 This undated file photo shows North Korean leader Kim Il-sung waving. The founder of the communist country died on July 8, 1994. / Korea Times |
By Michael Breen
Korea Times columnist
The unexpected death of Kim Il-sung on July 8, 1994, was a milestone in the modern history of North Korea but one that, in retrospect, brought no significant change to the lives of the people on either side of the border.
That sober conclusion tempers the current death watch on the peninsula in the last two years since the current leader, Kim Jong-il, the founding dictator's son, suffered from a stroke.
Before his death, the senior Kim's deteriorating condition was kept secret. Just three weeks earlier, he had met with the former U.S. President Jimmy Carter who described him as "vigorous, alert, intelligent and remarkably familiar with the issues."
Two months before that, on April 16 that year, I was part of a delegation of 20 people who spent over three hours with Kim over an interview and lunch.
One of our group, an American academic who had met Kim before, declared expansively, "You look great." We later discovered that Kim had got out of bed to meet us.
The defector Hwang Jang-hyup later revealed that by that time, the great leader, as Kim was known, was suffering from uncontrollable flatulence. If anything was happening across the table, those sitting next to him didn't let on.
The final demise was not the first time Kim had died. There was a memorable "Kim Il-sung is dead" moment in South Korea in November 1986 when the defence minister in Seoul, convinced by Japanese and U.S. intelligence, told the National Assembly that either a coup had happened or Kim was dead, or both. Special editions of newspapers hit the streets and the world went into a frenzy.
My editor, the legendary newspaperman Arnaud de Borchgrave, called his humble servant on the ground and asked dramatically, "What are you seeing there, Mike?" I think he imagined I was in a bunker on the DMZ, helmet on head and binoculars in hand.
At the time, I was staring down from my office in Seoul overlooking Doksu Palace, where almost nothing ever happened.
Fortunately, I had earlier called an American military intelligence source who said something that I could repeat which made me sound like I was on top of events. "Lot of confusion here, Arnaud. U.S. intelligence is being cautious. They think it could have been Kim's double who was killed."
Whatever had happened or not happened, Kim was alive and well and very much in charge of the nasty dictatorship he had been running since 1948.
The eldest of three sons, Kim was born on April 15, 1912, in a village near Pyongyang. He was named Song-ju. His father was an Oriental medicine practitioner, and had been educated at a school founded by American missionaries.
His mother was a church deacon. When he was seven, the family moved to Manchuria. Kim lived in China until he was 28, aside from two years back in Korea in his early teens.
Fluent in Mandarin, Kim was drawn to communism and became a guerrilla. He became known by the nom de guerre "Il Sung," meaning the sun who would help save Koreans from the darkness of Japanese rule.
In 1931, Kim joined the Chinese Communist Party, which was Korean-dominated in Manchuria, and in the following year, began his career as an anti-Japanese guerrilla with the Chinese National Salvation Army.
He led a unit of up to three hundred men who conducted mostly hit-and-run raids on Japanese police and other targets in Manchuria and northern Korea.
Kim was notable, not only for becoming the most wanted man in Manchuria, but also for his perseverance. While most other revolutionaries were killed, captured or turned, Kim survived, fleeing to the Soviet Union in late 1940, when the Japanese destroyed the guerrillas in China.
There, the Korean partisans were eventually restructured as the 88th Special Reconnaissance Brigade of the Soviet 25th (Far Eastern) Army, led by a Chinese commander.
Kim Il-sung headed one of its four battalions, which undertook reconnaissance and infiltration activities. He was now a Red Army officer and saw himself as part of the larger international Soviet-led struggle against imperialism.
By 1945, 33-year-old Captain Kim was a leading figure among the Manchurian guerrilla faction in the Soviet Far East.
After the war, the Soviets who controlled Korea north of the 38th parallel selected him to lead their zone. In October 1945, they arranged a mass rally in Pyongyang to welcome Captain Kim as a returning hero.
As Kim read the speech written for him by a Soviet official and translated by a Korean poet, many among the three hundred thousand in the crowd began to yell abuse.
They could not believe that the young fellow in a suit and sporting a Soviet medal was actually Kim Il-sung the legendary guerrilla fighter.
Soviet authorities then undertook an image campaign that led directly to the boggling personality cult that remains intact sixty years later.
On June 25, 1950, with Stalin's go-ahead, Kim launched an all-out invasion of South Korea. By the time, the armistice was signed in July 1953, the two sides had settled along roughly the same frontline as when they'd started, except that the city of Gaeseong was now in the North.
The toll was staggering. Millions of soldiers and civilians died. Hundreds of thousands orphaned and widowed, millions homeless and millions who would be permanently separated from their closest family by the Demilitarized Zone that separated the two armies.
The agony of the Korean War is slowly receding, but the blood-soaked legacy of the most extreme of all national divisions remains.
Kim Il-sung should have lost his job but after the armistice, he purged rivals, tightened the bolts on his centralized power system, and turned up the volume on the personality cult ― and with it the lie that he had saved the country from a war started by the United States ― to ensure lifelong power.
In the decades following the war, with both sides ruled by soldiers in civilian clothes, the Cold War was never colder than it was in Korea.
The South, of course, moved and became a free market democracy. Kim Il-sung's North Korea, meanwhile, remained stuck.
