The ongoing row over John Sweeney’s undercover documentary on North Korea has been blown out of all proportion. I was one of the students who travelled to Pyongyang with the BBC Panorama reporter and I was fully aware of the risks.
Did the BBC exploit us as students? I don’t think so. The ramifications of what Mr Sweeney was doing and what might happen to us were outlined to me – and I believe to us as a group – as soon as we signed up to the trip. I was aware that a journalist was coming, and I was aware our organiser worked for the BBC.
We knew the dangers – potential detention, arrest, or deportation and blacklisting. And I believe that I, as a 21-year-old student in international relations, am in a position to give my informed consent, even though the London School of Economics (LSE) says otherwise.
Backing: LSE student Mila Akimova says the BBC was right to infiltrate the trip to North Korea and insists students knew undercover reporter John Sweeney was with them
In truth, the trip was organised neither by the LSE, nor by the student society that advertised it. The LSE was merely a medium through which a group was formed. It was not involved in any other way. The college must have had its reasons for intervening, but in allowing the issue to become a nationwide media sensation, it has attracted unwanted attention to the matter.
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The trip to North Korea was an invaluable experience for me. When we read about the country in our university library, there was a temptation to remain sceptical, perhaps to think that critical analysis is coloured by Western ideas that equate simple lifestyles with suffering.
But there is a huge difference between reading and first-hand experience. When you land in Pyongyang, you take those doubts with you. You notice the barren landscape and think many countries have similar geography and remember that it’s still the end of winter. Then you meet your minders, and they seem perfectly normal people. They even let me keep my phone.
And then things go steadily downhill. Everywhere you see the faces of the Kims, the world’s only communist dynasty. You note the fact that the country is ruled by its dead president, asleep in a spotless mausoleum, celebrated with millions of pounds’ worth of gifts, while the rest of the country starves and shivers.
You see empty universities, hospitals, barren farms and factories long out of use; barbed wire surrounding what was meant to be a spa resort. A people stunted by malnutrition and living in fear, and yet still managing to seem jovial and good-humoured, waving and smiling to us from the streets.
It is harrowing to realise that you could easily have been in their place – they, too, have families, hopes and dreams, their jobs and everyday lives, and yet they do not have so many things that we take for granted. It is true that we were not attacked, shot at or threatened; and yet, even my grandmother’s accounts of the Stalinist regime she grew up with in Russia did not lessen the impact of being within that prison state.
As tourists, we stayed in luxury hotels – by North Korean standards. We were driven around in a bus and yet you feel the isolation. You feel restricted. Then, as the days roll by, you begin to feel patronised. Suffocated. Imprisoned.
When we finally escaped the country and our Air Koryo plane landed in Beijing, we felt liberated, even though China is hardly a beacon of human rights.
In queuing up to attack the BBC, Mr Sweeney’s critics have served only to portray journalistic endeavour in an entirely negative light. They have forgotten about the big picture: that the Panorama film aimed to expose the reality of life under the North Korean regime.
The film raised a very important point, that the country is seen as a communist state and yet, despite its initial alliance with the USSR and Mao’s China, it has evolved to be a far-Right state much closer to Hitler’s Germany, complete with genocide against its own people, who are slowly starving to death.
Called the ‘hermit kingdom’, it lives up to its name. There is no mobile network. No internet. No news from outside its heavily guarded borders. When one enters, one enters a social tundra. The doctrine of self-reliance and making one’s own destiny, Juche – the North Koreans’ brand of communism – has been twisted and distorted by the totalitarian government, turning the country’s borders into prison bars and the ideology into a sordid farce that upholds its regime.
The critics, too, belittle the benefits to the students of witnessing the work of an undercover journalist, the difficulties they face and the difficult choices they have to make. I believe it was a priceless contribution to my education.
The North Korean authorities would certainly not have welcomed a journalist aiming to disclose the dark secrets of their rogue state.
I hope that as the temperature cools, more focus will be placed on the film and less on the ill-informed sideshow about the so-called ‘exploitation’ of me and my fellow students.