“You are not allowed to visit another city and cell phones are forbidden”

The only Romanian reporter to be in North Correa after 1990, Dorin Chioţea, told "Adevărul" what he saw during a one-week visit to Kim Jong-il dictatorship, where two American journalists were recently condemned to 12 years of forced labour.

The Romanian reporter Dorin Cătălin Chioţea (36 years old) went to Nort Correa in 2007 with a photographer. After a week, he thought he had lived “something worse than during Ceauşescu’s era”. The communist regime of North Correa is so oppressive that people don’t know that man stepped on the Moon, they never heard of Michael Jackson and drive old Dacia 1300 model.

You can’t walk on the streets at your own like. No tourist is allowed to walk by your own, especially a journalist. Translators accompany you at every step you take. 

Almost all people wear uniforms – black, brown, grey – and everybody has Kim Ir Sen badge. All people wear his badge, but you can’t find it in souvenir stores. I wanted to buy one with 50 euros, but they wouldn’t give it to me, as a foreigner I wasn’t allowed to have it.