NORTH KOREA

 

Approximately every four years since the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union has subsidised a World Festival of Youth and Students. Thousands of young people (many of them young only in the communist-youth-movement sense of the word) gather from every corner of the world in the capital of a communist country to dance, sing and denounce the United States. The festivals, which last two weeks, are the Olympics of propaganda.

The 1989 festival was in Pyongyang, capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The British ‘delegation’ was fixed at 100 and I was accepted as a member because, though neither a youth nor a student, I was a doctor who had practised in Tanzania, a country whose first president, Julius Nyerere, was a close friend and admirer of Kim Il Sung, Great Leader of the DPRK (as the country is known to cognoscenti). It was therefore assumed I was in sympathy with what was sometimes called, rather vaguely, ‘the movement’.

I first met my fellow delegates in Islington, a couple of weeks before our departure, in one of those dingy public meeting halls that reek of resentment and frustration as strongly as men’s changing rooms reek of sweat. I soon found myself having to explain, somewhat shamefacedly, that I represented no one but myself: to be a mere individual when everyone else represented, or claimed to represent, the downtrodden, the disadvantaged or the dispossessed, was tantamount to class treachery. In the hall, the pleasures of grievance, past, present and to come, flourished abundantly. The members of the British delegation who had foreign passports – Turkish, Jamaican, Cypriot, Indian, Iraqi – asked what harassment they might expect from immigration officials when they returned from North Korea, and were told that an immigration lawyer would be on hand to help them. A member of the Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign, who called the recent riot there ‘the Uprising’, spoke against the western conception of human rights. He had become a professional proletarian (I was later told) on leaving Cambridge, adopting a cockney accent of considerable strength. He also assumed a roughness of manner that indicated his conception of the class he wished to join – and lead – was not an entirely flattering one. Like most socialists, he wanted to rid the world of all egotism and selfishness, yet he had no hesitation in putting his feet up on the public seats at Moscow airport. Indeed, he appeared to think it his proletarian duty to do so. His closest associate on the delegation was a young Jewish activist from Hackney who was so intemperately anti-Zionist that even the Palestinians in Pyongyang, so I was told, began to give him a wide berth, no doubt suspecting he was a Mossad agent.

Our journey to Pyongyang, of necessity via Moscow, was uneventful, though even by the time we reached Moscow airport a certain strain had begun to make itself felt. A temporary but enforced association of left-wing activists, each with his or her own cause to promote, and each utterly convinced of his or her own righteousness, is not necessarily a recipe for social cohesion. The blacks had brought a ghetto-blaster, and the question of whether everyone wished to listen to (or at least hear) reggae music all the way from London to Pyongyang was not one to whose answer they gave deep thought: and such is the moral terror that the accusation of racism now exerts among all right-thinking people that no one dared to tackle them about it. To be the member of a victimised group was a vocation and destiny that obviated the need for consideration of others. Persecution, real or imagined, was sufficient warrant for the rightness of their behaviour. The trouble was, of course, that the majority of the delegates considered themselves persecuted, whether as women, members of splinter communist parties, vegetarians, homosexuals, Irish by descent, proletarians, immigrants, or any combination of these. Hence almost everyone acted more-persecuted-than-thou. By contrast, I was the very epitome of bourgeois contentment. No stranger in my youth to the sterile joys of resentment, by means of which one ascribes all one’s failures and failings to circumstance, I had become convinced over the years that men are sometimes masters of their fate, and that – to an extent – they make themselves. Naturally, these were not sentiments I dared utter in my present company, especially as I should have had to deliver them with my unmistakeably bourgeois diction.

Tired as I was after dozing only fitfully across the several time zones of Siberia, our arrival on a cool morning in a new and exotic land with a reputation for extreme xenophobia acted like a drug coursing through my veins, causing an almost febrile hyper-alertness. Not that Pyongyang airport assaults the senses in the way that Indian or African airports do, with their pullulating chaos of officialdom, passengers, relatives, touts, idlers and general agents of uncertain employment. On the contrary, there is no bustle at all; only a large concrete apron dotted with expressionless guards in ill-fitting drab green uniforms and an airport terminal with a huge portrait of Kim Il Sung slanted at a backward angle on its roof. When the jet engines are turned off, an almost monastic silence reigns.

We were treated with consideration by the Korean officials, for we were honoured guests. We were put aboard brand-new air-conditioned coaches (imported especially from Japan) and were soon speeding along the six lane highway towards the city, a police car with blue flashing lights and a siren preceding us. This was not strictly necessary for there was absolutely no traffic in either direction, except once for a cavalcade of Mercedes saloons and police outriders, with a Mercedes as long as a city block at its centre which bore Yasser Arafat, Palestinian guerrilla leader and building tycoon, back to the airport after yet another fraternal visit to the Great Leader of People’s Korea.

The police escort was not entirely without purpose, however. At a stroke, it transformed a group of unimportant young discontents into people of consequence. This form of flattery exactly suited the psychology of at least some of them, convinced as they were that the country from which they had come unjustly failed to recognise and reward their manifest talents.

The countryside through which the highway made its eerie way was the brilliant green of fresh young rice shoots. The fields were beautifully neat and demarcated with geometric precision, in contrast to the scratched and haphazard appearance of the Russian soil, where everything Man has done still seems impermanent and at the mercy of Nature. Could it be, I wondered, that here in Korea there existed a culture that accorded well with the tenets of a planned economy?

We reached the city. Pyongyang was almost completely destroyed during the Korean War, with hardly a building left standing. It is one of those places with the distinction of having received more bombs than were dropped on Germany during the Second World War. Even accounting for the aid received from Korea’s great neighbours, the Soviet Union and China (which was never as much as requested), the reconstruction of Pyongyang was a phenomenal achievement. It is now a modern city, with public parks and gardens, huge monuments and buildings, and a Swiss standard of cleanliness. It created a fine impression on those of us who had come to worship at the shrine of Korean socialism, and even those less reverentially inclined admitted it was beyond anything they had expected. Coming as we did from a country whose cities seem endlessly in decay, whose streets are disfigured by garishness and strewn with litter, and millions of whose citizens live in neighbourhoods that seem to be the graveyard of hope and ambition, the scrubbed and scoured orderliness of Pyongyang was momentarily invigorating and even refreshing. The monumentality of the city seemed to indicate a pride in the present and a faith in the future. Here indeed was a change from our tired – no, exhausted – civilisation.

And yet I soon found the city profoundly disturbing, even sinister. No one can remain immune to the effect of size; but size in architecture is often a quality that speaks more of folly or megalomania than of genuine achievement. In the centre of Pyongyang rose something that looked like a great concrete rocket, the shape of a spaceship from the comics of my youth, a thousand feet high with row on row of portholes. Atop the 105th storey fluttered a huge red flag; at the bottom, a large poster depicted the completed structure, the concrete walls to be faced with shiny blue tiles. This would-be wonder of the world is to become a hotel with 3000 bedrooms. Since the existing luxury hotels of Pyongyang are seldom more than a tenth full, why this colossus of hospitality? The answer is simple, and mad: the South Koreans, the ideological enemy par excellence, were awarded a contract in Singapore to build a hotel of 103 storeys.

The streets in Pyongyang are never less than four lanes wide, usually with a special additional lane for the sole use of a certain well-known person, and are usually very much wider. Pedestrians must take underpasses: they may not cross the street above ground. At many intersections stand traffic police, young women in light blue skirts and white socks who perform an elaborate, slightly robotic dance on pedestals, swivelling round smartly with their batons every few seconds, hour in, hour out, directing traffic – that is not there. Are these vast boulevards, then, a miracle of foresight, a preparation for the inevitable day of universal prosperity when every North Korean will own a car? (At present, they are not permitted to own even a bicycle, in case they use it to attend subversive gatherings.) Or does the width of the streets serve the same function as in Tirana, as a deterrent to insurrection? Or is it merely part of the grandiosity that inspired Kim Il Sung to erect a triumphal arch one metre higher than the Arc de Triomphe, and a stone tower one metre higher than the Washington Monument (the tallest free-standing stone structure in the world), to commemorate his own seventieth birthday?

No visitor to Pyongyang escapes a visit to the Juche Tower, nor should he. The tower is built in segments, seventeen up two sides, eighteen up the remaining two, making seventy in all, each segment symbolising a year in the Great Leader’s life. On the top of the tower is a large red flame, constructed of glass, illuminated at night. The tower is called Juche after the Great Leader’s philosophy of Juche, which is described as a brilliant extension, deepening and completion of Marxism-Leninism, a synthesis of all human experience hitherto. At the base of the tower is a little grotto whose walls are covered with marble plaques attesting to the appreciation by foreign disciples of the ‘Juche Idea’. In design, the plaques are exactly like those one finds at the tomb of a miracle-working Catholic saint. I looked up, half-expecting to see crutches hung as trophies, testimony to the success of Juche in curing paralysis. The largest, most prominent plaque belonged to the Portuguese Committee for the Study of Kimilsungism; but there were also plaques from India and Senegal, Paraguay and New Zealand, indeed from every country in the world.

