The Sun Tyrant E-Book

JP Floru

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

When Londoner JP Floru tags along with three friends running the marathon in Pyongyang, little could have prepared him for what he witnessed. Shown by two minders what the regime wants them to see during their nine-day trip, the group is astounded when witnessing people bowing to their leaders' statues; being told not to take photos of the leaders' feet; and hearing the hushed reverence with which people recite the history invented by the regime to keep itself in power. Often, the group did not understand what they were seeing: from the empty five-lane motorway to the missing fifth floor of their Yanggakdo Hotel on an island in the Pudong River; many answers only came through extensive research of the few sources that exist about this hermit country. Shocking and scary, The Sun Tyrant uncovers the oddities and tragedies at the heart of the world's most secretive regime, and shows what happens when a population is reduced to near-slavery in the twenty-first century.

Leseprobe

A devastating report by the Commission of Inquiry established by the United Nations Human Rights Council concluded that the North Korea government has committed systematic human right abuses at a scale without parallel in the contemporary world – including extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH 2015

To the 25.6 million prisoners in North Korea, who one day will be free.

And to E., and great and wonderful things.

CONTENTS

Title PageEpigraphDedicationForewordPreface1: North Koreans don’t eat grass (or do they?)2: Women: take care of your husband’s hairstyle3: How to make a North Korean win the marathon4: Bowing to the tyrants’ statues5: Firing missiles while the people starve6: Expat slaves7: Access to this information is temporarily unavailable8: Cool kids with Molotov cocktails9: Those from the wrong class stand in the back row10: State-sponsored crime11: Red-eyed, medal-encrusted generals12: What do you give a tyrant who has everything?13: The Leaders love their flowers14: Hiding memory cards in bread rollsAnnexePrinciples for Unitary Ideology of 1974AcknowledgementsBibliographyIndexCopyright

FOREWORD

North Korea has a political system as evil as any the world has ever seen. It has installed concentration camps where people are sent to work until they die. It has a policy that led to a famine which may have killed millions and has had long-term health effects on many more. And it permits the murder of anyone who seems to oppose the regime in any way.

Beyond the border, it is easy to see the Kim family, especially Kim Jong-un, as simply comic. His funny haircut, the absurd language and the extraordinarily blatant propaganda make it difficult for the rest of the world to take the sheer evil of the man and his government seriously. The total control of people’s lives and the cult-like status of the Kim family in North Korea, however, create prime conditions for the government to continue their tyrannical rule, while the erratic approach to foreign affairs, combined with the threat of nuclear war, enables them to squeeze money and supplies from foreign governments – not that any of it ever reaches the poverty-stricken civilians who so desperately need it.

In JP Floru’s excellent travel diary, he exposes the horrifying extent of the Kims’ brainwashing of their people. He observes (and, at the behest of his guides, reluctantly participates in) bowing to statues of the Kims and overhears instructions that saving a picture of the Kims from a burning building is more important than rescuing a child. Before visiting the embalmed body of Kim Ilsung – who, although dead, remains the eternal President of North Korea – the tour guide, who is more like a prison guard, checks every item of clothing, including a used Kleenex, to make sure that visitors are sufficiently respectfully dressed to meet the corpse.

The whole organised trip is a propaganda exercise, an effort of the minders to sell the delights of North Korea; yet the surreal totalitarianism present in all aspects of the visit can do little else but instill fear and alarm in the group. The residents, however, must accept the situation or risk not only their own liberty, but that of three generations of their family. This is where JP Floru’s book is so well constructed. He draws out from the tourist experience the brutality of the Kims’ regime, and clarifies the many points where invented history diverts from the bleak reality. The population is fed on lies that are accepted because they are forbidden any access to sources of the truth. Smuggling DVDs from China is punishable by a machine-gun firing squad, and anyone who expresses even remote disdain for the regime just disappears.

While it is easy to laugh at this fat little man in a boiler suit, as Jeremy Paxman so memorably put it, underestimating his depravity goes some way to cover up the horrific goings-on in North Korea. The West’s assumption that he is mad has enabled him to play the West for fools; and even the Chinese government have been carried along by the manipulation of these so-called Great Leaders of North Korea.

It would be easy for a travel book about North Korea to be simply voyeuristic, but this is not the case here. JP Floru goes to great lengths to reveal the shocking reality of a country terrorised by its leader, offering the West much-needed insight into the atrocities that occur when the truth is rewritten beyond recognition.

Hon. Jacob Rees-Mogg MP

PREFACE

If I use the real names of the people I met in North Korea, they will not be seen again. And neither will their other halves. Nor their children. Nor their parents. Nor their brothers and sisters. That is how things work down there. I don’t think it was particularly wise to put my own name on this book.

