From KCNA:
Kim Yong Nam Receives Credentials from British Ambassador to DPRK
Pyongyang, September 30 (KCNA) — Kim Yong Nam, president of the Presidium of the DPRK Supreme People’s Assembly, received credentials from Peter Hughes, ambassador of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the DPRK, at the Mansudae Assembly Hall on Tuesday.
After receiving the credentials, Kim had a talk with the ambassador.
From Yonhap:
The British Football Association has donated some 600 items of sportswear such as gym suits and sweat pants to North Korea, a pro-Pyongyang daily in Japan said Tuesday.
The sportswear was delivered to the North Korea’s football association in a ceremony held in Pyongyang on Thursday with the British Ambassador to the country John Everard attending, the Choson Sinbo newspaper said.
Read the full article here:
British football association donates gym suits to N.K.: report
Yonhap
6/17/2008
From Her Majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office:
Mr Peter Hughes has been appointed Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in succession to Mr John Everard who will be retiring from the Diplomatic Service. Mr Hughes will take up his appointment during July 2008.
His CV can be found here.
From the British Council:
English Teacher Trainers, DPRK (North Korea)
Based Pyongyang, reference OA08007
You must read the Information about the Job before you make an application. It contains vital information on how to apply, our selection procedure, and the application deadline, as well as job-specific information.
Senior English Teacher Trainer - £29,361 a year
English Teacher Trainer (three posts) - £25,772 a year
Contract from 1 September 2008 to 31 August 2009 (with the possibility of extension)
Benefits including free accommodation, pension provision, medical insurance and regular flights to Beijing and the UK
JOB SUMMARY
The British Council/Foreign and Commonwealth Office English language project in the DPRK aims to deliver high-quality programmes in teacher/trainer training and to develop the curriculum and related materials as well as assessment systems at three leading institution in Pyongyang. This high-profile project has been running since 2000, and we are now seeking four experienced English language teaching professionals to fill the above posts, which will be based at these institutions.
You will have: a diploma-level qualification in TEFL (e.g. UCLES DTEFLA/Cambridge ESOL DELTA, Trinity College London Dip TESOL); a minimum of three years’ ELT and teacher training experience overseas; and course/curriculum planning and materials development experience. An MA in TEFL/Applied Linguistics (or equivalent) and experience of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) and of teaching ESP are desirable. Additionally, for the Senior English Teacher Trainer post you will have knowledge of testing, and people and project management experience is desirable.
Note: local restrictions mean that UK passport holders only can be considered for these posts. These are unaccompanied posts, although in exceptional cases the DPRK authorities might agree to a married couple.
WHO WE ARE
The British Council is the UK’s international organisation for educational opportunities and cultural relations. We work in 110 countries and territories reaching millions of people each year, and increase appreciation of the UK through the arts, education, science, government and sport.
HOW TO APPLY: Visit their website.
Back story: It looks like Suzanne Clark’s efforts are finally paying off…
Yonhap
1/29/2008
North Korea’s national symphony orchestra will perform in Britain as part of its planned concert tour to Europe in early September, a U.S. radio station reported Friday.
The North’s 120-member State Symphony Orchestra will hold three concerts in London and Middlesbrough Sept. 2 to 14, Radio Free Asia said, quoting a British businessman who arranged the tour.
Yonap
12/24/2007
As many as 245 self-claimed North Korean defectors sought asylum in Britain in the first 10 months of this year, a U.S. radio station reported Monday.
A spokesperson for the UNHCR, Jennifer Pagonis, however, noted the British government needs to confirm whether they actually came from North Korea, the Radio Free Asia said citing a spokesperson for the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Yonahp
Sam Kim
10/31/2007
North Korea has allowed an international relief group to bring supplies directly to the North’s southeastern region hit hard by recent floods, Radio Free Asia (RFA) has reported.
The U.S.-funded broadcasting station cited Tom Henderson of England-based civic group, Shelter Box, Tuesday as saying that North Korean authorities made the rare decision, allowing aid officials to deliver food and other supplies to flood victims in the region southeast of capital Pyongyang.
Times of London
10/24/2007
Lucy Bannerman
She is one of the few Westerners to be invited behind the borders of the world’s most secretive state, and is surely the only soprano from Middlesbrough to perform for Kim Jong Il.
Having become an unlikely celebrity in North Korea over the past six years, the opera singer Suzannah Clarke has pulled off perhaps her greatest coup by getting permission to take the state’s national orchestra to Britain. The Times has learnt that plans are under way for 120 musicians to perform at a number of big venues across the UK early next year.
The Foreign Office has already given its support to the project and the search is now on for sponsors.
For the performers, it will be their first experience of the outside world; for Clarke, 38, it will be the culmination of years of work, using her position as the darling of Pyongyang to build close relations with North Korea’s leaders. She said: “This is not an easy project. Two years ago I wouldn’t have had any hope of succeeding. But when I went out there last April, I could feel a change in the air, a warmer atmosphere. This is the first time the North Koreans have ever let their orchestra abroad.
