In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom. The private life has been entirely abolished.

Actually, North Korea is rather worse than Orwell's dystopia. There would be no way, in the capital city of Pyongyang, to wander off and get lost in the slums, let alone to rent an off-the-record love nest in a room over a shop. Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven't already failed). A recent nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no "free-world" propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarized zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north.

Leaving North Korea illegally is a high crime; going to South Korea is considered treason. Families -- even distant relatives -- of those who do so might be blacklisted, stripped of their jobs, imprisoned or killed. Many find freedom more complicated than they imagined, and their present haunted by the past.

Tens of thousands starved in the latest famine, from 1995 to 1997. Lee, who asked that her given name not be used, was a clerk in a government office who notarized the deaths in her town. She is a pretty young woman, 29, with tumbling hair curling to her shoulders and smooth, flawless skin that belies the hardships she has faced and struggles to explain. "We started seeing cannibalism," she recalled, pausing. "You probably won't understand."

North Korea is unique in two respects. It has sustained a single system, more or less Stalinist, since the 1950s without any significant change in direction or political upheaval - not even Romania and Albania, the countries to which it can best be compared, managed this - and it has taken its political ideology more explicitly into the region of spirituality than any other similar country. The North Korean political philosophy, juche, has its own understanding of ideas like 'God' and 'the afterlife', which are re-interpreted as a semi-mystical integration between the political leader and people. The North Koreans claim their historical situation - the depth of their submission to Japan before the last war; the devastation by American bombing during it; and the seriousness of the threat posed by the US and its 'puppet state' in the South - has produced a unique set of circumstances. Simultaneously, they argue that the juche idea is a universal one - Marx updated for the late 20th century and beyond - whose time will one day come. The recent North-South rapprochement should be understood in this context. A meeting in Pyongyang between the leaders of the two Koreas is a major step by any standards. Nevertheless, Kim Jong Il, the current North Korean leader, is one of the architects of juche and is unlikely to have become a secret liberal. But he faces crippling problems with an economy dominated by military spending. The desire for improved relations with the South must be partly a result of the need to survive.

"You are Americans?" asks an Indian diplomat, who has been sharing our rail car. For hours, we have chatted with the diplomat and his wife, about travel and language and curries, everything imaginable except our telltale accents. Neither has been bold enough to broach the subject, until we do. Then, they pour out their feelings of amazement. "Yes, I've been very surprised, I must say, when you mentioned that you had visas," the wife says. "It's usually not possible at all for Americans. You are most lucky."

They have been stationed in Pyongyang for two years, so we bombard them with questions. They have little to reveal, chiefly because they are confined to a radius of 40 kilometers from the embassy housing estate unless they have permission to go further from the Foreign Ministry. They never visited the homes of North Koreans. "Not even our own girl, who cleans our house," the wife says. "She's so nice and friendly in the house, but if we see her on the street, she won't smile, she won't even wave to us."

Ghost Highways North Korea is a land of vast motorways, some with as many as 10 lanes. But they are always empty. Very few people own cars. Pedestrians and cyclists zig-zag across them as they are so unused to traffic. But even though these roads host few vehicles, they are beautifully tended. Every Sunday, the people who live close by can be seen dusting down the gutter and pruning the shrubs on the road. Some might be visible in the distance here.

The North Korean government keeps most of the earnings... Experts estimate that there are 10,000 to 15,000 North Koreans working abroad in behalf of their government in jobs ranging from nursing to construction work. In addition to the Czech Republic, North Korea has sent workers to Russia, Libya, Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia and Angola, defectors say.

Almost the entire monthly salary of each of the women here, about $260, the Czech minimum wage, is deposited directly into an account controlled by the North Korean government, which gives the workers only a fraction of the money.

[...]

...By the time all the deductions were made, each received between $20 and $30 a month. They spent less than $10 of it on food, buying only the cheapest local macaroni.

How did Kim Jong Il control the country?

He controls his administration exclusively. It operates absolutely by his word. It's an autocracy. Although people have been suffering for 50 years, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il used to be like gods. Kim Il Sung used to kill people who didn't like his administration, but nobody blamed him. People thought that it was politicians' fault, not his fault. People have begun to realize that Kim Jong Il is wrong, he is killing people.

