Free North Korea Undercover by John Sweeney Page A

between the Cuban and Venezuelan Communist Parties. Everytime the Venezuelans threw a diplomatic reception and heard that the North Koreans would be attending, in capitalslike Warsaw and Prague, Carlos Diaz Sosa flew in from London, where he was based, and presented the North Koreans with letters for Kim Il Sung and the imprisoned poet.
    The Romanians, the North Koreans’ close stallies in the Soviet bloc, brokered the deal. Seven years after his first arrest, on 27 September 1974, Ali was allowed to leave North Korea. On arrivalin Bucharest, the poet had to sign a letter swearing that the dire state of his health and the torture scars on his body were the result of captivity in a Venezuelan prison. The regime was trying to cover its tracks. Ali was in a terrible state. Thin, half mad, he had a tumour on his back and paralysis in his left leg that resulted from being forced to squat cross-legged for years. But the regime fattened him up before releasing him. In Berlin, Ali under went surgery on the tumour and the frozen nerves in his leg. In late December 1974, he ended up in London, where his Venezuelan family were living in Finchley. Carlos David, then fourteen, had to give up his bed for his uncle: ‘The grown-ups stayed up all night for three nights, talking, talking, talking. It was as if my uncle had come back from the dead.’ Which, in a way, he had.
    His poem, ‘Pieta’, recalled from memory because to write it down would have been the death of him, told the truth:
    Life, in the abstract, in its great coach – hownice;
    But amidst vomit and outrage the real thing triumphs,
    It flows, sewage and decay .. .
    I suffer moons, hungers, cruel Christs of pus . ..
    I give in bone the explanation of this, my misfortune.
    Ali died on 30 November 1995. His friend Jacques Sedillot never made it out of North Korea, dying some time in 1976. Ali’s report for Amnesty in 1979 is a linein the sand, the first account by a Westerner, and a Communist to boot, of the true nature of the regime.
    From that year on, no one could have any doubt that the North Korea gulag was a serious contender to be the worst place on earth; that Kim Il Sungs regime had nothing what so ever to do with advancing the brotherhoodof man; and that it used hunger asa weapon to ensure that its people obeyed.
    Alejandro Cao de Benós of the Korean Friendship Association dismisses criticism of the North Korea gulag: ‘These are reeducation camps. With 23 million people, sometimes you may have a few criminals. We believe not in punishment but in rehabilitation. It’s a kindof psychological therapy.’ 7
    After reading Ali Lameda’s report for Amnesty and his poem, that is a sentence I would never utter.

    1 Bernd Schaefer: North Korean ‘Adventurism’ and China's Long Shadow, 1966–1972, Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center, Washington DC, 2004, p10.
    2 Suh, p52.
    3 E. Crankshaw: Cult of the Individual , Belfast, 1975, p 6.
    4 Ali Lameda: A Personal Account of the Experience of a Prisoner of Conscience in the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, Amnesty International, London, 1979.
    5 Breen, p104.
    6 Juan Paez Avila: Ali: El Viajero Enlutado , Ala de Cuervo, Caracas, 2003, p25.
    7 Hume, ‘His dear leader: Meet North Korea's secret weapon – an IT consultant from Spain’: Independent , 21 January 2012.

10
    Pissing on Marble
    In December 1969 two Italian Communists set off to Pyongyang, on the first ever delegation of the PCI – the Italian Communist Party – to North Korea. The two men were both heroes of the Italian Left. Emanuele Macaluso is a Sicilian leftist senator who has spent his life challenging the morbid power of the Mafia in his home island and throughout Italy. His friend Antonello Trombadori was then a famous artist, who during the second world war had been locked up by Mussolini and then the Nazis before escaping. If Communism ever had a human face, Macaluso and Trombadori were it. The artist