WHEN Lee Jong Man was growing up in the North Korean city of Hamheung in the mid-1990s, it was an everyday sight to see bodies lying on the ground where people had died of starvation the night before.

“In other smaller places it was much worse, and in my city it wasn’t so bad,” he said, over cheesecake in a coffee shop in the South Korean capital, Seoul. “But for about a year from 1996, you would see them on the streets every morning.”

“They’d be lying on the pavement, or on the subway, and by the end of the day someone would take them away and bury them,” Mr Lee, 24, who defected to South Korea earlier this year, said.

His parents designed clothes in a state-run workshop and usually found ways of getting just enough extra food to hold off starvation. “We saw the bodies there, every day but we just ignored them. We were too busy with out own difficulties,” Mr Lee said. “We didn’t have enough strength to care for other people.”

That was half a decade ago and since then conditions in North Korea have scarcely improved. In the absence of devastating floods and crop failures which caused the 1996 famine, food is more readily available, but everything else is in long-term decline.

According to South Korean and US government analysts, industrial output has shrunk to 15 per cent of its peak, and much of the country’s infrastructure is literally rotting away. Doctors operate by candlelight in hospitals without electricity or running water.

At least 1.5 million, and perhaps as many as 3 million people died in the famine, and hundreds of thousands have illegally slipped over the border to China. Those who are caught in North Korea trying to flee face execution or imprisonment in prison mines; every level of society is permeated by informers and spies who swoop upon complainers or dissenters.

Compared to the present state of North Korea, the East European communist regimes which tumbled in 1989 were in a state of vigorous health. “But it’s still there with 22 million people, with one of the biggest armies in the world, exporting missiles and running a nuclear programme,” a South Korean government official said. “How can it survive? It’s one of the great mysteries of our time.”

One answer is North Korea’s geography, which makes it particularly easy to isolate from the kinds of influences which undermined the Soviet Bloc. Its relatively small population, 22 million, are spread across half of a mountainous peninsula. Sea isolates them to the west and east, the impenetrable demilitarised zone blocks off South Korea, and to the north is authoritarian China, never a breeding ground for revolt.

Unauthorised possession of a short-wave radio is a grave crime in North Korea; the only internet connections are in the innermost sanctums of the capital, Pyongyang. For years before they threw off their government, East Germans had access to West German broadcasts. Apart from select members of the elite, North Koreans can receive nothing other than the official media.

Even if information about the outside world was capable of getting through, would it find anywhere to take root? From birth, North Koreans are subjected to a programme of brainwashing which has as much in common with a religious cult as with traditional communist propaganda. At its heart is a Holy Trinity: the late father of the nation, Kim Il Sung; his son, the present leader, Kim Jong Il; and the holy spirit of the Worker’s Party.

According to Kim Seong Min, a former officer in the North Korean People’s Army who defected to Seoul three years ago, the regime is able to turn even humiliation into a propaganda victory. When bags of rice sent from South Korea started appearing a few years ago, they were presented as the fruits of North Korea’s diplomacy, which had cowed Seoul into providing food aid. “I don’t believe the system will break down while Kim Jong Il is in power,” Mr Kim said. “The propaganda is so powerful, and that kind of education is not easily broken down.”

Extreme physical suffering is such an established part of North Korean history that even the hardships of the past few years may not topple the regime. “It frustrates me when people say that North Korea will change and economic sanctions will eventually work,” Mr Kim he said. “Just because they don’t have TVs and fridges doesn’t mean that the place is going to collapse.”

Travel within the country is restricted, the few phone lines are tapped, and organising dissent is almost impossible. A few years ago, rumours would occasionally trickle out via defectors of small local protests and uprisings. All were reported to have been completely crushed.

“In order for change to happen, people need to be able to express their resistance,” Mr Kim said.

“But thoughts like that were uprooted, before they were even spoken.”

North Korea

Area 46,540 square miles (120,538 square km) Pop 23,414,000 (1999 est) Capital Pyongyang (approx pop, 2,741,260) Infant mortality 22.8/1,000 live births (2002 est) Life expectancy (years) male 58, female 60.6 Pop growth rate 1.6% Pop density 194 per square kilometre (1998) GDP per capita US$440 (1998)

Source: Whitaker’s Almanack, CIA World Factbook

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