Clarke, who opened the Euro 96 football championships at Wembley, claims that ending isolation is the best way for the West to build relations with the hardline state, which has a dismal record on human rights and is thought still to be holding up to 200,000 political prisoners, and has presided over millions of deaths from famine and economic mismanagement. However, she argued that isolation was not the answer. The idea of a British tour came to her as she watched the orchestra perform during the annual Friendship Festival this year.
As befits the tough standards set by the dictatorship, the musicians displayed the same discipline and technical prowess demonstrated by the thousands of dancers who take part every year in the synchronised gymnastic games marking Kim Jong Il’s birthday. “They played a cheeky medley of tunes - Shostakovich, Mozart, as well as some of their own repertoire. It was powerful, passionate, but funny as well, and I thought, ‘Gosh, British audiences would love this’,” she said.
She is seeking sponsors and dealing with the considerable logistical challenge of arranging transport and accommodation for 120 North Koreans and their chaperones during their visit. “I wake up from mini-nightmares of losing a North Korean on the Tube,” she said.
Supporters include Lord Alton of Liverpool, chairman of the British-North Korean All Party Parliamentary Group and official patron of the project, and David Heather, a British financier who curated Britain’s first exhibition of North Korean art in Pall Mall, this year.
Michael Rank at NKZone (which seems to be making a comeback) has pointed out:
British Council is looking for three English language teacher trainers as part of its “high-profile project [that] has been running since 2000.”
The British Council website states:
Senior English Trainer - £28,240 a year, plus benefits
English Trainers (2 posts) - £24,877 a year, plus benefits
Contract from 1 November 2007 to 31 August 2008
Benefits including free accommodation, medical insurance and pension provision
JOB SUMMARY
The British Council/Foreign and Commonwealth Office English language project in the DPRK aims to deliver quality programmes in teacher/trainer training and to develop the curriculum and related materials as well as assessment systems at leading institutions in Pyongyang. This high-profile project has been running since 2000, and we are now seeking three experienced English language teaching professionals to fill the above posts, which will be based at these institutions.
For all posts you will have: a diploma level qualification in TEFL (eg UCLES DTEFLA/Cambridge ESOL DELTA, Trinity College London Dip TESOL); a minimum of 3 years’ ELT and teacher training experience overseas; course/curriculum planning and materials development. Additionally: for the Senior Trainer post you will have an MA in TEFL/Applied Linguistics (or equivalent) plus experience of teaching ESP and of people management. For one of the Trainer posts, content and language integrated learning (CLIL) teaching experience is required, and, for both posts, an MA in TEFL/Applied Linguistics (or equivalent) is desirable.
Note: Local restrictions mean that UK passport holders only can be considered for this post. These are unaccompanied posts, although in exceptional cases the authorities might agree to a married couple. Employment is subject to permission from the DPRK Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs.
WHO WE ARE
The British Council is the UK’s international organisation for educational opportunities and cultural relations. We work in 110 countries and territories reaching millions of people each year, and increase appreciation of the UK through the arts, education, science, governance and sport.
HOW TO APPLY
Please apply using the materials below.
Information sheet
Behavioural competencies
Guide for external applicants
Application form
Guidance on completing the application form
Senior English Trainer - Information about the job
English Trainer (with CLIL) - Information about the job
English Trainer - Information about the job
Closing date for applications: 12 noon, Thursday, 20 September 2007. Applications should be returned to TMP, initially by e-mail, then hard copies by post. Interviews will be conducted on 4 and 5 October 2007 in Manchester.
Please return completed application forms quoting reference OA07016 to:
Lisa Hampton
TMP
Chancery House
53-64 Chancery Lane
London WC2A 1QS
Telephone: 020 7649 6046
Fax: 08700 339318
E-mail: britishcouncil@tmpw.co.uk
If you are unable to download the application form and details please contact Lisa Hampton.
OUR RECRUITMENT POLICY
The British Council is committed to a policy of equal opportunity and is keen to reflect the diversity of UK society at every level within the organisation. We welcome applications from all sections of the community.
We also offer application packs in the following formats: large print, Braille, computer disk or audio tape.
We guarantee an interview to disabled candidates who meet the essential criteria.
We are the UK’s international organisation for educational opportunities and cultural relations. We are registered in England as a charity.
Asia Times
Michael Rank
8/1/2007
Above the chic shops and arcades of London’s Pall Mall, the flag of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea wafts incongruously in the wind. Look inside, and portraits of the Great Leader and the Dear Leader stare out at you.
No, the North Korean army hasn’t marched across the River Thames, but Pyongyang has established a small cultural enclave in London’s West End in the form of the first major exhibition of North Korean art in the Western world.
