PYONGYANG – “That was a personal commission,” says renowned North Korean sculptor Ro Ik Hwa, pointing to a bust of A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist denounced by the U. S. as the world’s greatest nuclear proliferator.
The bust sits in Ro’s workshop in Pyongyang’s sprawling Mansudae Arts Studio complex, which has become the latest target of U. N. sanctions seeking to curb nuclear-armed North Korea’s access to overseas hard currency revenue.
The Security Council resolution adopted unanimously in early December included a paragraph explicitly preventing U. N. member states from buying statuary from them.
The clause was aimed at a niche but lucrative business — run from Mansudae — of exporting giant memorials, mainly to Africa.
Ro, 77, is among the greatest living practitioners of such works, having been a lead artist behind some of the most iconic of Pyongyang’s monuments.
The Khan bust was commissioned after the Pakistani scientist visited the city’s Revolutionary Martyr’s Cemetery and admired the large bronze sculptures of individuals commemorated there.
“He asked for something similar in size and shape . . . so I made one,” Ro said during a recent tour of his studio.
“After he saw it, he really liked it and sent me a full-length photo and asked for another, so I made a 2-meter-tall one,” he said.
Revered by many Pakistanis as the father of the country’s atomic bomb, Khan confessed in 2004 to sending nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea, although he later retracted his remarks.
As U. S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton described him as “probably the world’s worst proliferator.”
Khan’s vanity purchase is dwarfed in scale and cost by the monumental multimillion-dollar projects Mansudae has worked on overseas — including the 50-meter-tall African Renaissance Monument, completed in 2010, outside the Senegalese capital of Dakar.
“We’ll send teams for between one and five years to work on these projects,” said Kim Hyon Hui, manager of the Mansudae Overseas Project (MOP) group.
A day after the latest U. N. resolution was adopted, the U. S. Treasury added MOP to its blacklist of entities that “support North Korea’s illicit activities.”
Ultimate authority over Mansudae technically resides with propaganda chief Kim Ki Nam. But according to Michael Madden, editor of the website North Korea Leadership Watch, its lucrative status marks it out for special attention from Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.
“Given its prominence as a labor-service contractor and export company, realistic control over its affairs lies with Kim Jong Un’s sister, Kim Yo Jong,” Madden said.
