Former U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s attempts to be philosophical about ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’ gave him a reputation for slipperiness and cant. The phrases uttered in 2002 to explain the military’s failure to improve security in Afghanistan have passed into folklore, alongside such gems as ’stuff happens,’ which was his explanation for the looting that followed the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003.

The ‘known unknown’ concept is a more useful tool in journalism than you would think from the derision heaped on Rumsfeld by reporters. As journalists we spend our time uncovering facts, reporting data, breaking news and offering insights into the meaning of events. We rarely stop to contemplate what we do not know, what we cannot know and what impact that ignorance has in shaping perceptions.

No place is more opaque, more secretive and more fiendishly difficult to intepret than North Korea. It is inaccessible, its leader does not give interviews and it rattles the nuclear sabre to a timetable and for a purpose we can only guess at. As we tremble with fear at the thought of Pyongyang developing an atomic arms capability, it is instructive to remind ourselves how thoroughly our interpretation of the North’s behaviour is overlaid with our own projections and assumptions. We build our framework of expectations on the shaky soil of past experience, historical parallels and a paucity of real, contemporary detail on how North Koreans think and how they live.

On a recent trip to north-east Asia it struck me how challenging it is to peer over the formidable wall that the North has erected around itself. Divining the real distribution of power around Kim Jong-il and extrapolating from it his next steps has been compared to Cold War Kremlinology,  the part-art, part-science process of guessing how the Soviet Union was being run. It is the nature of tightly-knit elites that they are hard to fathom. Nobody credible has been able to claim they spotted in advance that Mikhail Gorbachev would be the successor to Konstantin Chernenko in 1985.  So, add to Soviet-style secrecy North Korea’s clan system and dynastic tradition, and you have a recipe for inpenetrability.  Kim Jong-il’s third and youngest son, Kim Jong-un, is now ‘widely accepted’ as the heir presumptive to his ailing father. But might the flimsily-sourced stories on the succession have been solidified into ‘fact’ by self-reinforcing group-think?

Japanese media reported that the Swiss educated Jong-un, thought to be 25-years-old, visited China earlier in June to introduce himself to the leaders of North Korea’s only real ally. The Chinese haven’t corroborated that and I got a point blank refusal to confirm it from South Korea’s unification minister when I posed the question this week. (The FT had the most recent story on it, adding detail on itinerary and who was chaperoning the youngster, again sourced to unnamed officials.) It’s a sensitive issue, since electronic surveillance and espionage, too sensitive to admit to, might actually have confirmed to Seoul and Washington that Jong-un had made that journey. Perhaps that makes it an example of an unknown known.

So how do we get information about the North? Few journalists get visas and when they do their interactions with ordinary Koreans take place via handlers whose first loyalty is to their state, not the truth. A few diplomats report on the realities of life in the desperately poor North. A blurred picture emerges of a socialist state where the populace must fend for themselves; government food distribution has all but been abandoned and an informal structure of markets and suitcase trading of Chinese goods provides most of the nourishment and economic activity.  A few NGOs and tourists trickle through. South Korea monitors everything the North says about itself and meticulously reads between the lines to assess the ebbs and flows of power. Scholars parse the North’s internal propaganda to understand how the Kims sustain their leadership. A taste of its appeal to patriotism, disdain of outsiders, selective rendering of history and vilification of the South leaves non-partisans dizzy, but it has served for years to consolidate the ruling class’s grip on power.

How useful is the information given by what some call defectors but which others broadly consider economic migrants, fleeing the poverty of the North for the perils of Chinese human trafficking networks in the hope an aid group will lead them to the South via third countries? The South builds a picture by debriefing them, but the insights are not of those close to Pyongyang’s decision-making.

Most intriguing now is how the North’s story to its own people may have to change as the information cordon around the country frays. The disparity between reality and internal rhetoric cannot grow too far apart, it is suggested, because North Koreans are getting information via DVDs smuggled across their borders, visiting traders, informal networks and other unofficial sources. North Koreans will have heard from abroad the talk of who will rule them next. At home their media has made no mention of the Dear Leader ever being anything but a bachelor, never mind a father.  Can that gap persist without credibility vanishing? Will North Korea’s official media have to bring forward their launch campaign for the next Kim? How ironic if the unknowability of the North begins to be undone from the inside thanks to the unknowingness of outsiders.

Despite the seriousness with which the world takes North Korea’s missile and nuclear tests, the isolated country remains a rich source of humour for cartoonists, satirists and comedians around the world.

The diminutive, bouffant-haired leader, Kim Jong-il, has already been the star of a satirical full length cartoon, plaintively singing “I’m so ronery” in Team America, while plotting to blow up the world.

These days, it seems, every time North Korea rattles its sabres, the noise can be heard via the Internet.

