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From North Korea, Discordant Messages
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North Korea's overriding problem now and for the foreseeable future is a collapsed communist economy.
The central government's ability to deliver food, medicine and other services has disappeared in much of the country in the past decade, according to a number of analysts.
The U.N. World Food Program said last week that about a third of North Korea's children and mothers are malnourished, while only 10 to 20 percent of the population always has enough to eat.
The well-fed minority includes the Communist Party elite in Pyongyang, as well as the military, which is the fourth-largest in the world, with about 1.21 million men and women under arms, according to the State Department.
Food shortages could soon become much worse because of severe flooding last year that destroyed much of the rice and corn crop, the World Food Program said. The nutrition gap this year will amount to a quarter of the food needed to feed the country's 23 million people -- about 1.8 million metric tons, the agency said.
Amid these grim numbers, there's strong evidence that Kim's government -- in a major break from its defiant tradition of isolation -- is opening up the country's long-neglected deposits of coal, minerals and precious metals to investors from China, South Korea and other countries.
But as in nearly all of the North's dealings with the outside world, there is an alternating pattern of outreach and paranoia. Chinese and South Korean businessmen say mining operations in the North have been delayed and sometimes halted by government officials, who enthusiastically recruit outside investment but insist on complete management control over resulting operations.
Perhaps it will be different in music.
The New York Philharmonic flew to South Korea on Wednesday afternoon, following a 48-hour visit that is without precedent in the North.
Before leaving, music director Lorin Maazel led a rousing rehearsal performance by the North Korean State Symphony Orchestra, an experience he described as "amazing, totally amazing."
Maazel conducted as the orchestra played Richard Wagner's "Die Meistersinger": Prelude to Act One, and Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" Overture-Fantasy. Nearly every musician in the orchestra was male, and they all wore suits with lapel pins bearing pictures of Kim or his father, Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea.
"They were very focused, very well prepared and very emotional," Maazel said. "We know so little about music in the country. This was a revelation to all of us."
The artful professionalism of North Korea's elite orchestra may soon become much better known.
In what would be its first trip to Western Europe, it has accepted an invitation to perform this fall in Britain, according to David Heather, a British businessman who is helping organize that trip.
Heather told reporters here that North Korean officials have told him they are also open to allowing the orchestra to perform in the United States.
"I think there is willingness to do it on both sides," he said, referring to the governments of North Korea and the United States. "It is a question of funding."
