Development work was suddenly interrupted by a phone call from FAO in Rome

Axis of Evil or Axis of Hope?

My software development work was suddenly interrupted in 1992 by a phone call from UN Food andAgriculture organisation, FAO, in Rome. Was I available for an urgent database assignment in DPRK – the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of North Korea? The country which was in 2000 to become a “pariah” nation, one of George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” Certainly I was!

In 1992 the country was as bureaucratically inaccessible to the west as China had been two centuries ago. I could only get a visa under UN auspices and in person and in Rome; then only enter via Beijing; and not book ahead (no flights to the West), which meant over-nighting in Beijing and hoping the local UN offices could get me a ticket for the DPRK capital, Pyongyang. A good lad trying to get some background, I bought a book called “Korea” by Simon Winchester, a well-known BBC pundit. I read it from cover to cover. Not a mention of North Korea, because he’d not been able to get there. And still can’t – the BBC guy said yesterday his DPRK assignment was like reporting a football match from outside the stadium. How could a book which covered only half the country be named so? My own knowledge went back to the time of the Korean war, when I was doing my army service and could have been shipped out there to fight, as were some of my friends. Memories of hordes of Chinese troops, mowed down by “allied” fire but still coming on. Cold bitter dry weather, parched country, misery. Fascinating.

I eventually flew in from Beijing at sunset to see a rather striking city dominated by a strange 600 foot high pyramid like an upturned dart. With a tiny rusting crane on top – they’d run out of money to finish it, though as you can see on the TV reports it’s now finished. As we landed a mass demonstration was mustered on the tarmac, and we found that our fellow passengers included some distinguished looking international representatives of the "Worldwide Campaign for a United Korea". They were greeted with a massive throng and the warmth and lengthy ceremonial to be expected, whereas we got off the plane an hour later to a seemingly unenthusiastic, suspicious welcome from my host Dr. Han, the head of the Soil Research Institute. He came with two others whom he didn’t introduce. Later in the evening he said they had three Chinese consultants to help them on a problem, a problem which he didn’t explain. I went to bed in the Potonggang hotel glumly thinking of frying pans and fires - the set up seemed too similar to my previous assignment in Baghdad in Iraq which had ended with a spell as one of Saddam's reluctant “guests”. Another Great Dictator, “Our Great leader President Kim il Sung” And on top of this, three inscrutable Chinese who would no doubt muddy the waters. I turned on the TV, to see a great crowd being addressed by the people who had been on the plane with me. Formidable-looking people with allegedly scintillating academic records from India, Greece, or South America. Each gave in turn a tedious paean of fulsome praise to DPRK and the “Great Leader Kim il Sung” and his political vision of the “Juche Ideal” and of a united Korea.. ”One nation, two systems” Roars of adulating applause. This was followed by speeches from South Korean students about the maliciousness of Capitalism and their fervour for the Juche Ideal. This I think was genuine – Southern Korea’s aggressive acquisitive capitalism was, for students, no match for the communist ideal.

But the next morning dawned sunny and chilly, and I saw the hotel was surrounded by lovely wooded parkland alongside a river. Rather fragile trees, with crystal clear water flowing slowly by, rowing dinghies for hire, tracks winding into the capital, where there were wide squares and impressive architecture My growing assurance took a bit of a dip when my hosts whisked me into the city to join a queue at the national airline offices. Ten hours into the country and they were wanting to book me out again!

But from then on things improved rapidly. We shot off in an official limo through wide empty streets to the National Agricultural Research Institute four miles out into the countryside, and I was introduced around the place, and to our own laboratory of soils sciences. I asked about my Chinese “colleagues”. Ah, they had left yesterday, (presumably, I hoped, having been stumped by the undefined “problem”!)

