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White House Press Secretary Jay Carney recently expressed his outrage at some personal remarks aimed by the North Korean media at President Barack Obama.
The North Korean media is not known for the temperance and politeness with which it critiques foreign leaders. Politicians who are currently out of favor in Pyongyang are routinely pilloried as "bastards," "treacherous rogues," "spineless lackeys" and the like.
At any rate, all such epithets are de rigor for not only North Korea's opinion pieces, but even its regular news coverage (TV included). The North Koreans had to get really base and vulgar, and attack the president on grounds that any other state-owned news agency would see as beyond the pale.
On May 2, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) published a slightly unusual piece which included alleged letters from North Koreans readers about President Obama's recent trip to East Asia.
A recurrent theme throughout was that Obama is nothing more than an African monkey and a subhuman. Some quotes will suffice to show the reader what I am talking about:
"He acts just like a monkey with a red bum irrationally eating everything ― not only from the floor but also from trees here and there […] Africa's national zoo will be the perfect place for Obama to live, licking bread crumbs thrown by visitors.
"[Obama] had a disgusting monkey look even though he was wearing a fancy suit like a gentleman".
This all points to a peculiar part of what North Korea is. Racism, including anti-black racism, has existed for a long time, and has even gotten some mild official endorsement from time to time ― those who are interested might refer to the books of Brian Myers dealing with the phenomenon.
A good example of officially-endorsed racism is an article published in Rodong Shinmun (North Korea's main newspaper) in 2006 dealing with international marriages, a trend increasingly common in South Korea.
Such marriages were said to be a threat to the nation, made possible only because the treacherous clique in-charge in Seoul has done nothing to eradicate such a dangerous trend.
Indeed, the regime in Pyongyang has done all it can since the 1960s to make sure that North Koreans do not have sex with anyone who is not Korean. In the 1940s and 50s, as before, some Koreans married foreign women in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe while they were studying there.
The regime forced them to divorce and send their kids away with their wives. There are now dozens of adults trying to re-establish contact with their fathers left behind in North Korea, and needless to say, North Korea's consular officials overseas ignore all such inquiries.
Since then, there has been only one case of a legal foreign marriage. A North Korean woman was allowed to marry a Vietnamese man whom she had met when the man studied in the North in the early 1970s.
The man showed almost superhuman persistence and lobbied for permission to marry her for 25 years, ignoring habitual lies of North Korean diplomats who told him that she was dead.
Finally, the Vietnamese government took an unprecedented step and intervened at the highest level. The marriage proposal was discussed at a state-level summit and finally got Kim Jong-il's approval. The couple is now living a happy, but low profile life in Hanoi.
There are rumors of another similar story. Apparently, a marriage between a Yugoslav and a North Korean was authorized by Kim Jong-il in the early 1980s. This story remains unconfirmed though, and may be apocryphal.
At the same time, North Korea's attitude is a bit more contradictory than it appears. Racial diatribes against American presidents can easily be combined with diatribes against racism in the West.
There is even a small group of mixed blood North Koreans. Some (but not all) of these people are the children of Soviet soldiers stationed in North Korea in the 1940s.
These mixed blood Koreans are not subject to any visible discrimination and I am aware of one family that clearly belongs to the low reaches of Pyongyang's elite. We should also not forget about the Japanese women who married Koreans and eventually accepted North Korean citizenship ― many of them live quite normal lives in North Korea.
The picture is thus rather complicated. But as we were painfully reminded of recently, North Korea is not just an intensely nationalist country, but sometimes a blatantly racist place.
Professor Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. You can reach him at anlankov@yahoo.com.
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