A SONNET by Percy Bysshe Shelley, first published in 1818, is a warning to any despot who imagines the tide of history will simply lap harmlessly at his feet. Two centuries ago, the “shattered visage” of “Ozymandias, king of kings” had much to say to Europe’s absolutist monarchs, clutching the arms of their increasingly wobbly thrones.
But the statue’s “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” also cast a shadow over any contemporary dictator. Perhaps an even longer one: Ozymandias is a Greek name for Ramesses II or Ramesses the Great, a pharaoh whose rule encompassed much of present day Egypt, Syria and Libya.
However, if there is one state that recreates the rule of a pharaoh, or at least that of a God-king, in the early 21st century, it is North Korea.
The only way to properly appreciate what this entails is to hear the testimonies of its exiles. In recent years, tens of thousands of them have swum or waded out of North Korea across the Yalu and Tumen, two rivers that straddle the Chinese frontier. A few have made it as far as Europe.
One of these is Kim Joo-il, a former captain in the Korean People’s Army (KPA). One night in August 2005, he pitched forwards into the shallow waters of the Tumen, swimming frantically ashore and then scurrying through the darkness on the far side to avoid Chinese border guards. Thereafter, with the help of an NGO, he travelled through Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, finally reaching Britain in 2007.
A few weeks ago, I met him in New Malden, a town in the borough of Kingston Upon Thames, not far from Wimbledon. London’s Korean population has tended to gravitate towards New Malden and Korean restaurants, cafes and evangelical churches were in abundance as Mr Kim, a slight man in his late 30s, strode up to greet me.
Sitting in a very English terraced house, in the presence of two fellow refugees, he described the society he had fled. For decades, North Korea has been cocooned within a Father-Son dynastic cult, although the primacy of the former is never in doubt. Kim Jong-Il is only nominally North Korea’s premier. His father, Kim Il-Sung, who died in 1994, is “President for Eternity” under the Constitution.
The cult emerged following the 1950-3 Korean War, a stupendous paroxysm of violence that pitched Kim, with the tacit backing of Stalin, against the newly formed United Nations. After three years during which, the use of atomic weapons was twice contemplated by Washington, North Korea’s countryside was a wasteland. Its cities had undergone saturation bombing by American B-29s on a scale to match Tokyo or Dresden a few years before. The peninsula was still divided along roughly its pre-war borders. Three million Koreans were dead.
Now Kim-Il Sung had a chance to engineer a society where his “wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command” would be framed on the wall of every room and sculpted in bronze on every major thoroughfare. Deftly playing China and the Soviet Union off against each other and extracting the maximum aid from both, Kim nonetheless termed his State ideology Juche (self reliance). The capital city, Pyongyang, arose from a state of flattened blackness to become a giant shrine to the “Great Leader” and his son, Jong-Il, the “Dear Leader”. His subjects’ lives were given over to adulation. Even visitors from other communist nations were unnerved by its scale and volume.
But, as related by one of Mr Joo-il’s companions, a 60-year old named Mr Park, adjectives like “Stalinist” or “communist” simply do not do justice to North Korea. The Juche ideology could be considered a form of mutated Confucianism, characterised
by ancestor worship and the rule of an authoritarian patriarch.
Mass hysteria swept through Pyongyang when the patriarch died. “I thought I could not live without him,” admitted Mr Park, speaking through a translator. His tone was remarkably restrained, I thought, for a man who, late in his life, must realise he has given most of it to a lie. (Mr Park worked in State propaganda).
Things got worse under Kim Jong-Il. Under the “Great” Leader, there were at least regular harvests and electricity. In the 1990s chronic fuel shortages caused North Korea’s industry to atrophy, while its farmland was devastated by flooding. Famine claimed up to three million lives between 1996 and 1999. Another of Mr Joo-il’s companions, also an ex-KPA soldier, recalled how, during those years, in his native province of Hamyong, he was afraid to leave his home after dusk, lest he be killed and eaten.
The North Korean exiles feel encouraged by recent events in the Middle East. But, reckoned Mr Park, Kim Jong-Il would be “three or four times as cruel as Gadafy,” in the face of any attempted North Korean spring. He also has some truly infernal agents to unleash if the masses ever rose in revolt: mustard gas, phosgene, anthrax and bubonic plague.
For now though, the threat of incarceration in penal labour camps, known as kwan-li-so, keeps dissent, in word and deed, if not in thought, at bay. Amnesty International and other groups put the current number of detainees in the kwan-li-so at 200,000.
It was to draw attention to these mountain camps, to which detainees are accompanied by their families, that Kim Joo-il and a few other North Koreans held a vigil outside the House of Commons the next day. I stood with them, watching as Londoners and tourists ambled past, a few taking mild interest in their modest stand and leaflets. They have since followed this up with vigils outside the North Korean and Chinese embassies. The work is not without risks; North Korean agents were recently accused of plotting to poison Park Sang-hak, a defector engaged in a democracy awareness campaign on the border between the two Koreas.
Over the years, the exiles of many a despot, those of Gadafy’s Libya included, have campaigned in this dogged fashion, perhaps at times fearing inwardly that it was a waste of time. They can be reassured the fate of the pharaoh, Ozymandias: once ruling as a God-King, now existing only as a “colossal wreck, boundless and bare.”