North Korea is the only country in the world where the rulers are not only a dynasty, but are also venerated as Gods. North Koreans are made to bow to the statues of their leaders for fear of being sent to a labour camp, and the façades of all public buildings carry gigantic photos of the Great Leaders. Children as young as six are taught in school to hate Americans, the Japanese and whoever else is singled out as a class enemy. During the famine in the late 1990s, international food aid was kept back for the elite and the army while the population was reduced to munching tree bark. The regime continues to build up its nuclear missile programme at great expense while the population starves. The current Great Leader, Kim Jong-un, announces his imminent annihilation of South Korea, the United States and Japan with jocular regularity. There are no human rights. The Western Gregorian calendar has been replaced by the Juche calendar, in which 1912, the year President Kim Il-sung was born, is Year One.

Thankfully, the regime also provides some relative comic relief. In January, the Pyongyang Times claimed that North Koreans had discovered hangover-free alcohol that ‘exudes national flavour without dampening your national fervour in the morning’, and the year before, NK News announced that medicines containing extracts from the insam plant could cure SARS and AIDS.

I went to North Korea to run the Pyongyang marathon. Three friends were running it and had asked me to come along. I said yes – because travelling to the moon is not available yet. Then I realised they were going for only three days, and that the marathon trip would not include a visit to the Kims’ Mausoleum, so I switched to a nine-day tour instead. I also decided not to run the marathon myself, but to go along as a mere spectator. I did not want to risk blisters at the start of a tour; and North Korea is not a place where you want to end up in hospital.

Those who know me well all expected me to get into trouble with the authorities. ‘Please don’t say or do anything you will regret,’ my mother begged me. My friend John was nearly in tears, while Jimmy promised he would set up the ‘Free JP Campaign’.

It wasn’t the best of times to visit the shifty kid in the class, since North Korean leader Kim Jong-un chose this precise moment to test a few ballistic missiles. Most just flopped into the sea as per usual, but Kim called it a great triumph and President Obama promptly signed new sanctions to punish the sanctions-infested pariah state. A few weeks before I left, 21-year-old American student Otto Warmbier was arrested for pinching a propaganda poster from the hotel where we were going to stay. His sentence of fifteen years’ hard labour caused consternation the world over.

The icing on the cake was Kim Jong-un’s announcement a few days before my departure that a new famine was coming (after his announcement, he attended a 1,000-chefs’ cooking competition). My mother was now calling me every day to dissuade me from going, but my marathon friends and I just made a last-minute dash to the supermarket to fill all the remaining nooks and crannies with chocolate and nutritious bars.

I had not set out to write a book. But even as little as nine days in North Korea gave me such a tsunami of material that I could not resist the challenge.

CHAPTER ONE

NORTH KOREANS DON’T EAT GRASS (OR DO THEY?)

‘If you are arrested, there is nothing we can do for you,’ the guidelines from the British Embassy laconically stated. Their advice was hidden in the ten pages of dos and don’ts that we received from the travel agency in Beijing.

That was not the end of it. We spent the entire morning of our arrival in Pyongyang receiving an even more extensive briefing about the rules.

‘Sometimes you will see people on the side of the road cutting grass with scissors. Please do not misunderstand. They are not going to eat it! It is to feed their rabbits.’ Our guide laughs encouragingly, while keenly observing us.

None of us join in. Never mind people eating grass: do they actually cut it with scissors? Most of us have read up for this trip, so we know that during the famine in the 1990s, North Koreans definitely ate grass. Tree bark, too.

She pauses. Then our guide continues:

‘When there is a photo of the Great Leaders on the cover of a newspaper, make sure not to fold it in the middle of the photo, because that is disrespectful. Also, do not throw the paper on the floor. You will be reprimanded if you do. Just give it to us, and then we will dispose of it.’

I quickly decide not to touch papers featuring the leaders’ images. When the German architect Philipp Meuser produced an architectural guide to Pyongyang a few years ago, it was blacklisted by the regime because it had a double-page photo of a statue of the Leader across the centrefold.

It’s not just the photos that are a sensitive issue: the Great Leader’s name must always be spelled as one word on one line; it may not be split over two lines. And just to make sure that you don’t miss out on the really important stuff in North Korean publications, the Great Leaders’ names are always printed in bold.

‘Some things may be different in your own country. In the next days we will go to the statues of the Great Leaders. You will be expected to bow and lay flowers, as a show of respect. Please follow the rules, yes?’

The detailed instructions as to what is not permitted go on and on. When visitors leave the country, border guards check their cameras, delete photos and make arrests at will. The truth is that most visitors are so terrified of the consequences that they stay well clear of even innocuous acts. In North Korea, never to be heard of again is, well, not unheard of.