Five (or thereabouts) go mad in Pyongyang

I remember reading the Lonely Planet guide to Korea and after copiously covering the south, it opened its section on the north, “If you do go to North Korea, you’ll instantly become the most interesting person you know.”  No doubt being interesting went a bit too far when students visiting the hermit state were co-opted by BBC journalists.  Pixellated images only go so far because the authorities in North Korea know who they are.

In all research projects at university level, one must have signed ‘informed consent’ forms from all that you might be compromising.  It doesn’t sound like the BBC crew fulfilled this key requirement and so now suffer the blowback when some of the students have complained.  ‘Human shields’ is bombastic rhetoric worthy of the DPRK, but it seems like John Sweeney and his team knew they were on shaky ground with the British-based students, let alone Pyongyang.  Technically, if they had been rumbled, they could have been accused of being spies.  Those committing espionage have no protection under the Geneva Convention or any rules of war – execution was a possibility (and what could the West have done about it?  Absolutely nothing).

Still, that’s taking it to extremes.  The London School of Economics were pushing hard against the release of the Panorama programme, but then they’ve got their reputation to uphold.  Future research excursions not just to North Korea but any place with shady and suspicious governance would be imperilled unless they protested in the strongest terms, even if not students had kicked up some dust.  The LSE’s irritation at the BBC refusing their request to pull the Panorama reportage was slightly undermined by the vice-chancellor’s Irish brogue, referring several times to the ‘fillum’. 

Ultimately, the ‘film’ showed that becoming interesting would more be in one’s determination to journey to one of the last totalitarian states on the planet, rather than what one did there in all honesty.  Aside from comical asides, like the electricity failing in a building making electricity generators or a hospital with no visible patients, plus some of the outstanding scenery that has not suffered environmental degradation (an ecological catastrophe is taking place alongside the human one), what one could see of the place was strikingly boring.  They’d even taken down the portraits of Marx and Lenin from the parliament building (for no apparent reason).  There were interesting parallels with Mongolia: the blocky communist imagery on a war memorial and the central square outside parliament was just like Sükhbaatar Square, though Eastern bloc planning was largely identical in every architect’s briefcase.  Despite the grinding poverty, North Korea showed it had technology beyond missile- and fissile material-making in providing a metro service for the long-suffering of their population in the capital.  Not very attractive, let alone a patch on the Moscow Metro for communist design, it nevertheless the deepest in the world – as Sweeney remarked, useful for surviving a nuclear strike.  One can easily see the party functionaries and military officers commandeering it in such an event because it was for them originally designed.

I once went to the feudal fiefdom of Transdnistria, a tiny sliver of land across the River Dnistria from its ‘parent’ state of Moldova and unrecognised by the entire world (yet its integrity guaranteed by a resident Russian army).  It has two main cities – Tiraspol and Bendery.  I entered on a three-hour visa and, frankly, that was all that was needed.  Were it not for the fact that one can only enter and exit via China, one might not need a visa for that much longer in North Korea.