Follow the leader (continued) BY JONATHAN WATTS

NORTH KOREA has always been fond of bellicose hyperbole, but in the last year, the United States has been unable to resist engaging it in a war of words. George W. Bush included North Korea in the "axis of evil" and publicly stated that he "loathed" Kim Jong Il. Pyongyang then announced in October that it had not, as it had promised in 1994, halted its nuclear-weapons program. And the bad news kept coming. North Korea reopened the Yongbyon nuclear reactor in December, kicked out international inspectors at New Year, and withdrew from the nuclear-nonproliferation treaty in January — all of which renewed Western suspicions about its nuclear ambitions and sparked international condemnation.

America’s response — including cuts to vital fuel-oil supplies and food aid — seems only to have confirmed North Korea’s image of itself as a fortress being starved into submission by a malicious outside world. This siege mentality is undoubtedly useful for North Korean leaders who would otherwise have to answer difficult questions about the country’s shattered economy. Under Kim Jong Il’s "military first" policy, everything is subordinate to national defense. Pyongyang is filled with military posters, and each morning its residents wake to the sound of martial music. Primary-school children are taught songs such as "Little Tank Rushes Forward."

But for all the tough talk, a generation of North Koreans is being physically stunted and developmentally damaged due to malnutrition — and if it is true that an army marches on its stomach, then North Korea’s military is not going to get very far. Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans are believed to have died from starvation at the end of the 1990s; a few who managed to escape into China reported that people were dropping dead in the streets. The situation was starting to improve, thanks to the World Food Program (WFP), which feeds more than a quarter of North Korea’s 22 million people: since 1998, chronic malnutrition has fallen from 62 percent to 42 percent, while the proportion of underweight children has dropped from 61 percent to 21 percent.

But these gains are in danger of being wiped out because donations of food, fuel, and medicine have almost dried up since the start of the nuclear crisis last October. No government will admit that there is a connection between politics and humanitarian aid, but the United States — usually the biggest donor of food to the North — ceased offering food once the crisis began. (Late February, in a conciliatory gesture to South Korea, the United States resumed delivery, but at less than a third the volume it provided in 2002.) Japan, an important provider in the past, has given nothing for more than a year. Even in Europe, which is still supplying grain, it is becoming harder for governments to justify providing assistance to a country so out of step with global norms.

The WFP has thus been forced to ax support for three million people and reduce rations for 3.2 million of the most needy, including babies, orphans, lactating women, and the elderly. Schoolchildren must now get by on 300 grams of food a day, compared with 500 grams in the past. In South Hamgyong Province, one child in two is stunted, and one in eight suffers from wasting or acute malnutrition. Nationwide, one-third of mothers are malnourished and anemic. "The crisis is not over. If the UN can’t provide more medicine and food — and quickly — we will see malnutrition rates rise again, undoing much of the progress that has been made," warns James Morris, WFP executive director.

WEEKS BEFORE I arrived in Pyongyang, I had requested a visit to hospitals and orphanages in some of the worst-affected parts of the country. And though you’d think that appealing to Western charity would serve the regime, my handlers say they are unaware of any such request. Instead, they decide I should visit the General Hospital of Koryo Medicine, a showpiece institution for traditional healing. Here I am shown remarkably healthy-looking patients in perfectly starched and ironed outfits receiving treatment by acupuncture, moxibustion, cupping, and massage.

The deputy director, Hyun Chul, a hearty fellow to whom I take an immediate dislike, boasts that the hospital — established, of course, by Kim Jong Il — helped the nation through a period of crisis when Western medicine ran out. Korean spirit, he says, is more important than physical well-being. "A lack of food and energy does not really affect our people’s health," he says.

He leads me through dark corridors decorated with anti-American posters and some of the grotesque atrocity pictures I’d already seen at the Fatherland Liberation Museum. "Isn’t a hospital a rather odd place to be encouraging people to hate and kill each other?" I venture. Mr. Hyun doesn’t blink. "Our people are ready to fight to the last for a final victory. It doesn’t matter if you are a doctor, a teacher, or a scientist; if you are called by Kim Jong Il, you must change into an army uniform and get ready to fight."

"How prepared are you to take up a gun?" I ask.

"I am a crack shot," he grins. "If I fire 100 bullets, all 100 hit the target."

Such pride may be the death of North Korea. "The situation in the Northeast [part of North Korea] is worse than the Horn of Africa or Chechnya," says one aid worker. "I have never seen children suffering so badly from malnutrition. The growth of children has been stunted to such a degree that 11-year-olds look like six-year-olds. Generations of North Koreans will be mentally retarded."

