Journalists barred from N.Korea congress
Foreign journalists watch a broadcast of the second day of the seventh congress of the Workers’ Party on local television in Pyongyang, North Korea, Saturday. / AP-Yonhap
By Jun Ji-hye
North Korea invited more than 100 foreign journalists to cover the seventh congress of its ruling Workers’ Party, but is barring the media from entering the building in Pyongyang where the event is taking place, according to reports.
Reporters were not allowed inside the April 25 House of Culture and instead restricted to watching from a spot 200 meters away, according to the AFP.
Instead of covering the event on the spot, foreign journalists were led by North Korean authorities to visit such places as a wire factory, a collective farm, a department store and the birthplace of Kim Il-sung, the founder of the repressive state and grandfather of Kim Jong-un.
“North Korea’s information committee bused more than 100 foreign journalists to the congress venue for a look, but only from the outside, at the ornate April 25 House of Culture, draped in red party banners and flags,” the AP reported Friday, the opening day of the event. “Officials had another surprise as the day wore on for the news-hungry media guests ― brought in to give the congress a global audience ― who were then taken not to the meeting, but to a wire factory.”
The Reuters also reported that foreign journalists are being given almost no access to the event itself.
The historic congress, the party’s highest-level decision-making body, comes 36 years after the previous event was held in 1980 under Kim Il-sung. But reporters are working around the restrictions, and their movements have been closely managed.
Julie Makinen from the Los Angeles Times said she was experiencing some real-life version of the renowned play “Waiting for Godot.”
Written by Irish author Samuel Beckett, the play, regarded as a classic example of the “theater of the absurd,” explores the obsession of modern people who are apparently waiting for something that will never happen.
“Five days into an 11-day, highly controlled reporting trip in North Korea with scores of other foreign reporters, I’m starting to contemplate the boundary between absurdity and insanity ― and question which side of the line I’m on,” she reported. “There has been lots of waiting, with what some would say is very little reward. We have all, ostensibly, descended upon Pyongyang because Kim Jong-un has called the highest-level political gathering in 36 years.”
Meanwhile, delegates from China, the traditionally ally of the North, were absent from the North’s congress, according to Chinese media.
The Global Times, a newspaper with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party, reported that China's representatives were not invited to the gathering of the North's top political leaders.
Observers say that the rare absence apparently reflects the increasingly strained ties between Pyongyang and Beijing.
China cooperated with the United States in producing the harsher sanctions against the North at the United Nations Security Council in early March.