Life in North Korea

Imagine if you live in the most secretive country on earth. You are prohibited to travel outside the country. If you do, you would end up in prison camps, being shot in place, or being publicly executed. Your family — the whole three generations — would be punished as well. You have no idea how good other people live in other part of the world. You only know that you live in a paradise — that’s what they always tell you, although the truth is you live in hell. There is nothing called privacy there. Your detailed past, origin, good, and bad are all recorded in a file kept by the security services. Everyone is suspicious to one another. Spies are everywhere. Watching a foreign TV channel or listening to radio broadcasts from outside the country is considered a crime. Possessing foreign books and believing in religion other than Juche is unforgivable. You must agree of every single aspect the government says, or else, you would be tortured and dead. There is totally no freedom, whether it’s a freedom of expression, freedom of movement, you name it! Welcome to the world’s most wicked and isolated nation, North Korea.

North Korea is currently led by “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il, son of “Great Leader” Kim Il-Sung who died in 1994. The Great Leader is considered as the founder of North Korea (with the help of Soviet Union) and is greatly respected and worshipped as God among his people. He is regarded as “Eternal President”. These two leaders must be addressed as Great Leader or Dear Leader. Songs that do not mention the name of them are practically prohibited. The personality cult is seen everywhere throughout the country. Wherever you go, you will find the statues and potraits of the two Kims. Even every households must have their photos hung in one of the rooms; it is strictly and totally compulsory. Not to mention that most Koreans wear the pins of their leader on their clothes!! From the very young age, North Koreans are taught that life would not be as good as they have been through if it’s not because of the Kims. They are taught to always express their gratitude none other to ‘Father’ Kim Il-Sung. They have no choice, they have to do it; or else they are regarded as traitor, sent to prison, and later executed. When the Great Leader Kim Il-Sung died few years ago, thousands of people mourned around the capital city of Pyongyang (watch it! ). It was really incredible and shocking to watch. They all cried; kids, teens, adults… they all cried sincerely. Even the reporter cried. One of a man who was interviewed said that the leader had done so much for them. Wait until he sees with his own eyes how other people live in other countries!!

According to Hyok Kang, a North Korean who escaped and lived in China and later South Korea, through his book This Is Paradise!, people in North Korea are seggregated according to their “loyalty” to the Kims. A single wrongdoing (both criminal activities and political crimes) from one member of the family could strip your entire family’s reputation i.e. to the lower caste. A person who is considered too liberal could be either ‘re-educated’ or severely punished. If he has a family in South Korea, the punishment will be doubled. However, a letter of thanks obtained after giving gifts to the leader or a proof of his connections with the leader would reduce the sentence. The ‘selected’ pupils, those who are loyal to the Kims, are the only few members of Koreans who are permitted to go to university. Those are the people whose family fought in the war against Japan.

Every industry inside this country is state-owned. The government runs a system called collective farming in which farm laborers do not receive wages, but a share of the farm’s net productivity. Businesses are rarely found in a country where 20 million Koreans live. North Korea has suffered from economic failure for years as the country is depended on international aids. The government distributes a food ration to its people every two weeks. But Hyok Kang describes that the delays in supply had begun as early as 1985.

But shortly before the death of Kim Il-Sung, in 1994, the system began to break down. First of all we started receiving only a week of rations every two months. Then the big warehouses of the national reserves, which are guarded by the army, were found to be empty. It was at this point that quantities began to shrink: three days of rations every two months, then forty-eight hours of rations for sixty days…

As the economy is getting worst and worst, electricity is barely functioning. Not even at night. The villages and cities are entirely dark at night. Perhaps, Pyongyang is the only city where electricity has not been cut. Ah, not to forget; the statues of Great Leader and Dear Leader also continue to light up the night. A satellite picture could prove the difference between the two Koreas, North and South.

North Korea faces a food crisis or famine as early as 1993. Children stop going to school and skeletal children wander around in search for food. Rice and potatoes could barely be found, except by those who serve in high government positions. Thieves and cannibalism are no longer uncommon. Human corpses are left on the street for days. No one is paying attention to these dead bodies. Every person think only of himself. Everyone is hungry. Hyok Kang witnessed the death of many of his friends as a result of famine.

