To understand just how hard it is for the Obama Administration or anyone else to predict what the death of Kim Jong Il will bring to North Korea, it helps to understand just what a backward, out-of-touch place that country is. Having raided my mid-’90s notes to flesh out Jim Jackson’s excellent obituary of Vaclav Havel for TIME yesterday, I reviewed this morning my October 2000 notes from Secretary Madeleine Albright’s exploratory visit to Pyongyang, during which I was a pool reporter. The visit was the first, and only, by a U.S. Secretary of State, and was intended to test signs of diplomatic outreach by Kim as President Bill Clinton prepared to leave office. Albright’s first official stop after landing at the seemingly abandoned airport was fitting: the mausoleum of Kim Jong Il’s father Kim Il Sung, who had been embalmed and put on display (like Mao, Lenin and Stalin) after his 1994 death. Kim the elder’s arrested decay replicated the state of his country: frozen in time and sustained only by extraordinary intervention. A famine immediately after Kim Il Sung’s death killed more than 1 million people just as Kim Jong Il was consolidating power. Poverty of the most abject sort still gripped the country five years later, with peasants using centuries-old technology for farming. Electricity and indoor plumbing were scarce. Even the capital city was beset with deprivation: breaking away from my minder’s tour of the monuments to Kim Il Sung’s heroism, I wandered into a public park and found a hungry man boiling a dead dog in an aluminum pot over an open fire. You would not have known the state of the country from the “100 Flowers Blooming” guest house where Albright met Kim. In preparation for the meeting, the pool reporters were told to avoid any quick movements in the Dear Leader’s presence, not ask any questions unless Kim addressed us and under no circumstances stray from our minders. They walked us down a long corridor framed by thick bright-lime-green marble columns that led to enormous wood … Continue reading Inside Kim Jong Il’s Eerie Authoritarian World