But over the next four weeks, working at the Institute and going everywhere invariably together (as happened also in China) I got to know them well, and also to understand their English. Dr Han’s was particularly good, partly because as a kid in the Korean war he had been looked after by an US army sergeant – I think his parents had been killed in the fighting. Han was a lean, incisive guy of medium height. His severe, Korean features would sometimes relax into a beguiling laugh. His authority over his research colleagues was striking and humorous, and we had many splendid evenings together.

With him were Mr Ho, a slim fit black haired man. His official position was “hardware engineer”, but he was with me all the time, living alongside me in the hotel; no doubt my minder.

And then Miss Li, a chubby Chinese faced lady, may be 24 or so. Very committed and conscientious, but lightly humorous with it. She was the programmer. Han had written the previous software, in Fortran and later Basic. But the file-handling in these was nowhere near meeting their requirements. So Miss Li had been recruited, and had written the software in which my help was needed.

We explored together the apparently insuperable problems which they had hit. They were to do with the performance of their national database of fertiliser applications. Their system tried to do for fertiliser what Frank Cope’s system had done for two hundred farms in Suffolk, as we saw earlier, and for which, I think, he received the Chemical Society’s very rare gold medal.

In outline, from every “field” in the country was provided a soil sample once every four years. All these samples were sent to the laboratory for analysis in an x-ray spectrometer. The process added water to the sample and stirred it to dissolve the soil. It then heated the liquid to boiling and then blasted it then analysed the optical spectrum of the steam. This revealed by the colours in the spectrum which minerals were present.. The resultant data were fed into their PC. Here soils software designed by Dr Han listed the number and amounts and timings of fertiliser applications to be made to each field, increasing the allocation where nutrients are deficient and vice versa. The system attempted to create a level playing field of fertility for every field in every commune so that all were nearly equal It’s an astonishing, egalitarian process which would never be attempted in “supply-led”, free Western agriculture (But, has it a role perhaps for us in the future, when through global warming and climate change our traditional, profligate use of resources will have to be circumscribed, eg by carbon rationing?) However, the system’s performance was plainly crucial to the nation’s agriculture, and its performance was so slow that allocations were falling behind, and crude manual approaches were being used.

The programs were written and ran in Korean, in their rather beautiful script. They used their own counterfeit of Ashton Tate’s dBase, then the world’s foremost database programming language, interfacing to Korean BASIC for scientific calculations. So – I was faced with 44 modules of complex analytical software in an incomprehensible language with an incomprehensible character set!

However, we came to some clear conclusions:

The problem almost certainly lay with the modules of code which drove input and output on the discs.

Miss Li would enable me to comprehend the code by converting it to standard English dBase

We would create a model concentrating on the input/output (i/o) programs

We would simulate the scientific calculations by just imposing slight delays in the model’s running at the related stages.

This took us about two weeks, working long days. Fridays were different. The national custom was for all top brass and white collar workers to leave their desks and work in the fields. Even our Institute director! Though some alleged that he scheduled key journeys across the country for the fifth day! Miss Li and our limo driver had special dispensation, and she and I were the only occupants of the entire sprawling institute.

I recall one quiet Sunday, when I thought, why don’t I try phoning home? I picked up the phone in my room and asked the operator to get the number. She sounded cheerful, confident, keen to please.

What is country name?

Ah is Zero Zero Four Four

What is city number?

No city (I live in the country)

OK. You not know city number. . Then what is city name?

No city. Live in country

OK City name is “Nossitty”

No I live in country.

Yes you give me country. Now must have city. What is city name?

Just use the number I give you.

No, she explained with forbearance and charm, Must have city name. Or city number.

The loop continued till she involved the supervisor.

He came on confidently

I so sorry for my staff person.

What is country name?

We reached city name again.

And stuck.

We will help, he said, you just wait. We will help soon.

Twenty minutes later, along to my room came Mr Ho, my minder.

Problem, he said patiently, is city name. No such city as Nossitty.

I gave up and invited him for a game of pool. He thrashed me.

