A skatepark, high speed internet, Kim Jong-un spotting and a minder who played a mean game of ping pong. This is not what I expected from North Korea while filming for tonight’s Dateline (9.30pm SBS ONE).
Of course, we were on an official tour of the country’s capital, kept to a tightly-managed schedule that left us little time to independently explore more than the hallways of our hotel. After a few years of trying to get permission to do some stories there, the North Koreans had finally given me a visa to cover events surrounding the 60th anniversary of the Korean War ceasefire. The schedule saw us bussed from one spectacular ceremony to the next. But I wanted to get away from the media circus and speak to ordinary North Koreans. The only problem was, I had no idea who a North Korean might be. What did they even look like?
Like many, I’ve been a bit of a North Korea watcher over the years and I admit my knowledge of the country has been coloured by looking at the Kim Jong-il/un-looking-at-things tumblrs and allegations of a cognac-drunk dynasty building nuclear weapons and starving its people.
In Pyongyang, the wealthiest and most developed part of North Korea, there was no chance to search for an absolute truth. We were staying at a hotel on an island - with a casino and stash of pokies in the basement - and weren’t allowed to go anywhere without our guide/minder. His job was to keep us to the schedule and also to tell us what we could and couldn’t film. There was to be no filming from the bus windows, no cameras pointed at military personnel and no shots that cut images of the leaders in half. But there would be high speed internet allowing us to Tweet our photos of Kim Jong-un out to the rest of the world.
To be fair, our minder was personable, told decent jokes and humoured me when I said I wanted to ask people about love. But there were some things that were not to be laughed at. After hours of inspecting Kim Jong-un memes, it was fascinating to see the country’s leader in person – and he kept just showing up at all the official events, walking past us in close vicinity, making for the most Tweetable photos. His arrival was always heralded by the chanting of ‘Long Live Kim Jong-un’ and rounds of applause, the kind of welcome that Australian politicians could only dream of.
But it’s a comparison that’s hard to make – reverence for the Kim dynasty is a constant in Pyongyang. Portraits of the departed leaders – the ‘Eternal’ President Kim Il-sung, and ‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong-il – are prominently displayed on the city’s wide streets. At the mausoleum where their bodies lie in state, schoolchildren bow before these portraits. I was told this was a special place where people come to commune with the leaders – about their lives, their dreams and, of course, their hopes for reunification between the north and the south. I was told it was an insult to suggest that the people might be just feigning reverence.
As we zoomed around the city, past the flame-topped Tower of the Juche Idea and the yet-to-be-finished Ryugyong Hotel that’s shaped like a rocket, I wondered if we were part of some kind of elaborate Truman-show. We were allowed to speak a small number of people, but it was a challenge to get anything beyond platitudes for the leaders.
But, as I attempted to befriend kids at a local skatepark, I had the sense that this wasn’t a sophisticated show – it was just everyday life in North Korea’s richest city. Kids showing off, parents rubbing bruised knees, lovers finding excuses to hold hands in public.
This was not the North Korea I expected, and it’s not to say that the other ‘rogue-state’ North Korea doesn’t exist. It just makes the picture more complex. Well, more complex than Kim Jong-un looking at mushrooms.
See Elise’s full report on tonight’s Dateline at 9.30pm on SBS ONE, and read more now on the Dateline website.
