Subject: North Korea Thwarts Foreign Efforts To See Into 'Hermit Kingdom'
Date: Published: 8/26/86 57 lines
Source:  Wall Street Journal.  Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

   North Korea Thwarts Foreign Efforts
   To Gain Insight Into 'Hermit Kingdom'
    ---
   By Adi Ignatius
   Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

   HONG KONG -- It isn't easy keeping tabs on North Korea,
one of the world's most secretive societies.
   The government-controlled press is long on propaganda but
offers few clues about the true state of the nation.  "We
can't even make an informed guess," says a diplomat in Hong
Kong who has long studied the North Korean press.
   What is known is slight:  The country is dominated by its
74-year-old president, Kim Il Sung, officially dubbed the
Great Leader, and by his son, Kim Jong Il, known as Dear
Leader.  Political analysts can't say much else with
certainty.
 
[72 lines irrelevant to AIDS omitted -- sysop.]

   The Pyongyang Times, for example, ran an article claiming
that Seoul, the South Korean capital, was in the grips of a
widespread epidemic of acquired immune deficiency syndrome,
or AIDS.  "The Chun Doo Hwan group intends to communicate this
digraceful disease to foreign sportsmen, sports fans and
tourists by a massive prostitution tourism," the article
said.
   Analysts also try to make sense of the reams of glowing
accounts of the exploits of Mr. Kim and his family.  "It's
amazing what one man can do," says a diplomat.  "He helps with
textile plants, roads, cement construction.  Sometimes he even
gives on-the-spot guidance!"
   North Korean history books claim, for instance, that Mr. 
Kim led the country's guerrilla fighters against the Japanese
beginning in 1926.  But in 1926 he was 14 years old.
   Nor are Mr. Kim's exhortations to his people, collected in
dozens of volumes of his works, any more believable.  In a
speech to musicians, for example, he exhorts:  "You should
write a good song about tractor drivers.  If you write this
song well and circulate it widely, tractor drivers will treat
tractors with greater care and plough the fields better while
singing it."
   On the subject of fashion he declares:  "The attire of our
women must be altered somewhat.  The long skirts they are
wearing now look too long.  The short skirts that some of our
women are wearing these days are attractive, don't hinder
movement and are fairly economical in their use of cloth."

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