the Japanese occupying government. They eventually forced him to merge his company with a steel works for the war effort (it was 1943), and due to the economic rigours of the times, Chung found his luck once again going sour. He pulled out his savings, went back home to Kangwon Province and sat tight until the Japanese retreated in 1945. As the North Korean Army advanced in their wake, Chung fled with his brother to the port of Busan on the south coast of Korea, where the Americans put his boat to sea with a glut of construction and car repair contracts.

From there on in, he never looked back. His new firm Hyundai (the Korean word for 'modern') grew and grew, particularly helped later on by Chung's friendship with dictator Park Chung-Hee, who took power in 1961. (Chung found his way into Park's affections when the latter discovered his love of rising before dawn, walking three miles to work and then putting in a solid 16 hours in his shirt-sleeves, a work ethic that mirrored that which Park intended for the nation.) Hyundai developed a reputation for being indomitable and adventurous, expanding into areas as diverse as ship-building, engineering, construction, heavy industries, insurance, auto-motives, oil refining, paint and glass manufacture and department stores. They came to represent the rapid pace and ambition of Korean industrialisation and Chung Ju-Yung became its hero. The relationship between Park and Chung also came to epitomize the marriage of state and business in the new Korean Republic.

Further presidents came and went (albeit very slowly at first), but Hyundai remained steadily on the up, tipping the scales at a value of US$80 billion. Throughout his meteoric rise to oligarchy, though, Chung had been exiled from his home town in what was now North Korea by political circumstance, both physically and ideologically. And so when the North showed itself to be an ailing competitor to the South after the collapse of the Soviet Union had voided its Moscow bank account, it was only to be expected that Chung should see the fact that their two nations were still technically at war as mere detail to exploiting an investment and development opportunity in his old homeland. Why not step in to capitalize on the North's dire straits?

But animosity to the North, its government and its tyrannical leader Kim Jung-Il amongst the general population was not to be overcome without a little diplomacy and showmanship. How could this hurdle be leapt? What better way than having the then-current President Kim Dae-Jung – former democracy campaigner, Kwangju Massacre resistance fighter and general man of the people – go north to meet the bouffanted despot in person? It would serve as an opportunity to advance relations and as a show of brotherhood between the two Koreas. Kim Dae-Jung and his party benefited from the positive, peace-maker publicity in the run-up to an election, and Chung could paint his North Korean enterprises in the colours of reunification.

The only hindrance was that Kim Jung-Il had no interest in taking part in what was effectively an international publicity stunt. He had no-one to impress, being as he was and is in power by his own decree, and his country's status as a howling great pariah had been pretty much beyond rescue since China had 'normalised' relations with the South in the 90's. How was he going to be made to play ball?

How is any Korean politician or businessman made to play ball?

With a massive great fucking bribe is how.

How massive?

How does US$500 million sound?

Of course, not a word of this was mentioned at the summit or at the press conferences or at the emotional family reunions played out in front of banks of cameras. It wasn't even mentioned as Chung so generously and heroically sent his cows northwards, 'feeding' the starving North Koreans with one hand, securing their continued repression with the other.

The issue of the bribe only came to light after the event. The payment was arranged by Hyundai and backed by the government, who secretly contributed US$100 million to complement the $400 million from Hyundai, who were, they say, paying for monopoly rights to tourism and industrial projects in the North. Pyongyang wanted the South Korean government in on the deal to vouch for Hyundai, whom they regarded as a 'shady merchant', not worthy of trust. (I'll just reiterate that: The government of North Korea trusted Hyundai so little that they wanted the government of South Korea to vouch for them.) This agreement so expensively bought was signed by all three parties at the inter-Korean summit on June 15^th 2000.

When these dodgy dealings were shown the light of day three years later, the resulting shit-storm cost lives. Chung Ju-Yung had passed on by this time, so it was left to his son and partial-heir Chung Mong-Hun to deal with the fallout. He handled it honourably by throwing himself from the twelfth storey of the Hyundai HQ to his death.