Everything was falling apart and wasting away around me. Slowly but surely, like a mud flow swallowing up the mountain, hunger engulfed my little universe. And yet the pupils still had to go to school since it remained compulsory. The poorest lived on nothing but frass, and during class their stomachs rumbled. After a few weeks their faces began to swell, making them look well nourished. Then their faces went on growing until they looked as though they had been inflated. Their cheeks were so puffy that their view was impeded, and they couldn’t see the blackboard. Some of them were covered with impetigo and flaking skin.

As time passed, there were fewer and fewer of us sitting at the school desks. Sometimes there were only about ten in a class of thirty-five. The poorest, who had nothing to eat at all, skipped school to go to the market, because at least there they could try and steal something to eat. The teachers, who were by now equally unable to cope, regularly announced a week or two of holidays, without explanation. Work in the fields was still compulsory despite the fact that both the remaining pupils and the teachers were extremely weak. We actually went there not to work, but to glean anything we could find to keep from starving to death.

Only very few foreigners are allowed to visit this isolated country. However, once they set their foot in Pyongyang, they are escorted by guides at all times. These guides are responsible for showing “the best of North Korea”, making sure that visitors do not see the horrible part of this country, including poverty. Therefore, it’s impossible to see everything that has been described by North Korean refugees, unless you travel illegally inside the country. The tourists are not allowed to keep their passports, go out alone, and sometimes bring in forbidden things like magazines, books, and newspapers. Where would they find freedom? In the hotel room. The Koreans are not allowed to talk to the foreigners if they have no permission to do so. Pyongyang is a city with wide roads but few cars (due to the shortage of fuel), tall buildings, and statues. Handicapped people are blacklisted coming to the city. Not many Koreans have the privilege to visit Pyongyang, unless they have an invitation from the member of their family. FYI, this video shows a rare glimpse of North Korean starving people, perhaps taken by illegal migrants.

When the UN organised an inspection in 1998 regarding the aid which was not being distributed, the government tried in every possible way to cover everything up. Food that became so rare was once again available to most people. Everyone was told to tell good things to the UN inspectors, promising them that they would soon be able to enjoy a good meal once more. No one is brave enough to tell these inspectors the truth. The UN inspectors also “asked to pay unexpected visits to families, pointing at random houses… Each time a request was made about a house whose inhabitants they knew to be undernourished, they insisted there was no one at home.” Once the UN left, the situation changed completely to the ‘normal one’.

The most interesting part about Hyok Kang’s book is to know what sort of teaching that North Korean people learn all these years. Don’t you think it is amazing how well-organised this country is, even to the point of making everyone worships the leader (as if their purpose of life is only for him) and believes of every single thing he said?? (Can you imagine if the Communists lead our country???? Remember PKI?) As access to the outside world is impossible, the Korean people have been fooled to believe that, the fact that people in other countries in the world are suffered much more than they do. The only thing they know is that, ‘the bastard imperialist Americans’ and Japanese are their enemy. They call South Korean as ‘South Korean puppets’ (because of the American support). They are also taught that the Korean War that divided the North and South had been started by the South, when in fact, the North attacked first. Hyok Kang explains that he did not know that “it was the explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that had driven the Japanese to surrender in 1945, and they had thus been obliged to withdraw from Korea… We had been taught that it was Kim Il-Sung’s armies that had defeated the Japanese, to drive them off our territory!”

As the North Korean people starve to death, their obese leader (the only obese person in entire country) spends millions of dollars to develop a nuclear weapon. So is this the kind of leader who has done so much for them??? I wonder how the Koreans will react if they find out that their leader enjoys luxury and expensive goods while they are all at death’s door?? As most of North Korea’s neighbouring countries are furious about the nuclear programs and many of their citizens were kidnapped, why on earth does the U.S never have the intention to attack this country??? Yes, Saddam Hussein was cruel, but hey… at least famine was not present in Iraq!! I think, Kim Jong-Il deserves to be overthrown and hung than Saddam does! Hmm, would I be kidnapped and executed for writing bad things about him? LOL . Bring it on, fat Kim!

Further Reading:

• Frontline: Kim’s Nuclear Gamble
• North Korea, Slave State
• In North Korea
• FAQ: North Korea
• Korea’s Nightmare: Horrors of Life in the North
• Google Notebook: Life in North Korea – I collected many interesting quotes and facts from websites about the life inside North Korea