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Pyongyang Busted

Haneda airport in Tokyo, at 10.45 yesterday morning. I have just landed back in Japan after my jaunt to Mt Kumgang-san in North Korea last week, and a night in the South Korean capital, Seoul. At the customs desk, the uniformed officer asks me how long I've been away.

'Four days."

"Have you been to any countries other than South Korea?"

"Well, yes ... North Korea."

"North Korea,” he said slowly. “North Korea. Did you buy anything when you were there?”

“Just some souvenirs."

“North Korean souvenirs, eh? Could you show me?”

And then it dawned on me – I was a sanctions buster!

Into the Diamond Mountains

[Here's my piece from yesterday's paper about my trip last week to Mt Kumgang in North Korea.I'll try to post more on this in the next few days, along with some pictures by The Times photographer, David Bebber.]

The cosy, the frightening, the cute and the sinister

From Richard Lloyd Parry

At a tourist resort at Mt Kumgang, North Korea two worlds collide

The journey to Mt Kumgang in North Korea, the world's most bizarre mini-break, begins at dawn in an atmosphere of menace and confrontation. Electrified fences and tank traps line the road on the South Korean side of the border, and the forest on either side is strewn with mines. Travellers are given stern instructions about conduct on the far side: don't take photographs from the coach windows; don't speak to the North Korean officials at immigration; whatever you do, don't talk about politics.

Passports and bags are scrutinised and x-rayed, and one by one we are admitted to the world's most impenetrable country, a rogue state notorious for oppression, xenophobia and most recently, for nuclear proliferation. And there among the granite-faced soldiers, waving his paw in a gesture of cheery welcome, is a man dressed as a giant brown teddy bear.

The morning after

[Below is my analysis piece from today's paper. The splash by James Bone and I is here; plus sterling background and analysis from Bronwen Maddox (on the world's limited options), Richard Beeston (on the potential for a nuclear arms race), Mike Evans (on the technicalities of delivering a bomb) and Jane Macartney (on China's dilemma).]

At times of hunger, when the rice has gone and all the dogs and cats have been eaten, North Korean schoolchildren scavenge the fields around their villages for crows, dragonflies and rats. The countryside is littered with abandoned factories – not only is there no fuel for the machinery, but all the metal from the power cables has been stripped and sold. Diplomats in the capital Pyongyang worry about sending their cooks out to shop for dinner parties because the few hundred pounds they carry with them is the equivalent of several decades’ wages for the average worker.

Economically, North Korea is a husk of a country, poor by the standards of sub-Saharan Africa, let alone those of booming East Asia. But yesterday, despite ideological bankruptcy, growing diplomatic isolation, and a famine in the 1990s which killed as many as 3 million people, it became the ninth member of the nuclear club. Whatever else is true about North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il – and there is no doubt that he is a tyrant and a killer on a historic scale – it is impossible to deny his genius in playing the weakest possible hand of cards with maximum shrewdness and skill.

They went and did it

It's just before noon, a misty early autumn day, and I'm waiting to cross the road opposite City Hall in central Seoul. A lot of policemen are standing around, and the lights are taking an unusually long time to change. Suddenly there's a buzz of motorbikes and black-windowed limousines with little Rising Sun flags flapping. It's Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, just arrived after his rather successful summit meeting in Beijing.

I walk to the bank and change my Indonesian rupiah (the left overs of last week's holiday money) into Korean won. Then back around the corner to meet Dr Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert from Kookmin University, for lunch. "Did you hear?" he says. "They've gone ahead with the nuclear test."

It's not a surprise (although I hadn't expected it this early). And yet, stepping back a yard or two, how remarkable - that a country like North Korea, a starving, maimed wreck of a country, should have become a nuclear state. From the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France, down through Israel, India and Pakistan, and now - North Korea. It's like a nuclear armed Cambodia or Albania. Whatever you think of Kim Jong Il, what an amazing thing he has achieved.

How this happened and what happens next will be picked over for years, and I'll be writing more soon. Here's my brief instant reaction, largely based on my conversation with the admirable Dr Lankov, and a few thoughts to bear in mind while picking your way thorugh the self-righteous and inane guff that is already spewing out of CNN et al.

In the next few months there will be endless and tedious tough talking about how bad BAD BAD the Norks are, and what a spanking the "international community" is going to give them. There will be probably be an attempt at sanctions, but they won't make any difference. Nothing the rest of the world can do will make any difference.

There is nothing anyone can do about North Korea's nuclear test.

(r) The Big Black Hole: Two books on North Korea

[Originally posted December 2005]

THIS IS PARADISE: My North Korean Childhood
by Hyok Kang with Philippe Grangereau, tr. Shaun Whiteside
Little, Brown, £9.99; 164pp

ROGUE REGIME: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea
by Jasper Becker
Oxford University Press, £16.00, 300pp

During the catastrophic food shortages of the mid-1990s, as North Korean towns and villages slithered unstoppably from hardship to hunger and into outright famine, children like Hyok Kang found ever more grotesque and ingenious ways of fending off starvation. Floods, drought and corruption had made rice and meat so scarce that they were unaffordable. Creeping like thieves to avoid vigilant adults and guard dogs, already scooped and stunted by malnutrition, Hyok and his gang of little friends tested the limits of the edible.

Chickens, dogs and cats quickly disappeared from towns and farms. At harvest time, children ran out into the fields to pluck the freshly sown seeds from the furrows. They feasted on raw sparrows and quails; crows they fried on a brazier. But soon the birds had deserted the barren fields and the perch and loach had been fished to extinction in the ponds.

Then they started on grasshoppers and dragonflies (“Grilled,” Hyok Kang tells us, “the flesh of fat dragonflies tastes a bit like pork.”) Rats were hunted down, not only for their flesh, but for the grain and corn cobs which they stored in their underground larders. Families drank soup made out of boiled pepper leaves, and the verges were stripped of pigweed and dandelion.

Repeats

I am on holiday this week (cheers, cries of 'For he's a jolly good fellow!'), which means that I won't be posting very much (shocked gasps, sobs, stifled howls of grief). To assuage your loneliness while I am gone, I have a topping idea which I believe may be new to blogging: repeats.

Instead of going to the trouble of writing a new post every few days, I will simply redisplay an old post from my (admittedly rather slim) ten month back list. That way you can revisit - or experience for the first time - earlier moments in the life of Asia Exile. And I get to spend more time on the beach.

The experiment commences above.