Stuck Inside of London with the Pyongyang Blues Again

I must confess I’ve never taken much to John Sweeney, the BBC reporter in trouble for going to North Korea as part of a student trip. I remember a quarrel with him in a bar in Prague (in, what? 1988?  It’s possible) in which I very nearly lost my temper. I can’t recall exactly what it was about, but I assume it was politics.

 

But I sort of sympathise with him, up to a point, in his row with the London School of Economics about whether he should have entered the country in this way. It is very difficult for a journalist to get into North Korea, because the tour companies which go there won’t take you. They are, quite reasonably,  afraid they will lose business if they do.

This doesn’t matter if you are relatively anonymous, and I think quite a few journalists do sneak in on tours. I tried, but was quite quickly asked to drop out by the tour operators. So I had to find another way.  But it was not easy or quick. I spent 20 years trying, including hammering on the door of the North Korean embassy in Moscow (they wouldn’t come out to talk to me) and taking coffee with the charming staff of the new North Korean Mission in London, just down the road from Sid James’s old house.

 

I can’t, even now, reveal the full details of my eventual arrangements, which were circuitous and quite funny.  Nor am I sure how official my entry was. I’m sure that someone in the Pyongyang government knew who I was and what I was doing, but I’m not sure how high the knowledge had gone. I think, for instance that if the Pyongyang airport border guards had spotted anything in my passport revealing me to be a reporter, I would not have got in.

 

There were several journalists on the trip, from Australia and the USA, one with a TV camera,  plus some interesting and enterprising people who were not journalists, including two witty young women from California who – by the end of the trip – could do a jaw-droppingly accurate and very funny imitation of the curious marionette-like gestures used by Pyongyang’s beautiful female traffic police, while on point duty. These gestures are (or were, I believe things have changed as the traffic has increased) made still more haunting by their pertly tailored uniforms and by the fact that there was no traffic. It is widely believed that these officers are personally selected by the Leader himself.

 

I’ve never quiet fathomed how we all ended up on that particular visit. They all owed quite a bit to me, though – as the final hurdle of our visa procedure was an evening in the Chinese city of Shenyang (formerly Mukden) in which we entertained the staff of the North Korean consulate there. Several of them were very lovely women, and it was made clear to me quite late in the evening that it would be wise, for the purposes of getting visas, if some of the men in the party would dance with them. Nobody volunteered.

 

I cannot dance. But being British, and of a certain age, I did my duty even so, and embarrassed myself for Britain and for everyone else. As I twirled, an official headed out of the back entrance of the restaurant. Half an hour later, he returned with our passports, each adorned with the chocolate-brown oblongs which entitled us to enter the Democratic People’s Republic.

 

I’ll wait for tonight to see whether Mr Sweeney actually discovered anything of huge urgent interest or novelty on his trip. Almost everyone who goes sees more or less the same things – a controlled tour of Pyongyang, a trip to a mausoleum (I was refused this joy, which involved being personally vacuum-cleaned on the way in) , or to the museum housing gifts from abroad to the Great Leader, a trip to the frontier with South Korea, the National Library (which doesn’t have the works of George Orwell or Milton Friedman. We've all had fun asking). I was refused access to the Pyongyang Bowling Alley, though it exists. Then there are a few theatrical displays or parades, a very short journey on the Metro, the captured USS Pueblo (great fun this) and of course the crumbling Juche Tower, apt symbol of the Kim State.  My great good fortune was to see North Koreans spontaneously celebrating the rather picturesque and ancient festival of Chuseok, and also (quite separately)  to see enough incidents of drunkenness and enough evidence of a ready supply and a plentiful consumption of strong alcohol to form my own theory which is that the place survives only thanks to a perpetual fog of rice-wine.  

 

If you want a really good account of the country and its history, I cannot recommend too highly the book ‘Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty’ by Bradley K. Martin. Just don’t take it with you when you go.    

 

New readers might also like to read my own articles on my visit, now some six years back,

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-486079/PETER-HITCHENS-North-Korea-great-Marxist-bastion-real-life-Truman-show.html

 

and

 

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/prisoners-in-camp-kim/