Tower of Pride

[One of my op-eds at Modern Republic]

The Burj Dubai came up in conversation recently. This is the building in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, which, though still under construction, is unofficially the tallest building in the world. There was disagreement as to whether the Burj was in fact the tallest building, and since I didn’t know the name of the building beforehand, I had some googling to do.

Eventually I found references to the Burj (which is “tower” in Arabic). The official website for the Burj Dubai is really worth checking out – very slick, interactive, informative. The Vision statement is very intriguing. In part, it says:

The goal of Burj Dubai is not simply to be the world’s highest building. It’s to embody the world’s highest aspirations.

The byline on the homepage (it’s done all in Flash, so “homepage” doesn’t really apply):

Monument. Jewel. Icon.

(It’s interesting, by the way, that the vision statement includes a subtle but clear misnomer: The Burj Dubai will in fact not be the “highest” building – that honor belongs probably to some building in La Paz or Lhasa. But they chose “highest building” to finish the parallelism with “highest aspirations”, since “tallest aspirations” makes less sense than “highest building”)

In my searching, I found a discussion of the Burj in which there was a reference to the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea. Specifically, the reference was something like, “The Burj Dubai will not become another Ryugyong Hotel.” I was intrigued, and read what I could find on the net about the Ryugyong Hotel. It’s a sad story.

According to wikipedia, construction on the Ryugyong Hotel began in 1987. It was designed to be 105 stories, to a height of 1,083 feet – which in fact it is. It was scheduled to open its 3,000 rooms two years later (the Burj construction began in 2004, and is slated to be completed next year – a total of 5 years for construction). That didn’t happen. By 1992, “construction came to a halt…and has never resumed.”

The building still stands, though it is uninhabited, with no windows, no fixtures, crumbling concrete, and a construction crane still perched on the very top. It can be seen from every point in the city of Pyongyang. Its estimated construction cost – such as it was – was estimated at $750 million – “2% of North Korea’s GDP.”

“It’s to embody the world’s highest aspirations”…

North Korea hasn’t always been impoverished. Relative to its size, population, and arable land area, it was at one time in the recent past self-sustaining with regard to food production. Its people ‘enjoyed’ a relatively high life expectancy, and their children “were far better vaccinated than American children.” (http://globalpolicy.igc.org/security/sanction/nkorea/2003/0723peace.htm) Their people had, and surely still have, aspirations. What those are, I don’t know. Whether or not the Ryugyong Hotel embodied those aspirations, I seriously doubt it.

But whatever those aspirations were and are, the country suffered the loss of trading partners when the USSR collapsed, and on the heels of that, suffered severe drought. And, of course, various sanctions imposed by the United States and the United Nations.

Perhaps not every American knows that we are technically still at war with North Korea. Most do know that North Korea is a member of George Bush’s fictional ‘axis of evil.’ Whatever the point of that fiction, it functions in part as a justification of continued – and increased – sanctions against the people of North Korea. Because those sanctions are not only against military weaponry – as if the United States bomb and gun makers have shown any restraint in selling their bombs and guns to whomever they can.

Sanctions. After killing millions of North Koreans, and nearly destroying their land with our ‘scorched earth policy’, our government, with the complicity of the United Nations, continues to punish the people of North Korea.

I don’t know what North Koreans themselves think of the Ryugyong Hotel. In fact, some correspondents have mentioned that it’s difficult to get anyone to speak of it much. Even local guide maps don’t show it. To me, though, the Ryugyong Hotel embodies our lowest inclinations, not our highest aspirations. The arrogance of the leaders of North Korea, who built for their egos and not for the people; the petty pride of our American governments since 1950 to extract some kind of apology from a nation that we nearly destroyed; the inability of the United Nations to relieve the people of North Korea of inhumane sanctions; the shame of poverty and isolation.

My hope is that the Burj Dubai is indeed not another Ryugyong Hotel.