Covering North Korea

The first time I met LaBouyer was on the campus of UC Berkeley, where he is a senior political science major. Hanging on his lime-green polo shirt, just above his heart, was a Kim Il-Sung pin.

LaBouyer is one of three people who run the Korean Friendship Association. The KFA is an international organization, recognized and supported by the North Korean government, the purpose of which is to tell what Labouyer describes repeatedly as “the other side of the story.” As International Organization Secretary and editor of Lodestar, the KFA’s monthly newsletter, the political science major is the group’s primary storyteller.

What is LaBouyer’s version of the North Korean tale? “The situation was a heck of a lot better than it’s portrayed in the U.S.,” he told me, recalling his first arrival in Pyongyang.

Press restrictions? “Not as bad as people think." (He saw American journalists doing pretty much as they pleased in the Pyongyang train station.)

All that talk of famine? “Outdated.” (He saw store shelves stacked with food while taking a spontaneous walk with a tour guide in the town of Samjiyon near the Chinese border.)

What drew LaBouyer to North Korea is what draws many Americans to the country: fascination with, and curiosity about, history’s last Stalinist state. But Labouyer’s curiosity had another dimension.

LaBouyer (far left) and other members of the KFA with Yang Hyong-sop, vice-president of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly of the DPRK in August 2005

LaBouyer has hovered on the far left of politics since he was a pre-teen. The child of poor parents, he discovered Marx at 12 years old, felt an immediate affinity, and joined United States branch of the Communist Party soon after. He encountered the KFA website while surfing for information on North Korea in 2001 and joined that group, too. He rose quickly in the ranks of the KFA, but at the expense of his relationship with the Party.

“CPUSA has gone out of its way to distance itself from North Korea because it’s such a liability—it’s so demonized,” he said with a straight-backed formality that ruled most of our conversations. “It’s rather disheartening to me.”

Westerners may quibble with LaBouyer’s observations about North Korea, but he holds an advantage in any argument: Most of his critics have never been to the reclusive state, and even those who have visited probably saw far less of it.

In his two trips to the country, LaBouyer said, he has sipped drinks in Pyongyang’s Koryo Hotel, visited the former Japanese naval base of Wonsan and walked the jagged rim of sacred Mount Paektu. He has also appeared on North Korean television, lazed on a North Korean golf course and attended the opening day of this year’s Mass Games.

It is when he talks about the games, a legendary weeks-long acrobatic and musical extravaganza involving tens of thousands of performers, that LaBouyer’s voice loses the quiver of political tension.

“It’s dazzling,” he said, his head shaking with the memory. “It’s hard to believe people can make such beautiful images with such coordination.”

An "indignation meeting" to protest US aggression outside Pyongyang, which LaBouyer attended and other foreigners joined, in August 2005

It's difficult to believe LaBouyer escapes political conflicts when he's back in the United States, even in a leftie haven like Berkeley, given his sympathy for so reviled a regime. But he is hesitant to describe any. Pressed, he describes only one encounter in negative terms, a classroom debate with a "frat boy" who told him to go back to North Korea.

Instead, LaBouyer reserves his venom for Western media and their coverage of North Korea. Reports coming out of the West he blasts as unpardonably negative and founded mostly on bald speculation. In our first conversation, he used the words "brazen" and "disrespectful" to describe the American journalists he saw in the Pyongyang metro. His words snapped with indignation as he talked about them shoving their cameras in locals’ faces.

“That kind of behavior just infuriates me,” he said.

He also dismisses New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff’s recent reports from North Korea—reports that highlight, among other things, the dismal state of the country’s economy —as bald distortions.

But asked if he tought Americans should be let in to see the country for themselves, rather than relying on Kristoff's pen, LaBouyer said no.

“I don’t think Americans are capable of seeing Korea objectively, of stepping out of their biases,” he said. Why, he asked, should North Korea allow Americans in when the Bush administration is intent on destroying it?

He reminds me the two countries never signed a peace treaty to finish the Korean War.

“People who want to backpack around North Korea should support legislation to end the war,” he says. “After that happens, maybe then they’ll feel ready to open up more.”

[Note: In a conversation after this article was first posted, LaBouyer asked to be able to qualify his final statement. I maintain that I heard him correctly the first time, but I believe he should be able to represent himself as he wishes. He says he thinks some, not all, Americans are incapable of seeing North Korea objectively. He adds that while he hopes the situation will change to allow the lifting of travel restrictions, he supports the North Korean refusal to issue visas to Americans for the time being because he thinks the country's fears of spying and misrepresentation are warranted. He also objects to characterization of North Korea as a Stalinist state; he prefers, but still doesn't like, "Communist dictatorship." --JC]