If transition is mishandled, observers fear the country could descend into chaos
AFTER 16 years helming his now nuclear-armed country, marked by calamitous decline, famine and economic collapse, North Korea’s ailing leader Kim Jong-il is likely to attempt his most daring move yet – engineering another generational handover of power to his youngest son, Jong-un. Yesterday the state news agency KCNA announced that Kim had named Jong-un as a military general.
Kim is greatly helped by the fact that the country’s governing apparatus has shrivelled to a hollow shell, depleted by death and purges. The old five-member politburo now has one member – Kim himself.
The conference in Pyongyang’s Mansudae Assembly Hall, where Workers’ Party cadres from across the country are gathering, is likely to nudge his son along the road to power, not anoint him. But still, if Kim mishandles the transition, observers fear the country could descend into chaos.
Almost nothing important is known about Jong-un. He is thought to be in his twenties, Swiss-educated and stocky like his ailing dad. An official propaganda song has already reportedly been composed, he is now referred to as “Commander Kim” and a new breed of begonia named in his honour.
Pyongyang’s citizens are aware that a momentous change looms, but have no idea what the young heir looks like – he has never appeared on state-run TV or newspapers. “We don’t like to discuss succession because the Dear Leader is so energetic and healthy,” says one person.
But even official photographs now show a visibly aged Kim, his withered left arm dangling by his side following a 2008 stroke.
In this hermetically sealed society, where the internet, foreign broadcasts, books and magazines are banned, television and newspapers extol the bounteous virtues of Kim’s leadership in ornate language befitting less a modern leader than a deity.
Propaganda translated by North Korea-watchers quotes Kim senior as calling his son “a genius of geniuses . . . There is nobody on the planet who can defeat him in terms of faith, will and courage.”
Senior cadres have already seen photographs of Jong-un in pre-conference booklets circulated last week, according to the Daily NK, an online source that tracks life behind the “bamboo curtain”. Eventually that picture may take its place alongside the portraits of the father-and-son dictatorship that has ruled this country for more than half a century.
Those portraits are everywhere in Pyongyang – in classrooms, workplaces and homes, even on every carriage of the city’s creaking subway system.
And if that isn’t enough, every adult and many children wear a badge showing the smiling mugshot of the nation’s founder, Kim Song-il, over their hearts.
The clue to the madness – and reason – behind North Korea’s scowling, belligerent mask is in a cavernous 52,000sq m building in the capital. Here at the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, this country’s crucible years – the 1950-53 war that split the Korean peninsula in two – are documented in the typically florid propaganda that embellishes all official narratives.
Wide-eyed rural schoolchildren dressed in military uniform and wearing the bright red neckties of the Youth Revolutionary League listen as guides explain atrocities by the “US aggressors” committed during the war – more than half a million tons of bombs dropped, chemical weapons deployed, cities levelled. A futile war fought to a standstill ending with perhaps three million dead and, the museum recalls, the first US armistice in history signed without a victory.
Out of the wreckage of that conflict – unresolved to this day – Kim Il Sung built his isolated state, squeezed to the north by an old enemy, China, and a new one, the US-backed South. Instead of nursery rhymes, schoolchildren were taught songs about the “American imperialist bastards”.
Paranoia about Washington’s motives and its “lackeys” in Tokyo and Seoul set in, heightened by incursions by US spy ships and aircraft. Last March’s sinking of a South Korean warship – widely blamed on Pyongyang – is, the museum guide tells us, the latest ploy.
“It is a trick to isolate our country,” she says.
By the time Kim died in 1994, the North had been rebuilt into a modern, industrial state.
“This is not an undeveloped country,” notes Barbara Demick in her book about North Korea, Nothing to Envy. “It is a country that has fallen out of the developed world.”
But the rot was already setting in. The centralised economy was grinding to a halt, aid slowed as Pyongyang’s Stalinist allies in Moscow and Beijing made a startling transition to capitalism, and defence spending ate up a quarter of everything produced. In the mid-1990s, famine struck.
Only the messianic cult built around Kim likely stopped the regime from imploding. His death, famously, was greeted by mass hysteria, whipped up by apocalyptic propaganda that recorded how it had “blotted out the sunlight, shattered the earth and rent the sky, and shook the mountains and rivers, trees and grass, making them writhe with grief.”
His son deepened the cult with hundreds of murals, giant statues and monuments and having his father’s body entombed in a glass coffin in the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, a vast marble and granite mausoleum.
On a weekday visit to the palace last week, hundreds of workers and sunburned peasants, wearing their Sunday best – ill-fitting suits for the men, traditional dresses for the women – bowed and filed past his sarcophagus in the Great Hall of Lamentation. A piped dirge played throughout the palace and a taped commentator indicated the proper response – “awestruck silence”.
North Korean high schools must set aside two rooms for the study of the lives of the two Kims – the Benevolent Sun and the Dear Leader. Schoolchildren spend one sixth of their day in these rooms, surrounded by portraits and mythical episodes from the struggle against the Japanese and the Americans.
Even swathed in this elaborate cloak of official cant, however, achieving another orderly transition of power from father to son will not be easy, warn many observers.
“This is not the same era as when Kim’s father died,” says Youngkwan Yoon, professor of international relations at Seoul National University.
“Ordinary citizens are much more distrustful and angry at the regime. We are entering a period of great instability.”
How unstable remains to be seen. Malnutrition is widespread, affecting much of the North Korean population and stunting the growth of 32 per cent of children, according to the World Food Programme. Even the citizens of Pyongyang, the country’s showcase capital, appear thin.
Those schoolchildren in the museum are typical: skinny, sallow-cheeked and small for their age with heads too big for their bodies – a sign of malnutrition. Perhaps up to 300,000 North Koreans have defected across the Chinese border. Another 20,000 have found new lives in Seoul.
The South’s citizens, who enjoy a lifestyle unimaginable to most of their Northern cousins, say they want reunification but fret about the consequences – if they consider them at all. The nightmare scenario is the sudden collapse of the Kim regime, sending millions of refugees spilling into Seoul.
The South is not prepared for the consequences of that collapse, says Cho Myung-sook, who runs a Christian-funded school for North Korean defectors in Seoul. “Even the defectors who come find life hard here, so how can we deal with millions?” she asks.
“People are blotting their eyes to the truth.”