Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (13 page)

37° 56′ 12″ N, 126° 39′ 21″ E

Kijong-dong is a fake place where the lights go on and off inside tower blocks that have no glass in their windows. There are no residents and no visitors are allowed. But the lights are on timers and the roads are periodically swept clean. Kijong-dong, which is also called Peace Village, in North Korea, was built in the 1950s to lure potential defectors from the South and as a display of the communist state’s progress and modernity. The question is, what remorseless logic keeps it going?

Full-scale simulated cities are rare. They are sometimes called Potemkin villages, after the Russian minister who supposedly had fake villages built, complete with glowing fireplaces, in the recently conquered lands of the Crimea. It is said that he hoped to convince Catherine II that this was a prosperous and well-populated land. Unfortunately, there seems to be little truth in this legend. Better examples come from the Second World War, when decoy towns were quite common. One of the largest was a fake Paris, built to attract enemy bombers away from the real city (see “Arne,”
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). But this was a hasty job, gimcrack in comparison to Kijong-dong. The idea of a permanent fake civilian village, deployed to make people across the border think things are going well, seems to be uniquely North Korean.

Peace Village is a product of the armistice treaty signed in 1953 between North and South Korea. A 4-kilometer-wide demilitarized buffer was established between the two nations and each was permitted one settlement within this 250-kilometer-long no man’s land. The South decided to retain the rice-farming village of Daeseong-dong. The North Koreans chose to build Kijong-dong directly opposite it, about a mile across the frontier. It was a much larger place, and images from Google Earth show a sprawling town comprising three main centers, interspersed with farmland. Each of the centers has rows of what appear to be very large houses or public buildings, many with large gardens. Although it does not feature on many maps of the country, Kijong-dong was built to impress. The costly blue-tiled roofs on many of the concrete buildings and the electric power supply proclaim an anachronistic vision of luxury and success. In the context of the thatch-roofed peasant buildings typical of the area in the 1950s, Kijong-dong must have looked like the future. At the time, mass housing and electrification were symbols of communist progress, but it is unlikely that observers from south of the border find them impressive today. They know that North Korea is poor and that it is one of the least illuminated countries in Asia. Nighttime satellite photographs show it as a pitchy emptiness surrounded by brightly lit neighbors.

The official North Korean position is that Kijong-dong is a thriving community; that it contains a large collective farm (run by two hundred families) and many social services, such as schools and a hospital. Yet Kijong-dong is so close to the border that, with the aid of binoculars, people can see it is empty. And plenty of people do. During lulls in the level of hostility between the two countries, the border crossing draws a steady flow of tourists. They are eager to step across the demilitarized zone into the rarely visited nation to the north. Visitors, who are warned not to make eye contact with North Korean soldiers or gesture at them in any way, are taken to the nearby village of Panmunjom, from which Kijong-dong is even closer, clearly visible in the distance, though it is still very much off-limits. Panmunjom’s only attraction is the pleasure of straying into a forbidden zone. Tourists may also thrill to the official South Korean warning that their little journey across the border “will entail entry into a hostile area and possibility of injury or death as a direct result of enemy action.”

Other, newer propaganda tools also compete for the skyline. A nearby 525-foot North Korean flagpole, erected in retaliation for South Korea’s putting up a 323-foot flagpole in Daeseong-dong, was, for a while, the world’s tallest. Yet Kijong-dong remains a potent and, until recently, noisy symbol. Until 2004 loudspeakers on its empty buildings pumped out denunciatory speeches and patriotic operas across the fields almost every hour of the day and night. After a few years of silence, in 2010 the speakers went back on, not long after the North Koreans had sunk a South Korean submarine, killing forty-six of its crew.

Kijong-dong may seem like a novelty, but it is part of a twentieth-century tradition of hollow architectural spectacles. Communist regimes from Moscow to Beijing often indulged in monumental and monumentally useless buildings. They were built as expressions of revolutionary zeal and the permanence of the new order. What are we to make of the 1,100 rooms of Bucharest’s Palace of Parliament (a.k.a. the House of Ceaușescu), the second-largest building in the world, which was still being furnished when Nicolae Ceaușescu was thrown from power in 1989? Or Bulgaria’s Buzludzha Monument, a vast spaceship-shaped tribute to communism, filled with garish murals, that sits, remote and inaccessible, on the top of a mountain? Kijong-dong is part of a long tradition of clumsy architectural propaganda. It is a tradition that celebrates symbolism over utility, gesture over substance. It seems desperate for everyone to admire it but only at a distance—it’s a psychopolitical complex that doesn’t just spawn fakes but lovingly maintains them.

