Transcriber: Blanca Esteban Reviewer: Eunice Tan
Hi, everybody.
Okay. I'm going to be talking today about a holiday in 'the axis of evil'.
My talk is probably going to differ from the other talks you've heard today
because I'm just going to show you photographs from my holidays,
so it's a bit of a glorified holiday slide show.
I have to say, although I'm credited as working for the university,
I did go to North Korea under my own steam;
it wasn't on official university business.
So we should clear that up straightaway.
'Axis of evil' - that's obviously the term that George Bush, the US President,
coined North Korea along with some other countries
who he thought could potentially be harbouring terrorists.
So that's why I've used that -
it's not my own personal thought of North Korea.
Why did I go to North Korea?
Well, I could, really. I guess that was the main reason.
You can only visit North Korea as a tourist if you're in China,
and I happened to be in China last September.
So several hundred pounds later,
I found myself on a flight to Pyongyang.
Anyone can go to North Korea - even Americans as tourists -
apart from spies and journalists.
So if you fall into that category, don't go applying for your visa just yet.
I don't want to talk about the political issues
in terms of what I know about North Korea.
I'm really going to talk about what I saw,
which will be very different to what we read in the papers.
But I wanted to talk about it from my perspective for this.
But I guess a little bit of background is important.
This is North Korea.
The first rule of North Korea is you don't call it 'North Korea':
it's the 'Democratic People's Republic of North Korea'.
But for the purposes of this talk,
I'll just call it North Korea - it's a lot quicker.
This is North Korea.
North Korea and South Korea, the Korean Peninsula,
have been invaded thousands of times in their history,
annexed by Japan in 1910,
and then at the end of World War II when Japan was defeated -
which the North Koreans will tell you they defeated;
they never mention the atomic bomb -
it was under the control of the Kim family,
which it has been to the present day.
We obviously had the atrocious war,
1950 to 1953,
so you had the Soviets and the Chinese supporting the North
and the Americans supporting the South.
That war is still going on today although a treaty has been signed.
But in effect, the war is still going on.
And the countries border each other on the 38th parallel,
which is the most heavily fortified border in the world.
So, going to North Korea.
This is us, the group, arriving at Pyongyang International Airport.
We flew over on a Russian aeroplane -
so old, in fact, that it's illegal to fly it in European airspace.
(Laughter)
But it was a very smooth flight; I can't complain.
The air stewardesses on the flight were Malaysian, not North Koreans,
and they were all in the in-flight safety video as well, doubling up there.
We had a very nice chicken microwaved sandwich,
in case you're wondering,
and were given The Pyongyang Times,
which is the English newspaper that comes out of North Korea.
It had lots of stories about what Kim Jong-un was up to.
Incidentally, the in-flight safety video
was accompanied to a Casio version of The Cranberries' song, 'In Dreams',
so you can imagine.
And we also had a classical group -
like a state-sanctioned Spice Girls -
that was the in-flight film.
So we met our tour guide and our bus driver, Mr Lee.
He had five stars on his bust,
which meant that he had successfully driven 5,000 km without injuring anybody.
I was told -
I don't know if I should say this -
there was an incident with a cyclist.
But that was brushed under the carpet.
(Laughter)
So here we are in Pyongyang.
I actually arrived in the dark,
and I'd love to have shown you Pyongyang in the dark,
but it would be a blank screen
because all the electricity gets turned off at 9 p.m.
So I've taken one in the day so you can see what it looks like -
very much like Leeds, if you've been to Leeds.
Pyongyang looks like Leeds.
It even has the grey mist that surrounds Leeds -
also surrounds Pyongyang, much of North Korea.
That's the Taedong River there, and there was lots of these boats
that were just dredging the river continuously throughout my stay.
One thing I loved about Pyongyang
was the massive building you can see in the background of the photograph
that's a bit of a white elephant
because no one would talk about this building.
I've done some research:
it's the largest concrete building ever built;
it was scheduled to open as a hotel 30 years ago;
7,000 rooms, 5 revolving restaurants -
North Koreans love a revolving restaurant, I'll give them that -
I went to one in the hotel that we stayed at.
But the building will never open because it's sinking on its foundations.
So every time we asked to get closer to take a picture or to go and visit it,
we were just met with a blank response.
Okay, so this is the hotel we stayed at -
the Yanggakdo International Hotel, a very pleasant hotel.
It has 1,000 rooms.
I would say probably only about three floors were open -
you could tell from the lights on.
It's on an island in the middle of the river,
so it's perfect for tourists because they can't get in or out
unless there's somebody with them.
They had this lovely - well, I say lovely -
but they had a turtle in reception, which I actually thought was dead,
but on the third day, I saw bubbles come out of its mouth,
so it wasn't.
(Laughter)
Okay, so the first day, we went to Kumsusan Palace of the Sun.
Now, this is where Kim Il-sung, the Eternal President -
he's called that because, essentially, he's still ruling North Korea
although he's been dead for many years.
The people genuinely believe that he is ruling from -
well, from death, basically.