What exactly is this Juche, the idea that replaces and renders redundant all previous ideas? Insofar as it means anything intelligible at all, it seems to mean self- reliance, particularly Korean self-reliance. The Great Leader’s son and probable successor if the army doesn’t kill him first, Kim Jong Il, known as the Dear Leader, is an exponent of the Juche Idea. Though I tried harder and persisted longer than most, I found his writing – even allowing for deficiencies of translation – radically unreadable, its only claim to originality being a peculiar combination of opacity and banality. Each participant in the Festival of Youth and Students was presented with a booklet by him, entitled On the Juche Idea: Treatise Sent to the National Seminar on the Juche Idea Held to Mark the 70th Birthday of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung March 31 1982. It had a grey cover with gold lettering. Inside, protected by a leaf of tissue paper, was a photograph of the Dear Leader, looking exactly as rumour holds him to be: a plump, humourless, cruel, spoilt, but possibly intelligent, prig. Here are a few of his reflections on Juche:

 

As the Leader [ie Dad] said, the Juche idea is based on the philosophical principle that man is the master of everything and decides everything. The Juche idea raised the fundamental question of philosophy by regarding men as the main factor, and elucidated the philosophical principle that man is the master of everything and decides everything.

That man is the master of everything means that he is the master of the world and of his own destiny; that man decides everything means that he plays the decisive role in transforming the world and in shaping his destiny.

The philosophical principle of the Juche idea is the principle of man centred philosophy which explains man’s position and role in the world.

The Leader made it clear that man is a social being with Chajusong, creativity and consciousness. Man holds a special position and plays a special role as master of the world because he is a social being with Chajusong, creativity and consciousness.

The Leader gave a new philosophical conception of man by defining Chajusong, creativity and consciousness, as the essential features of man, the social being.

Chajusong, creativity and consciousness are man’s social qualities which take shape and develop socially and develop historically. Man alone in the world lives and conducts activity in social relationship. He maintains his existence and achieves his aim only socially. Chajusong, creativity and consciousness are peculiar to man, the social being.

Man is a being with Chajusong, that is, an independent social being.

 

I have quoted the Dear Leader at such length not to amuse, but to bore the reader, to give him some idea, however faint, of what it must be like to live in a country where passages such as the above must not only be read but committed to memory, publicly regurgitated and applauded as brilliant beyond precedence; where all printed matter is in the same style, no other style being permitted; where the eye is constantly assaulted by slogans and the ear by speeches (there are inextinguishable loudspeakers in the carriages of the trains, in the escalators down to the subway, in the factories, in the housing estates and even in apartments). Imagine further that this state of affairs had existed not for an hour or a week or a month, but for forty-five years as in Albania: and you begin to grasp what it is to live in North Korea.

One of the only two spontaneous, non-official conversations – as intense as they were brief – I had with Koreans during my two weeks in North Korea occurred a few days after our arrival in the country outside the Grand People’s Study House, a vast building that is half pagoda, half fascist mausoleum. Quite unexpectedly, a young man asked me as I walked by whether I spoke English.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘Do you mind if we speak?’ he asked. ‘I like to hear standard English spoken. It is a great pleasure for me.’

He was a student of English at the Foreign Languages Institute where, as in every educational establishment, Marxism-Leninism and the Juche Idea were taught – ad nauseam. Suddenly he said:

‘My only happiness is to read English literature. When I read Shakespeare and Dickens I feel a joy that is so great I cannot express it.’

Was this a form of flattery? I do not think so: his speech and emotion were unmistakeably sincere.

As I walked away – we could not tarry long, we should have been noticed – I pondered why Shakespeare and Dickens meant so inexpressibly much to him. I found the answer in Kim Jong Il:

 

The Leader put forward the idea of revolutionising, working-classising and intellectualising all members of society and thus transforming them into communist men of a Juche type, as a major revolutionary task in modelling the whole society on the Juche idea… Thoughts define men’s worth and quality and, accordingly, ideological remodelling is of the utmost importance in the transformation of man.

 

Who would not turn with relief (too weak a word) from that to this:

 

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings:

How some have been depos’d, some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos’d,

Some poison’d by their wives, some sleeping kill’d;

All murder’d: for within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temple of a king

Keeps Death his court, and there the antick sits,

Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp;

Allowing him a breath, a little scene

To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks,

Infusing him with self and vain conceit

As if this flesh with walls about our life

Were brass impregnable; and humour’d thus

Comes at the last, and with a little pin

Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

 

Was subversion ever sweeter?

As for Dickens, he was no doubt taught to demonstrate the horrors of capitalism, but lessons taught and lessons learnt are not necessarily the same. For the fact is that every character in Dickens, however ill-used or wicked, speaks at least with his own voice and in his own words, and therefore is more human than North Koreans are allowed or supposed to be.

Pausing after parting from the student of English, I gazed at the townscape in front of the Grand People’s Study House. What exactly was wrong with it? In some ways so impressive, why did it send such shivers down one’s spine? I cast around for the explanation, which eluded me but which was long on the edge of my consciousness.

Broad steps led from the Study House across the wide street to a square full of fountains, shrubs, concrete terraces, waterfalls, open spaces and an enormous group sculpture of dancing women, throwing concrete scarves up in the air to form arches. Then came some ministry buildings, with the colossal rectangular grandeur that the Chinese once favoured when building railway terminals in Africa. In the distance, up a gently sloping hill paved with concrete, with an arm stretched out in a Nazi-like salute, was a giant bronze statue, sixty feet high, of the Great Leader. Apparently, when Enver Hoxha died he bequeathed his overcoat to Kim Il Sung, for it was the same one that Enver wore on his statue in Tirana.

People moved about silently, insignificant as ants on a runway. At last I grasped what troubled me about this scene, apart from its bad taste: Pyongyang was langue de bois made stone.

We were put up in a vast new complex of apartments in Kwangbok Street, which itself was thirteen lanes wide (the thirteenth, central lane solely for the sole use of the GL). The complex had been built in the expectation that North Korea would be host to some of the events of the 1988 Olympics, but when it failed in its effort to attract any such events, the history of Kwangbok Street was changed, and it was decided that it was built not as an Olympic village but specially for the World Festival of Youth and Students. This illustrates the way North Korea lives in triumph and avoids humiliation. No historical event is too insignificant to be re-written.

The apartments were well-constructed, a long series of towers on both sides of the street that might have reminded me of Miami had there been any neon. There were five of us to each apartment; I noticed that the blacks and whites, except for a charming young physics student of Nigerian descent who was as interested in fun as in politics, stayed as separate as if there had been a law against fraternisation. We were given coupons for all our meals, which we ate in a canteen looking out on Kwangbok Street. The Korean waitresses who served us had enchanting smiles and moved with a natural grace that made our movements appear gross and clumsy.

At our first meal a young woman of clearly middle class origin, who wore only black shapeless clothes and had owlish round spectacles, startled everyone by announcing that she was always shocked how left-wing people, who called themselves caring, could eat meat. She was a person of very definite opinions, including a rather poor one of the male sex in general: when she signed her name, she appended a cross to the o it contained, to turn it into the biological symbol for female. Her reproach was of limited effect, though; for many of our ‘delegation’ were not the kind of people to wax sentimental over the fate of dumb beasts. They were hard-faced communists, who dressed tough and cut their hair short so that their heads should appear as bony as possible. I overheard one of them describing a demonstration he had attended in England, in which there had also been a member of Amnesty International with a placard.

‘I went up to him and said, “I don’t believe in that bourgeois shit”, and he said, “Do you think political prisoners should be tortured and killed, then?” “Too fucking right, I do,” I said.’

The person to whom he related this charming little exchange laughed. What I found frightening about the pair of them was that their faces were contorted with hatred even as they laughed, and when they talked of killing political prisoners they meant it. They were members of a little communist groupuscule for whom Stalin was a god, not in spite of his crimes but because of them. I wondered what life experience, what temperament, could have given rise to such venom. What splendid torturers and concentration camp commandants they would have made, had they only been given the opportunity.

If they had heard, as I did from diplomats in Pyongyang, that the World Festival of Youth and Students had caused food shortages throughout North Korea for several months in advance, they would not have believed it, or if they believed it, would have dismissed it as unimportant. Nor would they have thought significant the seemingly casual remark made to me by a North Korean lady that she and her twelve year-old son had for many months spent their evenings and weekends in ‘voluntary’ construction work on Kwangbok Street and its associated complex of arenas and sports halls. They would simply have praised the Stakhanovite spirit of the Korean people. If they had heard the end of my conversation with the student from the Foreign Languages Institute, they would have dismissed him as a ‘remnant’ of the old order, though he was born a quarter of a century after communism was established in North Korea.

‘Is it correct in English to use idioms?’ he asked me.

‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘We use them all the time.’

‘Would it be correct, then, to say, “This festival is as welcome as a snowstorm before the harvest”?’

I replied that he was in a better position to know than I.

What importance would my hard-faced communists have attached to the answer that one of the North Korean guides gave in reply to a question about the handicapped and war-wounded people of North Korea (only people without physical blemish are permitted to live in Pyongyang)?

‘That,’ he said, ‘is a problem we have solved.’