Curator David Heather says he first got the idea after meeting a North Korean painter at an art exhibition in Zimbabwe in 2001. “I got chatting with Mr Pak and he invited me to Pyongyang,” said Heather, making it all sound surprisingly straightforward. But the 45-year-old financier admits that mounting the exhibition was “quite a challenge … very time-consuming” and also admits that he has no great knowledge of art or the international art market.
He describes the surprisingly extensive exhibition of about 70 artworks as “an opportunity for people to see art from what is a secretive and protective society at first hand”.
The show ranges from apolitical landscapes and ceramics to a vast, blatantly propagandistic battle scene celebrating the routing of the US Army in the Korean War, as well as hand-painted posters on such unexpectedly diverse themes as “international hero” Che Guevara and “say no to sexual slavery in the 21st century”. This is a clear reference to Korean and Chinese “comfort women” who were forced into prostitution to serve Japanese soldiers during World War II.
Heather brought over three of the artists to London for the opening of the exhibition, including Pak Hyo-song, whom he had met in Zimbabwe and who has two dramatic - if highly un-North Korean - wildlife paintings of zebras and lions on show.
Pak spent five years in Zimbabwe as representative of the Mansudae Art Studio, North Korea’s leading group of official artists, whose activities include designing monuments and propaganda posters on behalf of foreign, mainly African, governments.
Pak’s dramatic if not entirely lifelike oil paintings seem to have been influenced by the well-known British African wildlife artist David Shepherd, and sure enough, the 47-year-old “Merited Artist” told Asia Times Online at the opening party that he was a great fan of Shepherd.
He is undoubtedly the only North Korean artist to have had a one-man show in Europe, after Heather mounted an exhibition of 15 of his paintings in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 2005.
The London opening featured a remarkable mix of people. It was was a rare chance for the three North Korean artists and normally elusive members of the North Korean Embassy in London to mix socially with South Korean diplomats, art collectors and business people as well as with British Foreign Office officials, members of Britain’s tiny pro-Pyongyang New Communist Party, and at least one aging Moonie.
Heather said he had hopes of bringing the show to Paris, Berlin and even New York, and that only a few days after the opening he had already sold 50 posters at 250-300 pounds sterling (US$500-600) each, as well as two large paintings priced at several thousand pounds.
The sum of 300 pounds may sound like a lot for a none too subtle North Korean poster by an anonymous artist, but propaganda art is highly fashionable nowadays, with Chinese posters from the 1960s and 1970s fetching hundreds of dollars in London and New York. Given that the North Korean posters are hand-painted while the Chinese pictures are mass-produced prints that originally cost a few cents, the North Korean versions may turn out to be rather smart investments.
Heather said he had “no idea” how much he had invested in the exhibition, including renting a gallery on one of London’s most expensive streets for six weeks. “I don’t do it to make or lose money,” he said, but he clearly takes pride in being “a good negotiator”.
He said the North Koreans are “very direct and straightforward” and that “they are very open to ideas”. He has visited Pyongyang just once, in 2004, and conducted most of his negotiations in Beijing. Heather said he had bought 150 artworks, which he would show in rotation. Pricing the pictures was difficult, as this was the first time North Korean works of art were being sold in the capitalist West, he noted. “It opens up a new market which wasn’t there before.”
The biggest and most expensive picture in the exhibition is called Army Song of Victory and is priced at 28,000 pounds. A collective work by seven artists, it shows a Korean People’s Army brass band celebrating as US troops flee in the Battle of Rakdong River in 1950. A spokeswoman said the gallery was considering an offer of 21,000 pounds on the opening night.
Heather said he had received “a lot of help” from the North Korean Embassy and the British Foreign Office, and quiet encouragement also from the South Korean Embassy, which was anxious to see what North Korean art was all about. He has taken the North Korean artists to the Houses of Parliament, the British Museum and the historic city of Bath - despite the floods covering much of western England - and invited them to his home for a traditional British dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.
Heather has clearly formed an excellent rapport with the North Korean Embassy, and has even played golf with one of its diplomats on a course near London. “He’s sort of average like me. He has played on the Pyongyang golf course; it’s mainly for the elite,” Heather explained.
But holding an art exhibition is just the beginning, and Heather is now hoping to bring a 150-member North Korean orchestra over to London next year. “I’m hoping they will play in the Royal Albert Hall or Royal Festival Hall,” he said, referring to London’s two biggest concert halls.
This may not be quite as far-fetched as it sounds. Heather is working on the orchestra project with British soprano Suzannah Clarke, who has given several concerts in Pyongyang and is one of North Korea’s few foreign celebrities. Her rendition of “Danny Boy” is said to be especially popular with North Korean audiences. Given her fame and his business prowess, it’s an unlikely plan that just could come off.
Artists, Arts and Culture of North Korea runs at La Galleria, 5b Pall Mall, London SW1Y 4UY, until September 2.