By Jon Herskovitz

The end of the Bush administration will likely bring an end to one of my favourite guilty pleasures of reporting on North Korea, which is the verbal battle between Washington and Pyongyang. Prickly North Korea will undoubtedly fire rhetorical volleys at Barack Obama’s team but it may be hard to match the vitriolic language it has levelled at the administration of outgoing President George W. Bush, which in North Korean parlance is “a bunch of tricksters and political imbeciles who are the center of a plot breeding fraud and swindle”.

The Bush administration came into office pledging to take a tough line toward Pyongyang to force it to end its nuclear weapons programme, stop threatening its neighbours with ballistic missiles and halt human rights abuses that are regarded as some of the worst in the world. North Korea bristles at any criticism of its leaders or its communist system. It unleashed its first insults directed at Bush weeks into his presidency in 2001, after his team labelled the North a dangerous state.   

In 2002, Bush bracketed the communist state of Kim Jong-il with Iran and pre-war Iraq as being part of an axis of evil. Later that year, according to Newsweek magazine, Bush astonished a meeting of Republican senators by launching a vivid personal attack on the North Korean leader. Newsweek quoted Bush as saying: “He’s starving his own people, and imprisoning intellectuals in a Gulag the size of Houston.” It said the president had called Kim a “pygmy” and compared him to a “spoiled child at a dinner table”.

The North shot back and called the United States an “empire of evil”. U.S. officials then called the North “an outpost of tyranny” and “a criminal state”.

The North welcomed Bush’s second term by saying his administration was “stuffed with Cold War hotshots”.

North Korea did not fire off any insults specifically directed at Christopher Hill, the main Bush point man for nuclear negotiations. Pyongyang can show restraint when it feels it is being treated as a serious country.

A list of top insults the North has directed at the Bush team will follow. It seems the last insult hurled at Bush came a few weeks ago. This was after an Iraqi reporter threw his shoes at Bush at a news conference in Baghdad. http://www.reuters.com/article/mediaNews/idUSLF8894820081215. The North’s cabinet newspaper said in an article that Bush looked like “a chicken soaked in the rain” at the lectern.

But anyway, here it is — a list (in no particular order) of some of the North’s greatest verbal swipes at the Bush team. And for anyone who wants to experience the fiery language of the North’s propaganda machine, I would recommend the “random insult generator” of this web site http://www.nk-news.net/index.php.

North Korean insults of Bush:

1/ Bush is a hooligan bereft of any personality as a human being, to say nothing of stature as president of a country.

2/ He is a half-baked man in terms of morality and a philistine.

3/ No one can expect to hear reasonable words from Bush, once a cowboy at a ranch in Texas.

4/ His remarks often stun audience as they reveal his utter ignorance.

5/ Bush is an incompetent and rude president who is senseless and ignorant.

6/ He does not know even elementary diplomatic etiquette and lacks diplomatic ability.

North Korean insults of Vice President Dick Cheney:

7/ Cheney is hated as the most cruel monster and blood-thirsty beast.

8/ He has drenched various parts of the world in blood.

9/ Cheney is a mentally deranged person steeped in the inveterate enmity towards the system in the DPRK (North Korea).

North Korean insults of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:

10/ Rice is bereft of any political logic.

                                                          By Jon Herskovitz

It is not often that I am reminded of Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan in our coverage of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.  But I thought of the 2000 movie starring Ryan and Crowe called “Proof of Life”   North Korea this week when  served up pictures of its Dear leader Kim and a communist party newspaper with a clearly marked Tuesday date.

This was the first time since Kim’s suspected stroke in August that North Korea has added a clear date as to when Kim appeared in public. The North has reported on Kim appearing several times in public over the past several weeks, but all of those reports have been undated.

 In the movie version, the “proof of life” is a part of the hostage and ransom trade where a kidnap victim holds up a newspaper to offer proof that he or she is alive on a certain date.

North Korea likes to do things its own way and in the official media, there is one picture that shows Kim in a winter coat, fur hat and ski gloves at a library standing behind his subjects as they stare into computer monitors. The next photograph shows a computer monitor with the on-line version of the North’s communist newspaper bearing Tuesday’s date. There is no picture of Kim and the newspaper together, but this is the closest North Korea has come to offering a proof of life, or better yet, a proof of recovery since Kim’s suspected illness.

