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From Our Own Correspondent: Frontier Tales

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Frontier Tales

07/05/2016 GMT

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, Frontier Tales

Making history in North Korea, on the US/Mexico border, Hungary's frontiers and in Turkey

Stories of personal loyalty and orders from above, from North Korea's surreal capital Pyongyang, the US/Mexico border, a Hungarian frontier post and the home of a Turkish novelist

Pascale Harter introduces stories of personal loyalty and orders from above, in North Korea, the US-Mexico border, Hungary's frontiers and the Turkish literary scene. 

Steve Evans was part of an unusually large foreign press contingent allowed into Pyongyang this past week, in order to cover a congress of North Korea's governing Workers Party. But how much, if any, of what he saw was real - and how much had been specially laid on to create a good impression? He reflects on trying to distinguish truth from theatre in a surreal, and still highly repressive, atmosphere in the city.

Katy Watson speaks to people of Mexican descent in California, many of whom are seriously worried by Donald Trump's ideas about limiting migration to the USA. Many of them have personal histories of crossing the border and want others to have the same chances.

Gabriel Gatehouse meets a man who inadvertently helped to bring about today's "border-free" Europe: a Hungarian frontier guard who, in 1989, crucially chose NOT to shoot at East Germans trying to storm across the barriers and into Austria. But what does he make of the apparent return of reinforced borders in today's EU, as it tries to limit the entry of migrants from Africa and the Middle East?

And Emma Jane Kirby has a brush with a national literary hero as she talks to the daughter of the late Turkish novelist Sabahattin Ali, whose book "Madonna in a Fur Coat" was written in the 1940s and is set in the 1920s, but has proved a sensation with the Turkish youth of the 21st century. They may respond to its romantic tale of doomed love, but Ali's passionate belief in freedom also has resonance today.

Photo: A worker stands before machinery during a media tour of the March 26 Electric Cable Factory in Pyongyang on May 6, 2016. Some 130 foreign journalists came to North Korea at the express invitation of the authorities to cover a rare ruling party congress, but weren't allowed in to the event, and were then offered a tour of the factory instead. North Korea issues reporting visas sparingly and escorts all journalists during their time in the country. (ED JONES/AFP/Getty Images)

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