Read North Korea Undercover for Free Online

lion trotted up and down his scruffy patch of concrete morosely, but he was trumped by a magnificent white Siberian tiger, lean and mean in a cage constructed of criss-crossed wire that didn’t look that strong.
    ‘I’ve never seen one before. In this respect,’ I told Miss Jun, ‘North Korea is superior to Britain.’
    ‘DPRK,’ whispered Miss Jun. The regime hates being reminded that it is one of two geographical halves, and both Miss Jun and Mr Hyun would always correctus if we used the phrase ‘North Korea’.
    Alex was filming us. ‘Could we feed one of thestudents, maybe Alex, to the tiger?’ I suggested. ‘Alex, I think it would be a useful sacrifice.’
    Tyger, tyger, burning bright, smacked his chops and looked like he fancied a bit of Welsh rarebit el Greco. The snack unforthcoming, Tyger washed his whiskers with a greatpaw, and rolled his back against a spot of concrete warmed in the sun. As we were about to move on, Alex’s camera caught a plaque, saying in Korean, then English: ‘The animals presented by the DearLeader Kim Jong Il, on September 22, Juche 99 (2010), Korean Tiger Panthera Tigris Altaica.’
    Juche 99 is a result of the regime’s decision to create a newcalendar, with Juche Year Zero starting on 15 April, Anno Domini 1912 – the date on which Kim Il Sung was born. The Juche revolution is so powerful it can turn backtime. Or so they would like to have us believe. In Juche Time, 2013 is Year 101. What is striking about every single attempt by an authoritarian state to reset the clock is not success, but failure. The French Revolutionaries did it, renaming 22 September 1793 as the beginning of Year II. The months got new start dates and lovely new poetic names, so that late October, often foggy, became Brumaire – the foggy one – and the next month Frimaire, because it is frosty in late November. Napoleon scrapped the whole thing because it was silly and didn’t work. Pol Pot in Cambodia reset his totalitarian clock to Year Zero in 1974. That experiment in blood and time lasted but four years.
    The Juche Year Zero, although backdated to 1912, actually commenced operation in 1997 after a governmental decree. On our trip, for all practical purposes, it was never used and very rarely alluded to. Some of the regime’s propaganda which used the Western calendar before 1997 has been cast in bronze or stone or even chiselled into high peaks up in the mountains. Take, for example, the dates on the Arc de Triomphe lookalike in down-town Pyongyang. On one leg of the arch is written‘1925’, ‘the year in which Kim Il Sung set out on the road to national liberation’, and on the other ‘1945’, commemorating the year of liberation from the Japanese. Surely, these dates should be converted to Juche Time? But would people, especially foreigners, guess the significance of‘13’ and ‘32’? Or would worshippers of the Douglas Adams cult believe that‘32’ was a typo for ‘42’ – the answer to life, the universe and everything?
    The cost of airbrushing these dates to the new calendar must be so astronomical no one has bothered. So Juche Time lingers on, anembarrassing experiment in time travel, but not one that bites very hard on ordinary or even official life. Just how long will Juche Time last? Either not a second longerthan the regime, or nuclear Armageddon, whichever happens first.
    Our tour continued. It turned out that the big cats had a big back garden at the rear of their terrace of cages, and we could look down on them from on top of an elevated concrete walkway. A lion and a tiger were mixed up in the same paddock, but seemed to be getting along nicely. Well, they weren’t eating each other. The zoo was turning out to be far more impressive – or, to be exact, far less pitiful – than, say, the Heavy Machine Complex. Perhaps that’s because the zoo animals and the children who come to gaze at them are core class; the factory workers not.
    The elephant house seemed top