North Korea Undercover (19 page)

At our museum, the soldiers trooped in behind us, some grinning, some staring but not impolitely. They, of course, are the target audience for all this: that foreigners so admire the Kim dynasty they wish to celebrate or at least appease its majesty, like the Tributes in
The Hunger Games.
Of the truth, that this is probably the most mocked regime on the planet, they have no idea.

In the halls housing tributes to Kim Jong Il, we came across a painting of Bad Elvis astride a white Siberian tiger. This was probably the worst example of tyrant kitsch I have seen with my own eyes in my entire life, and I’m something of an expert. Kim Two appeared to be wearing Elvis’s white-rhinestone cowboy suit with matching shades. To big up Midget Turd, the artist had drawn the tiger’s back curiously short. Rather than riding a majestic big cat, it looked as though Kim was on the back of a pale tabby cat: the effect was irresistibly comic.

Jais, the student from Morocco, pointed to Elvis-on-tabby and asked, deadpan: ‘Would the Dear Leader not be offended by such a gift?’ Stony-faced, Mr Hyun asked Jais exactly what he meant. The local guide seemed apoplectic. I moved away, trying to suppress hysterical giggles. It was like getting the funnies inside a courtroom: the worse it is, the funnier it gets. Tomiko explained that Jais was from Morocco and that in his country all cats, including tigers, were considered vermin. Mr Hyun looked unconvinced. In semi-disgrace, we were asked to leave.

¹
The Frontline Club is a drinking den in London for old war reporters; unofficial motto: ‘All the women have a past; all the men have no future.’

²
Christopher Hitchens: ‘Visit to a Small Planet’,
Vanity Fair
, January 2001, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2001/0l/hitchens-200101

12

The Man Who Went to North Korea and Came Back Mad

In 1971, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu went to North Korea. He liked Pyongyang so much he returned in 1978, and the film of this second trip is on YouTube. It’s an unforgettable five minutes of two tyrants just having fun.
¹

The video opens with Ceausescu in a black suit and tie and Kim Il Sung in a light grey Mao suit. The two big men are standing up in an open-top limousine, driving through the streets of the Big Zombie in an immense motorcade led by twenty police motorcycle outriders. Thousands line the streets, crying ‘Hosannah!’ or some such in Korean, but the actual soundtrack of the video is supplied by a living-dead choir, roaring out a weird soundwave, ebbing and flowing rhythmically. A pod of ladies in white Korean traditional dresses holding pink doodahs in each hand whirr, rotate and clap in perfect synchronicity, as if each one is a music-box
mannequin; balloons are released; a footbridge painted with rainbow colours arcs across the motorway, on it more ladies in white doing their stuff. The limousine passes two portraits, one of the Romanian, the other of the North Korean. Ceausescu is centre frame, passing the camera, waving manically; Kim Il Sung is more restrained. He’s been to this kind of party before. He doesn’t quite yawn, but he accepts the mass adulation like the Fonz might. The motorcade swings into Kim Il Sung Square, and then the fun begins.

Maybe a hundred thousand people crowd the square, maybe more. Closest to the motorcade, more ladies dance, waving things that look like paper flower bouquets, creating the impression of so much multicoloured seaweed floating this way and that in the tide. Half a dozen black-suited security men trot along beside the limousine as it passes a maypole, then yet more ladies, this time North Korean versions of Mary Poppins, waving their brollies aloft. The two great men enter a vast stadium, clapping Mao-style, lightly on their hands, while the masses roar their adoration. Then they sit down at two vast wooden desks, as big as a lifeboat on a Channel ferry, and feel the love. The masses oblige.

Opposite the stage, a sign at least 100 feet wide, created by a vast throng of people holding up flash cards, proclaims: ‘Traiasca Tovarasul Nicolae Ceausescu Conducator Iubit Si Stimat A1 Poporului Roman!’ which means: ‘Long live Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu Esteemed and Beloved Leader of the Romanian People!’ The show continues, with the flash-card crowd building Kim Il Sung, against a background of heavy industry, using a walkie-talkie pointing to a giant tractor and lorry. A real biplane puffs out show smoke at an extraordinarily slow speed; fireworks make white puffy clouds against a perfect blue sky; the twosome shake hands
aloft, Kim Il Sung jolly and delighted, Ceausescu a bit peevish.

