My trip to North Korea 11 years ago was one of the most depressing times in my whole life. I have never seen a sadder country. It was not simply an issue of appalling poverty: In 1989, the shelves of stores in Moscow were also barren, and Beijing still sported a maze of miniature slums -- the notorious "hutongs" where foreigners inevitably got lost and slightly nauseated. The sadness of North Korea was of a different kind; it was the sadness of a people scared to breathe.
Even infamous dictators Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler failed to bring their respective nations to the heights of totalitarianism reached by North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. In 1989, everyone in North Korea was wearing a Kim Il Sung badge. Men in the streets had huge, shiny ones pinned to their chests. People in the Foreign Office wore tiny, well-designed badges. Every tall building in the city was a disgusting sight because you knew it had been built with slave labor. Every foreign visitor was closely followed by plainclothes men, who were also frightened and underfed. In the town of Wonsan, I was nearly shot by two Kalashnikov-toting soldiers because I had attempted to take a picture of the local marketplace. All you could see on TV were pictures of the "great leader" and his puffy son, the heir presumptive. The media was advertising two brightly colored revolutionary flowers: "Kim Il Sung flower" and "Kim Jong Il flower."
In 1989, the heir presumptive had five years more to wait until he would become ruler. In 1994, when Kim Il Sung died, many thought that Kim Jong Il's reign would be short-lived. Everybody still remembered the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the shooting of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Yet now, Kim Jong Il has been in power for six years -- a very impressive term in this modern world of impeachments, free elections and a global mass media. More than that, he has initiated great change, having hosted a summit with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung in Pyongyang.