PYONGYANG: Roll up! Roll up! It’s show time in the twilight zone that is North Korea. Take your seats for one of the greatest, strangest, most awe-inspiring political spectacles on earth. Forget the nukes, forget the poverty, forget the reclusive reputation; this country is going to entertain you like you have never been entertained before. All welcome — even American imperialists and journalists.

In what may prompt the biggest influx of foreigners in North Korea’s history, its “Great Leader”, Kim Jong-il, is inviting the outside world to a party: the Arirang mass gymnastic display. The impoverished country has not only opened its doors to the event, which runs until mid-October, it is subsidising visitors to come through. Its ageing fleet of Tupolevs is offering several free flights from Beijing. Diplomats around the world have been selling tickets. Hotels in Pyongyang have never been so full.

Yet North Korea is pathologically suspicious of outsiders. In this country of 23 million people, there are only 300 foreign residents. Normally, there are so few visiting tourists and business people that overseas consular and Koryo airline offices are empty. Arirang, however, is part of a propaganda offensive on a scale that would make a big-spending Hollywood mogul envious. The stage is the 150,000-capacity May Day stadium in Pyongyang, and the cast is 100,000 strong. The performance is a technicolour mix of entertainment: a floorshow by 1,000 dancers; a military tattoo; a martial arts display; hordes of waving, smiling children; an aerial ballet by dancers on bungee ropes.

The most breathtaking element of Arirang is the backdrop — a giant human mosaic that forms elaborate panoramas of mega cities, slogans and cartoons. More than 30,000 children form a flip-card unit working so quickly that some pictures appear to be animated.

It is an awesome product of political control and economic weakness. Starved of energy, and economically retarded, the only resource North Korea has in abundance is its people — and they are often employed in places where richer countries would use electricity. Just as policewomen direct Pyongyang’s traffic rather than automated lights; in Arirang, tens of thousands of children are used to create a giant screen.

Even at the height of Soviet power, Moscow would have struggled to choreograph such a mass performance. The politics are surreal. The “prosperous fatherland” reads one giant banner above a mosaic of ploughing tractors — no matter that almost all farm work is done by hand because vehicles and fuel are in such short supply. “Green revolution” reads another, over an image of bumper crops, despite the fact that the nation has not been able to feed a third of its people for a decade.

Rather than crude propaganda, North Koreans see it as a counterattack against the powerful weapons employed by Hollywood and the western media. “The US imperialists are trying to stifle us. They create a negative image of North Korea. I hope Arirang helps to counter that,” Song Sok-hwang, the display’s director, told the Guardian. It is also a form of social control. Mobilising 100,000 people for months of training and performing keeps the population occupied and reinforces the impression of a strong state and a government firmly in control. One German observer whispered that it was frighteningly reminiscent of Hitler’s mass rallies.

But Arirang is more than that. As well as being technically astonishing — one foreign defence official said the military drills were the best he had seen — it is emotionally compelling. Mythologised or not, the story of the Korean peninsula is a genuine tear-jerker. Over the past century, it has been brutalised by Japan, devastated by war, divided by superpowers and plagued by famine, floods, dire leadership and a political system at odds with the rest of the world.

This makes the message more complicated than that of the rallies by the Third Reich or the Soviet Union. Despite the bravado about having an “army that no enemy can match”, the overall tone has changed from the last Arirang in 2002. It is less belligerent. One section features the “reunification train” — a reference to the new railway across the demilitarised zone (DMZ) which opens this month.

There are small signs that even North Korea may be moving in a direction that will make it harder to organise events such as this in the future. Hawkers are increasingly visible on the streets, suggesting that some people are becoming more economically independent and presumably less inclined to give up their time for mass events. More cars and fewer blackouts suggest that the energy situation is improving, which may one day mean more reliance on machines and less on such mass people power. Warming relations with South Korea have already brought billions of dollars of investment, tens of thousands of tourists and the railway — all steps towards a reunification that would remove the atmosphere of tragedy that gives the performance its emotional tug.

North Korea’s cultural and political purity are also under challenge from the influx of South Korean visitors — there are rumours that cross-DMZ romances are a new source of headaches for the government — and the growing Chinese influence. The markets are full of Chinese goods. Every new busload of affluent Chinese tourists screams out a message that North Korea is missing out on the spectacular economic growth in East Asia. “It’s a bit of a nostalgia trip to come here,” said a sightseer from Beijing. “It’s just like China 20 years ago.” As is always the case with North Korea, nobody is exactly sure of the motives for the event. But it comes at a time when the stars of the North Korean political firmament appear to be coming into an unusual alignment. Last month saw a breakthrough in the three-year nuclear stand-off with the US.