Kim and North Korea are most frequently a subject of discussion on the various late night TV chat shows so popular in the United States.

“According to Kim Jong-Il’s biography, they say he has been constantly accused of dishonesty, drunkenness and sexual excess. So if he lived here, he could be in Congress,” Jay Leno said on his show.

“North Korea conducted a nuclear test and the blast was so small that many scientists are saying it was a dud. Apparently, the nuclear bomb didn’t work well because it was made in Korea,” jibed Conan O’Brien.

And with news wires buzzing that Kim, who succeeded his father, Kim Il-sung, may in turn be succeeded by a favourite son, David Letterman said: “”North Korean dictator Kim Jung Il may be stepping down. Experts in the State Department say he could be replaced by his son, Menta Li Ill.”

But it isn’t just professional comedians having fun at the expense of North Korean and its dear leader, the Internet is full of keen amateurs doing the same.

Facebook, for example, has over 350 profiles and groups dedicated to Kim, listing his hobbies (films, nuclear experiments, torture), friends (Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad).

One group is set up to list achievements genuinely reported by the Korean Central News Agency, which frequently ascribes miraculous events to Kim, such as causing flowers to spontaneously bloom or even influencing the weather.

A not entirely more ridiculous Facebook group does the opposite, listing what he should be credited with: “There is no such thing as evolution, just a list of animals Kim Jong Il allowed to live”; “Kim Jong Il has two speeds: Walk and Kill”; “Kim Jong Il can slam a revolving door.”.

But perhaps the most popular resources of North Korean humour and satire on the Internet remains NK news, which has as a mission statement: This site aims its satirical lens solely at the regime of Kim Jong Il, and certainly not at the long-suffering people of North Korea, Korean culture, or Korea in general, North or South.

Its random insult generator draws on years of bellicose statements from the north. None of them are made up, apparently. The latest offering: “You sycophantic aggressor, your accusation against the DPRK is no more than barking at the moon!”

Insiders say Mohamed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was rather reticent and stiff in public when he took the job in 1997. He’d spent decades below the radar in Egypt’s foreign service, U.S. academia and the U.N. nuclear watchdog as head of the legal and external relations divisions.

But Mohamed ElBaradei evolved into a politically outspoken tribune for international peace and fair play.

That reputation grew as he challenged George W. Bush’s neocons over bogus evidence of mass-destruction weaponry they used to invade Iraq, and their policy of threatening rather than negotiating with Iran, which seemed to backfire by encouraging, not dissuading, Tehran to build up nuclear capability.

ElBaradei’s campaigning for negotiated non-proliferation, disarmament and development through peaceful uses of the atom earned a Nobel Peace Prize for him and the IAEA in 2005.
   
Now, as he prepares to retire in November, the 66-year-old, self-described “secular pope” has gone into legacy-building overdrive. Media interviews have proliferated with cable TV or web magazine outlets that air or publish his remarks unedited.

This week ElBaradei went public even in private, expounding off-the-cuff and very undiplomatically at a closed door meeting of the IAEA’s 35-nation Board of Governors, then authorising his remarks to be “leaked” to the media outside.

At other governors’ meetings dealing with hot-button issues like Iran’s stonewalling of IAEA investigators, I had to chase participants by sms or after-hours phone calls just to get tiny,
broken snippets of what ElBaradei had said inside.

This time, whole transcripts of his interventions on the boardroom floor found their way to nuclear beat reporters.

ElBaradei pulled no punches. And the pickings were rich.

On Tuesday, he lambasted the governors for their protracted failure to reach consensus on a big budget rise he wants to upgrade a crumbling inspections regime he said threatens to turn the IAEA into a laughing stock among nuclear proliferators.

“What you are reaping today is what you have sown for the last 20 years of zero real growth budgets,” he said.

“The whole idea that now we have to go out and borrow or hold out our hands and say, ‘Please give us some money to do safety and security,’ is really a bastardisation of an international organisation,” ElBaradei fumed.

“Today our lab lacks the equipment to do sensitive particle analysis. How can I come here and tell you I have credible conclusions on issues that have tio do with war and peace?

“If you come to me and say cut here or cut there, I and my colleagues will not assume responsibility if in a couple of years from now we see another Chernobyl, or a nuclear terrorist attack, or a clandestine nuclear programme.”

On Wednesday, ElBaradei dispensed with diplomatic caveats by telling the BBC it was “his gut feeling” that Iran “definitely would like to have the technology that would enable it to have nuclear weapons if they decided to do so”.

To IAEA governors, he said the IAEA’s mission to prevent nuclear weapons spreading to unstable regions was “going around in circles” because it lacked enforcement tools and world powers
had not negotiated seriously with states like Iran, or shared intelligence with U.N. inspectors in a timely way.