A few video frames back from the end, you can make out, sat between the two dictators, a small Romanian diplomat in a black suit, grinning at the fun; thirty-five years later that man sits in front of me in his small flat, not far from the centre of Bucharest: living history.

Izidor Urian – small, wiry, sprite, instantly likeable, his English extraordinarily precise for a man in his eighties – first went to North Korea, by train, in 1954. Back then, the journey from Bucharest to Pyongyang lasted fourteen days.

With Izidor now was his wife, Emilia, who clucked around her husband, a loving hen, occasionally putting her head to one side and smiling as a detail of something that happened four, five decades ago eluded him. Their flat was no palace, being on the seventh floor of a typically nondescript block in a not conspicuously fashionable area of the Romanian capital. But, within, the walls were decorated with pictures of Korea and framed ideograms, the calligraphy dark strokes against the white of the artist’s paper.

Why North Korea? ‘God decided.’ In the early 1950s the Communist lords of Romania were looking for bright working-class boys to become the new diplomatic corps, and Izidor, who fitted that bill, was picked for Pyongyang. He became so fluent in Korean that, in the 1990swhile serving as ambassador of Romania to South Korea, he won the first prize in a translation competition for foreigners. But, boy, did he suffer for his art.

To begin, I asked Izidor about that trip to Pyongyang in1978. ‘It was extremely difficult for me,’ he said, ruefully. He had been working on the Asian desk for the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs but at a few days’ notice he was ordered to fly out to Pyongyang. Ceausescu arrived, the visit started but the leader
hadn’t brought an official note-taker. ‘My job was to translate, but I also had to make notes at the same time. I scribbled notes, then at night I stayed up to two or three in the morning, transcribing my scribble into formal memos. After three or four days of this I was so exhausted I could barely function. Once, during the visit, Ceausescu and Elena’ – hisg hastly wife, a barely educated numbskull the Romanian propaganda machine had magicked into a doctor of chemistry – ‘had left Pyongyang and we were going on a train to a mountain residence of Kim Il Sung for a short break from talks. We were in a special carriage. I told them that I was so exhausted I could neither see nor hear. It was Elena who was nastiest: “Why can’t you take notes, write every word down?” I replied that I had been translating all day and writing up the notes all night. I hadn’t eaten in two days. “Why not?” asked Elena. “I can’t eat and translate at the same time. When you leave, I have to leave too, so I don’t get to eat,” I replied. Elena barked back the Korean translator had no problem. “That’s because there are three of them, and they work in rotation.” Elena put on her nastiest face and said: “It’s not your place to complain.”’

Ceausescu, who everyone says was a kinder man than Elena when it came to handling servants, intervened and Izidor finally got some rest. At the end of the North Korean trip, Izidor was booked on a flight back to Bucharest, but Ceausescu interrupted, saying that that was a waste of money, and told Izidor to come on the Romanian presidential jet with the rest of party to Hanoi. On leaving Hanoi, it turned out the runway was too short, the jet too heavy, so they dumped Izidor on the tarmac. He had three dollars on him. One week later, he managed to hitch a flight to Pakistan in a cargo plane. On that flight, no food and drink, only cold. At Karachi, he spent the last of his money on two bottles of 7-Up,
which was his only food and drink for the seventeen-hour flight back to eastern Europe. The translator shook his head: ‘That’s why I shall never forget that visit.’

He recalled Pyongyang in 1954, immediately after the Korean war: ‘It really was as it says in the Bible, “Not one stone upon another.” No buildings, no electricity, no running water, no heating. Our embassy was a small villa, a little away from the city. It had no glass windows, only scraps of cardboard. Later, they built an apartment building for us. There was no heating. In winter, it was extremely cold. Eventually, they brought me a very large duvet and I sewed up the bottom of it, making a sleeping bag.’

How did he find Kim Il Sung? ‘Like a god.’

The Great Leader was charming to Izidor, very friendly, had a ready laugh: ‘He wanted everybody to know that he was looking after the ordinary people. That was true but there was some acting, too.’ The Romanian seemed to have the mind-set of many North Koreans of the older generation, happy to give Kim the First the benefit of the doubt, but more critical of Kims Two and Three.

