You'd have thought that two fellow members of the axis of evil would have shown a little more solidarity. But evidently comradeship stops when it comes to sports, judging from the extraordinary episode of soccer violence in Pyongyang last Wednesday.
A 2-0 defeat for the home team at the hands of fellow bomb-maker Iran dashed North Korea's hopes of qualifying for the World Cup finals and provoked scenes more typical of a British soccer match than the world's most tightly controlled Stalinist state. The North Koreans were enraged when their team was denied a penalty kick by a referee from -- wait for it -- Syria, who must have faced a tough choice deciding which of his country's two fraternal comrades to side with.
While the North Korean team charged at the referee in protest, furious fans ripped up seats in the Kim Il Sung stadium -- which is supposed to be a sacred shrine to the country's late leader -- and threw these, together with rocks and bottles, at the Iranians. According to foreign correspondents in Pyongyang to cover the match, the violence only ended when players from the visiting team, fearing for their lives, were escorted from the stadium by police.
It's easy to see where the North Korean fans might have got the idea for such loutish behavior -- and it's not from watching Manchester United. A regime that has been known to attack American servicemen with axes in the Demilitarized Zone and distribute propaganda to schoolchildren showing Americans being bayoneted hardly sets a fine example for its citizens. Experts such as Andrei Lankov, a Russian who studied in North Korea and has written extensively on the country, say gang violence is commonplace on the streets of Pyongyang. After all, if you're starving and denied any chance of a better life -- you have much less to lose by resorting to violence.
Nonetheless the fact they rioted against the Iranians, of all people, adds to other recent signs -- such as reports of anti-government graffiti and organized opposition groups -- that the first cracks may be starting to appear in Kim Jong Il's formerly iron-clad dystopia. Some may speculate whether, as with so much else in the Stalinist state, last week's violence was stage-managed by the regime. But if that was the case, a better target would have been those eternal enemies from Japan, whose soccer team is scheduled to play in Pyongyang in June and have now demanded better protection. Indeed, the regime was so embarrassed by the violence that it rushed out a statement last Friday on how Pyongyang stood shoulder to shoulder with Tehran in the struggle against "imperialism."
But that evidently counts for rather more with North Korea's rulers than its ruled. It's somehow reassuring to see that the ordinary Pyongyanger is not averse to rising up against the representatives of one rogue regime when they feel they've been cheated out of a penalty kick. And if they can do that, perhaps we're one step closer to the day when they will rise up against another which has cheated them out of far more.