Across North Korea, monuments to prosperity and progress abound. The country is home to an Arc of Triumph, the largest arch in the world, which stands over a mostly empty highway. Built in 1982, the arch is inscribed with the “Song of General Kim Il Sung” and made up of 25,550 bricks, one for each day of Kim’s life. There are also the vast stone women that make up the span of the Three Charters for National Reunification monument, which yawns over another empty road. High above the capital, the 170-meter Juche Tower commemorates the seventieth birthday of the man who brought the country to its present parlous state, Kim Il Sung. It looks down at military parades during which fake missiles are trundled out for the benefit of an admiring world.

As part of their unsuccessful efforts to cohost the 1988 Olympics, held in South Korea, the North Koreans also built cavernous and little-used sports arenas. In the capital, Pyongyang, Chongchun Street is lined with a huge table tennis stadium, a handball gymnasium, and a tae kwon do hall. Most spectacular of all is the 105-story Ryugyong Hotel, one of the world’s largest hotels and the tallest building in North Korea. Its colossal pyramid shape dominates the capital. Building started in 1987, but it is still not finished, and it is unlikely that the hotel will ever attract the foreign tourists or investors it was supposedly designed for. It is another fake, a nostalgic ruin of the future that pretends, like Kijong-dong, to want to lure us in but actually doesn’t want anyone anywhere near.

39° 59′ 35″ N, 46° 55′ 50″ E

Ağdam is the world’s largest dead city. It is a place of ruins. Around the central mosque, one of the few buildings still with a roof, stretches a scene of destruction. If you peer down on Ağdam from Google Earth, you would be forgiven for thinking that a nuclear bomb had just exploded.

Ağdam was a casualty of a war over the nearby ethnic enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh (Karabakh for short), between Azerbaijan and Armenia and their ethnic allies, and was deserted then systematically blown apart in 1993. Between 1992 and 1994 many thousands died across this region in brutal ethnic battles while the rest of the world was still celebrating the fall of the Soviet Union. Karabakh saw some of the worst bloodshed. From the start, war reports were being filed of the scalping, beheading, and mutilation of civilians, including children. Along with the dead, three million were displaced, among them all of those who once called Ağdam home.

The attempt to destroy places entirely is a characteristic of modern, total warfare, in which the destruction of the enemy’s will to fight is assumed to follow from the annihilation of its centers of civilization and civilian life. The level of bombardment is a perverse tribute to the primary role of place in human identity. Typically, only the center of town is destroyed, and is quickly rebuilt after the war’s end. The complete nature and the longevity of Ağdam’s ruination make it distinctive, as well as the fact that it was so recent. A few decades ago Ağdam was a busy regional capital, known for its lively bazaar and for its quaint bread museum. Although a predominantly Muslim city, it was also renowned for its wineries. The Ağdam Brandy Company was rooted in a century-long tradition. Today one of the city’s many ghosts is a brand of fortified wine, still drunk in some of the former Soviet states, known as Ağdam. It’s the kind of potent and cheap brew that Russians call a “mumble juice.”

Ağdam doesn’t get many visitors. The accounts of the few travelers who have made it past the minefields describe an apocalyptic landscape. Here are brief extracts of two such tales from travel bloggers, the first from Justin Ames, the second from Paul Bradbury:

One thing that captures your attention before long is the scale of the destruction. Every time you think you are near the edge of the city or the end of a road, you go over another hill or around a bend and a whole new field of destruction opens up in front of you.

In this former town of 50,000 people we saw fifteen civilians (a mother and two sons were picking berries, which were growing wild in the main street; an elderly couple with granddaughter were foraging for firewood; the others were collecting scrap metal) . . . On one broken gate I saw the number 50. House number fifty, but which street? No other identification was evident. Even the roads had been dug up and all the pipes removed.

What is most telling about these accounts is their tone of surprise. “I had never even heard of Ağdam,” they chorus. How many of us could say otherwise? Or where in the world Karabakh might be? As the ragged fringes of the former USSR have been transformed into a shifting delta of enmities, the outside world has come down with shock-induced geoamnesia. In North America or Western Europe the region’s place names, unpronounceable, unplaceable, fly up every so often out of the news but are instantly forgotten. For anyone over a certain age it is hard to believe that we utterly mistook something so big, so solid, as the USSR. Even at a distance of almost a quarter of a century it is difficult to grasp that it was never a country at all but an unwieldy empire.