Izidor recalled translating for Ceausescu in Korea, and there was no chair, so he was obliged to stand. ‘Kim noticed, and said, “Why are you standing? Grab yourself a chair.’” On Kim Il Sung’s last trip to Europe in 1985, Izidor accompanied him on the train journey from Bucharest – remember, he hated flying – to the eastern border. As dawn came up, Kim sent word to Izidor to join him for breakfast, a sumptuous affair. Nothing much was said during the meal, butIzidor remembered the generosity of the god-king. Izidor recounted one of the fables told in North Korea, how Kim was being driven through the countryside when he passed a woman whose tractor had broken down. Kim ordered his chauffeur to stop and then tow the broken tractor to the nearest
town. ‘The common people believe this story. My commentary: it’s not impossible that this story is true’

What was the difference between Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il? ‘As far as foreign relations were concerned, Kim Il Sung was an excellent player; he juggled between China and Russia. Kim Jong Il had nothing of his father’s ability to play foreign interests against each other. That is why Kim Jong Il only ever visited China and Russia, no other countries. Kim Il Sung tried to save and maintain the Communist system, using political means on an international scale. Kim Jong Il did not use politics, but did his best to provide security for the country by force. The consequence was long-range rockets and three nuclear tests’

Izidor did four spells in the Hermit Kingdom: from 1954 to 1960, from 1962 to 1965, from 1968 to 1973 and the last tour from 1979 to 1983. He became aware of a great change in the mood in North Korea when he returned in 1968. Before that date, foreigners from fellow Communist countries like him had been free to travel around the whole country; afterwards, Izidor and his fellow diplomats were locked inside Pyongyang, and had to apply for official permission to move around the country, permission that was granted extremely rarely. The diplomatic lockdown reflected a deeper paranoia.

The two great moments of Izidor’s career under Ceausescu were the two presidential visits to Pyongyang, in 1971 and 1978. In the great scheme of things, relations between two minor Communist powers on either side of the world were not so very important, but the pay-off for both Ceausescu and Kim Il Sung was that they could display their independence to Moscow and Beijing.

However, many Romanians mark the 1971 trip to Pyongyang as the knife-slash in time when Ceausescu lost his reason, and sent his
country galloping off in the wrong direction, towards a national Stalinism. Sergiu Celac was Ceausescu’s English translator until he got the sack in 1978. I met him in 1990. Celac noticed the dramatic change in Ceausescu on his return from North Korea: ‘Up to 1971, by Marxist standards, he was able to generate new ideas within the limits of the system. After his visit to North Korea in1971, something of crucial importance must have happened to his mind. What he saw in North Korea was an image of “real socialism” – that is, total regimentation. Of course, everything in Romania was fundamentally wrong from the beginning. But the practical approaches until 1971 were mitigated by a degree of realism and independent thinking, which had not yet become militant and destructive nationalism. I think that all his life he believed in what he considered to be the generous idea of socialism and Communism. But in 1971 he apparently discovered the use of pyramidical organization inherent in one-party rule, and the crucial importance of the top of the pyramid. He hated and despised Stalin who had enjoyed just such a position, but Ceausescu hated Stalin because he saw him as a leader of an evil empire. The evil was its imperial character, not its ideology. Hence Ceausescu was blind to his own messianic bent. So 1971 was the moment of rupture for him and the date of the misfortunes he brought with him.’

If so, then Ceausescu’s Romania was the only successful export of Kimist ideology.

How much was Izidor aware of the dark side of the DPRK? He took a deep breath, and paused for a time. A diplomat since he was nineteen years old, and someone who served a Communist dictatorship of increasing repression for most of his career, and for eighteen years lived and worked in the worst tyranny on earth, Izidor knows that words can be as heavy as lead.

He looked down at the white tablecloth in front of him: ‘If someone disappeared, you couldn’t find them.’ He told me the tragedy of Georgeta Mircioiu, a Romanian woman who married a North Korean. She fell pregnant, but went home to have the baby some time in the early 1960s. She returned to North Korea for a time, but her baby fell sick and she went home once more. She was never allowed back to North Korea. They said her husband ‘had left for the mountains’, the code phrase for the gulag. The time-frame is roughly the same as the 1967 purge that did for Ali Lameda and Jacques Sedillot, when any suspect foreigner or North Korean connected to a foreigner entered the shadows. To begin with, Georgeta was able to send and receive letters from her man; then the letters stopped. For many years, maybe fifteen, maybe twenty, said Izidor, she never gave up, she insisted that he was alive, she pressed the Red Cross. ‘Nothing...’