Kim Jong Il’s on-the-spot guidance does for North Korean soccer what it did for North Korean agriculture and industry
At last, something interesting has happened at the World Cup after all. The North Korean team was crushed by Portugal in the most lopsided World Cup score in eight years, eliminating North Korea from the competition, and greatly advancing my personal objective of ignoring the rest of the World Cup.
The question on everyone’s lips now is whether the North Korean players or their families will face retribution for this loss. I really don’t know the answer to that, and although the speculation is not completely groundless, it’s too real to be legitimately amusing. To the extent anyone has a basis to ask the question, you also have to question the sporting league’s decision to invite that country to participate in the tournament at all. A case in point would be Uday Hussein’s “management” of the Iraqi Olympic team. Saddam Husein’s Iraq shouldn’t have been invited to the Olympics at all, and the OIC was complicit with the torture of Iraqi athletes for extending the invitation. FIFA and the OIC owe it to the North Korean athletes to pursue any similar such questions that are legitimately raised.
With that being said, I don’t hesitate to identify one North Korean who should face a firing squad: the imbecile who provided strategy advice to the North Korean coach before the game:
North Korean manager Kim Jong-Hun reportedly gets coaching advice directly from the country’s diminutive dictator via an invisible cell phone.
According to ESPN.com the coach has claimed he gets “regular tactical advice during matches” from Jong Il “using mobile phones that are not visible to the naked eye.”
“Jong Il is said to have developed the technology himself,” coach told ESPN.com.
And to think that some people wonder why I blog about North Korea.
And not for the first time, the results of on-the-spot guidance speak for themselves. It certainly suggests some first-rate content for the next load of DVD’s those defectors and activists float into North Korea. Each would begin with Coach Kim’s statement about this unique medium of on-the-spot guidance, and then would cut straight to a montage of all seven Portuguese goals, and finally, the glum faces on North Korea’s rented ChiCom cheering section.
Updates: Let’s begin on a lighter note. A reader forwarded this link, which I thought was pretty damn funny, even if I can’t vouch for its authenticity.
And in retrospect, this may not have been the best occasion for North Korea to experiment with live broadcasting:
North Korea picked the wrong moment to allow its people to see a bit more of the outside world. The authoritarian regime was so proud of its soccer team in the World Cup that it allowed an unprecedented live broadcast back home of the match against Portugal — a rarity for the communist nation that normally exerts strict control over the media.
What ensued was a different sort of history: North Koreans, used to seeing only positive news about their reclusive country, watched as their soccer team received the worst drubbing so far in this year’s tournament and was prevented from advancing to the next round.
As the 7-0 loss to Portugal concluded, the North Koreans quickly halted Monday’s coverage. “The Portuguese won the game and now have four points,” the Korean Central Broadcasting commentator said. “We are ending our live broadcast now.” [AP, Jean H. Lee]
The only thing needed to make this conform perfectly to stereotype would be if state TV immediately switched to stock footage of happy workers praising you-know-who:
It then cut to factory workers and engineers praising North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.
I wonder what stereotype will be validated next. From the report, it sounds like the North Korean players and coach left the field genuinely dejected. One can certainly image multiple reasons for that. To those of us who watch North Korea closely, the assurances of the North Korean coach that no one will be punished for playing badly aren’t really all that reassuring.
In a rather apt illustration of how the good intentions behind “engagement” often tend to do more harm than good for North Koreans, we’re reminded of a side of North Korean sports that sportswriters prefer not to write about. Incidentally, stop me if you’ve heard this reporter’s name somewhere before:
The 23 men training in Tembisa are their country’s most visible ambassadors, among the few North Koreans allowed to travel overseas. At home, they’re already heroes, bestowed with medals and merit citations and honored on postage stamps unveiled last week to commemorate the team’s success in qualifying for the World Cup.
With that honor comes pressure. Moon Ki-nam, a former national-level North Korea coach who defected to South Korea in 2004, said players are handsomely rewarded with coveted apartments if they win internationally but are punished, some sent to coal mines, if they lose.
Even some of the feted players from the 1966 team were said to have been sent to one of North Korea’s infamous labor camps for squandering a promising 3-0 lead to lose to a Eusebio-led Portugal in the quarterfinals. [AP, Laura Ling]
Hat tip to Theresa D for this one.
Leave aside the obvious comparison to the World Cup’s current host which, in the not-so-distant past, was isolated and ostracized globally for human rights abuses that never approached the severity of those in North Korea today.
Perhaps because I’m just not that into soccer, I can view it with some detached perspective and say that basic sportsmanship shouldn’t be negotiable, nor should the health and welfare of the players. That’s why any country caught doping its players or feeding them steroids would face a variety of sanctions, including team suspension, under FIFA’s rather intricate disciplinary code. And you mean to tell me that a country suspected of intimidating and possibly imprisoning its players wouldn’t? Well, let me know if you can see where that’s specifically prohibited.
Our speculation about our darkest fears for the North Korean players isn’t exactly groundless, but why speculate? FIFA can always ask for the right to do what the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Food Program can’t: inspect and monitor. If FIFA has the right to take blood samples from players for countries all over the world, what would really be so intrusive about it demanding the right to check in on the members of the team every few months? Doesn’t this concern actually dwarf those that justify FIFA’s aggressive and expensive anti-doping program?
Viewed in this context, you have to ask yourself just how responsible FIFA was to allow a low-ranked team representing a despotic regime with a history of sending losing players to the gulag into the World Cup.
They got direction from Kim Jong-Il? No wonder they lost!