But he's lying in state,
and we saw him and Kim Jong-il in this massive, massive -
it's a shame I couldn't take photographs in here -
it was absolutely incredible.
After we saw their bodies
and bowed three times from three different locations to them
and all statues of them within the palace,
we were then taken to a room where we saw the trains that they travelled on;
their car, which was a Mercedes-Benz on a couple of breeze blocks;
and then the yacht which they travelled on -
and they even had a papier mâché river
so we could tell it would've floated in times gone past.
We then went into a room
to see all the thousands of honorary doctorates they'd got -
most of them from Peru.
Sadly, none from the University of Birmingham.
But I did find a stone that was given to them from the County of Derbyshire.
So if anybody knows anything about that, I'd love to know more afterwards.
These are some women here in traditional dress.
Lots of these women would dress up like this for special occasions,
and going to paying their respects to the Eternal President and Dear Leader,
Kim Jong-il,
is a real big thing for them,
and we had to go in a tie and a shirt.
And these are dresses that most of them make themselves.
A lot of synthetic fibre goes into the making of one of those,
and yeah, I wouldn't go near one of those with a match.
(Laughter)
Unfortunately, by showing you this slide
I've actually broken the law in North Korea,
and I do apologise for that,
so I hope there is no one here from the secret service in the DPRK.
The reason it's illegal
is that picture at the top of the statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.
You're not allowed to take a photograph of the Kims in any form
unless you have the whole body -
so from the head right to the toe.
So therefore, I wanted to bring a newspaper back -
some colleagues had asked me to bring a newspaper from North Korea.
I wasn't allowed because the tour guide worried
that I would fold an image of the Kims to fit it in my suitcase,
and it's illegal.
So we weren't allowed to bring anything home that had their image.
This is the Grand Monument again.
It's another place where people will go and pay their respects to the Kim dynasty.
And as you can see here on these pictures,
people are queuing up and they were very solemn.
For them, it was a very emotional experience,
and we very much respected that.
Next, we went to the Fatherland Liberation War Museum.
The picture in the top left-hand corner is a massive row of tanks -
American tanks that were captured -
and they were very proud of this,
that they'd captured them from the Americans.
That's the main museum on the right.
Unfortunately, I couldn't take pictures inside,
but I can assure you it looks like a Las Vegas casino from about 1960s,
not really what you would expect.
If you've been to the Imperial War Museum, it didn't have the same kind of feel.
This is the USS Pueblo here.
This is the only US captured ship
that's on display not in the US, obviously,
and the only one that's a tourist attraction as well.
Again, they were very proud about this.
It must be difficult for an American tourist to visit North Korea
because you're basically told all the time how awful you are.
From a British person, I couldn't really relate to that,
but I imagine it was very difficult.
That was our tour guide.
Most of the museums we went to
had a military guide that would show us around.
She's all smiles there,
but she was very, very serious in the museum itself.
We were there over National Day
in September,
the 9th of September -
65 years since the DPRK was founded.
This picture doesn't really capture what we saw.
We weren't allowed at the main parade -
the ones you've seen on television with the tanks, missiles, and the like.
This was the supplementary parade.
And 10,000 soldiers drove past us on trucks,
waving with bayonets, rocket launchers, and all sorts.
These weren't part of the main army -
they were train drivers, bus drivers, you know.
And we saw, obviously, the obligatory female soldiers in stilettos as well -
they were part of this parade.
And it was very euphoric; it was very exciting.
But just to put it into context,
it was about 10% of the British Army that we saw,
and these were just supplementary soldiers.
We then went to the park.
Now, I really enjoyed this
because I got to dance with some North Koreans.
In fact, there were two women vying for my attention.
You can see the woman there in the sort of light green
and the one next to her on the right.
They were kind of like my dance rivals.
And it was amazing because it was a real good chance for us to socialise
with what we were led to believe were normal people who lived in Pyongyang.
But at the back of my mind, I was thinking,
to live in Pyongyang, you have to be invited -
you can't just move there; you're invited by the government -
so these are senior people in senior roles.
And although everyone was happy,
and we couldn't really talk since we didn't share a language,
but it did feel quite genuine,
although there was still a part of me thinking,
'Was this a set-up?'
And that continued throughout the trip:
you never were really sure whether you were in real life
or some kind of dystopian Disneyland.
Not much to say about this, the Arch of Triumph,
other than it's 10 metres taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
That was a recurring theme with the monuments we saw in North Korea:
they were taller, bigger, fatter, wider than their Western counterparts.
It's made up of 27,000 blocks,
and that equates to one block for every day of the life of Kim Il-sung.
Now, if you do ever get the chance to go to North Korea,
I would say go in September
because this thing, this Arirang Mass Games,
was the most incredible thing I've seen in my life.
It takes a Eurovision half-time show and times it by about 3 million.
(Laughter)
'Arirang' is a ballad shared between North and South Korea.
It's a very sad story, similar to Romeo and Juliet,
and off the back of that, they've created this show,
which now is very, obviously, highly politicised -
looks at North Korea's relationship with the world,
particularly with Russia and China -
and it actually features 100,000 performers.