Of course, they would have attached no importance to it at all. What is a little eugenics measured against the March of History? For myself, I rapidly became convinced – absolutely and unshakeably convinced – that one day stories would emerge from North Korea that would stun the world, of cruelties equal to or surpassing those of Kolyma and the White Sea Canal in Stalin’s time.

The leader of our delegation was a journalist on a radical Asian affairs magazine who devoted much of his life to Anglo-North Korean relations which were, of course, of an entirely unofficial nature. Kim Il Sung and Nicolae Ceausescu (not yet fallen from grace) were two of his heroes. A graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies, he was socially inept. His clothes, like those of many intellectuals, were shabby, and he always looked as if he had just been struck by a whirlwind; but unlike some of the communists on the delegation, he was a kind man, incapable of deliberately giving personal offence. Yet for all his kindness, knowledge and intelligence, he had hitched his political wagon to a regime of unspeakable tyranny. During our two weeks in North Korea, he approached one of the women on the delegation and said ‘I’ve been informed by Korean comrades that you were out all last night’. Having transformed himself into the instrument of spies and informers, he was genuinely surprised at the outraged reaction this remark called forth. He used the words ‘Korean comrades’ without irony; he was a true innocent abroad.

Of course, the Koreans treated him – as they treated all other heads of delegation – with great consideration. He was provided with a new Mercedes car and a driver; he was invited to attend meetings that seemed of great moment. He was a genuine idealist, materially unambitious, but still the contrast between the attention he was paid in North Korea and the disregard with which he was treated at home must have impressed itself upon him. What saddened me was the near certainty that in their hearts (and minds) the Koreans would have nothing but contempt for him, using him as a willing dupe and thinking of him as one of Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’. His naivety was appalling, but as a man he was not contemptible. One day he would be ashamed of his attachment to North Korea.

We arrived some days before the opening of the festival and were taken on tours of the city. As our bus passed through the streets of Pyongyang, the pedestrians stood still and waved to us, and the faithful waved back happily, thinking they were expressing international proletarian solidarity. But for those who cared to observe, the waving of the pedestrians had an odd quality to it, like a smile of the mouth without a shine in the eyes. They waved stiffly, like automata; as soon as the bus had passed, their upraised arms dropped like stones to their sides and they walked on. This was friendliness by decree, militarised hospitality.

We were taken to the History Museum and the Martyrs’ Cemetery. The exhibits in the History Museum were largely photographs to prove how Kim Il Sung had liberated Korea from Japanese colonial rule, something which it required every class of historical falsification and photographic forgery to prove, since in fact he had very little to do with the liberation of Korea in 1945. It was the Russians in the north and the Americans in the south who defeated the Japanese. While it seems to be true –every fact of modern Korean history is a minefield, figuratively speaking – that the Great-Leader-to-be once led a small detachment of anti-Japanese guerrillas and displayed bravery in incredibly hard conditions, he fled (sensibly enough) to the Soviet Union. There he spent most of the war years once he realised the unaided Korean cause was hopeless, returning to Korea only with the Red Army which established a communist state north of the 38th parallel.

Foreign armies did not get a mention in the History Museum; the part played by the United States in the defeat of Japan was not emphasised. But we learnt that Kim was, like Hoxha, a precocious revolutionary, beginning his anti-imperialist career even earlier, at the age of twelve. And as in the Hoxha museum in Tirana, the photographs in the Pyongyang museum were blurred and grainy, ready for subtraction or addition of personnel as political circumstance demanded.

Outside the museum was the giant copper-coloured statue of Kim looking humourless and bloated as a toad. I stood under it and laughed. But I also found myself wondering about the psychology of men like Kim Il Sung and Enver Hoxha. Did they come to believe in their own infallibility, or were they out and out cynics? What does a man think who sees his own statue, his own picture, his own words everywhere? If anyone holds the comforting belief that a man’s crimes eventually find him out, let him reflect on the fact that Enver Hoxha died peacefully in bed after forty years of triumphant psychopathy, and that Kim Il Sung could well beat this record.

As for the Martyrs’ Cemetery, high above the city, it was a fine example of the genre, somewhat more elaborate than the Albanian equivalent, as one might have expected from a nation seven times larger. Soft organ music emerged from speakers hidden in the clipped shrubs, which reminded me rather of the days when a Wurlitzer used to rise up from the orchestra pit in cinemas between films. The cemetery was terraced, with symmetrical rows of graves and a bust of each martyr on a white pedestal. This was not a place of mourning, still less of remembrance (to possess a memory being a crime in North Korea); it was just another propaganda tableau, and the busts almost certainly bore no relation to interred martyrs – if any were in fact interred there.

We were also taken on visits to schools and hospitals. The Secondary School Number 1 was the institution of its kind that visitors are always taken to see: when I mentioned to a diplomat that I had visited such a school, he said wearily, ‘Ah yes, Secondary School Number 1.’ Its entrance hall is built of marble, the whole building is immaculate and a perfect silence reigns. We were told by the guide that the school was historic because the Great Leader had visited it twice. We were then shown classrooms whose tidiness was almost supernatural, with not so much as a piece of chalk out of place. The blackboards had never been written upon and the blackboard dusters never used (for once used, a blackboard and its duster cannot recover their pristine condition). We were shown laboratories with magnificent new equipment, again never used. Such children as there were in the school – few, considering the size of the building – were elsewhere. The computer laboratory was equipped with the latest Japanese models, but neither the machines themselves nor the furniture showed the slightest sign of use.

‘Only socialism can do this,’ said one of our party with face aglow, a man who worked for the Soviet news agency in London and was, despite the revelations of glasnost, still a believer. His voice had the catch of religious hysteria in it.

He did not wish to understand the significance of the unused blackboards, of the tidiness that would have satisfied the most obsessional of housewives, of the fact that it took 45 minutes to reach the school via a circuitous route but only 5 minutes to return by the direct route. He did not ask whether the school, even if real, was typical, though if he were shown anything good in his own country would immediately retort that it was exceptional, resorting to a barrage of statistics to prove it. Here critical thought dissolved at the first sight of a marble entrance hall; far from unintelligent, he was a true political pilgrim, precisely the type of willing dupe for whom this preposterous charade was staged. Perhaps in the 1930s there was some slight excuse for intellectuals who were taken in by such a performance, inasmuch as it was then something the world had never previously experienced. But what excuse was there nearly 60 years later for such a fatuous response?

We went into the language laboratory (as I had been in the language laboratory in the school in Korce in Albania). I asked to see the English textbook, but had little time with it. One of the stories was about a hedgehog whose prickles repelled a tiger, and just in case the pupil failed to understand the moral it was pointed out to him; North Korea was the hedgehog, the United States was the tiger. There was poetry in the textbook as well: an ode by the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, on the joy of entering university named, as it happened, after Dad, Kim Il Sung.

One of our party asked about sex education in the school. The girls, we were told, learn about menstruation when they are 12 years old. And the boys?

‘They are learning engineering.’

The hospital in Pyongyang that foreigners ineluctably visit is the Maternity Hospital. This was said to be the Dear Leader’s pet project, indeed his personal gift to the nation, though how he was in a position to make such a gift is not a question prudent to ask in North Korea’s present climate of opinion. The Dear Leader, as well as being the ‘genius of the arts’ and a great musician (he has written a piano concerto, no doubt in the ‘correct’ musical style) is said also to be an authority on obstetrics.

The entrance hall is more like the foyer of an opera house than the reception area of a hospital. The Dear Leader, who is credited with having designed the hospital himself, is said to have exclaimed ‘You have built a palace, not a hospital!’ when he saw it for the first time. The multicoloured marble floor and the marble walls and columns reflect the light cast by the central chandelier. On the far wall is the inevitable mural of the Great Leader. Every public building has one of these paintings, thirty feet wide, portraying the GL standing alone on a mountain-top wearing a dark blue gaberdine raincoat and cloth cap among the pink cherry blossom, with a vast landscape at his feet, or with a crowd of lesser mortals – workers, soldiers, children, intellectuals, farm labourers – around the base of the pedestal on which he stands, their arms stretching up towards him as though his touch cured the king’s evil.

We donned snowy white gowns and put on overshoes: a hygienic proceeding that impressed the faithful deeply. We walked through laboratory after laboratory, facility after facility, with no sign of current use. I have seen a good many laboratories in my medical career, but the calm of the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital laboratories I had encountered previously only in mortuaries. In the radioisotope laboratory I noticed a small pile of liver scans. The last had been performed more than six months earlier, and they were few and far between. No patients, no staff, no trolleys cluttered the corridors, which echoed to no sound except that of our praises.

A few of the faithful were anxious to hear my opinion of the hospital, another achievement of socialism which brought the light of ecstasy to their eyes. Was not a hospital like this possible only under socialism, they asked? I replied that it was, though perhaps I did not mean it in quite the same sense as they.

Shortly afterwards, we met a charming and intelligent young Russian called Boris, a linguist who was fluent in French, English and Japanese. In the company of a young communist on the British delegation – of the naive rather than the hard-faced variety – I described to Boris our visits to the school and hospital. He laughed, for he remembered having taken part in precisely the same kind of visits as a guide and interpreter in the Soviet Union before the advent of Mr Gorbachev. Foreigners were solemnly taken to institutions of improbable perfection. The purpose was to dupe them: a process that required their willing co-operation.

