North Korea News Agency's Rose-Colored Glasses 


      February 20, 2002
      North Korea News Agency's Rose-Colored Glasses
      By JAMES BROOKE
      OKYO, Feb. 19 — Minutes after President Bush's plane touched down in Seoul 
      today, North Korea's news agency sought to upstage him with an amazing 
      report that two halos had just appeared in the sky above the legendary 
      mountain birthplace of Kim Jong Il.
      "Inhabitants were delighted to see a rare cloud in the shape of 
      Kimjongilia," the state news agency added, referring to an artificially 
      bred flower named after Mr. Kim, North Korea's leader. "Even the sky above 
      the Mount Paektu area seemed to be decorated with beautiful flowers" said 
      the dispatch, written 200 miles away in Pyongyang, the capital.
      In what the news agency reported as divine coincidence, on Mr. Kim's 60th 
      birthday last Saturday, Mount Paektu marked its 60th day of snow cover, 
      which had accumulated to exactly 60 centimeters.
      Churning out of old-fashioned news tickers in Japan or read on the 
      Internet (www.kcna.co.jp), the Korean Central News Agency provides a 
      window on the strange, secretive world of North Korea, a totalitarian 
      government that Mr. Bush lumps together with Iran and Iraq in "the axis of 
      evil."
      Through the dispatches of the agency, which is controlled by the ruling 
      Korean Workers Party, an image emerges of an Asian Sparta, a highly 
      militarized, ultra-nationalistic government that seeks to inculcate 
      worship of Mr. Kim. Readers learn that Mr. Bush is "a moral leper," who 
      leads the "empire of the devil." "After flying into South Korea with many 
      war servants and warmongers," the agency said, he is "to examine a plan 
      for a war against the North."
      Reflecting the agency's praise of Mr. Kim's "army-centered leadership," 
      North Korea devotes an estimated one quarter of its economic activity to 
      the military, fielding the fourth largest standing army in the world, 1.2 
      million soldiers.
      "The North Korean propaganda machine does not need to be taken too 
      seriously — it is on auto pilot," Selig S. Harrison, author of a new book, 
      "Korean Endgame" (Princeton University Press, 2002) said from Washington. 
      Noting that the news agency issued a dispatch condemning terrorism after 
      the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, he added, "When it winds down, 
      that is significant because it means that someone from above has reached 
      out."
      Li Yang Su, KCNA's distributor in Japan, said in an interview: "They are, 
      in a word, bashing Bush very hard. They feel Mr. Bush is stifling them, or 
      aiming at the extinction of North Korea." 
      But with the latest James Bond movie being filmed with "North Korea" 
      scenes, the agency's approach to news contributes to the reclusive 
      nation's "international villain" stereotype.
      North Koreans, whose only access to information is from state sources, 
      will not learn that the United States is the largest food and fuel donor 
      to North Korea.
      In the late 1990's, under Mr. Kim's leadership, a famine created by bad 
      weather, a state farming system and a cutoff of Soviet subsidies killed as 
      many as two million people, or almost 10 percent of the population. Today, 
      the United Nations World Food Program, which helps feed 30 percent of 
      North Korea's people, appealed for more money, saying that with pledges 
      for only a quarter of the campaign's $216 million goal, aid would be cut 
      off in early March.
      The news agency did not mention that today, reporting that Mr. Kim has 
      pledged to "build a powerful socialist country where national power is 
      strong, everything prospers and people have nothing to desire more in the 
      world."
      Mr. Kim's birthday festivities included a garden show. In Pyongyang, the 
      news agency reports, 500,000 people have visited the show. Displaying an 
      enthusiasm that does not seem to extend to growing food, the agency 
      reported that "80 organizations across the country presented more than 
      14,300 potted Kimjongilias," many coming from the more than 120 
      Kimilsungia-Kimjongilia greenhouses built across the country in recent 
      years.


      Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information