<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><HTML><BODY BGCOLOR="#ffffff"><FONT BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=3 PTSIZE=12 FAMILY="SERIF" FACE="Times New Roman" LANG="0">Dear friends and colleagues,<BR>
<BR>
Lest they be too modest to do so themselves,<BR>
might I draw attention to the praise rightly heaped<BR>
on four BAKS luminaries and stalwarts in this<BR>
very wise review by John Gittings in the Guardian.<BR>
(Thanks to Neil Drewitt for circulating this.)<BR>
<BR>
I'm copying this also to our friends across the pond<BR>
and worldwide, who might not otherwise have seen it.<BR>
None of whom, I'm quite sure, need to be reminded that <BR>
BAKS is the British Association for Korean Studies.<BR>
http://www.dur.ac.uk/BAKS/<BR>
<BR>
Best wishes, in grim times<BR>
<BR>
Aidan<BR>
<BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=2 PTSIZE=10 FAMILY="SERIF" FACE="Times New Roman" LANG="0">AIDAN FOSTER-CARTER<BR>
Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Sociology & Modern Korea, Leeds University <BR>
Home address: 17 Birklands Road, Shipley, West Yorkshire, BD18 3BY, UK <BR>
tel: +44(0) 1274 588586 (alt) +44(0) 1264 737634 mobile: +44(0) 7970 741307 <BR>
fax: +44(0) 1274 773663 ISDN: +44(0) 1274 589280<BR>
Email: afostercarter@aol.com (alt) afostercarter@yahoo.com website: www.aidanfc.net<BR>
[Please use @aol; but if any problems, please try @yahoo too - and let me know, so I can chide AOL]<BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=3 PTSIZE=12 FAMILY="SERIF" FACE="Times New Roman" LANG="0"><BR>
<BR>
__________________________________________<BR>
<BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=2 PTSIZE=10 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0">http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1920804,00.html<BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=5 PTSIZE=16 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0">The cult and the crisis<BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=3 PTSIZE=12 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0">John Gittings assesses current thinking about North Korea, a land where the <BR>
normal and the abnormal are inextricably intertwined</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=2 PTSIZE=10 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0"><BR>
Saturday October 14, 2006<BR>
Guardian<BR>
<BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=3 PTSIZE=11 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0">Art Under Control in North Korea, by <B>Jane Portal,</B> 192pp, Reaktion, £22.50<BR>
Everlasting Flower: A History of Korea, by <B>Keith Pratt</B>, 256pp, Reaktion, <BR>
£19.95<BR>
Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World, by Gordon Chang, 352pp, <BR>
Hutchinson, £14.99<BR>
North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula, by Paul French, 323pp, Zed Books, <BR>
£17.95<BR>
Aquariums of Pyongyang, by Kang Chol-hwan & Pierre Rigoulot, 256pp, <BR>
Atlantic, £8.99<BR>
North Korea in the 21st Century, by <B>James Hoare and Susan Pares</B>, 192pp, <BR>
Global Oriental, £15.99</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=2 PTSIZE=10 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0"><BR>
<BR>
I landed at Pyongyang airport, on my first visit to North Korea 30 years <BR>
ago, feeling very ill: I had unwittingly caught pneumonia in the sand-laden <BR>
winds that sweep down from Mongolia to Beijing. I was driven along an empty <BR>
motorway straight to the main city hospital where the doctors conducted <BR>
various tests. As we waited for the results, my minders suddenly looked at <BR>
their watches, exclaimed in alarm and rushed me out of the hospital. An <BR>
angry doctor shouted after us as we drove off at high speed.<BR>
<BR>
Ten minutes later I was being ushered into the front stalls of the Pyongyang <BR>
Grand Theatre, just in time for the start of The Flower Girl, an <BR>
interminable opera allegedly inspired, or even composed, by the Great Leader <BR>
Kim Il Sung. (Since his death in 1994 it has been ascribed instead to his <BR>
son and successor, Dear Leader Kim Jong Il.)<BR>
<BR>
During its many intervals I sat in a huge reception chamber for <BR>
