‘When You Sing a Song, You Can Rise Up’

The hulking 105-story Ryugyong Hotel dominating this capital city’s skyline is a fitting metaphor for a crippled nation.

The massive concrete pyramid, topped by several tiers of would-be revolving restaurants, stands unfinished. Years after construction came to an abrupt halt, cranes still hover nearby like a giant’s fishing rods.

Like the hotel, seen on an illicit outing in one of the world’s most paranoid countries, nearly everything in North Korea these days seems to have come to a standstill or, at best, a crawl.

Power outages routinely disrupt life, trapping subway passengers for hours in darkness and forcing residents to walk as many as two dozen flights to reach their high-rise apartments.

Doctors perform operations without anesthesia and recycle beer bottles to hold intravenous fluids. Sanitary conditions in hospitals are atrocious: In unheated operating rooms lighted by candles, patients shiver and blood freezes on the floors.

Most factories are idle. They lack not only energy and raw materials but spare parts to replace the decades-old machinery procured from former allies in the Eastern Bloc.

And although the famine that peaked two years ago appears to be largely over, the rural population is still barely scraping by. Residents just a few miles outside Pyongyang could be seen picking up grains of rice on the roadside next to a rice field Tuesday afternoon. Women lugged heavy bags of potatoes and vegetables on their backs, heading home from the capital on journeys that can be as long as 100 miles.

In a rare move, North Korea this week allowed American journalists into the country to cover Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s mission to improve U.S. relations with the nation accurately known as the hermit kingdom. What emerged--based on numerous interviews with international humanitarian aid workers here and a firsthand, non-government-sanctioned look at the city and surrounding countryside--was a nation in severe crisis.

That expedition, which involved dodging various “minders,” or guides, and hiding out in a store whose main offering appeared to be commemorative stamps of “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il and his late father, “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung, was led by a German doctor who has helped rehabilitate five hospitals here.

As fragile as everything seems to be, somehow the nation continues to defy expectations that it would simply disintegrate under hardships exacerbated by drought and floods in the past few years.

One reason: the resiliency of the North Korean people.

“When forced to do so, they will move a mountain overnight, mobilizing a million people,” said Norbert Vollertsen, the German doctor.

Society Is Termed ‘Incredibly Resilient’

There is also little corruption, and crime isn’t a problem, aid workers say.

“It’s an incredibly resilient society, if you look at the stress of the food shortages and consider that people are still surviving and still getting up and going to work,” said Douglas Broderick, country director for the U.N. World Food Program.

Moreover, the Stalinist government has an awe-inspiring ability to mobilize its people on short notice. That was on clear display in a “mass performance” involving 100,000 residents dancing and turning cartwheels in perfect synchronization Monday night that was akin to the opening ceremony of the Olympics.

Broderick said the performance paled by comparison with the spectacular show celebrating the 55th anniversary of the Korean Workers’ Party on Oct. 10, in which about a million people reportedly marched in lock step.

Other government feats include calling up thousands of women to take to the streets with brooms to keep them spotless. In the winter, the women clean the country roads of ice--by hand. The nation has no snow-removal equipment or salt for roads or sidewalks.

At first glance, the situation in Pyongyang itself doesn’t appear nearly as dire as one might expect. The city looks modern, with a beautiful subway system, a spectacular outdoor stadium that holds 150,000 people and numerous high-rise apartments, albeit all drab.

Huge gymnasiums are dedicated to sports programs for children, with separate buildings for badminton and gymnastics.

A flashy casino built for foreigners is lined with slot machines, and a bar offers top brands of liquor, from Remy Martin to Jack Daniels to Bushmills Irish whiskey. Huge monuments commemorating the late Kim and his son are brightly lighted and imposing.

There are several broad boulevards and highways, including a just-completed 10-lane, 129-mile “Youth Heroic Highway” built nearly entirely by hand over the past two years by young people hammering stones to make the roadway. They worked night and day to complete the project in time for the Workers’ Party anniversary commemoration.

