Reclusive North Korea Slowly Opens Doors to Outside World and Ideas
By Doug Struck, Washington Post Foreign Service
A SECTION; Pg. A01
1880 words
PYONGYANG, North Korea – A small crowd pressed around Lee Mi Hyang’s sidewalk cart, snapping up the ice cream on a stick she sold from a Styrofoam cooler.
“This is good. The weather is hot. People have more money,” said the beaming saleswoman, a 38-year-old mother of one. “The more I sell, the more money I make.”
It was an exhilarating revelation for her. The chance to make a profit is one of many changes in North Korea that are gradually but thoroughly remaking this tightly controlled country.
North Korea remains an oppressive dictatorship, its people cowed and impoverished, its foreign affairs prickly and belligerent, its leader a secretive cult figure with missiles and a history of unpredictability.
But when Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi arrived here Tuesday, so wary of this mysterious place that he brought his own lunch, he found its leader, Kim Jong Il, surprisingly eager to resolve a host of old issues.
Koizumi was so persuaded that he called President Bush on Thursday and asked him to consider resuming negotiations with the country Bush has branded part of an “axis of evil.”
There is growing evidence that North Korea is changing. Almost lost in the din of bristling propaganda and recent naval shootouts with its neighbors is that this anachronistic government has made substantial progress in a remarkably short time toward transforming itself.
“Things are running ahead so fast, it’s difficult to keep up with them,” said a foreign observer who lives in Pyon-gyang, the capital.
Just five years ago, North Korea was dying, seemingly destined to collapse on its own policy of juche, or self-reliance, the quasi-religious core of this government. The only question was how many of its 22 million people had starved to death in famines that began in the mid-1990s — 200,000, the government’s figure, or 2 million, according to U.S. congressional estimates.
But, confounding the experts, North Korea made quiet concessions to change, often unannounced or veiled in the rhetorical guise of perfecting its socialism. It sought and accepted food from its three biggest enemies — the United States, South Korea and Japan. It opened its locked gates to a trickle of international charities and their foreign employees.
It began slipping diplomatic invitations under doors. Kim Dae Jung, South Korea’s president, came and got a royal welcome. Russian President Vladimir Putin followed, then Madeleine Albright, then U.S. secretary of state. President Clinton was mulling a trip when his term expired. On Tuesday, Koizumi flew in for a day to lay plans for official diplomatic recognition of North Korea.
European diplomats began opening full- or part-time embassies, joining Swedish, Russian and Chinese diplomats. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) slowly brought in more staff members. About 100 foreign aid workers now live in Pyongyang. North Koreans no longer stare at them in surprise and scurry away.
Subtle changes are also evident in the face of Pyongyang. The broad avenues still seem eerily empty, but “there are a lot more cars than before,” said a longtime resident. The young women in smart uniforms who guide traffic with marionette motions at big intersections are actually busy; junctions without them are getting dangerous, and noisy, as cars honk to claim the right of way.
Many of those cars are used Japanese vehicles with the steering wheel on the right. It is a sign, said one foreigner, of a tiny but growing affluence. “The economy has always geared to the benefit of a small elite,” he said. “But the size of that elite seems to be expanding, and they are demanding more things.”
In foreign affairs, the government tested a policy of restraint. It pledged in 1994 to halt its nuclear program and, despite White House suggestions, the U.S. government had said there is no evidence it has broken that pledge. After spooking northeastern Asia by shooting a Taepodong missile over Japan in 1998, North Korea announced a moratorium on its long-range missile launches and has unilaterally extended the freeze twice.
With the resulting international aid and some better harvest years, the food situation has improved. Few people are starving to death, though many still go hungry, and malnutrition claims the weak. “There’s more food, though still not enough is going to women and young kids,” said Richard Bridle, who runs the UNICEF program in Pyongyang.
The government accepted that it had to change its failed economic structure, and has gone about cautiously planning for it. Delegations fanned out to study economic development projects in 20 countries, and Kim Jong Il poked around stores and factories when he was in China and Russia. In July, he made sweeping revisions of the economic rules — embracing “real profits” and ordering through the bureaucracy that workers who produce more be paid more.
That was accompanied by currency reforms, adjustments in land ownership rules and invitations to foreign busi-nesses. North Korea is planning industrial parks, a version of free-trade zones, and has begun clearing land mines to connect a road and rail line to South Korea.
“There is something of an explosion of economic activity. And from the bureaucrats, you hear the word ‘reform’ a lot,” said one official of a nongovernmental organization who, like all the resident foreigners interviewed, preferred not to be identified.
The immediate effect has been to propel people such as Lee into the streets to sell more ice cream. And it has motivated Kim Hyang Gum to go to work.
