By Jehangir S. Pocha, Globe Correspondent | October 30, 2005
PYONGYANG, North Korea -- The public face that this secretive nation shows to the world was on full display at a celebration marking the 60th anniversary of the Workers' Party ascent to power.
At the colossal May Day stadium here in the capital earlier this month, a cast of 100,000 acrobats, dancers, singers, soldiers, musicians, and children who made giant designs using colored cards enthralled audiences with an eerily precise extravaganza called Arirang. The show, as well as other events, was meant to show the enduring might and success of North Korea's unique brand of Communism.
As a group of sopranos sang a paean to Korean identity, Ryong Chol Li, one of the three government escorts accompanying four American journalists on a restricted government-orchestrated tour, seemed genuinely moved. ''It shows how our people are united around the Workers' Party of Korea with one mind, single-hearted," he said.
But the decay and poverty gripping the country of 23 million could not be entirely stage-managed away. After dusk, as the show ended and the government minders hustled the reporters away from curious locals, most of the lights were out in Pyongyang. The city is chronically short of power, and clothed in darkness it felt like a giant film set after wrap-up.
Pyongyang's skyline looked majestic from a high-rise hotel. But from the deserted streets below, most of the buildings, trams, and buses appeared derelict. Along the bumpy, tar road to the Demilitarized Zone that separates North Korea from South Korea, peasants in ragged clothes combed recently reaped rice fields for leftover grains.
The legacy of the famine and the series of natural disasters that collectively killed up to 3 million people from the mid to late 1990s is still alive.
Gerald Bourke, a public affairs officer with the World Food Program, said that despite a good harvest and increasing food aid from China and South Korea, North Korea could still face a shortfall of up to a million tons of food this year.
Pyongyang denies this, and recently informed many of the two dozen international nongovernmental organizations that it invited into the country at the height of the famine in 1995 that they will have to close shop by the end of this year.
Bourke said that would be a disaster.
''We very much feel the need to stay," said Bourke, whose agency has 40 people in the country. ''We feed about 6.5 million here [and] if WFP were not there to provide supplementary foods to children and pregnant and nursing women, it could be very serious."
Dr. Eigil Sorensen, head of the World Health Organization office in North Korea, said although his organization will not be directly affected, the expulsion of other groups could hurt supplies of essential medicines that ''would have a possibly subversive effect on the population."
Since North Korea's creation in 1945, founding ruler Kim Il Sung, and his son, Kim Jong Il, have advanced a cult-like self-reliance ideology called ''juche," or Kim Il Sung-ism. Juche is so fixated on the idea of self-sufficiency that it even has its own calendar, which uses 1912, the year Kim Il Sung was born, as its base year.
Reflecting the importance of maintaining the illusion of juche, the government escorts forbade the journalists from talking to the people scavenging in the fields or from photographing the scene. They said such descriptions would make ''the world think all North Koreans are hungry and that there is famine in the country," which they said is untrue.
During the tour, a government escort who identified himself only as Jiang pointed to groups of schoolchildren and office workers from the city who had been drafted by the government to work alongside local farmers in the fields for up to two weeks during the harvesting season. ''This is how we work -- as a single society, single unit with everyone dedicated to the national cause," Jiang said.
But later, as Jiang and the other minders relaxed, they acknowledged that North Korea is indeed facing hard times -- even if they were quick to translate this into a defense for Pyongyang's desire to produce nuclear energy, a quest that has put the regime at odds with the United States.
''We have no power, so nothing can run, and that's why we need the light-water reactors," said Jiang, referring to North Korea's demand that it receive civilian nuclear technology in exchange for its recent pledge to surrender its military nuclear program. ''Without power, it's hard to sow crops, water them, cut them, refine them, or take them to market."
The Stalinist state desperately needs huge amounts of capital to restructure its Soviet-style, heavy-industry economy and sustain the ambitious social programs it adopted during the 1960s and 1970s.
But instead of embracing economic reforms, as China did, Kim Jong Il is holding fast to the juche approach, while also fanning fears of an imminent invasion by the United States. This siege mentality has turned North Korea into an economic basket case.
The average annual income in North Korea is $1,700 a year in terms of purchasing power parity, about a quarter of the average income in China.
In 2002, Pyongyang experimented with economic reforms by allowing farmers to sell their own produce and by setting up special economic zones in places such as Kaesong, along the South Korean border. But it all had little effect.
''The greatest problem in Pyongyang is human," said Corrado Letta, a senior adviser to the president of Kobe University in Japan who recently wrote a report on North Korea for the European Union. ''Their political isolation has also led to intellectual isolation, and today in no ministry is there enough knowledge on how to go back, on what to do."
Part of the problem is North Korea's ''army first" policy, which directs the bulk of the nation's intellectual, economic, and social capital to its military.
At the DMZ, the soldiers in the North Korean positions overlooking the Americans' glass and steel building complex on the other side looked sharp in their khaki uniforms and mushroom peak-caps. But the village homes just yards away wore a ragged look, their unfinished walls cracked in places and their roofs patched with make-do materials such as tin.
Children there exhibited the stunted growth and gauntness consistent with chronic malnutrition.
Still, there is no doubt that many North Koreans still fervently believe in their leader and system, as evidenced during a tour of Pyongyang's grand National Library.
''I come here regularly to study the works of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung," said Kim Myong Chol, 47, a construction worker spending his morning hunched over the late leader's writings.
Later, the journalists learned that Kim Myong Chol had been so angry with the government escorts for allowing foreigners to speak with him that he had berated the escorts to the point where they worried he might file a complaint against them with the authorities -- the repercussions of which could be serious for the minders.
Opening up, it seems, can be a dangerous business in North Korea.