Dancing on Bones by Katie Stallard

Author:Katie Stallard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

Heroes

A dictator must instil fear in his people, but if he can compel them to acclaim him he will probably survive longer.

—Frank Dikötter, How to Be a Dictator1

Pyongyang, North Korea

The phone beside my bed rang just after midnight. It was the younger of our two government minders. He said there was going to be a “special event” the next day and we should be ready to leave by 5.30 a.m. He couldn’t tell me anything more, only that it would be “very high security” and we should leave our phones and most of our equipment behind. I took that to mean there was a good chance Kim Jong Un would be there.

I was in Pyongyang to cover Kim’s first Workers’ Party Congress in May 2016. It was an important event. The last one had been held thirty-six years earlier by his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, when he named his son, Kim Jong Il (Kim Jong Un’s father), as his successor. This latest party congress was a chance for the third-generation leader to set out his vision for the country and introduce his first five-year economic plan. But so far the closest we had managed to get to Kim or any of the proceedings was the outside of the building where the congress was being held—or, to be more accurate, the far side of a six-lane highway from the outside of that building. I could see the enormous portraits of the first two Kims smiling down from the high gray walls and the outer cordon of security guards, but that was pretty much it. Our two-person team—me and Sky News camera operator Kevin Sheppard—was accompanied at all times by our two assigned minders, or guides, as they preferred to be called. They slept in our hotel, which was on an island in the middle of the Taedong River, and they came with us every time we left. We wore blue armbands to identify ourselves as journalists to everyone we met as we toured model factory after model factory, and model workers told us how happy they were. “We work eight hours a day and everything is perfect,” one woman told me in a typical response as she operated machinery at a silk factory in the capital.

Inside the factories, enormous propaganda posters urged the workers on to ever-greater feats of production, and the signs on the wall recorded all quotas being met and exceeded. But it was impossible to know what anyone really thought, even as their eyes filled with tears of gratitude for the Kim family during interviews, because my constant companions were always next to me, writing down the names of everyone I spoke to and everything they said.

The roads were deserted as we drove through Pyongyang in the early dawn on the morning of the special event, but the sidewalks were filled with people on foot. They streamed out of the subways and over the bridges, all heading in the same direction, all in their finest clothes. The women wore beautiful silk traditional gowns and the men were dressed in crisp white shirts and dark pants.

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