In a blog posting at the weekend titled "It might not get weirder than this", Sophie Schmidt provided a candid take on the controversial three-day trip earlier this month that was criticised by the US government.
Miss Schmidt, 19, had accompanied her father on the visit as part of a delegation led by Bill Richardson, the former US ambassador to the United Nations. In a blog posting at the weekend titled "It might not get weirder than this", Sophie Schmidt provided a candid take on the controversial three-day trip earlier this month that was criticised by the US government.
Miss Schmidt, 19, had accompanied her father on the visit as part of a delegation led by Bill Richardson, the former US ambassador to the United Nations.
Our trip was a mixture of highly-staged encounters, tightly-orchestrated viewings and what seemed like genuine human moments," she wrote.
"We had zero interactions with non-state-approved North Koreans and were never far from our two minders."
While much of the blog posting is taken up with the sort of observational musings common to any first-time visitor to Pyongyang, it had some interesting insights into the official side of the delegation's trip.
In particular, it fleshed out the main photo-opportunity of the entire trip when they visited an e-library at Kim Il-Sung University, and chatted with some of the 90 students working on computer consoles.
"One problem: No one was actually doing anything," Schmidt wrote.
"A few scrolled or clicked, but the rest just stared. More disturbing: when our group walked in... not one of them looked up from their desks. Not a head turn, no eye contact, no reaction to stimuli.
"They might as well have been figurines," she added.
One of the world's most isolated and censored societies, the North has a domestic Intranet service with a very limited number of users.
Analysts say access to the Internet is for the super-elite only, meaning a few hundred people or maybe 1,000 at most.
On his return, Eric Schmidt said he had told North Korea it would not develop unless it embraces Internet freedom - a prospect dismissed by most observers as inconceivable.
Sophie Schmidt's description of the "unsettling" e-library visit suggests the delegation was all too aware that it was being shown a facade.
"Did our handlers honestly think we bought it? Did they even care? Photo op and tour completed, maybe they dismantled the whole set and went home," she wrote.
Source: AFP