The Hidden People of North Korea (6 page)

Two days before he died, Kim Il-sung reportedly gave a talk to a small group of officials in which he outlined several tasks to be accomplished, not knowing of course that this would be his last instruction.
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After his death, his words were enshrined as a sacred “behest,” and whenever it was convenient, his son invoked the behest as the mission his father wanted him and the North Korean people to accomplish, reminiscent of Stalin’s pledge at Lenin’s funeral to carry on his work. Kim’s last instructions showed how out of touch he was with economic reality. He instructed his officials to construct oil-powered power plants to help solve the chronic energy shortage, although North Korea had to import all its oil from abroad. He urged the repair of a large fertilizer plant and the “normalization” of the cement industry. He also ordered that the production of steel be increased. All these industries had been failing for years and would continue to fail because he could not tell the people where to get the resources to run them. He wanted to see an increase in trade with Southeast Asia, for which one hundred large cargo ships should be built—although North Korea only has the capacity to build small cargo ships. He also instructed his economic officials to go abroad to study modern business practices, although the country really needed a better economic system, not better businessmen. Kim’s final instruction was significant: to “achieve the complete victory of socialism and the fatherland’s reunification,” that is, the reunification of the peninsula under communism.

The Rise of Kim Jong-il

North Korea is one of the rare cases of successful hereditary succession in national politics. As the oldest son of the founder, Kim Jong-il had an inside track on succession, even though hereditary rule has never been a notable feature of communist regimes.
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But being a dictator’s son was not enough to guarantee Kim Jong-il the succession. He had to prove himself, because his father was not foolish enough to put the country he had built into the hands of an incompetent. The approval process lasted from the time Jong-il graduated from college in 1964 to the time he was publicly presented as the future leader in 1980. Along the way there were purges and banishments and most likely a few dead bodies. Once in power, Kim Jong-il took the country as it had been shaped by his father and, with a view to staying in power, made no substantial changes.

According to an early edition of North Korea’s
Dictionary of Political Terminology
, hereditary succession is “a reactionary custom of exploitative societies,” but that inconvenient characterization was deleted in later editions of the work. From 1974 to 1977, and sometimes even in later years, the North Korean media referred to Kim Jong-il only as the “party center,” leaving people to guess the exact identity of that individual.
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Why he was not identified by name is not known, although the most popular guess is that he or his father was concerned about how the public would react to such an obvious case of nepotism. When he was mentioned by name, he was often referred to as “Dear Leader Comrade Kim Jong-il” (
kyongaehanun jidoja Kim Jong-il dongji
).

The official story of Kim Jong-il’s birth has this auspicious event taking place in a log cabin on the forested slopes of North Korea’s Mt. Paektu, where his father’s guerrilla band was allegedly based. The mountain above the cabin, originally called Chang-su Peak, was later renamed Jong-il Peak. In fact, Kim was not even born in Korea but rather in a Russian military camp near Khabarovsk. In late November 1945, two months after Kim Il-sung was escorted back to Korea by Russian troops, the three-year-old Jongil and his mother landed at the small eastern port of Unggi, later renamed Sonbong, meaning “leading torch.” Kim’s younger brother, Shura, who had been born in 1944, died in a drowning accident at the family home at the age of five. Kim also had a sister, Kyong-hui, born in 1946, who would become one of his closest associates.

His mother, Kim Jong-suk, died while giving birth to her fourth child in 1949, and in about 1953, Kim’s father married the attractive Kim Song-ae and had a second son, Kim Pyong-il, a handsome and popular boy. Kim Jongil disliked his stepmother and stepbrother, and when he gained political power, he saw to it that both of them were kept out of the circle of influence, his mother under house arrest and his brother permanently assigned to ambassadorships in Bulgaria, Hungary, Finland, and Poland, where he was kept under close surveillance.

Kim discarded his Russian name of Yura at about the time he graduated from high school, and he would later change the Chinese characters of his Korean name to make them fitting for a member of the ruling family, because in Asia names carry more meaning than they do in the West. Jong-il, originally written in Chinese characters meaning “righteousness the first,” was changed to “righteousness the sun” when Kim made his political debut in 1980. The “sun” name is the same as the first character of his father’s name, Il-sung. Kim’s mother’s name, Jong-suk, originally written with the Jong character meaning “virtue,” was posthumously changed to the same Jong character for “righteousness” that is part of her son’s name.
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Thus, Jong-il ended up with one name from his father and one from his mother, signifying that he is firmly in the family “revolutionary bloodline.”

Kim’s childhood was typical—for the son of a dictator. He was treated with great deference by one and all and thoroughly spoiled. His father probably did not have much time to spend with his son, and having a father who was worshipped as a great hero and almost a god set a very high standard for the young Kim, who was always trying to gain his father’s respect. After middle and high school in Pyongyang (except for a few years in China during the Korean War), Kim enrolled in the university named after his father, Kim Il-sung University, and graduated with a degree in political economy in 1964. Kim’s university dissertation, perhaps ghostwritten (he was a bright, but somewhat distracted, student who had special tutors to assist him), was titled “The County’s Position and Role in the Construction of Socialism.” In 1964, Kim joined the Korean Workers’ Party’s (KWP) Propaganda and Agitation Department, which was headed by his uncle, Kim Yong-ju. By 1967 the young Kim was chief of the Culture and Art Guidance Section of the department, rising to department vice director in 1970.

Testimony from North Korean defectors suggests that Kim played an active role in the management of party and government affairs from the time of his first party appointment in the mid-1960s, including (according to the North Korean press) bearing direct responsibility for the capture of the U.S. spy ship
Pueblo
in 1968 and the ax killings of American soldiers at the border post of Panmunjom in 1976.
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Kim moved steadily into his role as successor. In 1973 he became a Central Party secretary, and the next year he was appointed to the Politburo. His leadership succession was made official at the Sixth Party Congress in 1980, where at his father’s direction he was appointed a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, secretary of the Central Party Committee, and member of the Central Military Committee. Only two other persons held such prestigious posts: his father and the top general, O Jin-u, who, not being a family member, could not be in the line of succession.