‘Thank god we are past that stage now,’ said Boris.

This was too much for the young communist; he fled the table so as to hear no more.

In the evening, Kwangbok Street came alive. Korean women who lived in Japan had been allowed to return to their ancestral home to set up stalls selling food and drink to the thousands of delegates. There were several temporary cafés run by a Japanese company whose staff wore American-style sunshades and who hoped every time we bought something from them that we would have a nice day. Many of the delegations had brought public address systems, causing the concrete of Kwangbok Street to vibrate with rock music. The Latin Americans had bands of their own and congregated to dance and sing until late into the night. The few Koreans who witnessed this Latin exuberance stood gazing as if they were creatures from outer space. The Latin Americans tried to get the Koreans to join in: but the depths of cultural difference, to say nothing of the political dangers, could scarcely have been greater, and the Koreans remained passive observers.

Diplomats posted to Pyongyang were astonished at the transformation of Kwangbok Street. They had seen nothing like its liveliness in all their time in the city. (Normally, they told me, even they lived in fear of the security apparatus; and one of them told me that the North Koreans killed foreign diplomats whenever they felt like it, though he was in such a state of abject terror that I did not know whether he was realistic or a psychiatric case – or both). But of course Kwangbok Street was sealed off from the rest of the city, as if plague raged there. At a curve in the single road that led to the centre of Pyongyang, the police had set up a huge spotlight to dazzle oncoming vehicles so that they slowed for the police to take pictures. In any case, it was unlikely that unauthorised Koreans would attempt to reach Kwangbok Street, North Korea not encouraging quixotic private initiative.

In any case, they would not have been able to buy anything there with their money. There were three kinds of currency in North Korea: ‘blue’ money, exchanged for hard currency, ‘red’ money, exchanged for socialist currencies, and ‘white’ money, in which Koreans were paid and which foreigners were not permitted to hold. Of course, blue money bought the most; prices in red money were at a premium; but only white money was accepted for train or bus fares, creating an additional problem for foreigners who wished to travel within the country.

There was very little for North Koreans to buy; they depend on rations (rationing is the essence of ‘actually existing’ socialism). I was told by a diplomat that on national holidays – when no special influx of foreigners was expected – the shops were filled with fruit. Not, of course, real fruit, but the plastic variety, so much more advanced technologically. Thus comes true the Marxist dream of Man’s domination of Nature; no longer dependent on seasons, Man becomes truly Man for the first time in his history, for the decision as to when to festoon the shops with plastic fruit is one that depends upon his consciousness and nothing else.

I went several times during the festival to Pyongyang Department Store Number 1. This is in the very centre of the city. Its shelves and counters were groaning with locally produced goods, piled into impressive pyramids or in fan-like displays, perfectly arranged, throughout the several floors of the building. On the ground floor was a wide variety of tinned foods, hardware and alcoholic drinks, including a strong Korean liqueur with a whole snake pickled or marinated in the bottle, presumably as an aphrodisiac. Everything glittered with perfection, the tidiness was remarkable.

It didn’t take long to discover that this was no ordinary department store. It was filled with thousands of people, going up and down the escalators, standing at the corners, going in and out of the front entrance in a constant stream both ways – yet nothing was being bought or sold. I checked this by standing at the entrance for half an hour. The people coming out were carrying no more than the people entering. Their shopping bags contained as much, or as little, when they left as when they entered. In some cases, I recognised people coming out as those who had gone in a few minutes before, only to see them re-entering the store almost immediately. And I watched a hardware counter for fifteen minutes. There were perhaps twenty people standing at it; there were two assistants behind the counter, but they paid no attention to the ‘customers’. The latter and the assistants stared past each other in a straight line, neither moving nor speaking.

Eventually, they grew uncomfortably aware that they were under my observation. They began to shuffle their feet and wriggle, as if my regard pinned them like live insects to a board. The assistants too became restless and began to wonder what to do in these unforeseen circumstances. They decided that there was nothing for it but to distribute something under the eyes of this inquisitive foreigner. And so, all of a sudden, they started to hand out plastic wash bowls to the twenty ‘customers’, who took them (without any pretence of payment). Was it their good luck, then? Had they received something for nothing? No, their problems had just begun. What were they to do with their plastic washbowls? (All of them were brown incidentally, for the assistants did not have sufficient initiative to distribute a variety of goods to give verisimilitude to the performance, not even to the extent of giving out differently coloured bowls.)

They milled around the counter in a bewildered fashion, clutching their bowls in one hand as if they were hats they had just doffed in the presence of a master. Some took them to the counter opposite to hand them in; some just waited until I had gone away. I would have taken a photograph, but I remembered just in time that these people were not participating in this charade from choice, that they were victims, and that – despite their expressionless faces and lack of animation – they were men with chajusong, that is to say creativity and consciousness, and to have photographed them would only have added to their degradation. I left the hardware counter, but returned briefly a little later: the same people were standing at it, sans brown plastic bowls, which were neatly re-piled on the shelf.

I also followed a few people around at random, as discreetly as I could. Some were occupied in ceaselessly going up and down the escalators; others wandered from counter to counter, spending a few minutes at each before moving on. They did not inspect the merchandise; they moved as listlessly as illiterates might, condemned to spend the day among the shelves of a library. I did not know whether to laugh or explode with anger or weep. But I knew I was seeing one of the most extraordinary sights of the twentieth century.

I decided to buy something – a fountain pen. I went to the counter where pens were displayed like the fan of a peacock’s tail. They were no more for sale than the Eiffel Tower. As I handed over my money, a crowd gathered round, for once showing signs of animation. I knew, of course, that I could not be refused: if I were, the game would be given away completely. And so the crowd watched goggle-eyed and disbelieving as this astonishing transaction took place: I gave the assistant a piece of paper and she gave me a pen.

The pen, as it transpired, was of the very worst quality. Its rubber for the ink was so thin that it would have perished immediately on contact with ink. The metal plunger was already rusted; the plastic casing was so brittle that the slightest pressure cracked it. And the box in which it came was of absorbent cardboard, through whose fibres the ink of the printing ran like capillaries on the cheeks of a drunk.

At just before four o’clock, on two occasions, I witnessed the payment of the shoppers. An enormous queue formed at the cosmetics and toiletries counter and there everyone, man and woman, received the same little palette of rouge, despite the great variety of goods on display. Many of them walked away somewhat bemused, examining the rouge uncomprehendingly. At another counter I saw a similar queue receiving a pair of socks, all brown like the plastic bowls. The socks, however, were for keeps. After payment, a new shift of Potemkin shoppers arrived.

The Department Store Number 1 was so extraordinary that I had to talk to someone about it. But the young communist from Glasgow to whom I described it simply exclaimed: ‘So what! Plenty of people go to Harrods without buying anything, just to look.’ Nevertheless, I returned twice to Department Store Number 1 because, in my opinion, it had as many layers of meaning as a great novel, and every time one visited it one realised – as on re-reading Dickens or Tolstoy – that one had missed something from the time before.

Department Store Number 1 was a tacit admission of the desirability of an abundance of material goods, consumption of which was very much a proper goal of mankind. Such an admission of the obvious would not have been in any way remarkable were it not that socialists so frequently deny it, criticising liberal capitalist democracy because of its wastefulness and its inculcation of artificial desires in its citizens, thereby obscuring their ‘true’ interests. By stocking Department Store Number 1 with as many goods as they could find, in order to impress foreign visitors, the North Koreans admitted that material plenty was morally preferable to shortage, and that scarcity was not a sign of abstemious virtue; rather it was proof of economic inefficiency. Choice, even in small matters, gives meaning to life. However well fed, however comfortable modern man might be without it, he demands choice as a right, not because it is economically superior, but as an end in itself. By pretending to offer it, the North Koreans acknowledged as much; and in doing so, recognised that they were consciously committed to the denial of what everyone wants.

But the most sombre reflection occasioned by Department Store Number 1 is that concerning the nature of the power that can command thousands of citizens to take part in a huge and deceitful performance, not once but day after day, without any of the performers ever indicating by even the faintest sign that he is aware of its deceitfulness, though it is impossible that he should not be aware of it. One might almost ascribe a macabre and sadistic sense of humour to the power, insofar as the performance it commands bears the maximum dissimilarity to the real experience and conditions of life of the performers. It is as if the director of a leper colony commanded the enactment of a beauty contest – something one might expect to see in, say, a psychologically depraved surrealist film. But this is no joke, and the humiliation it visits upon the people who take part in it, far from being a drawback, is an essential benefit to the power; for slaves who must participate in their own enslavement by signalling to others the happiness of their condition are so humiliated that they are unlikely to rebel.

My companions who were duped by this vast simulacrum of a city and a country did not pause to wonder why or how it was that every person in North Korea without exception wore a badge with a portrait of the Great Leader. If they had considered it at all, they would have said it was simply because of his popularity. The badges came in several designs, each apparently indicating the wearer’s place in the political hierarchy. No foreigner, however, had ever succeeded in breaking the code embodied in the badges: the world will probably have to wait for the death of the GL for the solution to this enigma.