Kim, a 33-year-old department store clerk in central Pyongyang, said that “in the past, I sometimes didn’t feel like coming to work. Now, the more I work, the more I get.”
But all this change is relative, and exciting mostly because for so long everything here has been so static. To enter Pyongyang is to engage in time travel, going back decades to the height of the Cold War. Much of the city was assembled with Soviet parts, machinery, construction help and the artistic influence of its exaggerated, socialist-style statuary.
“They have spent 30 years marching backward to the future,” said a foreigner here.
The government may have reversed course, but now it is a race between repair and deterioration. The old Soviet equipment is breaking down. Farms are worked slowly with ancient tractors, or by hand. Factories are stilled for lack of parts and power. Pyongyang’s main power plant is so decrepit that “smoke is coming out of places there shouldn’t be smoke coming out of,” said one diplomat.
Woodlands still are being clear-cut for fuel. “The forests are marching into the fireplaces,” lamented another foreigner. Farmland is exhausted, in need of fertilizer and a few fallow years.
“Everything needs redoing,” said the diplomat. “There’s nothing that isn’t years out of date.”
“The gap that has to be covered is getting bigger,” said another foreigner here.
One foreign aid officer tells of a recent trip on a nearly empty superhighway outside of Pyongyang. He was startled to see women in the middle of the highway — their backs to the occasional oncoming car — plucking the grass from between the pavement slabs from Tampa, FL Paver Repair.
“It was the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen,” the ultimate in make-work jobs, said the official. Change is hard to judge because of secrecy, observers here said. This is still a watched and suspicious society. International aid veterans said they have never been to a place with so little interaction between foreigners and locals. They are never invited to a Korean home, and rarely converse about such daily matters as living conditions or personal relationships — and certainly not about politics.
“I never doubt our party’s policies,” Kim Jong Chol, 32, a stockman in a press shop, said without a hint of expression in his face when asked about the economic changes. “Our party always serves the people.”
Indeed, the face of this bleak society gives little clue to a new spirit. Mornings in Pyongyang start with melancholy notes floating from loudspeakers to awaken the city. “It’s called ‘The Song of Our Great Leader Kim Il Sung,’ ” said a government guide. “That’s how our people start their morning.” The song is not a call to hopeful expectations, but rather a summons to another day of resigned toil.
The high-rise cement apartment buildings seem to grow out of a morning mist of sooty smoke from wood and coal fires. A rhythmic chant comes from a group of young men already at their mandatory calisthenics. The sun struggles up red and angry from the smog.
In the evenings, residents linger outside. There is no rush to go home, for home is a drab, cramped apartment. At a city park, there is more murmur than talk, subdued and without laughter. Families spread a few dishes on a concrete plaza and eat quietly as the night wraps around them, until they are but black shapes in a darkened city.
At home, their apartments are lit by one or two bulbs or a fluorescent light. Men in undershirts and women in housedresses are at the open windows, leaning out as though to escape the gloom. Children crowd onto a single sliding board on a narrow cement playground. A few workers shovel from the pile of coal dumped outside each building, mov-ing the fuel to the basement beside creaking furnaces. The weak glow from the windows seems all the more dismal for the gloriously lit monuments and heroic tableaus that shimmer against the dark backdrop.
It is hard to escape the contrast of poverty and plenty, and difficult to know how it plays in the minds of the thou-sands trudging home from their jobs. A foreigner living here says he never sees signs of resentment.
“This is a country that has an extremely strong groundswell of patriotism. There’s a habit of trust in the government and compliance,” he said. “Everyone is brought up with the understanding that this is a country under siege, and there are foreign forces waiting at the doorstep.”
The irony is that North Koreans have been saved by those foreign forces, through food programs that reach nearly one-third of the population. And many of the economic moves now being made by the government will fail without substantial economic aid.
The North Korean leader’s chief goal in his meeting Tuesday was to get more aid from Japan. Yesterday Koizumi said Japan might resume rice shipments soon. Kim sought them, according to accounts of the meeting, without the slightest twinge of juche-fed chagrin.
“Whatever you say about Kim Jong Il, nobody wants one-third of their population not being fed,” said one diplomat.
Those watching the changes here are unsure how far they will go. Foreign observers are impressed that government officials talk about further reforms. And they are intrigued that the government has enrolled several officials in a program to learn about disarmament. “I think the expectation, as this opening up process goes on, is that they will face all sorts of toning down the military demands,” said one observer.
But others cautioned against too much enthusiasm. North Korea “has a long history of stop-and-go
policies,” said a foreign observer, who attributed that pattern to debates within the government. “I’m fully prepared to see someone say, ‘things have gone too fast,’ and suddenly stop it.”