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CIAO DATE: 12/03
Pyongyang, Mon Amour: A Sojourn in a Surreal State
On The Issues
January 2003
The author recalls a recent official visit to Pyongyang and outlines the lessons it holds for America's negotiations with North Korea today.
I am a friend of North Korea. Or rather, that's what it probably says in my file in the North Korean ministry of foreign affairs. It happened like this. In 1992, as deputy minister for defense in Poland's first democratically elected government, I received an invitation to North Korea's embassy in Warsaw to celebrate the birthday of the Great Leader. Thinking that it would be my last chance to attend a Stalinist event, I went. The North Koreans were delighted to land such a "big fish." And when I told the ambassador, truthfully, that they must not allow ideological slackness or they would end up like Poland, he positively glowed. A laudatory telegram must have gone to Pyongyang, for each time I subsequently met a North Korean diplomat, he told me I was a good egg, who respected them at a time when even so-called communists turned their backs.
So, vibes were good when I went to Pyongyang on an official visit, this time as my country's deputy foreign minister, almost ten years later. Rules are rules, though, and the North Korean diplomatic protocol informed us that cell phones could not be taken into the country (even though they do not work there) and would be confiscated irrespective of rank. I left mine in that oasis of liberty, Beijing. Jimmy Carter once claimed that there are supermarkets in North Korea just like Wal-Mart, but I cannot confirm this. I saw people weakened from malnutrition wander from shop to empty, dimly lit shop. There is nothing to buy even in the "dollar shops," unless you count liquor with a snake in the bottle or cigarettes. The only reasonably well-stocked shop I saw was a bookstore selling the literary labors of the Great Leader and his son, the Dear Leader. I purchased a work titled The Great Teacher of Journalists, which opens with the immortal line, "Today, in Korea, the press is in its heyday and journalists are giving full scope to their talent in their worthwhile activities, for the Party and the revolution."
Foreigners move in North Korea as though enveloped in a smelly cloud-crowds part at their approach, pedestrians take a detour just to avoid being within talking distance. Apparently, if a Westerner so much as asks the time of day, locals have to report it to the secret police. I started reprimanding one of our diplomats for the fact that the information display (containing maps of Poland, articles, and the like) on the embassy perimeter wall was out of date. "It is pointless, minister. People are not allowed to walk on our side of the street." Interestingly, foreigners cannot buy regime newspapers-diplomats might glean too much from the vagaries of the changing party line.
The House of Gifts
Tell me: Have you ever driven on a four-lane highway with no other traffic on it? And I do not mean light traffic, I mean none whatsoever. For the first half-hour it is pleasant, but then the creepiness sets in. Private cars are banned in North Korea, so a car is by definition an official car. At the sound of an approaching vehicle, the teams of women with shovels and rakes who keep flowerbeds along the road in immaculate condition stand at attention with their backs to the motorcade.
I was being taken to the House of Gifts of the Great Leader. A vast steel door-as if this were a nuclear bunker rather than a museum-leads into a spacious tunnel. A hundred yards into the mountain, a cathedral-sized cavern opens up in the rock and a huge marble statue of the Great Leader greets the visitor. We bowed and scraped. Another hundred yards in, we reached a second vast chamber, where the Great Leader, as if alive, stands in the midst of an idyllic meadow. We bowed and scraped before a Chinese-made wax doll.
From there, we entered a labyrinth of hundreds of large, brightly lit rooms where 241,000 gifts have been lovingly preserved in glass display cases. Carpets from Iran, mosaics from Arabia, tea sets from the Soviet Union, ebony sculptures from Africa-the usual diplomatic-circuit junk, including several rooms of what must be the largest collection of objects from East Germany, mostly hunting rifles. A medal from Jimmy Carter and a trinket from Billy Graham get special attention.
I bore my own gift. My suggestion of donating a portrait of Lech Walesa had been deemed too provocative, so I took a distinctly feudalist engraving of Warsaw's Royal Castle. "Would you like your name etched on the plaque that will describe the gift, or would you prefer just your function?" my hosts inquired. "Our diplomatic protocol forbids displays of bourgeois individualism," I said, chuckling inwardly.
Poland being a potato superpower, I had previously secured fifty tons of prime seedlings as our food aid for North Korea, which now gave me the right to inspect the project. On the farm, I was shown rows of potatoes grown from seedlings from different countries. By happy coincidence, Polish potatoes, explained the farm manager, who held a healthy plant with nice big bulbs dropping dirt, came up the best. We should intensify the cooperation between our countries in the field of agriculture, swooned my minders.
Finally, we got to meet the president. No, not the Dear Leader, whom the outside world erroneously assumes to be in charge of the country: This was an audience with Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader himself. That he had been dead five years did not seem to upset our plans. We approached the presidential palace by way of a fully air-conditioned tunnel half a kilometer in length with marble walls and airport-style moving walkways. Eventually we reached the inner sanctum. Entering through an air sluice to prevent bacteria from polluting the air, we emerged into a chamber the size of the Reich's chancellery but made of the same red granite as the Lenin mausoleum. We bowed solemnly four times as we made our way around a reinforced glass coffin containing the mummified corpse of the Great Leader. This was our audience with Kim Il Sung, president-for-eternity of the Democratic Republic of North Korea. In Warsaw, we received letters of accreditation of the North Korean ambassador signed by the Great Leader two years after his earthly demise.
After visiting the president, one signs his visitors' book. One's embassy naturally prepares an anodyne formula about the friendship between our peoples and our respect for the Great Leader, but I had a moral conflict. As a lifelong anticommunist, I could not put my name to a lie; as a public servant, I had to. I wrote in what the embassy had prepared. Then, in a flash of inspiration, I added, "I am personally impressed by what I have just seen. Humanity has seen nothing like this since the Egyptian pyramids." Contrary to the fears of my delegation, the North Koreans were delighted.
Prospects for Diplomacy
For one who was brought up in a communist country, each detail of what I saw provided a clue to the ocean of ignorance, brutality, and hypocrisy that maintain what is probably the vilest regime on earth today. May the business results of my trip be a forewarning to those who think that anything can be achieved with this government through diplomacy.
First, I had been charged with helping save a Polish-North Korean shipping joint venture that dated back to Poland's communist times. Our trawlers were meant to make money by fishing squid in North Korea's territorial waters. I failed in this assignment. The sea off North Korea is full of squid, but the joint venture could not be made to work because the local party bosses stole the detergent and other accessories that we supplied to the Korean vessels meant to deliver the catch. The map of the Korean seabed was of course a top-secret document. The last economic cooperation proposal we heard was breathtaking: If we give North Korea our surplus coal-mining machinery, they will, in return, allow us to invest in their country.
Second, Poland, through its cold war era connections to North Korea, now hoped to serve as an honest broker in drawing the North Koreans into a dialogue about missile proliferation. On missiles, my partners were very clear about their demands. We want a billion dollars per year to give up our program, they said. 'Why can't the Americans see that it's a bargain?'
In recent weeks, discussions of North Korea in Washington have been dominated by technical issues-how many warheads do they possess; how many can they manufacture from the restarted facilities; can they put them on missiles; how far can the missiles reach? An old truth is in danger of being lost: It is not weapons, but people, who kill. It is the nature of the North Korean regime, and not its armaments, that threaten us. And that regime is beyond evil; it exists in a parallel moral universe. We can only be secure when it finds itself on the ash-heap of history where it belongs.
Radek Sikorski is a resident fellow at AEI and the executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative.
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