A diplomat told me that in the competition to prove loyalty to Kim Il Sung, men used to have the date of their admission into the Party tattooed on their arms. And the annual induction of children into the Young Pioneers is a ceremony of mass hysteria, emotions rising steadily for several days beforehand, culminating in a 15 minute invocation to Kim Il Sung at the end of which the new Young Pioneers are declared true sons and daughters of Kim. The girls break down into sobs at the mention of the name of the Great Leader. I was reminded a little of Maupassant’s story La Maison Tellier, in which a group of prostitutes find themselves at first communion, during which a wave of profound religious emotion sweeps over them (without, of course, ultimately changing their mode of life). And I was reminded also of the way news of Stalin’s death was received in Russia, with the sobs of the terrorised.

The festival was opened a few days after our arrival, at a ceremony in the huge stadium that had been built for the Olympics but had never witnessed an Olympic event. Attendance at the opening ceremony, we were several times reminded, was compulsory. We had each received official invitation cards, but RSVP was not written on them. Moreover, each delegation was to wear its ‘uniform’. In our case, a special shirt had been designed, and by happy coincidence it was coloured storm-trooper brown. About half of us were to take part in the march past Kim Il Sung, and the idea of doing so appealed to me immensely: I should relish relating how I marched past Kim in twenty years’ time. Alas, I was not selected as a marcher.

The ceremony was prepared with military precision. The buses taking the delegations to the stadium left at thirty second intervals, an impressive organisational feat. We arrived in the stadium two hours before the Great Leader was due to make his entry, leaving plenty of time for tension to mount: a technique well developed by another great leader, Adolf Hitler.

On the far side of the stadium were 20,000 children, each with a series of coloured cards which, by means of instantaneous and co-ordinated changes, produced patterns, portraits, landscapes, and slogans (the latter in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Korean). At the very moment the children changed the colours of the cards they exposed to view, they let out a high-pitched yell which pierced the sky. The effect was undoubtedly impressive because of its scale and the perfection of its timing; but it made one’s blood run cold.

Even had I not heard from a diplomat that these children were rehearsing for the opening ceremony for five or six months beforehand; that during that time they did not go to school; that often during that period they were to be seen being driven home in army trucks after rehearsals at two and three o’clock in the morning; that such parades and ceremonies were a constant feature of North Korean life; even had I heard none of these things, I should still have concluded from the spectacle itself that its production involved terrible sacrifices. Here was a perfect demonstration of Man as a means and not an end; of people as tiny cogs in an all-embracing machine. I think it true to say that even if there had been a machine available to do the work of those 20,000 children, the regime would still have chosen the children to do it: for what better training could there be for a life of personal insignificance and subordination to orders than participation in such a spectacle?

The stadium held 150,000 people, of whom only 15,000 were foreigners attending the festival. The rest were North Koreans. As we awaited the arrival of the GL, storms of applause, obviously co-ordinated, would start in the Korean sections of the crowd, and waves of people would stand up and throw their arms in the air, with an effect like wind rushing through wheat. To my horror, the people around me joined in this mindless activity (mindless, but not purposeless). What were they cheering, what were they celebrating, what emotion, or rather pseudo-emotion, were they feeling? I recalled a passage from Vaclav Havel:

 

Each person somehow succumbs to a profane trivialisation of his or her inherent humanity… In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life. This is much more than a simple conflict between two identities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself.

 

How right Havel was! There was no external compulsion for these people to behave as they did, to abandon their critical faculties, to lose their identity, to be united in a pseudo-mystical communion with a hundred thousand people of whom they knew nothing, absolutely nothing. Yet they could not wait to do so; in fact they rejoiced in doing it, and they felt fulfilled afterwards. Here was a profound rejection of individual freedom by people who were free, and who gratefully rejected freedom’s corollary: individual responsibility, with all its uncertainties and torments.

It would have been easy to stand and wave and shout hurrah when the tide of ersatz joy reached our part of the stadium. After all, what was really at stake? Did it matter whether or not I joined in? Well, it mattered to me and that was enough: I remained seated.

From time to time before the arrival of the GL, members of a delegation would take to the running track with their national flag and sprint round the stadium to the thunderous applause of the crowd. This was international friendship and solidarity in action, according to the lights of the North Korean government (for whom friendship is nothing personal). The first delegation to take to the track was that of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, followed not long afterwards by the Iraqis, bearing a portrait of that great friend of humanity and expert on chemical warfare, Saddam Hussein. The Palestinians received the kind of adulation normally reserved for pop stars; the Jewish activist from Hackney nearly swooned. And whenever an African delegation took to the running track, the blacks in the British delegation, one of them with Rastafarian dreadlocks and wearing a woollen cap in the colours of the Ethiopian flag, accorded them a strange tribute, making ape-like grunting noises in unison, apparently under the impression that this reversion to the jungle was somehow pan-African. At first I was embarrassed, and then inclined to laughter; but in the last resort, I found it melancholy, because these young people wanted desperately to identify with cultures and people of whom they were deeply ignorant, simply because they were of the same – or similar – racial origin.

The playing field area began to fill with what our programme called ‘performers’. There were to be 50,000 of them, in addition to the 20,000 children with coloured cards. As an organisational feat, it was stupendous; as an artistic one, it was of course infinitely less than one violinist playing a Bach partita.

Some of the performers were dressed in blue and white gymnasts’ kit; they goose-stepped and gave the special fascist-style Kim Il Sung salute. They kept up the goose-stepping until my legs grew weary: they were the embodiment of Strength Through Joy, or Strength Through Fear, which of course amounts to the same thing. But they were only a small contingent compared with the dancers. I use the words ‘dancers’ because the English language, fortunately, has no word that more accurately conveys the nature of these untold thousands of people. Can robots dance? For this was no mere corps de ballet. The ‘dances’ were military manoeuvres performed to music (3000 musicians, naturally), by male and female soldiers in a variety of garish nylon costumes.

The ‘dances’ they performed bore titles such as Let’s check and frustrate the imperialist moves towards aggression and nuclear war! and Fly, doves of peace! – the latter with the following programme note:

 

Doves of peace, fly high up into the blue sky that is clear of the nuclear clouds. Thousands of doves dance as if to cover the sky of the whole world.

 

The 50,000 performers carried pompoms and scarves, and by a manoeuvre of the utmost precision managed to turn themselves collectively into a representation of a flower. Personally, I did not think this was a fit thing for 50,000 people, with 50,000 personalities and 50,000 aspirations, to do. Only later was I told the true significance of the flower: it was a variety known as kimilsungia. The artistic inspiration (if artistic is quite the word) for this dreadful spectacle, it seemed to me, derived in equal measure from Busby Berkeley and Dr Goebbels.

With everyone in place, the moment arrived for which we had all been waiting – the entry of the Great Leader. It was an impossibility that everyone in the huge stadium saw this momentous event; yet a kind of controlled pandemonium broke out instantaneously all around the stadium. The 50,000 performers on the pitch threw up their hands in a gesture of true subservience before their Pharaoh, and the Korean spectators did likewise. They roared and howled in unison, and jumped up and down collectively for minutes on end; the foreigners, caught up in the atmosphere of hysterical self-abasement, stood up and applauded as if to save their lives.

I am not by nature brave, or even unconventional, yet in the moment of Kim Il Sung’s entry I decided that I would not stand, not if everyone in the stadium should hurl abuse at me, not even if I were to be threatened with torture or death itself. I was so appalled by the sight and sound of 200,000 men and women worshipping a fellow mortal, totally abdicating their humanity, that I do not think I am exaggerating when I say I should rather have died than assent to this monstrous evil by standing (my mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany). There I sat; I could do no other.

The terrible obedience of the crowd, uncoerced at least in the immediate sense, indicated the power of the regime, a power that seemed absolute and limitless, that had entered the very recesses of minds, that had eradicated any countervailing force. Yet the power that was so strong was also brittle. It would only have taken 10,000 people not to have stood up for Kim Il Sung when he entered the stadium – the omission of one small act of obedience – and his power and mystique would have snapped like a twig, to remain broken and irrecoverable. My refusal to stand was but a feeble, isolated gesture; but a tiny crystal thrown into a sea of saturated solution can cause an immense precipitate, and one day such a thing will happen in North Korea and everyone, wise after the event, will marvel that it didn’t happen sooner.

I wondered once again what it must be like to receive such adulation, calmly to watch 200,000 people worshipping oneself. After many years of it, does one become blasé? Does one come to believe that the tribute is merited, or worse still, that it is freely offered and expresses some real emotion? It would have been interesting to have a chat with Kim Il Sung. I recalled the only object of a political personality cult whom I had ever met, some two years previously: Jonas Savimbi. In his ‘Free Land of Angola’, that part of Angola where his forces held sway, there was a cult as grotesque as any. His picture and words were everywhere; his was the only poetry permitted; and when his name was mentioned in a private conversation, the speaker had to stand up while saying it. I asked Savimbi about his cult (he was claiming at the time to be a liberal democrat). ‘If the people love me,’ he answered, ‘how can I stop them?’

