JP Floru - The Sun Tyrant

I f I use the real names of the people I met in North Korea, they will not be seen again. And neither will their other halves. Nor their children. Nor their parents. Nor their brothers and sisters. That is how things work down there. I dont think it was particularly wise to put my own name on this book.

North Korea is the only country in the world where the rulers are not only a dynasty, but are also venerated as Gods. North Koreans are made to bow to the statues of their leaders for fear of being sent to a labour camp, and the faades of all public buildings carry gigantic photos of the Great Leaders. Children as young as six are taught in school to hate Americans, the Japanese and whoever else is singled out as a class enemy. During the famine in the late 1990s, international food aid was kept back for the elite and the army while the population was reduced to munching tree bark. The regime continues to build up its nuclear missile programme at great expense while the population starves. The current Great Leader, Kim Jong-un, announces his imminent annihilation of South Korea, the United States and Japan with jocular regularity. There are no human rights. The Western Gregorian calendar has been replaced by the Juche calendar, in which 1912, the year President Kim Il-sung was born, is Year One.

Thankfully, the regime also provides some relative comic relief. In January, the Pyongyang Times claimed that North Koreans had discovered hangover-free alcohol that exudes national flavour without dampening your national fervour in the morning, and the year before, NK News announced that medicines containing extracts from the insam plant could cure SARS and AIDS.

I went to North Korea to run the Pyongyang marathon. Three friends were running it and had asked me to come along. I said yes because travelling to the moon is not available yet. Then I realised they were going for only three days, and that the marathon trip would not include a visit to the Kims Mausoleum, so I switched to a nine-day tour instead. I also decided not to run the marathon myself, but to go along as a mere spectator. I did not want to risk blisters at the start of a tour; and North Korea is not a place where you want to end up in hospital.

Those who know me well all expected me to get into trouble with the authorities. Please dont say or do anything you will regret, my mother begged me. My friend John was nearly in tears, while Jimmy promised he would set up the Free JP Campaign.

It wasnt the best of times to visit the shifty kid in the class, since North Korean leader Kim Jong-un chose this precise moment to test a few ballistic missiles. Most just flopped into the sea as per usual, but Kim called it a great triumph and President Obama promptly signed new sanctions to punish the sanctions-infested pariah state. A few weeks before I left, 21-year-old American student Otto Warmbier was arrested for pinching a propaganda poster from the hotel where we were going to stay. His sentence of fifteen years hard labour caused consternation the world over.

The icing on the cake was Kim Jong-uns announcement a few days before my departure that a new famine was coming (after his announcement, he attended a 1,000-chefs cooking competition). My mother was now calling me every day to dissuade me from going, but my marathon friends and I just made a last-minute dash to the supermarket to fill all the remaining nooks and crannies with chocolate and nutritious bars.

I had not set out to write a book. But even as little as nine days in North Korea gave me such a tsunami of material that I could not resist the challenge.