distinguished guests, empty except for a general of the Korean People's Army <BR>
in full uniform silently drinking tea at the other end.<BR>
<BR>
After the show I was driven to a hotel and taken to my room, where three <BR>
doctors pumped me full of penicillin. I lay in bed for the next week, <BR>
receiving careful medical treatment - plus daily lectures on the Juche <BR>
doctrine of Kim Il Sung, delivered by a professor whom I labelled the High <BR>
Priest. No doubt I owed my recovery to this combination of penicillin and <BR>
philosophy.<BR>
<BR>
My experience was a more rapid learning curve than usual in the first lesson <BR>
that everyone visiting the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, even <BR>
today, has to grasp: the real and the unreal, the normal and the abnormal, <BR>
are inextricably intertwined. An ability to separate out these conflicting <BR>
elements is essential for anyone seeking to understand the North Korean <BR>
regime and its people.<BR>
<BR>
As the nuclear factor looms larger, getting this balance right may become a <BR>
matter of life or death. Korea, and especially the North, is now a <BR>
publishing item: the books before me - and these are only some recent titles <BR>
- include a polemic urging "obliteration" of the Pyongyang regime; a more <BR>
sober analysis of the "paranoid peninsula"; a full-scale history of Korea <BR>
from its mythical past up to the Seoul Olympics; a general guide to the <BR>
North by Britain's first diplomat there; a grim account of the northern <BR>
gulags; and the first ever study of North Korean realist art.<BR>
<BR>
Let us start at the top (as one can't avoid doing) with the cult of the Kim <BR>
dynasty, father and now son. Pervasive is an understatement for a phenomenon <BR>
from which there is no place to hide. A painting in Art Under Control - Jane <BR>
Portal's fascinating study of the interface between art and politics in <BR>
North Korea - shows a little girl playing the accordion while a boy with <BR>
chubby knees sings that "We're the happiest in the world (because of the <BR>
benevolence of Great General Kim Il Sung)". I have seen 20 little girls with <BR>
accordions in the Pyongyang Children's Palace playing a similar song in <BR>
unison - and another 20 in the next room playing it on the cello. It is a <BR>
cult that consciously refers back to the dawn of Korean history. Kim Jong Il <BR>
is portrayed as inheriting the mandate of Tangun, the mythical founder of <BR>
Korea 5,000 years ago (whose mother was a she-bear impregnated by the god of <BR>
heaven). This requires Kim Jong Il to have been born on the slopes of the <BR>
sacred Mount Paekdu - where Tangun first appeared - although Kim's real <BR>
birthplace was in the Soviet Far East.<BR>
<BR>
Keith Pratt, in his full and fascinating study of Korean history, cites <BR>
previous attempts in the imperial era to appropriate the Tangun myth: if <BR>
Korea were ever reunified in the future, he writes, "the implications of a <BR>
new 'semi-divine' birth on its [Mt Paekdu's] slopes would be obvious". In <BR>
1988 I was taken to see the wooden cabin where Kim Jong Il was supposedly <BR>
born deep in the forest during his father's guerrilla struggle against <BR>
Japan. Local officials told me that the site had only been "rediscovered" <BR>
recently. The cabin was brand-new, surrounded by a chain fence with a <BR>
decorative border of thousands of egg-shaped stones. I picked up one of the <BR>
stones, to our guide's alarm, as a souvenir: I have an awful feeling now <BR>
that they were shaped by prison labour.<BR>
<BR>
The cult is both fascinating and horrifying (as well as being a huge <BR>
diversion of scarce resources), but the central question today lies <BR>
elsewhere: is Kim Jong Il a rational leader with whom the west can do <BR>
business, or a loose missile (perhaps, after Pyongyang's nuclear test, an <BR>
unguided bomb), to be neutralised before he destroys himself and possibly <BR>
the world? The second view, unsurprisingly, was the one favoured by the Bush <BR>
administration which, on first coming to power, aborted the dialogue with <BR>
Pyongyang begun under Bill Clinton, who in 2000 received a senior North <BR>
Korean general in the White House. Bush himself told Bob Woodward that he <BR>
