Recognising opportunities in North Korea
Recognising opportunities in North Korea
Sunday, 10 May 2009
On Friday this week, two of the students I took to North Korea in August last year joined me to speak to the Kowloon North Rotary Club about their experiences. Our illustrated address was entitled “Building Goodwill in North Korea”, and we shared our vision and experiences of the latest phase in our initiative to establish trust and goodwill between United World Colleges and North Koreans, both at the level of senior Ministry officials and directly on a one-on-one basis between students.
Our ultimate hope is to establish a scheme to bring North Korean students to United World Colleges on full scholarships as a way of preparing the next generation of North Korean leaders for an era of enlightenment. On the trips to date, we have made substantial headway towards achieving this vision, but there are many more steps needed along the long road to making it happen.
Stephen spoke about the initiative to establish goodwill, which has seen four groups of students from Li Po United World College visit North Korea since 2005, and his personal (and often humorous) reactions to the situations he encountered in mixing with young North Koreans. His conclusion? They are great people, and contrary to the media stereotypes, they are friendly, welcoming and not too different to young people everywhere in the world.
I concluded the talk by quoting an extract from last week’s Newsweek magazine (27th April 2009). Provocatively entitled ‘Toppling Kim Jong Il’, the article by Andrei Lankov (an associate professor of North Korean history at Kookmin University in Seoul) very perceptively summed up the thinking behind the initiative we began in 2005. The section I quoted was the following (fair use excerpt):
The world's most perfect Stalinist regime is starting to disintegrate from below. The best way to speed things up is for Washington and its allies to push for active engagement with the North in the form of development aid, scholarships for North Korean students and support for all sorts of activities that bring the world to North Korea or take North Koreans outside their cocoon. Such exchanges are often condemned as a way of appeasing dictators, but the experience of East Europe showed that an influx of uncensored information from the outside is deadly for a communist dictatorship.... A scholarship program to study overseas would go mostly to students from top families. Yet this wouldn't limit its impact: experience of the outside world will change these young people and turn some of them into importers of dangerous information. A similarly small step helped to unravel the Soviet Union: the first group of students allowed to study in the US, in 1957, numbered just four and were carefully selected. Yet two grew up to become leading reformers, and one of them — Alexander Yakovlev — is often credited as having been the real mastermind behind perestroika. This approach will take time, but it’s the only one likely to work. The sole way to make North Korea less dangerous is to change its government. And the only way to do that is to change the North Korean people themselves.
I firmly believe that our North Korean initiative takes United World Colleges to the very heart of the reason for which they were established. With this in mind, I am in the final stages of preparing to take a fifth group of students from the College to North Korea later this year so that the next small steps along this long road can be undertaken, obstacles notwithstanding.