After the two weeks we had our first runs of the model, and were able to observe the timings. No joy at first, but then I noticed one of the modules performing strikingly badly. So I delved into it and came to the conclusion that Miss Li had carried out the i/o transfers clumsily. To put it simply, in fact to over-simplify, you can visualise the database as a massive book. You can either read it from cover to cover a page at a time. Or you can read in the sequence of the first word on page one, then the first word on page two, and so on to the first word on the last page. Then back to the second word on page one, and so on. If you do it the latter way you are going to take a phenomenal amount of time.

Eureka! I announced my discovery. Miss Li set to work to re-program as needed, and at the end of the next afternoon we watched as she kicked off the programs as amended. Time passed. In the end, they took a marginally longer time than before! We all laughed ruefully, and I returned chastened to the hotel.

The next morning I got back in to be met by a bleary-eyed smiling Miss Li. She had worked all through the night re-writing the real, Korean, software modules, and run them and found the timing problem had gone away. My theory had been right, but we had only been using a small sample from the database. And the operating system had been quietly “caching” this sample into the store (memory) for efficiency. This is unbelievably faster than going back and forth to the disc. So then, once the sample data were all in the cache it made no difference which way you read the data Fine, but with a full large database caching was not feasible. And without caching, computing speed was crippled.

We all rejoiced, and Dr Han called the Research Institute’s Director. He congratulated us, winding up by asking me to go and pack for a special trip for four days to the mountains of Kum Gang San. We left Pyongyang station – no Miss Li - in the sleeper for big eastern seaport of Won San I got my camera out but was instructed to put it back again. We went through the night and arrived at Won San at daybreak. Then I was left on the sea promenade of a wide luxury hotel, totally empty, for some hours. Not even a mug of tea. The group reconvened, with suitable apologies but no explanation, and we set off by car southwards. It was fairly empty countryside. We stopped for coffee at a fine sprawling beach, then eventually into the mountains of which I’d heard and seen so much. They were occasionally defaced by massive party axioms, carved in brilliant red letters into the cliffs. Like the US presidents in the cliffs somewhere in the States But otherwise they were as strange and spectacular as I’d heard and seen every night on TV, and as murals on the walls of the great buildings.

Staying in attractive modern rooms ten floors up, we spent two days walking in the mountains. The rocks were I think, granite into which glaciers, streams and rivers had carved smooth, wide channels and pools of clear water. There were a number of rather tragic fairy tales about spirits losing their lovers or children, some carved into the walls of occasional temples, some recounted by Dr Han. We walked among a steady stream of holiday makers, and then climbed high flat-topped pinnacles with superlative views over the ranges and forests. Most of it was beautifully done. I remember particularly stopping at a wide, hanging, waypoint platform and listening to a group of climbers. One sang, a fine thin soprano voice, and the others joined in choruses. In keeping with the spirit of the country, there was no evidence of individual exploration, no side tracks. Just the main path with steel ships’ ladders from the shipyards in Won San, flying across some dizzying drops from one anchorage point on the pinnacle to the next.

Back again in Pyongyang, Miss Li and I documented the software structure, and I spent a week going through the basics of systems tools like SSADM and Entity/relationship diagrams and others of the techniques we favoured in the UK. Then a very splendid departure ceremony, when Dr Han pressed on me a great two foot root of Korean ginseng and he and Mr Ho urged me to grind up some and drink it in salt and water every day. I’d been hit in mid-assignment by a vicious cold, coughing and spluttering and eyes streaming, barely able to work. Han got me to take a dose of the ginseng – foul tasting – and we had set off for the Institute. Twenty minutes later there was a sudden prickling in my nostrils, and the cold ceased as if a tap had been turned off.

Finally, Miss Li bid me goodbye in a prepared speech as we left the institute, and Han and Ho took me to the airport. There was a long straight corridor from the departure point. I looked back as I left it. There they were, hands raised formally in farewell. I expect that, like me, they felt this had been a fine, rare experience. That we were friends who were never ever going to see each other again.

