North Korea Undercover (33 page)

We headed back on the long, bumpy drive to the Big Zombie.
There, we had lunch at the Koryo Hotel, far grander than our own hotel, in its revolving restaurant – a fashion trend from the 1970s which has finally arrived in Pyongyang. The restaurant did rotate, but creakily so. Inch by inch, the whole demented city crawled by: the Juche Tower, the Three Prongs, the Grand Peoples Study House. It felt like we had been there a lifetime. After lunch, Hoe-Yeong spotted a piano in the restaurant and went over to tinkle. Mr Hyun found some scores of North Korean songs, mostly of the patriotic variety. Seeing Hoe-Yeong could play the piano, Mr Hyun said: ‘I’ll sing and you play.’ Hoe-Yeong did as he was told: ‘It was real fun engaging with our tour guide in musicmaking.’ But at the end when he told Hoe-Yeong that they had just performed a very well-known song that told of the greatness of Kim Il Sung, Hoe-Yeong had difficulty stifling his dismay. As a form of redemption, he started playing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ in the softest of pianissimos. It was certainly within earshot of Mr Hyun. Then again, he might not have known what the tune was, just as Miss Jun had explained to us that the Statue of Liberty was in Paris.

In the basement of the hotel we found a casino, entirely empty of customers, complete with CCTV, slot machines and washed-out croupiers who never see the light of day. As North Koreans of the wrong sort would never dare enter a hotel for foreigners, and foreigners with any sense wouldn’t play here, it seemed hard to divine how the casino could ever make any money. That mystery, like many other, was left unsolved.

They took us to the Metro, one of the great sights of Pyongyang. It was profoundly deep, at least a hundred feet below the ground, perhaps deeper, because it doubles up as anuclear shelter. There are no advertisements so you descend into the bowels of the earth looking at nothing verymuch. However, that sensory lack is more
than made up for once you arrive at platform level by a giant statue of the Great Leader offering OTSG to commuters. The station halls have a faded grandeur, great echo chambers ill-lit with enormous chandeliers, the tunnel walls decorated with murals depicting amazing wheat harvests and belching factory chimneys, the exact opposite of everything we had seen with our own eyes. The Metro might have looked impressive when first built, but a quarter of a century on the effect is Miss Havisham, not Paris Hilton: dowdy, old-fashioned, down-at-heel. The green and red trains do not look special but once inside the carriages the unique selling point of the Pyongyang Metro becomes apparent. Not only does every carriage havetwo portraits, one of the Great Leader, the other of the Dear Leader, but tinny loudspeakers blare out the latest regime propaganda, barely audible over the clickety-clack of the tube tracks. The newspaper stuck inside a glass case for the benefit of commuters was full of talk of war: ‘The artillery of the sacred mountain will show its power’; the commuters looked no less miserable than they do on London’s Northern Line.

In 2012, Tomiko, then in her last year at LSE, led a group of mainly international relations students from the university to North Korea for a similar trip. The weather was colder, the students more rebellious, but the tour was much the same, apart from the hospital visit. They went to Pyongyang’s maternity hospital, a huge Stalinist concrete block. It smelt, not of disinfectant, but of musty neglect. On the top floor, she was shown two sets of triplets lined up in a row of metal cots.‘Ahh,’ she cooed, then asked where the worn-out mothers were. ‘Oh, they are not necessary,’ was the reply.
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When triplets are born, the state takes them away. In exchange,
parents are given gifts, a ring for girls and a silver knife for boys. They say the state looks after them for the first four years but there is no way of checking that – it could be forever. The official logic behind this bizarre behaviour is that triplets are expensive so the state eases the parents’ burden by looking after them. But there may be a darker reason: Kim Jong Il was reported to have feared an astrologer’s prediction that a triplet would assassinate him.

The maternity hospital seemed like a living museum. They gave the 2012 trip a demonstration of a 1960s machine which, the guides said, could cure infertility. It looked like a bad confidence trick. The hospital’s take on patient care was medieval. Mothers have to give birth alone and aren’t allowed to meet with any family or even their husbands for at least a week after. The only contact they have is through little booths with phones like the ones in American prison dramas, except the mothers aren’t behind glass but on a TV screen. The explanation for this isolation is to prevent infection, yet rubber gloves, disinfectant or hand soap did not seem to be deemed necessary.