Some countries send food, medication, and so on, to North Korea. But they shouldn't send these things through Kim Jong Il. I think they would do better to provide it individually, person-to-person, in North Korea by dropping it with a big balloon, rather than provide it through Kim Jong Il. I think it will be more effective. Why do they provide these things through Kim Jong Il's regime?

Everyone wants to escape from North Korea. If Kim Jong Il would open the industry of North Korea, his system would die. North Korean people really want to open up, to trade with other countries, but Kim Jong Il doesn't.

I don't understand why you guys don't try to talk to the people of North Korea rather than to Kim Jong Il. He might not listen to you. If you guys help our people to get out of there, there would be a revolution by people against Kim Jong Il in North Korea. There are lots of defectors from North Korea in China, South Korea. We have connections to people in North Korea, and eventually we could have revolution.

There are a lot of ways to destroy North Korea, Kim Jong Il. If we would really want to destroy Kim Jong Il, we should be brave. If we are afraid of war, I don't think we can have peace. We shouldn't be afraid of war.

North Koreans have long felt threatened by American nuclear weapons, and sought protection under the Soviet nuclear umbrella by signing a mutual defense treaty with the USSR in 1961. But North Korea does not have a lot of trust in Russia or China either. The Russians did not help North Korea during the Korean War as directly as the North Koreans would have liked, and although China sacrificed a great deal in the war, North Koreans have traditionally been concerned about China's own ambitions to dominate the Korean peninsula. In the early 1990s, both China and Russia stopped giving North Korea oil at subsidized prizes, which badly hurt the North Korean economy. The Russians have abrogated their 1961 defense treaty with North Korea, and although the China-North Korea treaty is still presumably in effect, it is not clear whether China would really aid North Korea in case of an attack.

For many years North Korea has also felt deeply threatened by South Korea, which has a much larger population, a much more developed economy and a much more modern army than the North. South Korea is also backed by the United States, as is Japan, Korea's historical enemy. From North Korea's perspective, it is surrounded by enemies or, at best, untrustworthy "friends". This has reinforced North Korea's attitude of self-reliance or Juche. It may also be a reason that North Korea feels possessing nuclear weapons is the best way for it to defend itself.

Nearer to hand, however, Pyongyang is quite beautiful. Built on both sides of the Taedong River, it boasts sweeping vistas, meticulously maintained parks and fountains, and an impressive collection of giant monuments and government buildings connected by broad, tree-lined boulevards -- all of which convey something of the grandeur and expansiveness of Washington, D.C., though with none of that capital's energy and hubbub. Pyongyang is both clean and silent; there is not a scrap of trash anywhere, no garish neon signs, no sirens screaming through traffic-clogged streets, and virtually none of the pollution that chokes other Asian capitals -- a blessing attributable less to good environmental planning than to poverty. Most industry has petered out, and the roads are almost entirely free of vehicles.

After the 1990s famine, Kim Jong-il introduced semi-free market reforms, which allowed people to buy and sell food and goods to each. However food prices soared higher than wages, and as a result only the elite sections of society – government officials, security forces and the leadership of the army could eat. The average family can only afford to buy 4kg of the cheapest grain. North Koreans are surviving on less than half the internationally recommended minimum of 550-590 kg of grain a day.

Kim Jong-il has always used the nuclear threat to blackmail the international community into providing food donations. With the protracted six-party talks on the nuclear threat stalemated, many of the larger foreign donors are withholding their usual food offers. To date, only 270,000 of the 500,000 tonnes of food has arrived this year. Aid agencies have now insisted that they will only supply donations if they are able to distribute it themselves. This may now be a futile decision since North Korea has formally told the United Nations it no longer needs food aid, despite reports of widespread malnutrition.

Crimes in "Kim-land" include defecting (or just trying), slandering Kim or the government, listening to foreign broadcasts, reading "subversive" material - even sitting on a newspaper that displays Kim's picture.

Failure to play by the rules can mean a bullet to the back of the head or time in one of Kim's seven political gulags, hard-labor camps that hold more than 200,000 men, women and children. The North Korean Freedom Coalition estimates that 400,000 to 1 million political prisoners have perished, some in gas chambers, in these camps since they were set up in 1972.