There are signs of luxury too: A “forbidden city” with lovely trees and beautiful buildings houses elite government and military officials and artists. (It’s off limits to all but residents.) On the outskirts of the city, there’s at least one gated complex in which large, modern-looking houses with green lawns are nestled.

Kitchenware, liquor, cookies and clothes--albeit cheaply made ones--line department store shelves. Coca-Cola arrived a few months ago, imported from China.

But a closer look and a drive around the city reveal a far grimmer reality. There are few cars on the streets, and most are well over a decade old.

Olive-green pickup trucks that appear to be of Korean War vintage double as buses, with tightly packed passengers standing in the backs. The few traffic signals on the streets are shut off in order to conserve scarce energy. Instead, female traffic coordinators, looking like plastic figures on jewelry boxes, twirl “light sabers” to direct traffic at intersections.

On a gloomy Tuesday, lights were out in a major downtown hospital and a department store, making it difficult to see clearly inside. One- and two-room houses in tiny villages just outside the city lack plumbing. Residents of low-slung apartment buildings use charcoal to fuel small burners for heat.

A strange cackling can be heard at dawn in the center of the city. Many residents keep chickens and rabbits on their small balconies for eggs or meat.

Malnutrition Still a Serious Problem

Yet Pyongyang is North Korea’s breadbasket compared with the countryside.

“There’s not enough food or vitamins, and sickness is created by poverty,” Vollertsen said. Malnutrition is still a serious problem, a lingering aftereffect of a crisis that reportedly killed thousands just a few years ago.

In some ways, the scenery is reminiscent of rural Eastern Europe under communism. But the big difference, said Jan Erlebach, a technician with the German doctor’s group, German Emergency Doctors, is that the East Germans, for example, “were not so poor and had lots of food.”

The North Koreans blame their perilous economic situation on outside forces such as droughts, floods and “countries trying to stifle socialism,” in the words of one North Korean. That rationale explains why the international food and medical workers operating in North Korea report to an agency that the North Koreans dub their “Flood Damage Rehabilitation Commission.”

Most severely hit are the country’s northern and eastern regions, where there is little arable land amid mountains and little, if any, electricity. In Chongjin, a city in the east with 1 million to 1.5 million people, one or two smokestacks out of 50 are working, said the World Food Program’s Broderick. Some families eat cornhusks and make soup out of pine bark.

The country’s economy began to fall along with the collapse of North Korea’s old allies and trading partners, the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc nations such as Czechoslovakia, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Left with meager foreign exchange, now the country can afford few imports and little oil.

There is an Orwellian feel about the nation. Journalists were not officially permitted to travel outside the hotel except in the company of minders. Television crews had a particularly difficult time escaping their official escorts. During the several-hour tour with Vollertsen, the car was tailed.

Yet, in contrast to the people in most other Asian nations, where a tall blond foreigner attracts plenty of stares in homogenous lands unaccustomed to outsiders, most North Koreans seemed not the least bit curious about their visitors.

It might strike outsiders as odd, but the people don’t seem to be fed up with conditions.

“We cannot understand--[the people] are not rebelling,” said Rupert Neudeck, founder of Vollertsen’s group.

Yet Vollertsen said he thinks the population is gripped by depression.

“People are depressed because they have no ideas, because there’s no future,” Vollertsen said. “They are sleeping whenever they choose, drinking whenever they choose, and the main deaths are from drinking and smoking and cancer of the liver.

“It’s all a sort of suicide, committed because of their depressing lives.”

North Korea didn’t provide any spokesmen to rebut such comments. But Ryu Yong Jin, a 28-year-old English professor appointed to monitor a Times reporter’s activities in Pyongyang, had some theories.

Asked if people are depressed, he replied: “Maybe because of hunger and starvation, but we have a saying that although you are hungry or starved, when you sing a song you can rise up. Some kind of unknown potential energy comes out.”

He asked a reporter to describe how Seoul and America compare with North Korea, but he chuckled at a response that included their being more modern and having more cars.

“So you want every car to be jammed, so you’re always late at rush hours?” he said, his English slightly awry. “Do you think all those faces are happy in Seoul?”