Removing the veil of secrecy
By Michael Carney Posted Jan 1 2006
Photo/ Michael Carney
A North Korean man reads a newspaper displayed in a glass case near a subway platform. During Carney's visit to the country, he did not see people reading newspapers anywhere else.
North Korea has been quite successful at keeping the West guessing about life inside the so-called “hermit kingdom.” News organizations hoping to serve state and foreign journalists are routinely barred from entering the country, prompting Reporters Without Borders to rank North Korea last on its annual World Press Freedom Index.
Foreign diplomats posted to Pyongyang are kept under tight control; the government limits their ability to travel and restricts which segments of society they see. The few foreign journalists who have made it into the country in recent years have been kept on even shorter leashes. Only a handful have successfully circumvented the restrictions, usually by traveling with tour groups or foreign dignitaries.
Even fewer correspondents, including Bob Woodruff of ABC News and Mike Chinoy of CNN, have been able to produce detailed reports of life in the country. Both were forced to comply with strict conditions that limited their ability to travel freely or speak to regular people. Government guides controlled what they saw and whom they met, taking careful note of the questions they asked and the answers they received.
My experiences were similar. I was allowed to visit only because I hold dual citizenship in the United States and Ireland; I traveled on my Irish passport. Still, it took 18 months to get approval to fly into Pyongyang with a delegation from the Korea Friendship Association, an international organization that provides financial and moral support to the regime. My visa was approved only after a fitful application process that included several false starts and a detailed review of my background and past writings. Members of the association even scoured the Internet for information about my background.
Only when they were satisfied that I had not written anything negative about the Democratic People's Republic of Korea did they authorize me to travel with them on a solidarity mission to Pyongyang in August.
Cell phones, video cameras, radios and televisions were prohibited. I received special permission to bring a digital voice recorder but only after I agreed to always get the expressed permission of speakers.
We could take pictures, so long they didn't include anything that the government considered sensitive — a long list that included bridges, rail lines, military personnel, government facilities, people picking food on the side of the road and anything else that might present North Korea in a negative light. One otherwise genial guide grew furious with me after I snapped a picture of a wizened old peasant walking down a road with a large bundle of wood strapped to her back.
The head of the tour group, a Spaniard who has spent the past 15 years working overseas on behalf of Pyongyang, warned me that any violation of the restrictions would have serious and immediate consequences. I would be confined to the hotel pending an investigation by the security services. If they decided not to charge me with a crime, he would have me sent back to China on the next train or flight out of the country.
These were far from idle threats. An ABC News producer who traveled with the group in 2004 reportedly had his videotapes confiscated after organizers accused him of filming sensitive sites despite repeated warnings to stop. He was confined to his hotel but was allowed to leave the country with the rest of his tour group.
Things didn't end so well for a retired Japanese journalist who was accused of espionage during a 1999 trip. Takashi Sugishima spent more than two years in prison before North Korea released him, reportedly in return for a ransom payment from the Japanese government.
Efforts to influence foreign journalists continue after they leave the country. I was reminded on more than one occasion that another visit would be allowed only if my account of this one passed muster.
Officials claim to read everything written about North Korea in the foreign press via tightly controlled Internet accounts and subscriptions to foreign magazines that are available to well-trusted apparatchiks. In my case, they held out the possibility of increased access to senior officials in the future if they deemed my stories about the trip to be fair and impartial.
Our hosts in the Ministry for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries assigned five guides to our 13-person group. They were to facilitate our authorized travels and ensure we didn't embark on any unauthorized excursions. Every minute was planned in advance, with careful attention paid to the potential for negative images, anything portraying the Korean people as something other than strong and satisfied.
The guides, always on message, patiently answered our questions about life in the country. Given that the government controlled every contact we had with the local population, they were important sources of information. More than once, the guides acknowledged the severe fuel and food shortages that have decimated the country's already fragile economy.