A single person's offense can get an entire family - sometimes up to three generations - sent to the gulag. Female prisoners, who become pregnant - sometimes due to rape by prison guards - often undergo forced abortions. Infanticide, at the hands of guards, takes place, too.

Making matters worse, North Korea has been fighting a famine since 1995. Natural disasters such as annual floods account for some of the food shortages, but most is due to failed agricultural and economic policies.

As a result, as many as 2.5 million people (out of a population of 22 million) have died due to starvation/disease over the last decade. While accurate numbers are near impossible to come by, today , 7 percent are believed to be starving, and 37 percent chronically malnourished, reports Freedom House.

Even more tragic, many children born during the famine have been orphaned - and suffer from mental/physical handicaps due to severe malnutrition early in life. Defectors report cases of cannibalism.

And while North Korea has received massive influxes of international food aid, relief groups say Pyongyang uses food as a weapon, directing aid to the most loyal segments of society, while withholding it from others. People have subsisted on twigs, bark and grass for years. Local cooperatives mix grass with grain to produce horrid, drab olive "Franken-food."

Unfortunately, however, the truth is different. The food shortage worsened after 1990, and especially so after 1994. Rations were completely stopped. Workers do not go to work. Children do not go to school; instead, they go to the hills in their neighborhoods and try to fill their stomachs with grass.

Murders and the sale of human flesh in markets were no longer uncommon. Drowned bodies of people who had starved to death have been found floating in the rivers at the border - bodies so swollen from being in the water that their clothes had split.

I directly heard the following story in China from one of the priests who care for orphans. Dead bodies become caught in the reeds and grass along the riverbank on the Chinese side, where they gave off a foul smell. The priests cannot stand the stench, and in one month alone they had to dig fifteen graves along the riverside to bury the decomposed bodies of starved victims.

"The situation here began worsening last spring, and we are now in terrible shape. The food rationed by the government stopped, and we have no other choice but buy black-market rice. My monthly salary is 100 won (note: this person is an elite living in the capital area), while one kilogram (about 2.2 lb.) of rice now costs 110 to 120 won. We cannot buy anything at government-run stores. Although starving to death never before even entered our minds, it is becoming quite believable these days. Because of malnutrition, minor health disorders easily turn into fatal diseases."

"My wage is 89 won, and my two younger brothers each earn about 80 to 90 won. However, we get only 20 to 50% of the wages because of the extreme shortage of cash. So, we get 10 to 20 won a month - 25 to 30 won at the most. From this amount, the fees for insurance, union, and social sentry are withdrawn from the wages, so the actual amount of money that we get is 10 to 20 won.

In the black market, 180 grams (about 0.4 lb.) of rice costs 65 won, one egg costs 5 to 5.5 won, 180 grams (about 0.4 lb.) of corn costs 35 won, one apple costs 7 to 10 won, and one persimmon costs 3 to 5 won.

There is a lot of uproar currently because we now have lots of thieves. Family suicides are not uncommon.

We are so lucky that we can afford to buy the black-market rice thanks to you, Mother. People over here are having a really hard time. They have swollen, yellow faces because of starvation."

Kim has a different kind of family background problem. He comes from the right one, of course. But he has never commanded as much respect as his father, Kim II Sung, did. The Great Leader fought the Japanese during the colonial period, founded North Korea with Soviet help, and is still the official President even though he died in 1994. His son merely inherited the top position. He consolidated his hold on power by currying favor with the military and promoting scores of officers loyal to him.

But to run a dictatorship you need to be able to keep your people ignorant—blissfully so. These days, it isn't just the élite in Pyongyang that has access to the outside world. Chinese Koreans are bringing in cell phones and leaving them with North Korean relatives living near enough to China to piggyback their calls on the mainland cellular network. North Koreans are watching South Korean TV in China, then going back into the country and spreading the word about life on the outside. The regime's propaganda machine used to claim that South Koreans were beggars living under the oppressive heel of capitalists and American imperialists. These days, North Koreans know South Koreans and Chinese are rich. Many dream of escaping to those countries, says Yu Jong San, a defector who arrived in Seoul earlier this year. "Seventy percent of North Koreans know what is going on outside (their) country. They aren't brainwashed robots anymore."