An attraction of computing is the intense pleasure of intractable problems which are jointly solved. Getting friendly with Dr. Han and Mr. Ho ("hardware") and Miss Li ("software") we talked ("you and I are scientists; we may speak of these things") increasingly openly of the differences between our countries. Dr. Han's view of the UK was the usual communist caricature – a country of unfettered exploitation of downtrodden masses, unemployment, violence, drugs and decay, ruled over by a Queen in a way which symbolised the backwardness of a once great country. My feeling for DPRK was less stereotyped, because I'd read Simon Winchester's book "Korea". This dispelled the current British view - of a country of stern orientals, terrorists and assassins, of bitter cold and pickled cabbage, of barren hills and paddies, savagely fought over in the drawn war in the fifties, dominated since then by a dictatorship to be named among the worst with Cseausescu and Saddam. A country shortly to collapse, the westerners believed, with so many others into the arms of the severe but welcoming West. Winchester had not been allowed to cross the truce line from South Korea into DPRK, but had the impression that the rampant excessive capitalism and corruption which disfigures the south had in the north been tempered by care and generosity. (His recent articles have been less approving).

Looking back, my first impressions had been very pleasing. As I hinted earlier, the capital stretches among hills along two winding rivers backed up with shallow weirs and dotted with occasional clusters of communal rowing boats, cheap and much-used. The river-sides are fringed with occasional benches, fishermen and miles of parkland, woods, lily-ponds and fountains. The parks merge in and out of formal squares with large, no-doubt very costly, but often imaginative public buildings. Most of the city is very clean, with wide streets, firm whistle-blowing women traffic-police and negligible traffic. Everywhere there is an emphasis on youth and students, typified by fine new buildings like the Mangyongdae Students and Childrens' Palace. In the squares the communal exercise sessions which all ages love take place - like open-air aerobics involving lines of people, often 1,000 in a square, bending, dancing, stretching and doubling back and forth to the instructions of a leader who stands atop a platform using a megaphone. After the sessions people spill enthusiastically into the parks doing handstands, arguing and chatting amicably. (There is a strong emphasis on art also, and the sculpture and architecture of the capital seems to me finer than that of most equivalents -say Seoul or Singapore or Hong Kong). One sees crocodiles of schoolchildren walking purposefully and swiftly to school singing songs of their mountains and of praise for "Our Great Leader President Kim Il Sung" - henceforward OGLPKIS - (the phrase rolls infuriatingly off everyone's tongue) and with similar but more muted reverence for his son and now successor, Kim Jong Il.

As we walked outside the Childrens' Palace Mr. Ho told me with shiny eyes "OGLPKIS he loves all our children. At New Year he gives EACH child a special present". Driving out to the Institute once my exasperation at OGLPKIS broke loose. A visiting scientist and I had been discussing our tax systems and he said proudly "in Korea we have no taxes at all". I responded "No; with us we earn our money and then the state takes some. With you the state takes first and then gives a little back." More warmly: "take Mr Ho - he says that OGLPKIS loves every child, gives them each presents... But I tell you it's not the President who gives them the presents! It’s you". He glanced at those in front quickly to see if they had heard, giggled, looked hard at me and said "Yes of coss, of coss. But you must not say!".

The strength of popular support among young and old for the system and OGLPKIS "you can see nowhere - nowhere - in the world" Dr. Han told me after we saw a fervent mass demonstration which must have involved more than a million, seemingly the entire capital, welcoming Kim il Sung back from China. To confuse this real fervour with the rent-a-mob antics in favour of Saddam which I saw in Baghdad would be very dangerous. My feeling was that the North was brimming with confidence, was taking the initiative in the bridge-building process with the Koreans in the south, and believed with some reason that it had the support of the majority, especially the youth, in the South. To his people, OGLPKIS was succeeding - for example while I was there he launched an International Crusade for Korean re-unification and the removal of US nuclear missiles, supported, his people were told, by "318 million people world-wide" - and shortly the US missiles were on their way out.