In the maternity hospital Tomiko saw no disabled children. A doctor told her they are cared for in special homes, and no, they were not allowed to visit them. In 2006 Dr Ri Kwang Choi, who defected from the North to the South, claimed that babies who were born with physical defects were put to death and buried. Handicap International and the Red Cross do work with disabled people in North Korea, but there have long been concerns about how much effective monitoring of such aid work takes place. Also, people can become disabled in work accidents. In 2012, Tomiko’s party of fifteen students, Britons, Italians and others, saw no disabled people at all. One year on, we saw two: a man on crutches and a woman in a wheelchair, close to the hospital.

That there are disabled adults in North Korea does not rule out
the possibility of a policy of infanticide of disabled babies. Dr Ri’s claim of state infanticide does not seem far-fetched, and tallies with what we know about its far-right ideology of racial purity. David Hawk’s ‘The Hidden Gulag’ (a report writtenfor the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea) details more evidence of infanticide, in particular the killing of babies and, more common, the forced abortions of North Korean women who have been impregnated by Chinese men.
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This, too, conflicts with racial purity. Hawk writes: ‘The women impregnated by Chinese men were routinely punished and their babies killed, accompanied by racial slurs and refusal to accept children who were part Han Chinese.’ Hawk’s witnesses include a midwife who saw three babies killed immediately after they were born in 2000 at a prison camp in the north-west of North Korea, close to the Chinese border; a former prisoner who helped deliver seven babies who were killed in a police detention centre in the same area, also in 2000; another witness on the north-east side of the country near the Chinese border who helped deliver four babies who were then killed in 1999; a former nurse in the North Korean army who saw multiple forced abortions by injection of the drug ravenol into the womb of pregnant women. North Korean guards cursed the women, reportedly, as ‘bitches who got Chinese sperm and brought this on themselves’. The report cites one woman in a detention centre who refused to have an abortion: ‘Guards compelled male prisoners to jump on her stomach until the woman aborted on the floor. The woman was then taken to hospital where she died.’
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The hospital we were taken to in 2013 is famous in North Korea. The ‘local guide’ was a senior doctor, who popped up again on the video boasting about the nation’s medical achievements played on the plane leaving Pyongyang. The doctor went through the usual motions, proclaiming that the hospital was created thanks to the wisdom of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, infront of a painting of the two men, walking by the bank of the river that runs through Pyongyang, the Taedong. In the painting, Kim Two is in a black Mao jacket and Kim One in a Crombie overcoat, both men’s shadows faintly reflected in a puddle beneath their feet.

As we listened to the standard lecture in front of the painting, one of our party darted forward and glimpsed in the distance a great crowd of patients and sick people being hurried out of the way down a corridor, lest we capture them on video. The doctor said the hospital looked after 1,300 patients. Once inside the hospital proper, it was freezing, so cold I buttoned up my coat. But at least the lights were on. And then they went out. After a bit, the power came back on, and they showed us a series of fancy machines, a CT scanner, UV lights, but something was missing. We hadn’t been shown a single patient. I asked a doctor, or, at least, a lady in a white coat: ‘There are no patients today?’ She replied: ‘Mostly, the patients come and get treated in the morning, because in the afternoon they go to work, or have social activities. They were here and they left.’

In South Korea, I asked a doctor who had defected from the North, anonymous for fear of reprisals by the state, what would have happened if she had said, ‘We need more money for medicines for the patients’.

She replied: ‘They would kill me the next day or even that same
day. They would kill you regardless of your rank. Even a high-ranking official would be killed. Everyone knows that.’