They perform three nights a week in August and September time.
And the screen at the back,
when I walked into the arena, I thought it was an LED screen,
but each one of those sort of pixels is a child holding a card.
And they would flip them over at incredible speed
because it was animated - it looked like you were watching a TV screen.
So there's 20,000 children there,
and in the foreground, there were up to 80,000 performers -
about 2,000 professionals,
but the rest were volunteers who would practise for months on end.
And regardless of what you think of North Korea,
they can really put on a show.
It was absolutely incredible.
(Laughter)
So we went to the Korean Demilitarized Zone.
As you can see on the far, that's South Korea -
not a lot was happening there.
It was talked about quite a lot during the trip,
and the North definitely talk about this kind of reunification process,
and they talk about it 'within our lifetime'.
They definitely want to be reunified with the South -
they share their folklore; they share a history.
And it was very interesting being there -
that they're so close but so separate at the same time.
And, you know, for example, even in South Korea as well,
like we pay VAT, they're paying for a tax
that will pay for whatever happens when reunification comes.
So there's things happening behind the scenes
for something to happen,
but the problem is
each county is not willing to concede to the other country's regime,
and that's where the issue is.
We came back from the Demilitarized Zone on the Youth Hero Motorway.
A few years ago, all the universities in North Korea were closed,
50,000 students went to build a brand new motorway,
and it was amazing.
We were on this motorway -
it was like the M6 Toll without the extortionate prices -
for 200 yards.
And they'd been building this for two years, we were told.
You're probably not interested in railway museums; I like trains, myself.
The reason why I'm showing this
is most of the museums we went to visit didn't have any -
they weren't really about what you were there to see
or thought you were there to see.
I thought I was going to see some trains in a railway museum,
but of course, it was about how the Kims used the railway network,
not what the railway did for the country.
Most of the museums were like this.
We went to an agricultural museum,
and we saw a cabinet of Wellington boots
just because one of the Kims had looked at them.
And this was massive -
it was probably about the same size of this curtain -
and it was just listing all the train journeys
that Kim Jong-il had made during his lifetime,
(Laughter)
which were quite a lot because he was afraid of flying.
You can see there he travelled through Russia a lot on the trains
because he didn't want to fly.
This was the Children's Palace.
Exceptional - literally went from room to room to room,
and it was child genius after child genius after child genius,
and they were all singing about their praise for the Kim dynasty.
The Pyongyang Metro, the deepest metro system in the world,
that doubles as a nuclear bomb shelter should they ever require one.
The rolling stock, incidentally, is from East Berlin,
so it was quite weird going into a railway carriage
with pictures of the Kims there at the back,
as most buildings and rooms did,
but the graffiti on the windows was all German.
(Laughter)
They were beautifully decorated.
I don't know if anybody's been on the Moscow underground,
but it was very similar to that in terms of how beautiful it was.
This was something that I saw a couple of times:
sort of people doing - well, not very much, really.
This lady was cutting grass with scissors.
North Koreans work six days a week.
Sunday is the holiday,
but most of them volunteer to work for the state on the Sunday.
So they end up doing jobs like this,
and they volunteer to do that,
so we were told.
We went to the Grand People's Study House - the main library.
They had a very extensive English language collection, we were told,
although I only saw 'A History of German Shepherd Dogs'
and 'How to Go Yachting'.
And we also went to the music library.
You can see down here there was like about 100 boom boxes from the 80's,
and they proudly brought out this Beatles CD.
I asked if they had anything else,
and I was told that they didn't have time to get it out.
This is another famous view of Pyongyang.
This is where the main parades happen, if you've seen it on the television,
with the missiles and the tanks,
and it's where a lot of activity happens on a grand scale.
In the background is the Juche Tower,
one of the only things that was lit up at night in Pyongyang.
And that celebrates the Juche ideology,
which is their form of communism which mixes in the personality cult.
They have the sickle, the hammer,
but they also have the paintbrush, which is the intellectual.
And this is from the Juche Tower.
Looking back, you can see the giant concrete hotel there,
and then you've got these new buildings.
Things are happening in North Korea.
We watch these documentaries on television,
and I always feel that some of them are there to scare us.
Because the things that I saw - there were cars there -
I mean, there weren't a lot of cars, but I did see cars there.
And there was lots of building work going on.
I mean, by our architecture standards, they don't look very much,
but seeing what else we saw in North Korea, these looked amazing.
And they're housing about 200,000 people, we were told.
So, you know,
so something is happening there.
And I think one of the reasons why I decided to go to North Korea
was because I really do hope that things change there, you know.
And people say, 'Well, is it a bit sick, really, that you wanted to go?'
And I say, 'Well, no, because I'm here now talking to you about it
and you're going to think about it and talk to other people about it.'
So it's about spreading that knowledge and those ideas as well
and sharing that with other people.
And, you know, North Korea at the moment
is a country that's really living in the past,
but it's got a really interesting future,
and I'm sure it's one that we're all going to be looking at very closely indeed.
Thank you.
(Applause)