Arirang Festival parade at May Day Stadium in Pyongyang on Sept. 9

AP Photo/Kyodo News

PYONGYANG

YOU SEE MONUMENTS and museums, you’re whisked down near-empty highways to the truce village of Panmunjom, 90 miles south, and the port of Nampo, 60 miles west. You’re twice taken to May Day Stadium to witness the Arirang Festival, the biggest if not the greatest show on Earth.

And, of course, you’re treated to the famous northern noodles and other sumptuous fare with not a moment’s show of concern about the near-starving millions who you know are out there, more than 200,000 in a gulag of political prisons.

You’re here in search of mood and insights, and you sense a regime that’s on edge, uncertain and seething with rage at the United States and South Korea about prospects for reconciliation — and denuclearization.

You don’t hear a word about resumption of nuclear reprocessing at Yongbyon, about 55 miles north of here, but the lieutenant who shows you around the North’s side of Panmunjom on the line between the two Koreas talks angrily of the breakdown of North-South dialogue, and of six-nation talks on the nuclear program.

“We want action for action,” he says, meaning President Bush has got to remove the North’s name from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. The inference, though he doesn’t say so, is the North is free to do whatever it wants regardless of the nuclear deal of Feb. 13, 2007.

At the War Museum, Ryu Ok, the museum’s senior guide, wearing a uniform of khaki blouse and skirt, though she insists she’s a civilian, shows us walls papered with articles repeating charges of biological and chemical warfare, of bombs filled with disease-carrying insects, of scenes of human suffering and devastation wrought by American bombing during the Korean War.

You don’t waste time arguing the old germ-warfare charges, but I can’t resist debating her as she leads us past a diorama of the battle for Taejon, when North Korean troops drove out the American defenders in July 1950.

The figure of Major Gen. William Dean, commander of the force that held the city in a delaying action, is shown surrendering as North Korean troops swarm over the wreckage. When I tell her that Dean escaped for a month until two South Koreans told North Korean troops where to find him, the guide denounces that version as “not true.”

It seems strange that the story has to be distorted when it’s well known that Dean was the highest-ranking American prisoner of war. Would it not suffice to say that South Korean “patriots” revealed his whereabouts? But then the question would arise, what about those South Koreans who sheltered and fed him for weeks before his capture?

You also sense a craving for acceptance of a system that appears to have changed little since my first visit in 1992. The craving comes through at the Arirang Festival, a show of unity in which 50,000 young people flash cards on one side of the stands portraying scene after scene of national glory while 50,000 march, dance and pirouette on the field.

The festival this year marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the DPRK, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, on Sept. 9, 1948. The fact that Kim Jong-il did not show up to review the parade goes unmentioned as his image appears on the flash cards promoting songun, “military first.”

A firebrand guide tells you excitedly that the Dear Leader is “my father” and he’s “in excellent health” when asked about his condition, but the real father of the country remains Kim Il-sung, whose bronzed statue stares from Mansu-dae, the hill overlooking the city.

You wonder, though, if Kim Jong-il will be remembered as reverently. Sights of near-empty shops, bereft of customers as well as goods, of decrepit buildings off the roads out of the capital, of oxen pulling ploughs and soldiers filling potholes by shoveling tar from cans by the road all convey an image of little change.

In the meantime, a guide advises you not to crumple or toss copies of The Pyongyang Times, the weekly English-language paean to the regime. “They will have pictures of our Great Leader Kim Il-sung and Our Dear Leader Kim Jong-il;,” she tells us. “Foreigners who have thrown the papers away have gotten into trouble.”

Donald Kirk is a longtime editor and foreign correspondent.