Sense of Fear Pervades A Capital Stuck in Time
By Doug Struck, Washington Post Foreign Service
A SECTION; Pg. A01
880 words
PYONGYANG, North Korea – The woman with the red armband at the door of the train station stepped forward briskly as a stranger approached. “Not allowed,” she said firmly, blocking his way.
North Korea is a place where much is not allowed.
The country is being toasted by the diplomatic world for undertaking a dramatic reversal of its isolationist ways, a process hastened by the visit today and Tuesday of U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright. But within its tight borders, this remains a rigid dictatorship untouched by any flowering of personal freedoms.
Pyongyang, the capital, has the feel of other iron-fisted regimes. The people carry the same
frightened look as those in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein and in Damascus under the late
Hafez Assad. It is the look of people who fear those with power and are unable to exercise any of their own.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation about politics with a North Korean here,” said one
member of Pyon-gyang’s tiny community of foreign residents.
The capital looks like a city stuck in time. Trucks from the 1950s and 1960s ply the streets.
Rectangular, concrete apartment buildings date the skyline. There is even something vaguely
Twilight Zone about the street scenes; all the props are in place, but no people seem to live there. Along the main streets, storefront after storefront is empty. Around the apartment buildings, there is no laundry hanging from clothes lines, no bikes or chairs on balconies to suggest anyone is home or enjoying family life.
Few factories or businesses appear to be in operation. Walk the back streets among the glum
tenements, and people are just sitting, waiting, not working. Only children bring the clamor of life, when they burst from their schools in the late afternoon.
Although North Korea took an unprecedented step of allowing 46 American journalists into the normally secretive country to cover Albright’s visit, old habits remain firmly in place. The answer to most of the journalists’ requests was “not allowed.”
It was not allowed to visit a department store.
It was not allowed to go into a train station.
It was not allowed to talk to any officials. And it certainly was not allowed to talk to any people on the street.
In fact, it was not allowed to leave the hotel except to witness officially approved ceremonies.
When a reporter wandered into the street anyway, the message was reinforced by the people. No one approached him. No one was willing to try to bridge a language gap. People looked and then looked quickly away–the side-walk-survey tactic of avoiding eye contact.
Pyongyang lacks the vibrancy one expects in a capital of about 2 million people. Its heavy silence is especially misplaced in Asia, where most big cities are clogged and chaotic, overtaken by vehicles and their noxious fumes. With little national income to buy fuel, however, North Korea has few cars, and its streets have been largely claimed by pedestrians. Thousands of pedestrians give the place a calm, unhurried pace.
In the central business district, there were few shops open, and those that were had a paucity of goods. It is now the harvest season, so produce is available; the occasional housewife could be seen hauling a tied clump of cabbage or onions home to begin making the winter’s supply of kimchi–pickled spicy cabbage.
International aid officials worry what will happen toward the end of the winter when food supplies run out. There isn’t much reserve in the North Korean diet. According to the U.N. World Food Program, the typical meal for a family in Pyongyang is kimchi; noodles made of donated American wheat; perhaps a little rice and a few vegetables; and fried bread. Meat and other sources of protein are rarely available. “Maybe they would get some meat around the holiday,” said Douglas Broderick, director of the World Food Program here.
Incomes are meager–the equivalent of between $ 1 and $ 2 a month. But housing, utilities and food rations are provided by the government free, or for a nominal fee. In any case, there are few signs of people working around Pyon-gyang; many of those who are employed work for the government.
The blue-uniformed policewomen posted in the middle of major intersections direct the sparse traffic with a small street show. They snap their commands and pirouette in metronomic precision as the old trucks chug by.
Elsewhere on the streets, the old-fashioned but crisp military uniforms of soldiers abound. North Korea, a country of just over 22 million people, has a standing army of more than 1 million. The olive drab pants and jacket favored by North Korean leader Kim Jong Il are an Everyman’s uniform, worn by many here.
But if much of Pyongyang is threadbare and shabby, that is not true of the towering monuments that break the monotony of the city. At the “Great Monument,” for example, a 60-foot Kim Il Sung–founder of the communist state–gestures in bronze grandeur, as women sweep leaves from the grass and meticulously tend the flowers around it.
At night, as apartment buildings are periodically plunged into darkness, huge electricity-sucking flood lamps light the Great Monument and dozens of others of its ilk around the city. But no one complains.
It is not allowed.