“We are sometimes called the ‘watchdog,’ but we don’t bark at all if we don’t have the legal authority to do our work.

“The U.N. Security Council should not necessarily mean just sanctions. It is supposed to be a forum to find solutions,” he said. “When there’s no dialogue, we come to a standstill. We are completely gridlocked in North Korea and Iran.”
   
On Thursday, simmering tensions between Israel and ElBaradei boiled over at the Board when the Jewish state’s envoy accused him of political bias and lacking assertiveness in his probe into an alleged secret plutonium reactor site in Syria.
   
That was a “totally distorted” position, ElBaradei shot back. He upbraided Israel for trying to tell the IAEA how to do its verification job but hindering it from doing that job by having bombed the purported reactor to ruin in 2007 before alerting inspectors first to check the evidence.

“(Israel says) we refrain from using tools. Israel is not even a member of the Non-Proliferation Regime, to tell us what tools are available to us. You cannot sit on the fence, making use of the system, without being accountable.

“To say I am biased, I won’t dignify that with a response.”

On Thursday, the IAEA governors, citing rights disputes, derailed ElBaradei’s campaign for a global nuclear fuel supply bank that would reduce the appeal of proliferation-prone enrichment in unstable states.

It was a stinging setback to his vision of stemming the spread of nuclear arms knowhow while sharing atomic energy for peaceful purposes in a safe, accountable way.
   
This time, ElBaradei was silent.

But he still has a few more months to weigh in on this and all his passionately-felt themes of war and peace — and later when he will be in demand on the global lecture circuit.

(International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei attends a board of Governors meeting at Vienna’s UN headquarters June 15, 2009. REUTERS/Herwig Prammer (AUSTRIA POLITICS ENERGY HEADSHOT))

We often hear of the human cost of war. We don't often see the cash cost laid out so baldly as in the price list that went with my colleague Abdi Sheikh's feature from Mogadishu on the arms market that thrives in the city amid Somalia's tragedy.

Among popular weapons, a 120 mm mortar costs $700, plus $55 for each mortar bomb. A 23 mm anti-aircraft gun (truck mounted), fetches a hefty $20,000.

Pistols range from $400 to $1,000 according to condition and country of origin. An Indian-made AK-47 Kalashnikov assault rifle costs $140. Better quality versions from North Korea cost $600 and the Russian original costs $400. Hand-grenades go for $25 each, landmines $100.

Huge weapons systems, such as nuclear missiles, are the stuff of international geopolitics. But in Africa at least, the weapons that are killing people on a daily basis in places like Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Darfur are more modest in scale and can be bought at a relatively low cost.

Finance ministers and other executives busy discussing the future of Eastern European transition economies at a European Bank for Reconstruction and Development meeting were reminded of a country far from Europe which needs aid to transform its economy.

South Korea thinks its Stalinist neighbour should receive aid from the London-based lender, set up in 1991 to help former communist countries make the transition to market economies.

"I strongly recommend North Korea as a next candidate to become a recipient country, once it decides to transform itself into a market economy," Young Geol Lee, vice minister of strategy and finance, said in a speech. "Please bear in mind that North Korea has great potentials as a future client of the EBRD."

The EBRD is owned by 61 countries as well as the European Union.

By Jon Herskovitz

There is almost no such thing as a happy retirement for South Korea’s former presidents.

Former President Roh Moo-hyun, who left office a little more than a year ago, joined the club of troubled ex-leaders on Thursday when he appeared before prosecutors to answer questions about their suspicions his family received at least $1 million in bribes from a shoe company CEO.

Roh came to office pledging to clean up the South Korean presidency. Even his critics say one of his biggest achievements was to make the election process far more open and fair.

But he was not able to change what critics see as a fundamental problem with politics in South Korea — overly strict election laws. After decades of seeing bribery as commonplace in political circles, the country set up tough laws on campaign financing and other electoral reforms that have helped South Korea become one of the most vibrant democracies in Asia but have also led politicians to scramble for funds.  

Yun Chang-hyun, a professor of finance at the University of Seoul explains: “In America, lobbyists are legal but it is not legal here. That said, lobbying is still going on in many ways. We do not officially accept that money is needed for politics, but in reality, politicians and statesmen need a lot of money. A small amount is permitted, but they need a lot of money. “ 

The fate of former President Roh should become clear in the next few months. Here is what history has brought to his predecessors, almost all of whom left office with dismal support rates:

Syngman Rhee served from 1948-1960. An independence movement leader during the 1910-1945 Japanese colonial period, Rhee was a key figure in setting up the Republic of Korea with the help of the United States. In his final year in office, Rhee’s manipulation of the presidential election vote provoked a nationwide student protest, forcing him to step down and seek refuge in Hawaii. He died in exile in 1965.

Yun Bo-seon was a figurehead leader who served from 1960-61 and would later be put on trial for anti-government activities by the strongman who followed him as president.