The adulation of the Great Leader ceased as suddenly as it had started, as if on a hidden signal, as if a certain precise length of time had been set aside for it. Then came the march past of the delegations, 140 of them. It was a tedious procession, but the tedium was not pointless. The Koreans, who were not allowed so much as to draw breath without the permission of their government, must have concluded that these delegations were in some way official, and that therefore their country, North Korea, was presently the centre of world attention. Not surprisingly, the delegations from Guatemala and El Salvador were from the URNG and FMLN respectively, that is to say the guerrilla coalitions. At that time the Iraqis still had to be kept away from the Iranians, and the Scandinavians, to my great admiration, unfurled two banners, one asking why Amnesty International was not permitted to investigate conditions in North Korea (not a difficult question to answer), and another expressing solidarity with the Chinese pro-democracy students who had not long before been massacred in Tiananmen Square. Later, when the Scandinavian marchers returned to the body of the stadium, scuffles broke out as security men tried to wrest the banners away. A few of the Scandinavians were punched and kicked (Sweden used to have a diplomatic representative in Pyongyang, but he was withdrawn when the North Koreans refused to pay for some new Volvos which they had ordered and received).

When these scuffles broke out, I overheard some of my fellow delegates, the hard-faced communists, express a willingness, indeed an anxiety, to join in – on the side of the North Koreans, ‘to beat the shit out of them’. Discussing among themselves the famous scene when the single student (since executed) stood in front of the column of tanks in Peking and held them up by moral force alone, one of them remarked that if he had been the tank driver he would have driven ‘straight over the bastard and squashed him’. And his face showed that he meant what he said.

There were only two delegations that did not carry their national flags with them: the Japanese, who might have thought the omission tactful considering Japan’s colonial record in Korea, and the British, for whom the Union flag was the object of concentrated hatred, especially, of course, amongst those of Irish descent.

When all the delegations had marched past, a girl from South Korea entered the stadium, to the great and genuine excitement of the crowd. Against South Korean law, she had come to the North, taking a circuitous route (and when she returned to the South she received a very long prison sentence). All Koreans are agreed that their peninsula is one country, artificially divided at the end of the war. But if Korea is one, the question is, which one? The answer, except to the eccentric and brave girl from the South, is obvious: the North is doomed. Not only is its population half that of the South, but its stagnant per capita gross national product is less than a fourth that of the South, its foreign trade less than a fifteenth of the South, its foreign debt, though small, unpayable. The South, on the other hand, is destined in the not too distant future to overtake many countries in western Europe; and while far from a haven of freedom and democracy, it allows a liberty in everyday life unthinkable in the North. The communists on our delegation saw the constant student riots in Seoul as a sign of weakness; I saw them rather as a sign of strength, for they have become ritualised and do not threaten the economic order of the country. It is countries with no dissent, which live in the quiet of the grave, that are vulnerable and fragile.

It was time for the Great Leader’s speech. The whole ceremony up till now had been so Hitlerian, so megalomanic, that I assumed the Great Leader was a fiery orator, a man able to rouse his listeners to a frenzy of indignation and other enjoyable emotions. I could not have been more mistaken. He spoke like a retired bank manager recalling cheques he had been obliged to bounce. His voice was monotonous, without modulation or intonation: a real bureaucrat’s voice. It was impossible to make out the content of his speech, which was translated simultaneously into English and broadcast over an echoing public address system. I am unable, therefore, to comment on its other qualities, except to say that it seemed not to be a model of concision.

The rapture with which the GL’s speech was received had nothing to do with what was said: only with who had said it. If he had recited the Pyongyang telephone directory – assuming such a subversive volume exists – the crowd would still have applauded with tears in its eyes. The contrast between the banality of his delivery and the ecstasy of the response was terrifying.

It was now time for the guest of honour, Comrade Robert Mugabe, to speak. Part of his Zimbabwean army, the brigade used to terrify the Matabele, was trained by the North Koreans. The public address system, which relayed his speech almost simultaneously in English and Korean, rendered it virtually incomprehensible, but such snatches as were heard were purest platitude – education was a good thing, the future of the world belonged to the youth etc. Of course, the fact that he had nothing to say did not prevent him from speaking for a long time. The twentieth century belongs to windbags.

The applause he received at the end of his speech was polite but without enthusiasm. I suspect that the Great Leader thinks that a clap for somebody else is one less clap for him.

There was more military dancing, then some lighting effects and fireworks. It was tedious – kitsch on an unimaginable scale. The departure of the Great Leader was accompanied by the same pandemonium as his arrival, and it continued for several minutes after his motorcade must have sped away.

As we left the stadium, one of the naive communists asked me what I had thought of the opening ceremony.

‘To tell you the truth,’ I said, ‘I’ve never been very keen on fascism.’

So now the festival was open. There were hundreds of ‘events’ every day: for example, solidarity rallies with the various peoples of the world who were suffering the effects of imperialist intervention. They were held outside public buildings and with the exception of a small contingent of nationals from the country with which solidarity was being expressed, the crowds were entirely Korean, brought in for the occasion by military vehicles.

I attended several of these rallies, which had an air of complete otherworldliness about them. What answer should I have received if I had been able to ask the Koreans at the rally in solidarity with the Guatemalan people where Guatemala was? Members or supporters of the URNG (Unión Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca) made emphatic if not eloquent speeches in Spanish which were applauded from time to time by the Koreans, acting on instructions, who had understood not a word of them and who for the most part stood around in a state of bleary and exhausted indifference. Towards the back of the crowd a few of the women surreptitiously chatted during the speeches and even while they applauded. Men held upright banners inscribed with slogans in Spanish, in precisely the same style of lettering as the banners of all the other rallies (except for those in Amharic and Arabic). Their faces betrayed no thoughts. As soon as the rally was over, the Koreans trooped back to the military trucks to be taken home, or possibly to attend another rally in solidarity with another oppressed people.

Alas, the Guatemalans were so wrapped up in their own cause, so assured of its justice, that they were blind to the indifference of others towards it. They did not notice that the people at the ‘rally’ were there compulsorily; they preferred to believe that the Korean people supported them, and in thus deceiving themselves when the truth was so plainly before them, proved that they were unfitted for power.

The rally in support of the African people was, of course, in the same mould. By coincidence, shortly afterwards I met some African medical students who had nearly completed their studies in North Korea. They were drawn to Kwangbok Street during the festival as moths to light: here was proof that there was life after death.

We had a chat and my admiration for them grew apace. They had come to Korea without knowing anything about it, having answered advertisements in the newspaper. They had failed to gain entry into medical school in their own country and Korea appeared to give them a second chance. Of those who had arrived with them seven years ago nearly half had had to return, unable to tolerate Korean conditions. As soon as they arrived they were told that they were to listen on their radios neither to the BBC nor to the Voice of America; they were not permitted to play foreign music even in the privacy of their own rooms; they were not to visit Koreans in their homes, nor were Koreans to visit them in their quarters; and that if ever they were found with a Korean woman, they would be sent home and the woman would be killed.

Was this for political reasons, I asked, or for racial ones? Both, they replied; but the prohibition reflected the strong racial prejudices of the majority of Koreans. Nevertheless, the students were able sometimes to make friends with Korean women, by bribing guards and officials to look the other way.

And in the privacy of their beds, I asked, did the women express unbounded love for Kim Il Sung? They laughed. The women spoke – in whispers – of their bitterness and hatred for the regime.

These students had travelled throughout the country. There was great poverty there, they said; malnutrition still existed and tuberculosis had not been eradicated as the government claimed, quite the reverse. People were not allowed to travel away from their homes without permission, which was rarely given; Pyongyang was a completely closed city, its inhabitants vastly privileged by the standards of the rest of the country. The students knew of surgeons and physicians in the provinces who had never been allowed to Pyongyang, not even for a brief visit. But bad as things were now, they had been worse a few years ago: there were faint signs of relaxation, and it was no longer the case that everyone was obliged to wear the same clothes. Some variety and colour were now permitted.

One of the Africans, a man with a more melancholy air than the others, said that he had come to realise Man’s desperate need for something that went beyond himself, some form of transcendence. Religion gave to human life a significance which no social doctrine could ever give it. He wanted to write a book about his experiences in North Korea, and I encouraged him. In fact, I said it was his duty to do so.

We parted, and in the afternoon I attended one of the round table meetings with Boris, the charming and formidably intelligent Russian. The subject of the meeting was religion, in which Boris was particularly interested. It was held in a giant conference hall, with simultaneous translations of the speeches into English, French, Spanish, Russian, Korean and Arabic. It seemed to me an effort of considerable magnitude designed to persuade the gullible that North Korea was a tolerant state with regard to religion; but residents had told me that religious belief was ruthlessly repressed throughout the country, though a Catholic cathedral still functioned in the capital to dupe foreigners. Once again, in paying lip service to tolerance, the North Koreans were admitting that they had chosen a path they knew to be wrong. At least the Albanians had the courage of their persecutions.