I just read an article in which the North Korean coach is attempting to take a bullet (hopefully not a literal one) for the team. I’m sure Jong Tae-Se will be alright but the rest of the team will be crushed.
Wait a minute…I call BS on that “invisible phone story.”
There is no way that Kim Jong-hun would refer to KJI as “Jong-il.” That’s too un-Korean. Even if they were close, long-time friends, KJI would be referred to, in public at least, as “The General,†or “General Kim.â€
In the South, I highly doubt that Coach Huh Jong-mu would refer to President Lee as “Myung-bak.†Anyone who has spent time in either Korea knows what a major cultural taboo it is to refer to a superior by his given name.
This story is either parody that somehow got misreported as news or the reporter is making it up out of thin air.
Yay! My first hat tip!
Theresa, you deserved it. Joshua, if the refugees of the DPRK start accusing those from the the “Paradise” Capitol City of “Willows”, then maybe we all can in the outside world help the descendants of the “Atheist people’s paradise” of North Chosun. If you want to visit hell, you better hope that you are an elite member of pyongyang or a tourist with a 15 days pass at maximum, before venturing outside of that Capitol city’s gates. The truth is, if you are an elite North Korean, you are by brain a Jucheist, and by heart an Atheist. No one in that City has the priviledge to come from a religious family. Not even Buddhist.
DPRK is Stalinsm perfected.
Which is why that City will/must fall and rise again.
So that it’s people of north Korea can rise. Even the Chinese now know that the people within the DPRK want reform. It will only be to China/U.S./World benefit if China opens up the DPRK. The Greater United States and Greater China must both realize that worrisome appendixes, cannot come between both of them any longer.
‘Viewed in this context, you have to ask yourself just how responsible FIFA was to allow a low-ranked team representing a despotic regime with a history of sending losing players to the gulag into the World Cup’
I think this conclusion is a bit premature, as the North Korean team is hardly anything but North Korean. Why ? They hardly play and train at home and prior to attending the world cup they finished a 16 month tour around the world where they played and trained in dozens of countries (!), but never in North Korea. For what it’s worth, they seem to have taken the world cup rather seriously as they were aware that they could never reach a qualifying level by just staying at home and put faith in the great chollima. Yes, I am actually saying that the NK football squad had something of a free hand when it comes down to the world cup, would you believe.
Also, the 1966 squad didn’t get send to the gulag either contrary to popular belief.
Ernst, I’m prepared to stand corrected, but did Kang Chol-Hwan not recount encountering members of the 1966 squad in Camp 15?
In other news, how the Daily Mash may have reported it. And how the Communist Party of Great Britain did report it.
I do have concern for the North Korean soccer team because they are human beings, both for what might happen to them for losing so bad and the players who went missing for awhile, but turned up at practice.
Also, the 1966 squad didn’t get send to the gulag either contrary to popular belief.
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How do you know for sure?
Theresa, in 2002 a film about the North Korean 1966 football squad was made called ‘the Game of their Lives’ and nearly all 1966 players featured in this movie. It also showed how the footballers received a hero’s welcome in Pyongyang and their subsequent ‘careers’ in NK were seemingly ‘on the up’ rather than to the salt mines.
It could be all b***s*** of course, but it seemed fairly genuine and in all fairness, the Norks performance in 1966 was perceived as a genuinely stunning and Britain (as tournement host) treated them like absolute heroes for knocking out Italy.
I would also highly recommend “the game of their lives”. Unlike some of the DPRK’s other past star players, these guys have not seemed to mysteriously dissapear from record for the most part.
Alec
I read that too in The Aquariums of Pyongyang, page 95:
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“Among the prisoners I met in the camp was a celebrated former athlete who made a name for himself in Yodok by making it through a very long stint in the sweatbox. According to rumor, his survival secret was to eat every insect he could get his hands on. Whether or not true, it won him the nickname Cockroach. Park Seung-jin, as he was really named, had lived his earlier moment of glory back in the 1966 World Cup in England. That year, the North Korean team won on which he played miraculously made it to the final round, where in the first game it managed a 1-0 victory against the mighty Italians. To celebrate their victory, the players went on a wild drinking binge and, by the end of the night, were seen carrying on in public with some girls. By the next game day-two days later-they still hadn’t fully recovered. The team, nevertheless got off to a strong start, taking an early 3-0 lead against the Portuguese. But then they fell apart, and Portugal stormed back to win the game 5-3.
In Pyongyang, the national team’s barroom antics were judged bourgeois, reactionary, corrupted by imperialism and bad ideas. Upon arriving back in Korea, the whole team-save for Park Douik, who, suffering from stomach pains on the night of the party, had been forced to stay in his hotel room-was sent to camps. Unfortunately for Park Seung-jin, his celebrity won him few favors in Yodok, as he discovered when he was caught stealing nails and cement from the camp’s construction materials shop where he worked. His punishment was a three month stint in the sweatbox, which he miraculously survived. By the time I arrived at Yodok, he’d already been there almost twelve years. And he was still there when I left the camp, though he was much weakened.”
Hm, interesting. I did read ‘ Aquariums…’ but had completely forgotten about that bit. As the Games of their Lives required NK government facilitation, it would have always been very unlikely that the players had anything negative to say.
So, two conflicting accounts ….or truth in a bit of both ie upon return send to reeducation camps / concentration camps with most of the players being reinstated at various points in their lives – with Park Seung-jin being a worst case scenario….
Even if it’s not entirely true, the situation is just horrible enough for it to be (like reports of shrunken heads on display in Nazi death-camps).
For readers in ROK, take care clicking on the link I gave regarding the Daily Mash. It links to KCNA and you’ll get a stonking great big Police warning!