Impoverished North Korea smartens up model city ahead of summit

SEOUL, South Korea - To an outsider, it was a startling sight: thousands of people, some on their knees, scrubbing streets and polishing tram lines in Pyongyang, North Korea's showcase city.

The scene on a recent weekend, described by a foreign witness, was part of a vigorous cleanup campaign in the North's capital ahead of an inter-Korean summit next week.

These days, it's no secret that North Korea's economy is a mess, that food, transport and electricity are scarce, that people have stripped hills of their trees for firewood. Yet the communist government always strives to dazzle foreign dignitaries.

Its biggest attempt yet to impress comes June 12 when South Korean President Kim Dae-jung flies to Pyongyang for his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. The summit offers hope for gradual reconciliation after decades of bitter conflict.

South Korean television technicians will broadcast part of the historic visit live to Seoul via satellite, giving the world a rare glimpse of one of its most hermetic nations.

On Monday, South Korean Unification Minister Park Jae-kyu said the North Koreans were ''trying to give a facelift'' to the airport where the South Korean president will arrive. They were also refurbishing houses along the highway that Kim Dae-jung will travel on.

Such efforts are more than cosmetic because they show North Korea's respect for the leader of a nation that it long reviled as a puppet of the United States, said Paik Hak-soon, an analyst at the Sejong Institute, a research center in Seoul.

During his three-day trip, the South Korean president will tour a city of parks, wide avenues and huge monuments dedicated to Kim Il Sung, the late founder of North Korea whose revered status is perpetuated by his son and successor, Kim Jong Il.

But the South Korean visitor, whose own capital is the vast, crowded center of one of the world's leading economies, will quickly spot how rudimentary life is for most of Pyongyang's 2 million residents.

Police officers stand at intersections to direct traffic, but there are few cars. Many streets are unlit at night because of power outages. Commercial activity is a fraction of that in neon-lit, bustling Seoul.

The situation is worse in the countryside. International aid workers say foraging for food remains a daily challenge even though the famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people in the late 1990s has eased.

Totalitarian North Korea, a master at controlling its own population, has tried with less success to sway visitors to its capital. Some attempts seem stilted, even comical.

North Korean defectors have described how Foreign Ministry employees are ordered to fill Pyongyang's often-empty, main department store to give foreign VIPs the impression that business is booming.

''Pyongyang turns into a huge stage'' when foreign officials visit, Ko Young Hwan, a former North Korean diplomat, wrote in his book, ''Kim Il Sung's dream comes true in Seoul.''

Ko, who defected to South Korea in 1991, said Kim Jong Il was the director of his capital's periodic pageants.

North Korean guides have sometimes proudly shown a looming, 105-story building in Pyongyang to foreign tourists. But the building has not been completed and is said to be structurally unsound.

The North's foreign news outlet, KCNA, occasionally muses on Pyongyang's grace. Earlier this year, it marveled at a computerized bowling hall that opened in 1994 on the banks of the River Taedong, which flows through the North Korean capital.

''It boasts peculiar architectural beauty as it has three pyramid-like roofs and it is largely covered with glass,'' KCNA reported. The hall has a sauna, a restaurant and a basement parking lot for 100 cars, it said.

North Korean officials spruce up the capital even when not trying to win visitors' respect, said an American expert who has traveled frequently to Pyongyang, most recently in 1997.

''Pyongyang is the model city. It's always being cleaned up and scrubbed up and the roads kept clear,'' said L. Gordon Flake, head of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs, a Washington-based public policy group.

People are similarly image-conscious on the other side of the Demilitarized Zone. In 1988, South Koreans responded enthusiastically to a government cleanup campaign before playing host to the Olympics.