Korea Read Free

fact I rather liked some peculiar aspect of North Korea and hoped I might go there fairly frequently, to see how this outlandish and wayward state managed, despite being so terribly out of step with almost all of the rest of humanity. In fact, as is the way, I have never been back since.
    The country has behaved in eccentric, duplicitous and dangerous ways in recent years. True, there had been some feeling of conciliation since the moment Mr Kim Junior arrived on the scene with the death of his father in 1994, and more obviously so since he was declared Supreme Leader in 1998. An agreement was signed with America in 1994, the North pledging to give up its atomic-power plants, accept new and less harmful versions from the Americans and then use its nuclear expertise for power generation and medical research only. In 2000 Kim Jung Il invited his opposite number in Seoul, Kim Dae-Jung, to come up to Pyongyang—the summit, three days of talking and memorial-visiting, was the first ever meeting between the heads of state of these neighbour-nations. And it seemed to do some good: there were protocols signed for opening the border, restoring rail links, allowing tourists to come and go.
    All seemed to augur fair—until, true to its maverick nature, North Korea suddenly scuppered everything, first by admitting that it had had a secret nuclear-weapons programme all along, then by tossing out the UN monitoring equipment from its atomic plant at Yongbyon, next withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and embarking on a campaign of vilification of America (who had named North Korea a member of the world’s Axis of Evil) that was marked by alarming and hysterically belligerent commentary and rhetoric. North Korea was suddenly in the vanguard of the planet’s public enemies, feared and loathed by turn and by all.
    And yet, with a perversity that I recognize only too well, I nurtured through all of this a slow-growing affection for the place, even a kind of stubborn admiration. Few can be thosewho regard North Korea with anything other than fear and loathing; that I am tempted to at all stems in part from those long talks I had with poor Mr Park, and from the occasional glimpses of the human side of the country that I won from the visits into the North Korean countryside and my unauthorized running forays in the capital itself.
    I saw, I think, a kind of innocent gentility to the place, a misguided pride in the crackpot philosophy of juche —self-reliance, the guiding principle of the Kim dynasts—and I discerned, dare one say it, a feeling of the essential purity of the Korean-ness of those bleak lands and towns that lie north of the 38th parallel.
    I feel about North Korea much as I do about today’s Cuba—that however grim and impoverished and unfree it may be, there is some credit to be given for the fact that it has as yet not been entirely swallowed up by the globalized Coca-Cola culture of its neighbours, that it labours still to be entirely free from influence from America, that it manages, however weirdly, to limp along without much help from the world beyond. This does not mean that the people are solely anti-American—they are anti-just-about-everyone. North Korea’s newspapers do not permit, for instance, a single character of Chinese print to sully the purity of the hangul script in which they are written: the South Koreans by contrast have no problem with their former suzerains, and are as free with inserting the Chinese language into their newspapers as they are inserting Wal-Mart and Safeway on to their streets and suffering the huge impress of the American military everywhere from Panmunjom to Cheju-do. South Korea is most decidedly a part of the outside world; North Korea is not—it remains, albeit cruelly and menacingly, Korean only, and for that I offer, for what it is worth, my half-grudging admiration.
    So, my esteemed Columban Father of Kwangju, I never did make it up to Paektu-san, true. But I