Man in the News: Kim Jong-il
By Christian Oliver
Published: April 10 2009 18:07 | Last updated: April 10 2009 18:07
Trying to break the ice over dinner with a kidnapped South Korean actress in 1978, Kim Jong-il revealed he had no illusions about how the world viewed him.
“How do you find me? Shorter than a midget’s arse, aren’t I?”
North Korea’s dictator, who riled the world again last weekend by firing a long-range rocket over Japan, has always proved an easy target for ridicule, with his tinted shades, platform shoes and bouffant hair. But he is also self-aware.
George W. Bush mocked him as a “pygmy” and youngsters in the west often visualise him as the tantrum-throwing puppet of the 2004 movie Team America: World Police who dumps Hans Blix, the former UN weapons inspector, into his shark tank.
Such comedic caricatures can sit uncomfortably with the few grim realities known about the Dear Leader, who presides over vicious gulags and prises open lobsters with silver chopsticks while his people starve.
South Korea accuses him of personally masterminding the bombing of an airliner with 115 people on board in 1987. Seoul also says it was Mr Kim who was responsible for the 1983 attack on South Korean government officials in Burma, killing 21 people, including the foreign minister.
While historians and biographers generally have little sympathy for Mr Kim, many have still appreciated the absurdity of his position, stuck from birth in a cold war he knows is lost while most of his 23m people remain unaware that the game is up.
From a few diplomats, family members and even his Japanese chef, scraps of information on Mr Kim’s surreal parallel universe have emerged, although very little can be corroborated.
At home, the diminutive film buff enjoys Hollywood action movies and hears tales of life in the west from his Swiss-educated children, while trotting out the party line in public. While his population can only buy radios pre-set to one official frequency, Mr Kim surfs the web and styles himself as an internet expert. He even proudly gave his e-mail address to Madeleine Albright, then US secretary of state.
“What can he possibly be thinking?” writes the US historian Bruce Cumings. “He is thinking, get me out of here.”
The Kim boys do not even pretend to live the socialist dream any more. His eldest, Kim Jong-nam, haunts the casinos of Macau and his second son, Kim Jong-chol, invited Eric Clapton to give a concert in North Korea.
Their father has even made some attempts to inject a little capitalism into the economy, allowing currency revaluation and shaking up the market structure in 2002. Recent visitors to Pyongyang have seen evidence of plastic money and shops competing for business through discounts, unheard of under the socialist model.
The lies started at birth for Kim Jong-il. He almost certainly came into the world in 1941 in a Russian base-camp of Korean guerrillas fighting the Japanese in Manchuria. But for the son of Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader to be, that simply would not do.
In the official narratives, he was born of the flanks of Mount Paektusan, the crucible of Korean civilisation. A new star appeared in the firmament after his birth, a crucial sign of heavenly approval. Although North Korea is officially atheist, the Confucian notion of “the mandate of heaven” remains strong and official news reports still include celestial phenomena that show heavenly contentment with Kim Jong-il’s actions.
Psychoanalysts love digging into Mr Kim’s childhood for signs of where it all went wrong. Growing up physically small in the shadow of the prepossessing Kim Il-sung can hardly have been easy. To compound his problems, his mother and younger brother died when he was young.
In rising through the ranks, Kim Jong-il’s skills were chiefly used as a propagandist, a field in which he could indulge his love of cinema. He also founded the Pibada (Sea of Blood) opera company in 1971, dedicated principally to keeping alive the stories of his father’s guerrilla battles with the Japanese, with plenty of gore among the arias.
He was granted responsibilities that led most observers to assume he was heir apparent for almost 20 years before the death of his father in 1994, ensuring a smooth succession.
Beyond the putative economic reforms, his dictatorship has been marked by a divide-and-rule policy, playing the communist party off against the army’s high-brass to ensure that neither became too powerful. North Korea detonated a nuclear warhead in 2006.
This need to divide and rule illustrates an under-appreciated dimension of the North Korean dictatorship: Mr Kim must always keep one eye on his throne, particularly now he is sick. Once a bon viveur, he looked frail when he appeared in parliament on Thursday. No-one is above suspicion and most senior officials, including his influential brother-in-law, Chang Sung-taek, have spent periods undergoing “re-education”.
Last week’s missile launch was part of shoring up power. “It’s a sign to people that matter: major players and challengers to Kim Jong-il,” says Daniel Pinkston, north-east Asia deputy project director at International Crisis Group.
A massive train explosion in 2004 was commonly viewed as an attempt on Kim Jong-il’s life, after a mobile phone was found near the blast site. Mr Kim never travels by aeroplane.
His power is chiefly exercised through his role as chairman of the National Defence Commission, the country’s top post. As expected, parliament this week rubber-stamped a third term for him in this role.
But there is every chance that his years of good living could prove a more imminent threat to the regime than internal coups and bombers. Intelligence services claim he has suffered a stroke and undergone minor heart surgery in recent years.
He was long famed as a gourmand and heavy smoker and drinker. In 1980, his chef noted he would jog up and down stairs to shed the pounds. He claimed to have quit smoking but was snapped puffing on a cigarette at a tobacco factory this year.
How much he still drinks is another unanswerable question, though he enjoys wine at official functions. He was famed as a hard liquor man, ordering cases of luxury cognacs, although there is some dispute as to whether they were for his own consumption or to present to loyal subjects.
When you always get 100 per cent support in elections, that is a lot of brandy.
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