| |
PYONGYANG WATCH
He scoffs, they
scour
By Aidan Foster-Carter
The season turns. So let me take this chance to
wish all Asia Times Online readers a happy and (dare I
hope?) a peaceful new year. Also to thank AToL's editors
for continuing to offer me this platform, for a quixotic
mix of heat and light on a cold and dark subject. I
meant to say all that last time, but ran out of space -
and got carried away with urging you all, malgre
tout, to give to help hungry North Koreans
(An appeal for the
children, December 24). In fact
there is more to add on that theme, so this first
Pyongyang Watch of 2003 follows on from there.
It was a while since I'd been on the ReliefWeb
site, and I'd forgotten just how good it is. Thanks to
seven years of international aid to North Korea, with
about 100 foreign workers now living in Pyongyang, our
knowledge of the hermit Kimdom has grown enormously.
Reading United Nations crop assessments and the like,
the sheer solid information is almost like for a normal
country. In that sense, aid is not a one-way street;
there is learning too, on both sides. It would be tragic
if that process were cut back, or ended.
Thus
it's thanks to the aid agencies that we have some idea
of the impact of last July's drastic wage and price
increases. The UN World Food Program (WFP) notes that
urban families now spend up to 85 percent of their
income on food, and rely heavily on farmers' markets
where the price of rice continues to rise. It also fears
a shake-out of labor as firms strive to become more
efficient, and plans to help those laid off with
food-for-work programs - assuming, of course, that its
appeal for resources falls on less deaf ears around the
world than so far.
Also, these days the agencies
don't pull their punches. Here's how the International
Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC), in its latest appeal
issued in December, sums up what's wrong with North
Korea:
"A lack of locally produced inputs and
the resources to purchase them has contributed to
nationwide deterioration in the socio-economic
infrastructure, including (although not confined to)
transportation, energy, health, education, and welfare
sectors. This is exacerbated by deforestation, soil
erosion and overall land degradation. Poor environmental
practices have contributed to heavy water pollution and
there are insufficient amounts of potable water. The
country is prone to flash floods, landslides, tidal
waves, storms and drought."
Pretty
comprehensive, and devastating. In a word, everything is
up the creek. Note that bad weather, Pyongyang's excuse
for it all, is only part of the story. The reality is a
deep, structural, systemic crisis. The IFRC also cites
the collapse of the Soviet Union as hitting North Korean
trade (for which read Soviet aid).
If a normal
country were in such dire straits, you might wonder what
the government was doing about it. How reassuring, then,
to note that for at least one North Korean the food
question has been completely solved. The Dear Leader has
never looked noticeably underfed, and we've had a few
glimpses of him at the table - not least on these pages,
in Ermanno Furlanis' bizarre tale, I made pizza for Kim
Jong-il. Defecting diplomats
have reported that their assignments included scouring
the globe for rare delicacies such as blue shark, often
paid for by the usual juche methods: smuggling,
trafficking, that sort of thing.
But for a full,
nay, rounded account of the Dear Gourmet, we must thank
Konstantin Pulikovsky. As President Vladimir Putin's
representative in Russia's far east, he had the job of
escorting Kim Jong-il on that famous train journey all
the way from North Korea to Moscow, last summer but one.
And he wrote a book about it, called (inevitably)
Orient Express. Meant to show the human side of
the Dear Leader, and supposedly written with his
blessing, this has caused red faces in Moscow and
provoked a protest from Pyongyang.
You can see
why. If you'd wondered how they whiled away the long
days across the steppe, a big part of the answer is
eating. Make that banqueting. Four hour meals were not
unusual - and what meals! "It was possible to order any
dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French
cuisine," according to Pulikovsky. Cases of Bordeaux and
Beaujolais were flown in from Paris, as was live
lobster. Not that the local fare was rejected - at
least, not all of it. Omsk, sadly, was not a gastronomic
success: the Dear Leader turned up his nose both at the
dumplings (too small) and the pickles (too Bulgarian).
Honestly, I'm not making this up: it was all in the New
York Times. But in Khabarovsk, he liked the brown bread
so much that he had an assistant fly 20 loaves to
Pyongyang, to be fresh for him when he returned.
What a comfort it would surely be to Kim's
subjects - assuming anyone were so rash as to enlighten
them - to know he wants for nothing. Their own choices
are a tad more limited. Gerald Bourke, WFP's spokesman
in Beijing, was quoted by the British Broadcasting Corp
(BBC) praising ordinary North Koreans' hardiness in face
of hunger: "Over time they have developed coping
mechanisms. They can go up to the hills and scour for
edible branches and grasses, or go down to the beaches
and scour for edible seaweed."
The leader
scoffs, the people scour. True, many countries have such
savage inequalities. But in few are the extremes at
either end so grotesque - let alone a regime supposedly
communist. Kim Jong-il has no claim, now, to that noble
ideal. Lump him rather with Mobutu or Baby Doc - and the
sooner the better.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
