BANGKOK - In April 1989, Ron McMillan was standing on the main railway platform
in Pyongyang. It was abuzz with rumors that something was afoot in Beijing in
the wake of the death of discredited former Communist Party heavyweight Hu
Yaobang.
McMillan, a Scottish photojournalist who had been covering China and Korea
since the run-up to the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympic Games, headed to Beijing,
where indeed student protesters were gathering in Tiananmen Square demanding
reforms. Unable to
raise the funds needed to stay in Beijing to follow what appeared to be an
important developing story, McMillan returned to his base in Hong Kong.
In May, he managed to get a Paris photo agency to contract him to return to
Beijing. The Tiananmen protests were continuing, but talk of a government
crackdown still consisted only of rumors, including one about "tanks" gathering
in the western suburbs of the capital.
Jaded by this time, journalists ignored this - except McMillan. Unable to speak
Mandarin, he persuaded a taxi driver to help him find the rumored military
build-up by drawing a tank and some question marks on a tourist map. The driver
got the message and took McMillan about 15 kilometers out of town, where sure
enough about 20 armored personnel carriers (APCs) sat parked, bored soldiers
sitting on and around them.
"I walked straight up and started photographing right away, only to be stopped
after about a minute by a young Chinese guy, perhaps a student, who gently but
firmly led me away, saying something about having to respect the army because
'they are Chinese, too'," McMillan recalls.
Shooed away by a People's Liberation Army officer, McMillan returned to base in
Beijing, clinging to his equipment and photos.
"So far as I know, they were the only photos taken of the APCs that almost
certainly rolled into the square about a week later," McMillan says, and one
can be viewed
here . "They never ran in the press anywhere, and a few days before
June 4 I left Beijing on a flight filled with journalists who thought, as I
did, that things were going to be allowed to peter out. Dumb, dumb, dumb
mistake, by far the biggest one of my photojournalism career."
It was a low point among many highs, as since then McMillan has roamed Asia
with his camera, including a quick visit under the protection of the mujahideen
to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
The 1989 visit to Pyongyang was one of five - always as a "tourist", of course
- to the Hermit Kingdom, and McMillan has an rare portfolio of photos from that
country, which he calls the center of one of the biggest, and most
under-reported, tragedies of the past half-century.
The criminal mismanagement of North Korea by the Kim dynasty has, over the years, even made the hapless denizens of the DPRK physically different from their Southern cousins, and McMillan recently learned why from Nothing to Envy, an award-winning book by the Los Angeles Times’ Beijing bureau chief, Barbara Demick.
"When you're malnourished, your body doesn't grow normally, but your head
does," he explains. "So the country is full of small people with
disproportionately big heads."
Based in Hong Kong for a decade, McMillan followed the philosophy of going
where the story is - right now, without waiting for proper credentials. This
took him to mainland China nearly 50 times, all but a few as a working
photojournalist.
Perhaps surprisingly, he has rarely gotten into serious trouble, not even in
ultra-paranoid North Korea. "I did get myself under 'citizen's arrest' almost
every trip, sometimes more than once per trip, for breaking loose from the tour
groups and exploring back streets that were like shantytowns hidden from view
by the Potemkin-village grand apartment buildings that lined the boulevards."
McMillan sees little hope for an early end to the misery of the North Koreans.
They are and always have been the pawns not only of Kim Il-sung and his son Kim
Jong-il, but of the great powers who were behind the break-up of Korea in the
first place and have helped maintain the status quo ever since for their own
interests. Even the South Koreans, who officially desire reunification, in
reality want nothing of the sort, McMillan says. "They remember the problems
associated with the reunification of Germany."
Like many, McMillan believes the fate of North Korea lies in the hands of China
more than anyone else, but if China does interfere, it will only be to get
control of the DPRK's considerable natural resources. "The South has
agricultural resources, but most of the minerals are in the North," he notes.
And North Korea's backwardness has meant that it does not have the technology
to extract much of the wealth that lies beneath its own soil - a fact of which
resource-hungry China is fully aware.
"It will take something huge to bring down the North Korean regime," he
concludes. Huge, extremely unpleasant, and leading to an uncertain conclusion.
Now the author of two books, a travel narrative about Scotland's Shetland
Islands called Between Weathers and the new novel Yin Yang Tattoo
(see One man's Korean war, Asia Times Online, February 4), McMillan is planning a second novel. It will focus
on the struggles of those few who manage to escape North Korea for a taste of
the life their Southern cousins take for granted.
David Simmons is a Canadian editor based in Bangkok. The linked photo is
used by permission of Ron McMillan; all rights reserved.
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