SEOUL — Beneath chandeliers, gloved waiters tend banquet tables laid with linen. Sleek limousines slide past manicured gardens. Child stage performers prance in opulent costumes.
The heavily controlled television images from Pyongyang this week during a summit between leaders of North Korea and South Korea depict a cultural capital, an elegant city studded with monuments. Yet hardship is the reality of life for most North Koreans.
Many of the communist country’s 22 million people don’t get enough to eat, don’t have electricity in their homes and walk everywhere because there is no transport. By some estimates, up to two million people died of famine in the 1990s.
The unprecedented summit, at which Korea’s leaders signed a deal June 14 agreeing to work toward reunification, was a chance for impoverished North Korea to showcase its regal capital. The face it showed to the world was one of splendor, but the pomp highlighted the economic divide between the ruling class and the powerless.
The TV footage of parades, state dinners and stage performances was an example of how tightly North Korea tries to regulate its image. Fifty South Korean journalists were allowed to accompany South Korean President Kim Dae-jung on his trip to Pyongyang, while foreign reporters were barred from traveling there.
North Korean minders kept a close eye on the South Korean media, which could only file pool reports and was not allowed impromptu interviews with people on the street. Most television footage of street scenes was filmed from moving vehicles.
The scarcity of traffic in Pyongyang is a sign that living conditions are basic.
But the image campaign of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has swayed some people in South Korea, who have avidly watched live television reports from Pyongyang.
“We’ve always thought North Koreans were so poor and lived so differently, but on television, their lives didn’t seem so bad,” said Hwang Hye-yon, a 55-year-old cloth vendor in Seoul.
“But perhaps it’s a facade they were showing to the world, and maybe it’s different behind that,” he said.
The situation is far more precarious in rural areas, where international aid workers say food shortages remain widespread despite better harvests after several years of low yields caused by bad weather and mismanagement.
North Korean officials, who have relied heavily o outside food aid since 1995, have become more candid about the urgency of their needs. Yet they have controlled the access of most foreign aid workers, prompting several aid groups to pull out of the isolated country since last year.
“Everything is done to hide all the interesting things we should see and know,” said Jean-Fabrice Pietri of Association Contre La Faim, a Paris-based aid group that left North Korea in March.
Pietri said he had to inform North Koreans of field visits one week in advance. On some occasions, he said, officials said they could not give him lists of nurseries in an area because they were “military secrets.”