However, they also regurgitated obvious falsehoods — such as the claim the country's leader, Kim Jong Il, is so humble he sleeps in his car instead of a palatial compound. But when telling these stories, they seemed to be sharing what they perceived to be the truth.
Such is the result of decades of indoctrination. It has taken a toll on their ability to discern reality from the propaganda the government force-feeds its citizens from a young age.
“Why do you think the United States opposes North Korea's nuclear weapons program?” I asked one of the guides during a rest stop on our way to the demilitarized zone.
His eyes blazed. “Because they hate us,” he said.
“It might be a little more complicated than that,” I responded, hoping to draw out his views on the larger strategic implications at the core of this issue. But he wasn't interested in discussing it in any greater detail. As far as he was concerned, George W. Bush and the imperialist aggressors in Washington were once again seeking to punish the peace-loving people of North Korea.
Another government guide, a well-educated young woman who had spent her formative years in Western Europe, argued quite passionately that the United States was trying to kill the peasants of North Korea. She was convinced that the Central Intelligence Agency was poisoning their cigarettes, their foodstuffs and even their soap. As far as she knew, the White House — not al-Qaida — was responsible for the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
She accepted such claims without substantiation yet remained intensely curious about many aspects of American culture. During our week together, she asked a number of informed questions about movies, music, politics and religion.
As the privileged child of a high-level government official, she had the opportunity to taste some of what the world has to offer. Most North Koreans aren't so lucky. They know little about what goes on within, much less beyond, their borders. As far as they're concerned, North Korea is free and South Korea is enslaved. Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is a den of inequity where the people live in subjugation to the “U.S. imperialist wolves.”
It is impossible to overstate the government's effectiveness at exerting total control over the flow of information in and out of the country. North Korea is completely isolated. For all intents and purposes, the Internet does not exist. TVs receive one channel. Radio speaks with one voice. So do the official newspapers, which seem to exist solely to extol the virtues of Kimilsungism and laud the comings and goings of the two leaders.
During the visit, our delegation had no access to domestic or international news. We received copies of The Pyongyang Times, the country's English-language newspaper, on the flights in and out of the capital. At our one-star hotel, we saw no one reading periodicals. Only during a tour of the subway system did we see people reading the newspaper, which was displayed in a glass case on the platform.
Korean Central Television broadcasts much of the same information during 30-minute newscasts, which air several times between 3 p.m. and 11 p.m. English-language transcripts of broadcasts during the time of my visit show they were devoted to feel-good propaganda about “The Dear Leader” and details about his latest “on-the-spot guidance” to military personnel, factory managers, farm workers and educators. Communiqués from other foreign leaders, such as Cuban President Fidel Castro's response to birthday greetings from Kim Jong Il, led the broadcast.
Most reports are stale by Western standards. When a massive explosion killed or injured thousands near the Chinese border in April 2004, the state-owned media took two days to release any information about the incident. Foreign correspondents were barred from crossing the border and had to rely on sketchy reports from Pyongyang and foreign diplomats to piece together what happened.
On Sunday evenings, state television broadcasts a 30-minute roundup of international news, which focuses on stories such as the Iraq war and the plight of the Palestinians.
There were no stories during our stay about the internal problems that have contributed to the persistent shortages of food and fuel that have crippled the economy and destroyed the standard of living for most North Koreans. A content analysis of the Korean-language news programs and publications during our stay shows that there was also no coverage of major world events, such as Hurricane Katrina.
Despite evidence to the contrary, the North Korean news media and guides claimed the Kim dynasty has established a utopian society in which poverty and hardship have been stamped out. That might be true in the palaces of Kim Jong Il and his top advisors, but not the crumbling apartment blocks and cottages most North Koreans call home.
But because they have never been exposed to anything other than a Stalinist dictatorship, it is safe to assume that the vast majority of North Koreans accept the teachings of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il as accurate, unbiased renditions of reality.