The session opened with a statement by the Korean chairman, to the effect that the fundamental concern of all religions was justice. No one leapt up to deny it; and the hidden implication of his remark, that between religion and Marxism-Leninism, which was also concerned with justice, there was no real disagreement (until, that is, the Marxist-Leninists achieve full state power), went uncontradicted.

The first speech from the floor was distinctly odd. For some reason, a brochure from the Afghan National Tourist Agency, encouraging people to visit Afghanistan and assuring them of a warm welcome, had been distributed to every desk in the conference hall. The Afghani representative stood up to explain that it was an old brochure, and the name of His Majesty King Zahir Shah, exiled in Rome some 14 years earlier, should be deleted from it, as Afghanistan was now a democratic republic. What, then, was one to make of the picture of the Bazkashi, the great ceremony held in honour of the king’s birthday in which thousands of horsemen chased after a headless goat dragged along from another horse? In whose honour did they perform the Bazkashi now? Were there any goats left in Afghanistan, headless or otherwise? Alas, these questions were never asked, let alone answered, but several of the delegates did dutifully expunge the erstwhile king’s name from the brochure, thus helping to build the future by altering the past.

Several speeches followed, all delivered in a determined monotone, and each like a molecule spinning in a vacuum, having no connection with what went before or what came after. It was as if Harold Pinter had written a play about religious fanatics cooped up for a weekend in a country house. Boris, sensitised by years of tedious and meaningless Brezhnevite verbiage, went mad with boredom almost at once, for he had hoped for real discussion. I, on the other hand, had brought a book and was therefore able to laugh. A Colombian in a yellow baseball cap declared himself in favour of human rights. A Sudanese in long robes declared that Islam was the only clear and just religion. A Korean Catholic thanked Christians all round the world for helping to defeat the demoniacal manoeuvres of the imperialists. An Afghani said that Islam demanded that Moslems be good. A Nigerian declared that ‘there can only be peace if there is no war’. Boris had to make a dash for the exit, as if in the grip of colic.

In the evening, I nearly attended a semi-clandestine meeting arranged by the Scandinavians behind one of the tower blocks in Kwangbok Street to express solidarity with the pro-democracy students of Tiananmen Square. But before I went, I had a beer with Mr Kim, one of our minders, a man of great charm and kindness. It was impossible not to like him: I could hardly believe he was in favour of all this nastiness. I mentioned where I was bound, and Mr. Kim looked alarmed.

‘Please do not go to this meeting,’ he said. ‘Please do not go.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘It will not be good for me if you go. I ask you as a favour to me not to go.’

Was he serious? He certainly looked it. Later I met a West German businessman, a general agent who dealt in almost everything and who knew North Korea intimately, to whom I recounted this story, and he said that Mr Kim was only playing a part, appealing to my bourgeois sentimentality to help keep down the numbers of people attending a meeting inconvenient for the authorities. The West German businessman, so worldly-wise, so evidently successful from the material point of view, made my decision to comply with Mr Kim’s request seem naive and foolish. And yet I also felt that if there had been only a thousandth chance that Mr Kim would suffer as a result of my attendance, my decision was correct. At any rate, when I said I would have another (Japanese) beer instead of going to the meeting, Mr Kim seemed deeply relieved. He praised what he called the discipline of the British delegation, so different from the unruliness of the Scandinavians.

Ah, if only Mr Kim had known about the comic opera politicking that went on behind the scenes, the coups and counter-coups among the various factions (each believing itself to represent the Absolute Marxist Truth), the clandestine meetings during which a clique would compose a document claiming to represent ‘British policy’, as if the delegation were a government-in-exile, and the Lilliputian fury such presumption would produce among the other cliques. Mr Kim had heard that the British were unruly (the fame of our football hooligans had reached even North Korea), but he now realised that this was a misconception. On the contrary, he repeated, we were most disciplined. I wanted the praise of a man who, probably through no fault of his own, worked for the North Korean security apparatus.

Once in Pyongyang I glimpsed the terror that underscores the tombstone orderliness of North Korea. I was in a taxi, specially available for the festival, with a fellow delegate. As we were returning to Kwangbok Street, we had to pull over to the side of the road because an official motorcade was going by. My fellow delegate extracted his camera from his bag to take a photograph. In that instant, the taxi driver’s face contorted into a grimace of fear reminiscent of the photograph of the little girl fleeing down the road in Vietnam: his arms waved in panic as he tried to push the camera below the window level. My companion took the hint: but one could see that the driver’s pulse was racing for a considerable time after the camera was safely back in the bag. As for the motorcade, it did not pass us directly, but only at an intersection far ahead.

A week into the festival I went to the Students’ and Children’s Palace to attend an international meeting about literature. The building, despite its name, made no concessions to children: there were no pictures of little furry animals, no toys, no games and, at least while I was there, no children, except on the mural in the marble entrance hall where, with shining and adoring faces turned upwards, they mobbed the Great Leader. How Great Leaders love children! How children love Great Leaders!

I was taken to the top floor of the Children’s Palace in a lift operated by a lady whose job, I felt as she eyed me discreetly but with care, was as much to observe as to press the buttons. Her memory would not have been taxed by the number of clients: the Palace was empty and no hermit in a desert cave could have desired more complete peace.

I was met by a member of the Writers’ Union, who took me down the corridor to the room in which the meeting was held. On either side of the corridor were doors marked Literature Creating Rooms, and naturally I was curious to see inside. The member of the Writers’ Union opened the door to one of them: a bare room with five desks lined up in a row like a guard of honour, each with a typewriter (three in Latin script, one in Cyrillic and one in Arabic) with a sheet of paper ready inserted and a little pile of paper beside. In short, everything possible had been done to extinguish even the faintest spark of literary inspiration.

The meeting was held in a long rectangular room with an opening to another room of similar dimensions. From both ends portraits of the Great Leader and Dear Leader gazed down on us with the lugubrious omniscience that derives from omnipresence. Around the walls of the room were placed heavy square armchairs upholstered in deep green, each with a frilly lace antimacassar. The taste in furniture was Maoist: and Mao, of course, had an aesthetic fixation with the petit bourgeois style of the thirties.

The meeting was principally between North Korean and Ghanaian writers, but for some reason the General Secretary of the Ethiopian Writers’ Union was there, as was a lone American, a radical poet who wore two badges – Free South Africa and Health Care is a Right Not a Privilege – and who dressed as for an anti-Vietnam War rally. I introduced myself as a doctor who liked literature, not as a writer, and the chief of the Korean poets present said it did not matter that I was not a writer because we were all engineers – doctors were engineers of the body, writers of the soul.

The ‘discussion’ consisted largely of the Korean poets describing the enviable conditions under which they worked. Writers in Korea were paid a salary equal to a vice-minister’s or even a minister’s. There were 500 professional writers in Korea, 50 of whom were women, and all belonged to the union. They were trained to be writers at the Kim Il Sung University. There was no problem with publication in North Korea (the Ghanaian writers had complained of the difficulties in finding publishers in Ghana) and one of the poets was able to quote the production statistics for last year:

 

Novels - 50 pieces

Short stories - 600 pieces

Poems - 1000 pieces

 

The Ghanaians were impressed. The problem with Ghanaian literature, they said, was that it was not planned. Writers like them had to fend for themselves, there was no state support. Most of them had to work at other jobs to support themselves. The Korean poets shook their heads at such intolerable conditions.

They chain-smoked throughout the meeting. They were intelligent and cultured men, who knew Byron and Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, and who would have quoted French and German poets had there been French or Germans present. Was I imagining it when I detected that under their official optimism there was a profound, unspeakable despair, a sense of total personal defeat and surrender, and a complete absence of self-respect? I asked to see some of their work and one of them said he would bring me translations of his work the following day.

I returned to the Students’ and Children’s Palace as arranged and the poet, still smoking, gave me a sheaf of poems, one of which I transcribed:

 

The Sun of Mankind

 

Comrade Kim Il Sung the Great Leader –

He was awaited for ages

With great anxiety in every heart.

He soared high

To meet their ardent wishes.

 

The long history that had flowed by

And all the ages to come

Joined hands

To put him high up in the sky of the 20th century.

 

Comrade Kim Il Sung the Great Leader –He

Found the beautiful gems of truth

Sought in vain for centuries

Amidst the downtrodden masses

And spread them over the world

In billows of beams of light.

etc, etc.

 

This is less than a quarter of the poem, in the rest of which the Great Leader, inter alia, embraces the people groaning in chains and shackles, stands them on the spring fields of the green hills of bliss which undulate far and wide, dignifies them and gives them the wings of freedom for which they shed so much blood, draws the image of a new world that has been in chaos for so many centuries and gives an immortal banner to the Grand March of History.

North Korea was not so much a factory of flattery as a forced labour camp for it. The only genre for a true poet there was silence, and perhaps even that was dangerous once a man had declared himself a writer. No opportunity was lost to further the cult. Here are a few lines from a Korean phrasebook for English speakers:

 

His Excellency Kim Il Sung is the greatest genius of present times.

President Kim Il Sung is the sun of mankind.

Marshal Kim Il Sung is the miracle-maker, peerless patriot, and a giant of history.

 

On the way to the hotel, according to the phrasebook, one might exclaim ‘Let’s mutilate US imperialism!’ to which the reply might be ‘In our country, 60 is the prime of youth, and 90 the beginning of old age’.

