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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 2008 D1 KEEPING SCIENCE TALK SIMPLE SPECIAL REPORT Prof Leo Tan on creating a science-literate SCIENCE society D15 SPECIALREPORT Once again facing food shortages and using the nuclear gambit, North Korea marked its 60th anniversary on Tuesday. Sim Chi Yin, who visited Pyongyang recently, pieces together life in its surreal capital city. Hermit Kingdom ST PHOTO: SIM CHI YIN saturdayí the hermit kingdom THE STRAITS TIMES SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 2008 PAGE D2 Pariah paradise A FLEETING GLIMPSE OF RECLUSIVE NORTH KOREA O, WHAT do you think of my For decades, North Koreans have believed that their standards of living are among the highest in the world. Foreign country’s mountains?” he asked me. visitors to the hermit kingdom, however, will find it pleasantly calming but perhaps also a touch too surreal. “They’re beautiful,” I replied cautiously, not about to antagonise ‘S my official guide on my maiden visit to reclusive North Korea. “Beautiful? How can they be beautiful? There are no trees. With their sanctions, the Americans forced our people to chop down all the trees for fuel,” STORIES & PICTURES BY SIM CHI YIN Mr Kim retorted, CHINA CORRESPONDENT silencing me. I did wonder about the bald mounds of brown earth I saw through the oval-shaped windows on our hour-long plane ride from Beijing. They provided the only form of in-flight entertainment on the rumbling Soviet-era Air Koryo aircraft, as stern air stewardesses served us a six-course meal of fish fillet and cold pork cuts. But it is just so difficult to know the right A young North Korean woman bidding goodbye to loved ones as she boards a train to China. The calm and answers about this country. contented lives Pyongyang residents seem to lead belie the food shortage and other brutal realities of the nation. A poster at the entrance of a Pyongyang metro station reminds residents of their duties to the country. The metro’s tunnels – up to 200m deep – are meant to provide shelter in times of war. Only a few stations are open to foreign visitors. IKE many first-time visitors on its promises. five-day visit to the Democratic to this “hermit kingdom”, I On a short and chaperoned Now, just as the country marks People’s Republic of Korea L held in my mind vague its 60th anniversary this week – (DPRK), as North Koreans prefer images of a poor, proud and visit, what I saw was a and with reports on the ailing their country to be known, what I uniformly martial and robotic health of its leader Kim Jong Il saw was a people who were not population, steeled by their filtering out – Pyongyang is just automatons and a society national ideology of juche (which people who were not just reassembling the key Yongbyon that was neither starved nor translates roughly as nuclear plant. This comes barely sterile. “self-reliance”). automatons and a society months after it signalled its But what could a visiting As a journalist based in Beijing, commitment to denuclearisation foreigner really see of this home to the on-again, off-again that was neither starved by dramatically blowing up the secretive country, the last bastion six-nation talks to persuade facility’s cooling towers in front of the Cold War? What could I Pyongyang to ditch its nuclear of TV cameras in late June. make of this self-styled “paradise programme, my only contact with nor sterile. In the popular imagination, the on earth” largely isolated for 60 North Korea thus far had been secretive, isolated country of 24 years – and counting? through its diplomacy. The million is known largely as a imprint it left was that of a cagey nuclear threat or for its famines. CONTINUED regime which regularly reneges Yet, on a short and chaperoned ON PAGE D4 saturdayí the hermit kingdom THE STRAITS TIMES SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 2008 PAGE D4 If there was a famine coming, our hosts were determined not to let it show. At meals, we were plied with dish after dish of kimchi, rice cakes, steak and cold cuts of meat. The border town of Sinuiju, seen from the Yalu River that separates North Korea from China. The capital, Pyongyang, may look like a picture of seductive charm and calm, but life looks a little grim here. FROM all become patriots of the Korean Workers’ All set for a PAGE D2 Party”. feast. To On the city’s main square, schoolchildren foreign eyes, N A crisp, clear morning in Pyongyang, I practise calisthenics en masse. A portrait of Kim there is cruel took in the seductive, almost soporific Il Sung hangs on one side of the square beneath a irony in the calm that