Even in Pyongyang, people live in wretched conditions. In the winter, the temperature can dip below zero, and electricity is in such short supply that the government has closed the Children’s Palace — a cultural centerpiece — because it cannot heat the building. At the elite Kim Il Sung University, tomorrow’s diplomats and politicians are forced to study in scarves and overcoats. Even the energy ministry has no heat, and its officials say many of the city’s high-rise apartment complexes also have no power for elevators, heat, or water. "You can imagine the suffering of people who live on the 20th and 30th floor," says Kim Myong Chol, a director of the ministry of coal and electricity industries. "The very old, the very young, and the weak are worst affected. It is an agony to our people."

O Yong Il, external director of the Economic Promotion Committee, says shortages of electricity mean machine-tool factories are able to run at only 60 to 70 percent of capacity, and the furnaces at steel and iron works are not functioning. "It is hurting people in their daily lives," he says. "Shops and factories are not producing the things people need."

Under the 1994 "Agreed Framework" deal brokered by Jimmy Carter, North Korea promised to mothball its suspect nuclear plant in Yongbyon in return for two modern light-water reactors and better diplomatic and trade relations. It was, many in the Bush administration now believe, a fantastic piece of blackmail that rewarded North Korea’s "bad behavior."

But the gloom of Pyongyang tells another side of the story. The light-water reactors were supposed to have provided 250 megawatts of power by this year, but construction is years behind schedule and now looks like it will never be completed. Until the work was finished, the United States was slated to provide 500,000 tons of fuel oil, but this was cut last November.

Blaming the United States for isolating North Korea, the electricity director, Kim Myong Chol, says that cuts to the country’s oil imports are creating serious problems, and his country plans to build five reactors that together will be capable of producing 255 megawatts of electricity.

This plan has put Pyongyang on a collision course with Washington, which suspects North Korea will use the nuclear plants to enrich uranium in order to build nuclear weapons for its army and to sell on the international market. That may be so, but North Korea’s energy needs are undeniable. Satellite pictures of Asia at night show blazing lights in Japan, South Korea, and China, but a black hole in North Korea. The streets of Pyongyang are so dark that this capital city has become the perfect place for stargazing.

The contrast with the dynamic, modern, information-rich nation south of the border could not be more striking. It is brought home to me in one of the few permitted churches, where the parson has to submit his sermons to the censors a month in advance. The day I attend happens to coincide with a rare visit by a group of choristers from Seoul. The Southerners look plump, expensively dressed, and happy — cracking jokes and taking pictures with digital cameras and video recorders. By comparison, the Northern congregation looks frail, cold, and anxious. "It was heartbreaking to see the suffering of our brothers and sisters," says one of the Southern visitors.

ON FEBRUARY 15, the day before Kim Jong Il’s 61st birthday, I head back to the demilitarized zone, and onward to Seoul, and from there to Tokyo, where I now live. At the only service station on the road from Pyongyang, the staff rehearses a song called "General Kim Jong Il, Please Don’t Travel the Snowy Road," which implores their leader not to work too hard. Tomorrow, children at orphanages and hospitals will get extra rations, as will the 200,000 prisoners — about one percent of the population — inside the country’s brutal "re-education camps."

Oddly, I feel more calm at the DMZ than I have all week. Here, in the border area where the North’s million-man army comes eyeball-to-eyeball with 600,000 South Korean soldiers and 37,000 US troops, tension has been the norm for so long that the nuclear crisis appears to be just another incident. "If the Americans keep on squeezing us, do you think we’ll sit back and take it?" asks Lt. Colonel Ri Gwang Hol. "If they attack us, we’ll attack America in a most unexpected way."

But, he says, his main priority is not to mobilize for war, but to prepare for the "Great Leader’s" birthday. When the day comes, the Workers Party newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, reports the appearance of glorious rainbow clouds in the Mount Paektu range: "It seems it is the magic of heaven that on the birthday of the Great Leader, this phenomenon appears." North Korean television hails the discovery of a rare albino raccoon, which it says signifies momentous times ahead for the country and its leader.

I leave the country the next day with a deep sense of foreboding. In a week, I’ve been taken to about a dozen places and introduced to almost 20 people, but I’ve not found a single ideological crack, not a hint that anyone wanted a different life, that a single person would flinch from death to protect the beloved general. This is, no doubt, just what my hosts want me to believe: that North Korea is a country to be feared and respected rather than loved and pitied. Certainly, after a paranoid week in Pyongyang, it seems only natural to me that Kim Jong Il would want to build nuclear plants and missiles, not despite but because of international condemnation.

And — short of a war — what could stop him? Outside pressure only strengthens the North Korean siege mentality. And internally? Well ... one day, regime change might occur in North Korea, but for now it is impossible to imagine that it will ever be initiated from within. Too many people have taken part in too many birthday celebrations for too long.

Reprinted with permission from Mother Jones magazine, ©2003, Foundation for National Progress. Jonathan Watts has covered the Korean Peninsula for seven years for the Guardian. A 35-year-old Londoner now living in Tokyo, he first visited Pyongyang in May 2002.