In dealing with North Korea, progress is measured in tiny increments, says University of Washington professor Clark Sorensen.

Last week, he had a brief exchange with a young North Korean tour guide who assumed that Korean is the language used by the world for international communication. He told the man otherwise.

"If you can go even an inch, that's progress," Sorensen said.

Professors from the United States and six other countries caught a rare glimpse of life inside North Korea, among the world's most isolated countries, during an unusual conference they staged there last week.

The two dozen academics met to discuss North Korea's nuclear proliferation and the breakdown in six-party talks — involving the U.S., North Korea, South Korea, Russia, China and Japan — aimed at defusing the crisis.

Though the government allowed the foreign scholars to come in for a three-day visit, no North Koreans participated in the discussions. The conference included academics from the other five countries involved in the six-party talks, as well as Thailand and Australia.

Representatives from the U.S. government were invited to the conference, but they decided not to participate. A State Department spokesman declined to comment.

"It was certainly a wild experience at a whole host of levels," said Donald Hellmann, a UW professor who organized the trip together with Seoul National University's Peace and Unification Forum.

Hellmann, a critic of U.S. policy toward Pyongyang, said he wanted to hold the meeting in North Korea to make "a forceful statement" about the importance of resuming negotiations. He says U.S. policy fails to address North Korea's economic and security issues but focuses solely on getting the country to give up the nuclear option — its only bargaining chip.

Even before they arrived, participants received a note saying that no criticism of the North Korean political system or the economy would be allowed.

The group toned down its original conference agenda. They considered it too risky to discuss the topic of regime change in North Korea and instead began with a discussion of how the U.S. war on terrorism has affected policy in Asia.

Most of the funding for the trip came from Seoul National University. Hellmann paid about $11,000 in travel expenses for the seven Americans from his budget at the UW and a grant from Battelle's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. It's unusual for any academic conference to take place in the repressive, authoritarian state, especially one focused on the sensitive issue of its nuclear ambitions.

North Korea has stayed out of official talks for a year, and some worry the country is on the verge of testing a nuclear bomb.

Those who attended said the meeting would have little effect on the immediate problem. Still, they found the rare visit eye-opening.

Traveling by bus from South Korea across the 10-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone, they arrived in a tourist resort in a remote part of North Korea called Mount Kumgang.

The resort was set up by Hyundai Corp. following South Korea's sunshine policy of warming relations with the North. It caters to visitors from South Korea. But North Korean authorities tried to prevent any contact between North Koreans and South Koreans, going so far as to hire tour-bus drivers from China.

They drove down roads with towering fences on either side. Young soldiers stood at attention over unused railroad tracks, dikes and farmyards. In the morning, they awoke in their luxury hotel rooms to the sound of trumpet blasts and patriotic anthems.

Hyundai CEO Mark Juhn welcomed the group on the first day. In the middle of the conference, a blackout cut off electricity to the entire hotel until Hyundai's generators kicked in.

Entertained at night

Guests hiked up a mountain to a pristine waterfall wearing picture IDs around their necks. The stone cliffs were marked by carvings describing the visits by former President Kim Il Sung.

In the evening, the group dined on raw sea cucumber and drank bilberry wine. They watched an acrobatic performance hosted by a young Korean woman in a flowing pink traditional dress. When the troupe sang a song about reunion, many South Korean visitors broke down in tears.

"If you want to know about a place, being there is incredibly important," said Sorensen, chairman of the Korea Studies program at UW.

A chance to see the relationship between South and North Koreans was a valuable experience, participants said.

Buses shuttling visitors from the south cross into North Korea twice a day. In spite of efforts to control personal exchanges, these fleeting contacts are slowly introducing North Koreans to people and ideas from outside.

Change is happening in North Korea, but it's "slow, twisted, performed in a very much authoritarian way from above, strictly controlled and conservative," said Alexei Bogaturov, deputy director of the Institute of International Security Studies at the Russian Academy of Science, in an e-mail exchange.

Nonetheless, he believes, such changes will "inevitably breed a systemic evolution of the North Korean regime."

Kristi Heim: 206-464-2718 or kheim@seattletimes.com