It appears that the junior Kim ran most of North Korea’s domestic affairs from about 1980 onward. He issued commands in the name of his father and, by that token, had to be obeyed because his father’s word was quite literally the law of the land. Because he served as his father’s principal administrative assistant, reports sent to Kim Il-sung had to go through Kim Jong-il, who therefore decided what information his father would receive.

In the 1990s, Kim Jong-il was given (or took) several titles and top posts to consolidate his control over the military, the only institution that could conceivably block his succession. In 1990 he was elected first vice chairman of the National Defense Commission (NDC), an entity whose only significance at the time was that Kim Il-sung was its chairman. In 1991 Kim Jongil was named supreme commander of the KPA, and the following year, on the KPA’s sixtieth anniversary, he received the title of marshal (his father took the title of grand marshal). While reviewing the military parade commemorating the KPA’s anniversary, Kim made the only publicly broadcast utterance of his career, calling out in a high-pitched voice, “Glory to the heroic KPA officers and men.” According to one South Korean source, his words were only supposed to go out on the public address system, but due to a sound engineer’s error, his brief speech was picked up by Korean Central Television (KCTV), a mistake for which several broadcasting officials were duly punished.
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In 1993, Kim Jong-il succeeded his father as chairman of the NDC.

When Kim Il-sung died on July 8, 1994, no one other than Kim Jong-il was even remotely positioned to succeed him, but it is likely that Kim had to do some additional work to consolidate his political position now that his father was no longer around to back him up. To this end, Kim placed even more emphasis on the military as his main source of support and the “pillar” of North Korean society. He continued to reward and promote KPA generals, usually announcing the promotions on Kim Il-sung’s birthday, thereby making the officers loyal to both him and his late father.

Many observers of North Korea, ourselves included, doubted that Kim Jong-il could hold on to power after his father’s death. The reasons for such skepticism were numerous, but two stand out. First, the junior Kim was riding to power on his father’s coattails. It seemed quite possible that the KPA generals might not rally around the great leader’s son, who had no military experience, even though North Korean propagandists called him “a military genius who has boundless military insights, limitless boldness, extensive military knowledge, and political insights.”
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This line of skepticism failed to consider, however, that the top generals, most of whom were of Kim Il-sung’s generation, recognized that they could not run the country themselves. They were, after all, uneducated warriors who owed their positions to having fought alongside the senior Kim fifty years before.

Another reason for discounting Kim Jong-il’s staying power was his relative obscurity. Unlike his father, who loved to meet people and give speeches, the junior Kim avoided the public and never gave a public speech or made a media broadcast. He even failed to utter a word on the fiftieth anniversary of the country’s founding in 1998, when the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA) convened for the first time since his father’s death. Instead, the assembled delegates were treated to a recording of a speech made by his father in 1990. But, of course, the North Korean people have no voice in politics, so even though they were skeptical of Kim Jong-il’s leadership ability, it hardly mattered.

By the mid-1990s the North Korean economy was in disastrous shape because Russia had ended its concessionary trade relations with North Korea, and China had curtailed them. Food rations began to run short even before floods hit the country in the summer of 1995. For three years after his father’s death, while millions were going hungry and even starving, Kim Jong-il lived in seclusion. The press said he was such a loyal son that he was honoring a traditional three-year mourning period. Only in 1997 did he come out of his self-imposed seclusion to have himself appointed to his father’s position as general secretary of the KWP. The appointment was made without convening a party congress, which had not met since 1980 (nor has it met since). In 1998, when Kim finally convened the Supreme People’s Assembly, the delegates adopted a new constitution that retired the position of president, thereby making his father North Korea’s “eternal president.” Kim chose to be reelected as NDC chairman, a position declared to be the country’s top leadership post. In the North Korean media, Kim is often referred to by the full complement of his ruling titles: Comrade Kim Jong-il, chairman of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) National Defense Commission, general secretary of the Korean Workers’ Party, and supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army.

First-Person Accounts of Kim Jong-il

Kim Jong-il is hidden person number one in North Korea. He has shrouded his life in secrecy as a first line of defense against domestic and foreign threats to his regime, and it would seem that secrecy is also an important characteristic of his lifestyle and mode of governance. He has said, “We must envelope our environment in a dense fog to prevent our enemies from learning anything about us.”
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Kim’s penchant for secrecy makes it difficult to get behind the persona of the “respected and beloved general” and his international reputation as a crazy playboy. In reality he is not crazy, and although he likes to think of himself as a bold leader, his most important decisions are made with calculation and, more often than not, with caution.

Kim’s international debut could be said to have occurred when he welcomed South Korean president Kim Dae-jung to Pyongyang for a summit meeting in June 2000. The meeting went well, and some Korea observers expected that Kim’s public success would prompt him to adopt a more open leadership style. As it turned out, Kim was not about to become a public figure or international globe-trotter, and he never got around to making a promised reciprocal visit to Seoul. The leaders of China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea have come to Pyongyang, as has an American secretary of state, but Kim has continued to lead a secluded life and stayed close to home. Except for making a few trips to China and Russia, where he can feel at home among fellow autocrats, he has avoided going out into the world.

Clues about his personality, leadership style, and personal goals can be gleaned from the testimony of the relatively small number of North Korean defectors and foreigners who have come into contact with him. They describe him (to use what psychologists call the “big five” personality traits) as publicly retiring, impulsive, open to experience, alternately good-natured and irritable, and tense and insecure.