"loathed" Kim Jong Il and wished to see him "toppled". Although the dialogue <BR>
was resumed through the Six Party Talks in Beijing, Pyongyang continues to <BR>
be painted as a "criminal regime", headed by an unstable leader, with which <BR>
Washington has been reluctant to talk directly.<BR>
<BR>
Gordon Chang's Nuclear Showdown would do well on Bush's bedside table: Chang <BR>
regards North Korea as a rogue state that has put "all humanity at risk" and <BR>
depicts Kim Jong Il as a monster, recluse and lover of S&M videos who can <BR>
"barely say six words" in public. Chang's prescription for dealing with the <BR>
North is regime change, indeed "regime obliteration" through military force <BR>
if diplomacy should fail.<BR>
<BR>
Even the deaths of "hundreds of thousands or even millions", says Chang <BR>
(hinting at the use of nuclear weapons), would be an acceptable cost for <BR>
"ending the existential threat posed by Kim Jong II". True, many South <BR>
Koreans might die in the conflagration but they would have only themselves <BR>
to blame - Chang shares the US neocons' loathing for the South's <BR>
democratically elected presidents Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo-hyun. Seoul seeks <BR>
to appease the North, he claims, and no longer "stands with Washington".<BR>
<BR>
Chang's first book, The Coming Collapse of China, was much better researched <BR>
and argued in spite of its apocalyptic title. Now he seems to be bidding for <BR>
a bigger and more dangerous bang. Paul French's more balanced study of North <BR>
Korea today reminds us that Kim Jong Il, far from being tongue-tied, appears <BR>
"capable and knowledgeable" to those who have met him, including former US <BR>
secretary of state Madeleine Albright.<BR>
<BR>
When Kim Jong Il met a delegation of senior South Korean media figures in <BR>
2000, at the height of Kim Dae Jung's "sunshine diplomacy" towards the <BR>
North, he did most of the talking - in fact he could not stop talking. No <BR>
subject was too large or too small, from the missile programme (which he <BR>
said was entirely his idea) to the excellence of French wine (his doctor had <BR>
told him not to drink too much). He spoke as a Korean nationalist: "The <BR>
smaller the nation, he declared, the stronger it must be to keep its pride." <BR>
But he added that no one need worry because it would be madness for North <BR>
Korea to launch "two or three" missiles at the US.<BR>
<BR>
French's thesis is the exact opposite of Chang's and closer to that of the <BR>
two southern presidents: North Korea is "a failed state and therefore liable <BR>
to become unstable unless engaged enthusiastically and strategically". The <BR>
outside world ignored the North for decades, he argues, except at <BR>
intelligence levels, and "a little paranoia is perhaps forgivable". The 1994 <BR>
Agreed Framework, which was supposed to reward Pyongyang for halting its <BR>
nuclear programme, was "never really taken seriously by Washington". This <BR>
longer historical view is essential, if one is to grasp not only what drives <BR>
the North Korean regime but what it shares (to the growing irritation of the <BR>
Americans) with the South.<BR>
<BR>
"Nationalism is strong," says Pratt, "in both North and South Korea. The <BR>
world needs to understand it, though not necessarily to fear it." Koreans on <BR>
both sides of the 38th parallel (based according to Pratt on "nothing more <BR>
than a National Geographic map") are still acutely conscious that for them <BR>
the cold war has never ended. The memory of annexation by Japan - Koreans <BR>
were forced to bow before Shinto shrines and adopt Japanese names - still <BR>
arouses shame and anger. Yielding to a great power goes back to the age of <BR>
Chinese domination, when Korea was forced to adopt the policy of sadaechuui <BR>
("serving the great").<BR>
<BR>
One of the secrets of Kim Il Sung's success (apart from his ruthless <BR>
suppression of opponents) was to condemn this policy as "flunkeyism" and <BR>
portray the South as in thrall to a new great master. His son's <BR>
missile-rattling refusal to "serve the great" may appeal particularly to the <BR>
North Korean military, on whom his regime relies heavily.<BR>
<BR>