Dr. Han and others at his level were more cautious. When we discussed IT they were well aware of their backwardness. On privatisation versus state enterprise they were very conscious of evidence that the infrastructure was decaying - notably the railways (pretty good), which I rode overnight to visit the lovely Mountains of Kumgang in the east, but was forbidden to photograph. They had no doubt their political system was better, but had obvious misgivings at communist collapses elsewhere.

Their system is encapsulated in the "Juche idea", OGLPKIS' philosophy, derived from Marxism but a distinctive brand propagandised vigorously everywhere. The emphasis on youth, art and gracefulness is one strand; others are:

a refreshing egalitarianism. Everyone has a job; nearly all live in similar rooms in reasonably attractive apartment blocks where "only the old hanker for the cottages of the past"; every Friday senior management and white collar workers all have to work all day in the fields or equivalent - hospitals offer only emergency cover because doctors are out planting rice. Professionals like scientists or doctors earn only 40% more than the average manual wage. Egalitarianism permeates all - the objective of our Soils/fertiliser system is to achieve a uniform fertility level across the entire national field (30,000 units) so that all co-operatives have equal productive potential. All must produce either rice or maize - pre-revolutionary alternatives like wheat, barley etc. are banned (and with ecologically sound justification).

a strong feeling for communal activity and discipline - individualism is seen as perhaps dangerous and sinful. If I asked who designed a building, the response was "what does that matter?"; when we went in the mountains there was invariably only one path, often up sheer cliffs which we climbed on steel companion ladders, as on ships, from Won San shipyards. Often we queued with a stream of workers from the communes who made their way up and down. Each member had been voted by his/her fellows to be the holiday person or group of the year. (Sometimes a group would stop with us and sing and dance the rather haunting ballads of the "Sky Goddesses" who live in some mountain pools - though not the pool which celebrates the spirit of OGLKPIS). The social pressures at work sounded formidable; the elected group leader gathers his group together each evening and announces who has earned how many work days (usually .8 to 1.3) and why. Eddie Grundy be warned! Their group tasks and targets have been set from the County Co-operative Management Committees; their targets in turn were set by the national soil database system on which I had worked. Here lies the rub, because without a price system no-one can assess what levels of fertiliser are the economic optimum - production cost and benefit ratios cannot be assessed since neither can be evaluated without a market mechanism.

Western media reports suggested appalling hardships in the country-side. I saw none round the Institute or en route east across the entire peninsula to Kumgang. But more cogently, Dr. Han must have known the truth. And if the westerners’ reports were right why was he so confident in the rightness of his cause?. Westerners, including two of only four I met there, generally commented with hostility, and expected the system to collapse on OGLPKIS death – it hasn’t. I suspect the dice are loaded heavily that way. But DPRK offers in the balance against lost liberty and grossly sycophantic totalitarianism:

Fairness; absence of violence, aids and drugs; full employment, no poverty (in 1992), astonishingly low pollution (contrast Pyongyang with Seoul), social confidence, much apparent happiness. And, maybe, the key quality which the West cannot claim for itself, leave alone the rest of the world: sustainability. It's a challenging alternative. Personally I favour the Western approach, though with increasing doubt but humanity will gain if the other approach also survives. We worship at the shrine of biodiversity; why not also sociodiversity and political diversity.

In a nutshell, taking the famous French revolutionary causes liberty, equality, fraternity

North Korea scores zero for liberty, but 9 for equality and 9 for fraternity.

A BBC commentator recently showed a satellite view of the area at night. China, South Korea and Japan were a blaze of light. North Korea was in total darkness. There you are, she said, contrast the bright civilisation of the west with the pariah state.

But, I thought, maybe the pariah state has it right.