I leave it to the reader to guess the age of the Great Leader when the phrasebook was published.

I should have gone on a pilgrimage to the Bethlehem of North Korea, the village of Magyongdae where the Great Leader was born in a humble home. It was not far from Kwangbok Street, and I knew that if I failed to visit it I should regret it immediately I left the country. But even in that knowledge I could not bring myself to go.

Nor could I bring myself to attend the revolutionary opera, Song of Joy (the ‘people’s prize laureate work’, with 5000 artists). A glance through the programme of the opera was enough to convince me not to go:

 

Prologue: Song of Joy Dedicated to the Leader.

Act I: Happiness Blossoms from Great Love.

Number: Treasures Shine in the Loving Sunlight.

Number: We Owe the Bumper Crop to the Leader.

Act II: We Are Happy Loved By the Leader.

Act III: The Sunlit People’s Paradise.

Children’s Dance: We Are the Happiest in the World.

Folk Song and Dance: My Country Is a People’s Paradise.

Act IV: Following the Leader and the Party.

Dance and Chorus: Following the Leader and Party For Ever.

Finale: Song of Long Life and Good Health to the Leader.

 

One might have supposed that exposure to this kind of ‘art’ would immunise people against it forever. Far from it. At the Students’ and Children’s Palace there was a collection of poems written by participants during the festival. A lecturer in English Literature from India had written A Poem for the 13th WFYS, Pyongyang:

 

The atmosphere is joyful

The buildings are so grand

Those who host the festival

Are people of great land

Under the brilliant leadership

Of Comrade Kim Il Sung

A new sun shines in Korea

And every flower blooms

Korea DPR

is a song

the song of mighty

delicate people

bigger than the earth

 

And one of the Ghanaians, who lamented the lack of outlets for writers in his native land, contributed Pyongyang, A City of Brilliance:

 

How beautiful it is,

How wonderful the works

Structured under the noble guide

Of our dear comerade [sic] Kim Il Sung . . .

Pyongyang, we admire your zeal

In hosting this festival

Indeed you are a city of brilliance.

 

In these poems is revealed one of the attractions of Marxism-Leninism for certain frustrated intellectuals: it is the revenge of the untalented upon the world. Only in the most absolute tyranny could the authors of these poems live as poets.

With only two days left in Korea, it was time to go on a visit to a Korean family – not spontaneously or at random, of course, but in a highly organised and official way. Our bus drove us to an estate of tower apartment blocks, by no means pretty but certainly not worse than British municipal efforts of the sixties and seventies, and whose public areas, unlike their British equivalents, were not covered in graffiti and did not smell of urine.

The entire population of the estate was there to greet us. They applauded our arrival and the women, in long nylon dresses, waved – or in some cases shook, in a manner I found almost threatening – plastic flowers at us. When the flat-dwellers clapped there was no applause on their faces, only indifference. Their movements were mechanical and exhausted, like clockwork winding down.

We were split into small groups and led, like lambs to the slaughter, to our respective hosts.

It transpired that the apartment block in which my group’s host lived was a little special: it was built solely for sportsmen. (There were also blocks for artists, writers, scientists etc). Our host was a world champion wrestler, and therefore more than a little privileged. For example, in a country where ownership of bicycles was not permitted, he owned a car. He had travelled to many parts of the world, and had photographs to prove it. He was a very short man, reaching only to my shoulders, but there was no mistaking the musculature that bulged under his clothes and made his suit look even more lumpen than it already was.

His wife greeted us demurely and we sat on the floor round a low table laden with food. This hospitality would have been more touching had a video camera for the television service and a tape recorder for the radio station not been present, and had our interpreter not been quite so hectoring in her insistence that we must enjoy ourselves and smile. I found the presence of portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il in every room somewhat inhibiting, too – the self same portraits, incidentally, that one sees in every room in the country (there is no freedom even to choose which portraits of the dynamic duo to hang). I also found that the martial music relayed through the open window by the public address system outside, from whose imperious broadcasts only stone deafness would have provided relief, failed to create an atmosphere of personal intimacy.

We were asked what we did for a living. I said I was a doctor, which was straightforward enough; but one young woman in our party with whom I had struck up a friendship said she was an ethnomusicologist.

‘What is that?’

‘I study music in different parts of the world.’

‘And then?’

The question was a little difficult to answer. If she were lucky, she would teach ethnomusicology to others.

The conversation faltered. The cameraman moved around and pointed the camera at us, anxiously seeking out signs of life.

‘Ask many things,’ said the interpreter, with an edge of desperation in her voice, as though she would be held responsible for any longueurs. ‘Please ask many things.’

I know of no finer cure for curiosity than appearing on North Korean television. Eventually, with the music entering the apartment despite the closing of the window, the wrestler asked me whether I liked sport.

Something inside me snapped. I was tired of lies: I felt as if an anodyne answer would make me an accomplice of a terrible crime.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I hate it. I can’t stand it.’

Probably the interpreter relayed my message as ‘Yes, he loves to play volleyball.’

Immediately, I had one of those cries of conscience that so conspicuously mark out the western liberal. The poor wrestler was not to blame for the lies (the whole visit was a lie) manufactured by his government: he was only a pawn in a game in which individuals counted for nothing. Within the limits prescribed, he was probably trying to be hospitable; and if the visit was deemed a failure, he would also probably be blamed. Under normal circumstances, I shouldn’t have dreamed of being so rude as to tell a world champion in his own home that I hated all sport. After all, a world champion is no less worthy of personal respect than anyone else. But I had felt very strongly, irresistibly, that to allow the visit to proceed smoothly along its prescribed, banal course was to play the regime’s game for it, to dehumanise oneself, and that gestures of nonconformity, however tiny, were of vital importance, for they were signals to others that under an apparently robotic exterior there still existed a mind that turned towards truth.

It was time to leave the wrestler’s apartment, but the final act of the charade was yet to come. This was the compulsory dancing in the concrete yard between the apartment blocks. The music blared from the loudspeakers; the women who previously had shaken plastic flowers at us came up to us and led us in the dance. There was no escape: almost cerebrally palsied when it comes to dancing, I shrank to the rear of the crowd, but a determined woman, mindful of the instruction that all foreigners should dance before the cameras to demonstrate the internationalist joy of the occasion, grabbed me by both wrists and led me to the front. It would have taken a considerable struggle to shake her off, quite possibly a punch on the jaw. She whirled me round: it was like dancing under arrest and in handcuffs. Her grip was unnatural, terrorised, and her face was fixed in a grimace of compulsory joy. She would not let me go, even between dances, for the Party had allocated a certain length of time for dancing with foreigners and to have let me go before that time was up would have been a dereliction of duty, if not a counter-revolutionary crime. And so on we danced, like the skeletons in a medieval woodcut of a danse macabre, she never once meeting my eye though we danced for fifteen minutes, her face resolutely turned away from mine throughout.

Dancing on the same strange dance floor was a liberated young woman from West Berlin, a supporter of good, or at least bien pensant, causes to judge by the way she dressed – an anti-war, anti-pollution kind of person. She too was being danced around in the vice-like grip of a Korean woman who would not look her in the eye. But our glances met, hers and mine; and I saw from a barely perceptible change in her expression that she understood for the first time what only the self-indulgence and self-importance of intellectuals could have hidden from her, namely that there was something more evil in the world even than the Berlin city council, or an Axel Springer newspaper.

Suddenly, I dissolved into a fit of the giggles. My legs went weak and I should have fallen to the ground like a puppet without its strings had not the redoubtable Korean lady, determined for the sake of her life that the show should go on, held me up. Of course she could not tell why this strange foreigner was laughing; but her face betrayed no interest in the matter. Her cheeks, her mouth, her eyes, were as granite as the heroic statuary found everywhere in Pyongyang. Truly the New Man: Kim Il Sung would have been proud of her.

No Aeroflot aircraft can have been boarded with such relief as mine. The airline has a poor reputation among travellers (Xan Smiley once told me in Moscow that he realised glasnost was something important and not just a cheap gimmick when an Aeroflot hostess smiled at him), but I had no complaints to make against it. On the contrary: now that the winds of change had swept through the Soviet Union, it seemed to me that the very air inside the aircraft was free by comparison with that of North Korea. When we were forced by weather conditions to land at Vladivostok instead of Khabarovsk, I looked at everything outside with benignity, and felt the romantic allure of the vast Siberian land stir within me.

We arrived home several hours later. There was a man just past the immigration desk at Heathrow Airport who stopped some of us and, without saying on what authority, demanded to see our passports and to know where we had been. His manner was abrupt and rude. Almost certainly he was from the Special Branch or MI5. I cannot say that police interest in some of our party was illegitimate: there were several active supporters of the IRA among us, and those who did not think that the world would be a better place for a few strategically-placed bombs were distinctly a minority. But the clumsiness of the security service, its uncouthness, could not have fed more successfully the paranoia of those young people who believed, despite having just visited a land of forced labour, where everything was either forbidden or compulsory, and which out-Orwelled Orwell, that they suffered persecution without parallel in the history of the world.