The appeal of the Kim cult to the North Korean people at large is less <BR>
certain. Hwang Jang Yop, the chief high priest and ghost-writer of the Juche <BR>
doctrine, defected to the South in 1997, and younger officials today cannot <BR>
even explain coherently what it means. The cult has increasingly become an <BR>
instrument for enforcing absolute obedience - just as Mao's cult became in <BR>
his later years - allowing the ambitious and unscrupulous to rise in the <BR>
hierarchy by denouncing others.<BR>
<BR>
No visitor to North Korea, however keen-sighted, will glimpse a trace of its <BR>
gulags but they have never been a complete mystery. Amnesty International <BR>
published an account in the 1970s by Ali Lameda, a Venezuelan poet working <BR>
as a translator in Pyongyang, of his labour camp experiences. His crime was <BR>
unclear, though he was told that his poems were "bourgeois filth". Defectors <BR>
to the South, no longer manipulated as in the past by South Korea's KCIA, <BR>
tell credible stories of which The Aquariums of Pyongyang (now in a revised <BR>
edition) is the most accessible example. Kang Chol-hwan was sent to Yodok <BR>
camp at the age of nine with his family - under suspicion because they had <BR>
lived in Japan. He describes public executions, but it is in the main a <BR>
depressingly familiar tale of forced labour, hunger and brutality.<BR>
<BR>
Hardest of all is to understand what life is like for millions of ordinary <BR>
North Koreans, apart from the fact that they have been desperately short of <BR>
food for more than a decade. Yet the occasional glimpse does reveal a more <BR>
complex society than might be supposed. I was amazed on my first visit to <BR>
see holiday-makers in a Pyongyang park playing blind man's buff and dancing <BR>
with traditional animal masks. (My minder, in a rare confidence, told me the <BR>
park was "a good place for making love".) Ten years later I observed farmers <BR>
sweeping the graves of their ancestors and burning paper gifts on the day of <BR>
Pure Brightness, just as they do in China.<BR>
<BR>
Jim Hoare and Susan Pares, who have written an entertaining account of <BR>
setting up the new British embassy in Pyongyang, have a good eye for human <BR>
detail. North Korean society, they tell us, is becoming more differentiated <BR>
and unequal as the regime gingerly introduces market reform. There are golf <BR>
courses, pet dogs and even private cars; there has been a decline in <BR>
collective effort such as clearing the snow; and there are more pickpockets <BR>
on public transport and at markets. Public health made big improvements <BR>
until the 70s, but has since fallen away: there are sad stories of elderly <BR>
people dying alone in unheated apartments or on the stairs of high-rise <BR>
blocks. Women are more equal than in the past but must still "think of <BR>
marriage by 26, to avoid becoming an 'old slipper'". The authors met one <BR>
woman who complained bitterly of being "'one skirt' who had to look after <BR>
'four trousers'".<BR>
<BR>
Hoare was for years the only British diplomat in Whitehall who tried to <BR>
understand the effect of the past upon North Korea. His colleagues would <BR>
grimace and roll their eyes at seminars when he argued that Pyongyang might <BR>
have a rational point of view. In any case, the official FCO line was that <BR>
the US State Department had 100% ownership of the North Korean problem, and <BR>
it would be folly for Britain to get involved. Even in the South Korean <BR>
capital, British diplomats insisted that they were "just a commercial <BR>
mission".<BR>
<BR>
There was a patchy dialogue with the North in the 90s, but Hoare says the <BR>
atmosphere was often frosty "with minimum courtesy on the British side". Not <BR>
until 2000 - after Italy and Australia had already recognised Pyongyang and <BR>
US-North Korean relations under Clinton were improving - did Britain have <BR>
the nerve to follow suit. What an opportunity Britain missed. It is still a <BR>
long and difficult task to bring North Korea in from the cold, but one which <BR>
is vastly preferable to a nuclear showdown.<BR>
<BR>
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006<BR>
<BR>
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