Bill Gates does not know that. One of the richest men in the world is giving some of his billions to help North Korea’s health service back on its feet. Raelyn Campbell of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation told a conference in 2013: ‘Relative to other countries, the health situation is not that bad in North Korea.’ Campbell cited World Health Organization (WHO) statistics revealing high vaccination rates, dramatic reductions in infectious diseases, decreasing child mortality rates, and several other positive health indicators based on WHO data. The North Korean health system, she said, is accordingly ‘dysfunctionally functional’.
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The same message, that things are better than people think they are inside North Korea, was echoed by Dr Hazel Smith, professor of resilience and security at Cranfield University.
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Dr Smith told
NKNews
some startling statistics on public health in North Korea. For example, she said the rate of severe malnutrition in the North, at 5 per cent, is significantly lower than the 17 percent average in Asia, and much lower than India at 20 per cent and Indonesia at 14 per cent. These statistics, says Smith, say: ‘You’ve got a society that hasn’t collapsed, for a start. Most of all, it tells you terms of poverty indicators, when you’ve got child mortality, infant mortality and maternal mortality, they’re a lot better than lots of other Asian countries. If you look at the data on TB and malaria from the 2000s, you see that with the help of the WHO and the Gates Foundation, they’ve shot down. If you compare the data, you find
that North Korea is actually doing pretty well in getting these diseases under control, with help of course but pretty well.’ Dr Smith added: ‘Of course the North Korean government is not a good government... What we do know is that North Korea is by no means one of the worst-off countries in Asia.’

Dr Smith is relying on statistics published regularly by the WHO. She puts down exaggerations of the North’s malnutrition to ‘lazy scholarship... Or else it’s more sinister than that, but I’ll put it down as lazy scholarship to be kind.’

Are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the WHO and experts like Dr Smith right? Finding people who will openly criticize the Gates Foundation, one of the major benefactors in the world, is not easy. I asked one expert on North Korea if the Gates people speak Korean, had done on-the-spot checks, and have done lots of upcountry visits. He replied: ‘No, no, and no. These numbers are likely fed to them by the North Korean authorities. They are not reliable.’

In Saddam’s Iraq, I came across the samething, of the WHO parroting Saddam’s numbers, as if, in a corrupt and totalitarian state, mass murder is acceptable, but faking health statistics not so. If I was a betting man, I’d bet Bill Gates a pint of beer and apacket of crisps that, come regime change in Pyongyang, the Ministry of Health will admit that it made statistics up, big-time; that it prevented foreigners from seeing the worst provinces; and that doctors who did complain on behalf of their patients were silenced.

Mary Lou is not an expert in health statistics, stillless a billionaire. But she is a North Korean defector who speaks to her brother on the phone and knows what conditions are really like in North Korea, even though she now lives in south-west London. We showed her our filming inside the hospital. Like the majority
of defectors, she had never been to the big city, and had spent her whole life in the north-east of the country, not permitted to visit Pyongyang. It’s hard toget across to Western readers the chasm in wealth and opportunity between the Big Zombie and the rest of North Korea. Perhaps the way to understand it is recalling the awe with which Dorothy and friends first see the gleaming emerald city in
The Wizard of Oz.

Mary Lou said: ‘You only get hospitals like that in Pyongyang. Hospitals in other areas are nothing like that. There are small hospitals with doctors, but no medicine, because the doctors sell it all on the black market. They are given medicine from the government, but very little, and what they do get is just sold. Very few go to hospital, because they know there is no medicine, and only go as a last resort. Women give birth and have cesareans without anesthetic.’

Its the end of our tour of the hospital, which has been quite the most depressing visit of our eight-day tour, where the authorities have been openly contemptuous, it seemed to me, of civilized standards. You need heat and light in a hospital. How come the dead kings enjoy that in their mausoleum but ordinary people must do without? And where were the 1,300 patients? On the tarmac apron at the entrance to the hospital, the doctor explained that we could not see patients without their – the patients’ – permission. But we couldn’t ask for that without seeing them. Catch-22.

Through Mr Hyun I told the doctor what I thought of his display of the North Korean public health service: ‘Tell the doctor we’re not fools. We haven’t seen any patients. Please don’t treat us in this way.’

On the basis of what we saw with our own eyes, the powercut,
the absence of patients, and felt with our skin – the cold – the grave charges made by defectors against the public health system seem valid, that it is amonstrous lie.