Ağdam is an endless source of surprise, not least because it keeps on getting forgotten. For the Armenians and Azeris, the ethnic majority in Azerbaijan, by contrast, it is an ever-potent reminder of what both sides like to cast as an age-old territorial dispute between victim and aggressor. The fiercely Christian Armenians have good reasons to think they are surrounded by enemies. Azerbaijan, to their east, is a Turkic state and stalwart ally of Turkey, its western neighbor and a country that not only denies responsibility for the Armenian genocide of 1915 but prosecutes people who talk about it in public, under a law that forbids “insults” against the Turkish nation. But Turkic peoples across the region have their own history of persecution and genocide. They have been the victims of countless ethnic massacres, including in Karabakh.

When the Bolsheviks finally took control of this warring region in the early 1920s, they began to make deals to win over the biggest national groups. They first promised Karabakh to the Armenians, but then, in order to win over Turkey, gave it to Azerbaijan. Simmering disputes were not so much resolved as crushed. These conflicts became increasingly public in the late 1980s when protests throughout Karabakh called for an end to Azerbaijani control. The Kremlin refused to countenance any change in the status quo, but when the USSR fell apart, so did the brakes on ethnic conflict.

Ağdam was singled out for special treatment in these disputes because of its strategic location near Karabakh. But it was also targeted because it provided the backdrop for street protests against the breakaway of Karabakh in the late 1980s. In 1988 street fighting erupted between ethnic Azeris and Armenians in and around Ağdam. The town became a symbol of Azeri militancy and resistance. It was the memory of this that seems to have spurred the pro-Armenian Karabakh army to such vindictive destruction a few years later. Certainly, the Karabakh army’s explanation was weak; it claimed that Ağdam was being used as a military base. Yet the city was poorly defended and soon fell, its population fleeing before the invading troops. The invaders then withdrew and subjected the empty city to continuous artillery bombardment until almost every building was destroyed. Other regional towns were also attacked, but the assault on Ağdam, because of its size and thoroughness, remains remarkable. Today the war is in abeyance, but there are few signs that the conflict is over.

The Armenians know very well that most atrocities get forgotten. Karabakh declared its independence after its military success, and although it is not recognized by any other country, even by its kin nation of Armenia, it is a de facto sovereign state. The Karabakhians’ position is that they will hold on to Ağdam, and the rest of what they call their “security belt,” until their independence is recognized by Azerbaijan. But recognition is a distant prospect, and in the meantime, all that the Azeris have to hold on to is a different label not only for the “security belt” but for the whole of Karabakh: it’s “Armenian-occupied Azerbaijan.”

The legal claims are far apart while the ruined city crumbles away. In the interregnum before the next wave of violence, small steps to rehabilitation have been made, and in 2010 the Karabakh government announced that the central mosque had been partially restored. However, the propaganda mileage that can be gained from restoring one building in the middle of a wrecked city is small. And even this gesture has elicited bitter recrimination. The media in Karabakh has reported vox-pop reactions such as, “If the Azeris destroyed our cemeteries and churches, why are we restoring their mosques?”

Both the total nature of the destruction of Ağdam and the long time it has remained deserted have established it as an iconic site of suffering and anger. The grief is compounded by the inability or unwillingness of the outside world to notice Ağdam’s, or Karabakh’s, calamity. The only real rebuilding of Ağdam that has taken place has been symbolic, among supporters of the Ağdam soccer team. Imaret Stadium, built in 1952, was home to FK Qarabagh Ağdam, but the building was destroyed along with the rest of the city and the team scattered. The team has since become a cultural symbol to the region’s Azeri refugees, and with financial aid from both Turks and other Azeris the club was reborn and now plays in the Azerbaijan Premier League. It is one of the most successful clubs in the country and has made it through to European-level competition several times. A new “home ground” in Azerbaijan has been found for it. Its success contrasts with the fortunes of what was once one of the USSR’s top clubs, FK Karabakh Stepanakert, which is based in the Karabakh capital. Banned from the international game, that team has withered, and today it has no money and only local fans to rely on. It sounds like a parable: the ghost town cheered to the rooftops and the decline of the crowing victor. But success at soccer is thin consolation for the loss of a city. The annihilation of place has consequences for both its victims and its perpetrators, and until it is rebuilt the dead city of Ağdam will continue to excite further hatred and violence.