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\"Starving and deluded – yet North Korea is ready for war
Sue Lloyd-Roberts in Pyongyang

SITTING in a leather chair in one of Pyongyang’s smartest hotels, the economic adviser to the North Korean government was enjoying giving me a lecture. “Our country has reached new heights of economic achievement,” said Ri Ki-song, “thanks to the strength and self-reliance of the North Korean people and to our plentiful natural resources.”

The room was suddenly plunged into darkness. It was another of the city’s daily power cuts.

The blackout might have cast a shadow on the country’s “new heights of economic achievement” but Ri continued without hesitation. “And, what is more, we are meeting all our people’s needs.”

Barely able to see my interviewee, I gave up. What was the point of reminding him that the World Food Programme reports that a third of his people are starving and there is so little power that half the factories in the country are not working?

During my visit — the first of this nature by a BBC TV crew to the world’s most secretive and isolated country in six years — I found a people in denial and suffering delusions. George Orwell would have felt at home here. Indeed, defectors from North Korea have been known to ask, referring to his dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four: “How did he know our country so well?”

While the people starve, their government tells them they are the “happiest on earth”. They are taught that they have “nothing to envy” in the outside world. They are expected to worship their Big Brother, Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader and founder of the country, as a god.

While Kim, who died in 1994, is president for life and the afterlife, he defers to his son, Kim Jong-il, the Dear Leader, for the day-to-day running of the country. The Dear Leader, 68, recently had a stroke but has three sons to call on to ensure that the hereditary communist dictatorship of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will continue.

Curious to discover what they learn at Pyongyang University’s elite language school, I visited an English-language class. Somewhat disconcertingly, they had chosen hand grenades as the topic of the day for their conversation class — but I was impressed by their English.

“Thanks to the Great Leader, we are allowed to watch British and — even though America is our enemy — American films,” said one 20-year-old. “Like The Sound of Music.” Apart from the Great Leader, whom does he admire? “I admire many world leaders,” he answered, “like Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.”

Stalin? Mao? Do they believe they are still alive? Probably. With giant portraits of the Great Leader and Dear Leader on every corner and goose-stepping soldiers marching down the streets, North Korea is mired in the last century. Its versions of Mao’s Little Red Book — the prolific works of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il — are on sale at every bookstall. And, 60 miles south of Pyongyang, North Korea has its own Iron Curtain and festering cold war.

The demilitarised zone — 155 miles long and 2½ miles across and with hundreds of thousands of troops based on either side — is the most fortified border in the world. Yet it was surprisingly quiet on the day I visited, considering that the two countries have been brought to the brink of war over the sinking of a South Korean naval vessel, the Cheonan, earlier this year. Forty-six crew members died in the attack, which, independent investigators concluded, was made with a North Korean torpedo.

“It’s a Sunday. We all take a rest on a Sunday,” explained my guide at the border, Captain Choe Song-il. “A good day to invade?” I suggested. “It was a Sunday, June 25, 1950, when the Americans invaded us,” the captain replied, “and if they try again, we’ll give them an even greater beating than they got in the 1950s.”

Orwell would recognise the rewriting of history. It was the North Koreans who crossed the line in 1950 and triggered a bloody three-year war.

What is to explain North Korea’s latest act of aggression: the sinking of the Cheonan? Choe, like all the North Korean officials I spoke to, dismissed the country’s involvement as mere speculation. But, he said: “We shall retaliate with force to any aggression by South Korea or the Americans. We shall fight back.”

Until two years ago, North Korea liked to posture while being propped up by its neighbours, China and South Korea. It was sent tons of aid by South Korea, which wanted to maintain the status quo and to keep its 23m people north of the border. Unification with its starving, seemingly deluded cousins to the north is not what South Korea needs. In 2008, the newly elected, conservative government of Lee Myung-bak stopped sending the aid in retaliation for North Korea’s nuclear energy and weapons-testing programmes.

“In the past, North Korea got whatever it asked for — fertiliser, food, oil, everything,” said a former senior officer in the Korean people’s army who has defected to the South. “When the South Korean government stopped sending aid, the North Koreans got angry.” Lieutenant Im Chun-yong believes that the sinking of the Cheonan was intended to show the world, and South Korea and America in particular, that the Dear Leader and his people will not be bullied or ignored. They want respect.

Will they be satisfied now that their action has sent Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, on a frenetic tour of the region — to Tokyo, Beijing and Seoul — to try to defuse a dangerous situation? If the reaction of America and its allies becomes excessive, Pyongyang has threatened “all-out war”. It has an army of 1m and 800 ballistic missiles that can allegedly reach not only Seoul but Washington. North Korea’s recent missile testing, however, has gone awry: one missile crashed into the sea a few seconds after takeoff.

The rest of the world can only hope that, like boasting in the dark of economic achievements, North Korea’s threat of “all-out war” is yet more posturing and delusion; that the sinking of the Cheonan was an attempt at a big splash and that business-as-usual will resume.\" www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article7140284.ece (I realise I'm reposting the link, it's just to show the source in my post)