State media has also been issuing reports and pictures of  what are called “field guidance visits” by Kim in recent months to places such as army units, factories and chicken farms. In most of these pictures, Kim seems a little bit thinner than he did about a year ago. He is almost always seen wearing a heavy coat, sunglasses and gloves.

But try hard as they might, the North Koreans have been unable to fully convince the rest of the world about Kim’s well-being. ”The fact that they cannot provide conclusive photographic evidence that he is alive now shows me that he is incapacitated,” says Brian Myers, an expert on the North’s propaganda at Dongseo University in South Korea.

There is still no clear and timely evidence, such as Kim attending a large ceremony or meeting visiting officials, that would indicate he has fully recovered.

The head of South Korea’s intelligence service was quoted as telling a parliamentary committee there is no evidence that the photos of Kim have been doctored but there is also no proof of when the pictures were actually taken.

There has been speculation in the South’s media that Kim is showing the lingering effects of a stroke with mobility limited in the left side of his body. Several local reports also note that Kim is no longer wearing his trademark platform shoes, saying he has more difficulty balancing after the stroke and the shoes are too dangerous for him to wear.

Within North Korea itself, people were probably aware of persistent reports about Kim’s health, analysts say. They point to a word-of-mouth network that has grown stronger in recent years.

And the average North Korean probably feels that that Kim is well in control due to all the pictures they have seen in official media over the past few weeks.

Whatever it is, Kim’s health is one of the most closely guarded secrets in the highly secretive North that is known only to a small inner circle. North Korea has yet to convince a lot of people that Kim is healthy, and until that happens; we are likely to see thousands of words of speculation until we get that one definitive picture.

                                 By Jack Kim
North and South Koreans have been divided for more than 50 years by one of the world’s most heavily fortified borders. When we come into contact, it is almost always in small and carefully arranged visits.

I was a part of a South Korean group that recently spent four days in the North. Over the course of countless hours of contact with the North Korean minders assigned to our group, conversation turned from heated discussion over international politics and inter-Korean troubles to nationalism and sports. 

We had been told by the officials from the group in the South that arranged the trip to avoid any discussion of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il because this highly sensitive subject would invariably lead to awkward discussions and raise tension.

But there was enough time to get a glimpse of the softer, human side of North Korean officials who were supposed to be tough, propaganda-conscious apparatchiks armed with skills to respond to any kind of challenge to the communist state’s leadership or its ideology.

The minders, usually mid-level cadres in the bureaucracy, would invariably break into warm smiles when we raised the subject of family, either ours or theirs, just to change the subject after a tense discussion on politics. They willingly talked about life at home.

“You have experience keeping a living?” a North Korean “guide” asked, using an expression that was not immediately clear in meaning, to ask whether I had a family. When I said I had a wife and a one-year-old daughter at home, he broke into a grin and said the girl would be “at an age when they are so adorable” and that I must sorely miss her.

He said he himself had a boy and a girl “all grown up,” meaning they were in primary school. Later on, as I prepared to head home, he said he had to meet another group of South Koreans who were arriving later in the day. He would be staying with them at their hotel. And that would make it eight straight days away from home, he said.

                                                           By Jack Kim
For about eight straight years I’ve been covering North Korea, one of the world’s most closed countries with a human rights record that is roundly criticised as one of the worst on the globe.

So it came as a surprise when a North Korean “guide” said on my seventh visit to the communist state that when it comes to restricting freedom of movement, South Korea’s spy agency makes life tougher for North Korean visitors to the capitalist neighbour.

“They even follow you into the hygiene room and wait there until you’re finished!” a North Korean handler said as his voice rose in indignation when describing the treatment given to North Korean visitors to the South.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service agents limit a North Korean visitor’s movement from floor to floor and ban any kind of excursion unless in a group tour. They also follow visitors into public restrooms.

“Conducting official duty” is the explanation when asked what they thought they were doing following you into the bathroom, the North Korean guide said, adding it is presumably to make sure you’re not receiving secret instructions from the North or being handed a secret message from a double agent in the South.

We on the other hand as part of a South Korean group were free to wander anywhere inside the hotel, be it a drunken lurch from the sky lounge to the lobby bar (“tea shop”), for a browse through the bookstore or venture out the main door for some fresh air or a smoke.

But it did seem a bit excessive to be following anyone into the bathroom and wait in there until that person is finished, which is why I asked the NIS for official explanation. The agency did not immediately have a comment.