Sandstone Press

Cursed Land

Posted by Ron McMillan on 21st July 2010

Two stories on the Guardian website on consecutive days bring North Korea to mind. The first was about Kwon, Ho-ung, the formerly high-flying member of North Korea’s political elite whose ‘policy failures’ earned him a brief appearance before a firing squad. That there can even be an elite sector of a Workers’ Paradise that claims to embody all things democratic and socialist is, of course, a contradiction. But North Korea is a giant contradiction, one with not much in the way of hope for even members of the pampered elite – the sector that, however confusingly, has to exist in order to keep the rest of the benighted population toeing the line. As for the little guys, they have little or no hope of anything other than a lot of toeing of lines.

The Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea is anything but democratic – and nothing to do with the people. It is the largest and longest-running and most egregious ongoing human rights transgression in our world, an obscene scandal with no end in sight.

We all share a little of the blame for this. For it was our forebears the Allies and the Russians who, at the conclusion of World War Two, in a singularly misanthropic act of power lust and land grabbing, arbitrarily divided the Korean peninsula in two, roughly along the 38th Parallel. The land grab was motivated by the opposing sides’ respective needs to threaten and to protect Korea’s erstwhile colonial conquerors Japan, a fact that would only hurt Koreans all the more as that particular realisation slowly dawned over subsequent decades.

Let’s try to put the division of Korea into perspective. Imagine if, at War’s end, the Russians and the Allies decided to draw a line across England, coast to coast, connecting Liverpool and Grimsby. Then imagine that they constructed a several-kilometres-wide no-go zone that set the stage for the frontier to be so hermetically sealed that, for the next sixty years, not so much as a postcard passed between the millions of divided families on either side of the arbitrary border. The analogy is not perfect – yet nor is it so far from the reality of the miserable situation endured for so long by the Koreas.

The artificial 38th Parallel division initially separated impoverished superpower-backed puppet regimes. Neither one was much more democratic than the other, and they were soon to fight a horrific war of their own (drawing support from China and the Allies) from 1950 to 1953 that ended only with the same artificial border closed forever.

More than thirty-five years later, The Republic of Korea (South Korea) emerged, against all the odds, from decades of military misrule to become one of Asia’s most progressive democracies, and a major player in global manufacturing and trade.

Over the same period, North Korea, ruled by what became the world’s first and only Communist dynasty, cemented its own hideously cultist isolation and slid down the economic ranks until today it cannot feed its own people.

The grotesquely misnamed Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that cuts through the two halves of the peninsula remains intact, twenty years after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. It is the last remaining Cold War Frontier – and the most likely future flashpoint for world conflict (as opposed to the centuries of slow-burning mayhem that our war- and oil-hungry leaders have condemned us to in Persia of old).

Want a horrifying illustration of how entrenched the DMZ divide really is? It is widely thought that, if hundreds of thousands of North Korean troops from one of the world’s largest standing armies were to flood over the frontier, their advance would meet with destruction wrought by a line of US nuclear devices set underground along the southern edge of the DMZ. The suspected purpose of this? To alter the topography so completely that maps and invasion plans become obsolete at one, hideously cynical stroke. I told you it was horrifying.

I count myself extremely fortunate to have visited North Korea on five occasions, between 1989 and 1995. Each time I arrived as a ‘tourist’, albeit carrying thousands of pounds’ worth of cameras and over a hundred rolls of professional slide film. I was on assignment for magazines in South Korea, Europe and North America – including TIME, Newsweek and L’Express.

My first visit to North Korea came only six years after I first turned up in South Korea. In Seoul in 1983, waitresses would, with totally innocent curiosity, sweep a palm along the foreigner’s hairy forearm even as he stretched chopsticks towards kimchi.

The 1989 appearance of the same foreigner in the streets of the North Korean capital of Pyongyang saw fear-stricken parents sweep children into their own arms and spirit them indoors.

Travels in North Korea were never-ending expositions of the truly odd, yet no visit was anything like so strange as my last one in 1995. This was when, for reasons unfathomable, North Korea relaxed incoming visa restrictions so that hundreds of foreigners could congregate in Pyongyang at once for – wait for it – a professional wrestling tournament. Yep, we all went there to watch tattooed steroid abusers from Japan and America pretend to bitch-slap each other.

That visit was remarkable for another reason: the ability of arch-enemy imperial running dog Americans to set foot in the North, an opportunity never before presented, and one that was quickly grabbed at, not only by journalists like the crew from CNN who tried to interview me on the street, only to be rebuffed by one hissed word: ‘Press’.

Exchanges with two other Americans were the most memorable of all. The encounters took place days and a couple of hundred kilometres apart, but both featured 40-ish American males who both went out of their way to quickly strike up conversation, and were equally quick to glean as much information about me as they possibly could. Both supposedly owned trading companies based in Hongkong, though neither claimed to know the other. When I pushed a little harder for information on their businesses, they said:

“Mostly import-export, light industry, trading around the region, always on the lookout for new opportunities.”

They both said that. Verbatim. Word-perfect, rote-learned responses delivered days and hundreds of kilometres apart. To hear it once meant nothing, but the second time it was presented with stare-me-in-the-eye sincerity I burst out laughing and asked the friendly man if the CIA’s resources didn’t stretch to concocting more than one cover story. He walked away without responding, surely making mental note of another black mark for the McMillan file in Langley, Virginia.

The second story in the Guardian was about United States secretary of state Hilary Clinton and defence secretary Robert Gates visiting the southern edge of the DMZ and delivering the usual platitudinous invocations to the North about peace and security. I hazard a guess that, high above the Pacific on Air Force One, they were surely briefed by CIA experts. I only hope they were smarter and a little better prepared than the two bozos I met on the other side of the border, fifteen years before.