 Park Chung-hee, a former elementary school teacher and general, took office in a military coup and was the country’s longest-serving president. His 1961-1979 tenure also came to the most abrupt end when he was shot dead by his intelligence agency chief at a private dinner party.

   Chun Doo Hwan, who served from 1980-1988, was another general who forced his way to the presidency but was later forced to step down in face of massive pro-democracy protests. 

His successor and military colleague, Roh Tae-woo, allowed the National Assembly to conduct a humiliating investigation into Chun’s presidency at a time when Seoul was hosting the 1988
Olympics. After his resignation, Chun spent two spartan years in internal exile at a remote Buddhist monastery in the mountains.

Chun and Roh were later convicted of receiving millions of dollars in bribes as well as mutiny and treason for their roles in the 1979 coup and 1980 massacre of civilians in Kwangju.

Chun was sentenced to death, later commuted to life in jail, while Roh’s 22-1/2-year jail sentence was reduced to 17 years on appeal. Both were released from prison in early 1998.

The next president Kim Young-sam, who served from 1993-1998,  was forced to seek a $58-billion bailout led by the International Monetary Fund in his final weeks in  office when the country teetered on bankruptcy. His son was arrested and jailed for corruption but freed under the next president, Kim Dae-jung.

    Kim Dae-jung, who served from 1998-2003 won the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing the divided Koreas closer together but business scandals tarnished his last year in office. Two of his sons were convicted of bribery and tax evasion.

There is only one leader who left office without much fuss, enjoyed a quiet retirement and has also mostly been forgotten.

That would be  Choi Kyu-hah who served as the head of a what was considered a caretaker government from 1979 to 1980. After being forced out by Chun Doo Hwan, and decided he had had enough of political life.  He kept quiet, kept to himself and kept away from the prosecutors office.

(Reuters pictures. From top to bottom: President Roh Moo-hyun. Anti-Roh demonstration outside of the prosecutors’ office in Seoul, file picture of former Presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae-woo on trial.)

                                              By Jon Herskovitz

North Korea says somewhere up in the sky, a satellite it launched at the weekend is beaming to earth two revolutionary paeans: “Song of General Kim Il-sung” for the founder of the reclusive state and “Song of General Kim Jong-il,” for the son who succeeded him when he died.

U.S. and South Korean officials said the North Korean rockets did not send anything into space and all pieces of the rocket crashed into the sea, including the claimed satellite, which might have been North Korea’s oversized attempt to replicate an iPod.

The North Korean report was a a bit of a blast from the past because North Korea made a similar claim in 1998 that it had sent a satellite into orbit playing the exact same two songs.

There is far more to North Korea’s hit parade of songs than the two homilies it said were aboard its rocket. This is a country where soldiers sing, farmers sing, the hundreds of thousand gather in the centre of the capital Pyongyang to dance in special days and a refined teenage girl always has her accordion ready to play a tune.

The North Korea songbook is diverse. It has the dance number “Let’s Dash Forward to Build a Great Prosperous and Powerful Nation”. It has a tune for choral groups called “May the Song of a Happy Soldier Reverberate Far and Wide,” and it has a children’s song called Generalissimo Kim Il-sung Danced With Us.” Here are the lyrics as translated into English by the North:
On the New Year’s,
We danced together hand in hand
We danced out of our wish for his pleasure
The Generalissimo danced with us
Out of his wish for our happy future.
His parental love for us
Moved us to tears.
Our respect and filial devotion are growing.
The Generalissimo danced with us.

I saw this song performed about a year ago at the Mangyongdae Schoolchildren’s Palace when I went to Pyongyang for the New York Philharmonic concert. The school is dedicated to the performing arts and the children, many still of primary school age, sang and danced their way through songs such as “Jingle Bells” and “We are Faithful Only to Kim Jong-il.”

When they grow older, the North Korean song book awaits them. Here is a top 10 list in no particular order of North Korea’s greatest hits:

* “Song of Defending Homeland”
* “The Ten-point Programme of the Association for the Restoration of the Fatherland”
* Let’s Dash Forward to Build a Great Prosperous and Powerful Nation”
* Let’s Hold Higher Rifle of Working Class”
* “Hopeful Is the Future of Us under the Care of the General”
* “May the Playing of My Accordion Resound Forth”
* “Song of the Coastal Artillery Women”
* “We Will Defend the Headquarters of Revolution with Our Lives”
* “Our General is Best”
* “We Have Planted Apple Trees on Mountains”

Perhaps, the next time North Korea attempts to launch a satellite, it might want to load a few of these tunes in order to expand its repertoire.

{Photos of Kim Jong-il with  with scientists and engineers involved in a rocket launch and a protest in Seoul against the launch]

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.