In one of his four suicide notes, he expressed the wish that his ashes should be scattered at Kumgangsan, maintaining a keen sense for marketing to the very end. The nation mourned, and tours to the resort were temporarily stopped 'as a mark of respect' (until who held what cards could properly be established). Chung Mong-Hun's brother Chung Mong-Koo told the press that he was adamantly opposed to investments in the North that did not make money, which must have set a record for the quickest ever inspiring and then snuffing out of hopes for ethical concerns being part of Hyundai's business strategy. The tours later resumed after assurances from both sides (and lubricative loans from the South Korean government), and the shit-storm abated.

And so it is through such tangled dealings and backsliding that myself and T-Max were able to visit North Korea. Hyundai built the road that got us there, the hotels in which we overnighted, the immigration centre where I fell asleep in a plastic chair, the shops where I bought some Pyongyang soju, the restaurants where I ate, and the theatre where I gawped; they paid the guides and the guards and they greased up the government.

But this isn't Hyundai's main interest in the North – that honour falls to the Koesong Industrial Park, which is under expansion and should soon employ 100,000 North Koreans on behalf of 20 South Korean manufacturers. Hyundai will supply the power, the telecommunications, the logistics, the facilities and the rest of the 17 necessities to which it has bought itself the exclusive rights. The North supplies the workers (who obviously get paid next to nothing and get no choice); the government get the kickbacks, and Seoul puts the whole thing into play. Not a bad little set up, so long as you're somewhere up at the top.

You could argue that Hyundai et al are doing the workers a favour by employing them. You could argue that, but then you would probably be working Hyundai's PR account and so would be way beyond being worthy of an opinion. You could argue that Hyundai are paving the way for reunification, but even then, your hypothesis wouldn't stand the most basic of assails. Much better would be to argue that Hyundai and the South Korean government have validated Kim Jung-Il's rule by doing business and holding summits with the fucker. If you then went on to ask questions about what happened to the US$500 million, as well as all subsequent operating licence payments that have been made, the warm light of righteousness would start to shine upon you, and I would share with you the following:

It is widely thought that the half a billion dollars funnelled to Pyongyang was used to build the nuclear device that shook us awake one October morning last year. Thanks, Hyundai! Even if that seems like too much of a convenient connection, let's bear in mind the following. In its 2007 report on North Korea, Amnesty International highlighted the following points:

“Systemic violation of human rights, including the right to life and to food, continued; the rights to freedom of movement, expression and association were severely curtailed; access by independent monitors severely restricted; enforced disappearances among families of North Koreans who left the country or were forcibly returned; arbitrary use of imprisonment, torture and capital punishment; 12% of the population face starvation; opposition to the Korean Workers Party of any kind is not tolerated – any person who expresses an opinion contrary to the the Party faces severe punishment, and so do their families in many cases.”

This is the regime that our friend and hero Chung Ju-Yung propped up with massive bribes and validated through the organisation of meetings; this is how he honoured his homeland, how he showed his fraternal love for his Northern brethren. This is the nation that he sent 1,001 heads of cattle in a cynically folkish gesture of largesse, claiming at the time to be seeking redress for the cow he stole from his father as a youth. The level of the hypocrisy leaves one wondering how further depths could ever be plumbed.

But this is Korea, and this is Korean business, and ethics simply don't enter into it. Hyundai are no worse than any other of the chaebol – they just happened to get in there first.

And I have to admit to the hypocrisy of taking part in the Kumgangsan tour myself. I hold my hands up to it, but there were many things that I wanted to see first-hand. If I ask your forgiveness, it's with the following deal-sweetener: The photo below shows me giving the two-fingered 'fuck you' in front of a full-length portrait of Great Leader and the Dear Leader, Kim Il-Seong and Kim Jung-Il. The picture was taken by a North Korean, and had she known the meaning of the gesture I was effecting, she would have been scandalised beyond words and I would have been in very deep water - pictures of the two dictators have to be treated with absolute reverence, on pain of arrest and re-education. And so I took this risk for YOU, to show my depth of feeling for the power in Pyongyang, and with the hope that one day soon, the pot-bellied, speccy, bouffanted poison dwarf will be suspended by his neck from a lamppost by the workers of North Korea, and that he shits his pants in the process.

Amen.

Peeeeyyoooo! That was an epic, wasn't it? If you're still reading, thank you very much for your hard work. I appreciate it very much, and shall bid you, for now,

Anyonghi kasseyo.