shrouded the city. giant DPRK flag, facing smaller ones of Vladimir depiction of O plenty in a Like neat grey milk cartons, concrete Lenin and Karl Marx. apartment blocks line the streets. If they looked Beside a padi field on the outskirts of town, a country suffering from somewhat grim, they were also without exception giant board shows Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il standing knee-deep in golden fields of rice ripe a chronic food free of litter and graffiti. shortage. A thin girl skips on the steps of a building. A for harvest, beaming and chests swollen with man does push-ups on the pavement. A group of confidence. men fishes in a stream off the main Taedong That perhaps encapsulates the thrust of the River that runs through Pyongyang while a few official ideology of juche. Its claim to superiority people play chess nearby. is based on the promise to deliver prosperity and On a bridge, a woman rides pillion on a a good life to all Koreans, as leading scholar of bicycle, her arm snugly around the man’s slender North Korea Andrei Lankov notes in his writings. waist. To foreign eyes, there is cruel irony in that Down a driveway from the grand Mansudae depiction of plenty in this country with a chronic Hall – the country’s parliament house – food shortage. But it is difficult to know if those well-dressed children climb a tree. who live in this self-proclaimed paradise How very “normal”, I thought to see reassuring hope in those images or myself. That impression was to be are numb to them. voiced repeatedly by the rest of our A crippling famine between 1996 and delegation of Singapore officials, 1999 killed up to one million people businessmen and journalists – almost as (about 5 per cent of the population). High school if we could not believe our eyes. MORE ONLINE Some scholars have recently sounded the students Still, Pyongyang is known to be a alarm that another famine might be having their “showcase city” for visitors’ looming. In July, the United Nations graduation consumption and where politically To view a World Food Programme said North photo taken approved citizens live. slideshow, go to Korea was facing its worst levels of under the It is easy to forget this is a country www.straitstimes hunger since the late 1990s. watchful eye where the average monthly income is .com As with many other things about this of North said to be US$2 to US$3 (S$2.89 to controversial pariah state, the causes of Korea’s S$4.34), enough for just about 4kg of its repeated bouts of food shortages are founding rice – before the recent skyrocketing of fiercely debated, with Pyongyang father Kim Il food prices due to shortages. blaming floods and outside observers fingering Sung, in front From what we could see driving by, shops the North Korean leadership for bad decisions. of the seemed well-stocked behind their glass windows. An Asian businessman who has travelled to Kumsusan One had a giant paper cut-out of what looked like North Korea over the past 10 years shares some Memorial a Tabasco bottle in a showcase. of the North Koreans’ sense of victimhood. Palace. His Emerging from underground subway stations, “Many outsiders and Westerners blame the body now men and women – mostly lean and unhurried – government for the famine. That’s all crap,” he rests here in a wear boxy, brown two-piece suits, similar to the says. glass case It is really because North Korea has very little basking in arable land – just 14 per cent by some estimates crimson glow, – and poor weather, he maintains. in the style of It is easy to forget this is Scholars, however, note that similar conditions Lenin, Mao in neighbouring South Korea (19 per cent arable Zedong and a country where the land) and China (13 per cent arable land) do not Ho Chi Minh. yield the same tragic results. What Pyongyang average monthly income needs to do for a long-term solution, argue economists, is to restart industry, and export minerals and manufactured goods, then import is said to be US$2 to grain – just as Seoul, Beijing and Tokyo do. (The latest brewing emergency has its roots in US$3, enough for just 4kg the government’s decision to ban private trade in grains in 2005, criminalising the main way locals of rice. had been using to get food, say United States-based economists Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland in a paper published in May.) gear North Korean paramount leader Kim Jong Il Whatever the case may be, in Pyongyang, no is seen in on the rare occasions he surfaces in the sign of this food crisis was visible. international media. Still, we hardly saw any fat people.

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