Leader: No signs of North Korea awakening soon

EVEN by the standards of North Korea, this was an extraordinary funeral. Tens of thousands of mourners, screaming and flailing their arms, lined the route of the procession as the body of the country’s late leader, Kim Jong Il, passed before them.

In the main plaza, Kim Il Sung Square, hundreds of thousands who had been sobbing and wailing for days, cried out as the hearse went by. A weeping soldier asked on state television: “How can the sky not cry?”

The utter isolation of North Korea and the grip of the tyrannical regime over its people is one of the most sinister sights of the 21st century. Yesterday’s scenes might as well have been beamed from another planet, such was the sense of a country completely detached and hermetically sealed from modern reality. For more than a quarter of a century the word “globalisation” has been on the lips of peoples the world over. Yet during all this time, North Korea has remained in the grip of a totalitarian dictatorship ostensibly committed to communism but where power is passed from father to son behind the shield of one of the biggest armies of the world. Tens of thousands have been imprisoned or killed, foreigners are strictly controlled, a free press unknown, police surveillance total and minds shut down.

Locked in a Stalinist time-warp, North Korea is now less a tyranny than a manipulated hysteria, a dystopian disorder beyond reason. Its population is drugged by fear, starved of food and freedom and subjected to one of the most robotic social systems in history. That it now appears set on perpetuation is the most worrisome feature of yesterday’s macabre spectacle.