In a fortnight, Pyongyang will hold a huge rally to mark the 60th anniversary for the founding of the Workers’ party, prompting speculation that Mr Kim will announce his successor. Stalled talks with Japan are expected to reopen soon. But this does not mean that the world’s worst-understood and least-loved nation has finally succumbed to globalisation: it may even be part of a step back towards the disastrous self-reliance policy of the past. While the country is welcoming more tourists, international food and medical aid groups have been told to leave by the New Year. North Korea insists this is because it is now ready to stand on its own feet and that future aid must come in the form of economic development. For that to happen on a large scale, concrete progress will have to be reached in the six-party nuclear talks. This is far from assured. But while the country waits and wonders what is in store for it next, the tough talk is being mixed — for the next two weeks at least — with an invitation to party. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service

A FOREIGN Office spokesman stated at a recent press briefing that Pakistan’s position on the Durand Line was ‘very clear’. The line, an internationally recognized border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, ‘is not subject to any controversy’.

He went on to ask his audience to ‘pick up any atlas of the world to find it for himself where the border lies’. A cogent but essentially facile argument, as world atlases, regardless of their authenticity, may have little relevance or use for countries concerned with certain border issues.

World atlases need not conform even to the geo-political and operational maps of the countries concerned. For example, such small indentations as the Berubari Union in the erstwhile East Pakistan remained a bone of contention between India and Pakistan till the very end.

Kashmir appears differently in different world atlases, practically to obliterate the dividing line - LoC - between the two segregated parts of the prepartition state of Jammu and Kashmir. Thus, reference to ‘any’ world atlas as a defining document can be easily disputed to complicate the issue.

According to the spokesman, fencing the line involved only some ‘segments’ of the Pakistan-Afghan border as internationally recognized. Even the use of the term ‘border’ could create problems being different from the official description of the dividing line at Torkham as ‘the Frontier of Pakistan and Afghanistan’.

The Penguin Dictionary of Geography defines ‘boundary’ as the ‘line of demarcation, real or understood... And of legal or no legal significance...’ Frontier, on the other hand, is ‘that part of the country or other political unit which (con-)fronts or faces another country - sometimes applied to the actual boundary....’. (The Durand Line: its geo-strategic importance by Dr Azmat Hayat).

The delineation of ‘segments’ along the 2,500-km-long rugged terrain alone might well turn into a cartographic duel, each side pressing its own claim to a certain piece of overlapping real estate perceived to be more on its side.

Kabul delayed its response either for against the Pakistani initiative. Not that the Afghan government has not been for a change in the 100-year old territorial status quo. On the contrary, it has persistently questioned the status of the Durand Line ever since the final exit of the British, the only co-signatory of 1893. The end of British rule signified the end of the Anglo-Afghan Agreement on the Durand Line.

Whatever be the status of Pakistan as the successor state inheriting the mantle of the outgoing imperial power under international law, Afghanistan was under no obligation to recognize that. Hence, Afghanistan’s single negative vote against the admission of Pakistan into the UN. Afghanistan laid its claim to a huge swath of trans-Indus territory right upto the Attock Bridge.

Pakistan’s offer to erect a fence all along the Durand Line (or only to some of the ‘segments’) is impetuous as well as unnecessary. Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri, in an uncontrolled display of irritation over Kabul’s allegations regarding Al-Qaeda / Taliban incursions from the Pakistan side, said: ‘Pakistan has nothing to hide. We are fed up with people (Americans and Afghans — parenthesis added) who say Pakistan has to do more to counter terrorism.’

That was in New York on Sept 13. About the same time, President Pervez Musharraf in his 75-minute meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice offered ‘to fence’ the Durand Line to stop ‘incursions’. At the time these lines were written it had been over a fortnight since Pakistan’s unilateral offer without an appropriate response from Kabul.

However, a US State Department spokesman would not wait to welcome the Pakistani initiative without advising Kabul to reciprocate. A three-member US team led by Congressman Mark Wood also reportedly went to Peshawar to discuss the ‘issue’ of ‘fencing’.

As if the offer to Afghanistan to fence the border alone was not enough to revive the controversy about the international status of the Durand Line, a most astonishing statement came from the NWFP Governor Khalilur Rahman. He stated that the line as ‘demarcated’ by the British in 1893 had ‘expired’ in 1993 on the completion of 100 years. He even advised the president to contact the Afghan government for extending the agreement.

The governor’s statement was followed by the usual note that he was misquoted. But the damage might have been done.

Fencing the line would virtually amount to re-drawing the border. Where and what exactly be the ‘segments’ to be mutually identified and marked for fencing? Furthermore, who would determine the exact relocation of the boundary pillars? Most importantly, would the project be bilateral as between Pakistan and Afghanistan or tripartite with the tribal areas involved added to the process?

Dr Azmat Hayat in his doctoral thesis points out ‘several ethnic absurdities’ in the demarcation of the Durand Line. Certain places marked on the Durand map did not exist on the actual ground. What he calls the ‘worst blunder’ committed was the boundary dividing the Mohmand tribal area into two separate parts, thus upsetting tribal homogeneity. Much the same mistake was committed in Waziristan and other tribal areas straddling the Pakistan-Afghan frontier.

The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army.