Misery and mass bowing: the view from a North Korean tour bus-video

A UN report into human rights in North Korea has recorded systematic and appalling abuses including torture, rape and murder. Staffan Thorsell entered the country on a tourist visa during a weekend of commemorations for the late supreme leader, Kim Jong-il. He found a desperately poor country in thrall to its latest dictator, Kim Jong-un



Restraints on foreign tourists fail to mask the hardship and mind control in country UN likened to Nazi Germany

A stunningly beautiful, twentysomething woman dressed in black performs her death wail in the main hall of an obscenely luxurious palace in central Pyongyang. Her face seems to contort as her voice breaks over and over again. Speaking in a monotone, a guide translates the weeper's words into English: "The departed supreme leader's love will fill our hearts for eternity …" The voice just keeps going, and in a glass cage in the middle of the room lies the embalmed body of Kim Jong-il.

The weeper is here to preach the everlasting omnipotence of North Korea's second leader and to express the grief of a nation more than two years after his death. Everyone in the mausoleum bows their heads before the body – or perhaps the wax doll – flanked by North Korean army officers at attention. Anything else would be intolerable and would result in immediate arrest.

It's all part of the baffling experience that awaits the visitor to the world's most closed country, which was recently compared to Nazi Germany. Mass dancing, synchronised swimming, ritual bowing and weeping – all are de rigueur on certain days of the year when the country's first family are to be remembered and revered. Otherwise public spaces are vast and eerie.