Monumental failure as a leader
By Michael Breen
Such was the incredulity engendered by the nature of his regime in the post-communist world that Kim Jong-il in recent years had become the butt of jokes. Christopher Hitchens, the atheist essayist who died just last week, famously rejected the appeal of a religious “heaven,” on the grounds that it would certainly be something like North Korea.
Kim was a gourmet who enjoyed fine wine while his 23 million subjects endured a famine and who defied the predictions of the collapse of his state by developing a rogue nuclear weapons program that the international community was helpless to stop.
Kim, 69, died on Saturday of exhaustion brought on by a sudden illness while on a domestic train trip, the official Korean Central News Agency announced. He had been in poor health for some time. It is believed he had a stroke in August 2008 and there were also reports he had pancreatic cancer.
Since his emergence in 1980 as the heir to the throne in Pyongyang of his father, Kim Il-sung, to the selection of his own son, Jong-un, as his successor, Kim’s leadership explains so much of what South Koreans have come to take for granted: why Seoul spends so much on defense, why the northern parts of Gangwon and Gyeonggi provinces are littered with army bases, why young men have to do military service, why Korea is not whole, why South Korea’s image suffers internationally, why so many old people will never see their families again, and why we can’t drive round to Haeju and up to Pyongyang for a weekend.
His impact on his own people, of course, was much worse. In perpetuating the virulently racist form of Korean nationalism he inherited from his father, and along with it, the crushing restrictions on rights and useless thinking on economics, he wrought disaster on his country.
Kim, it must be said, was brilliant in the North Korean context. On the death of his father in 1994, North Korea had long been surpassed by South Korea in all aspects. Given that its raison d’etre had been as a nationalistic alternative to the South, its existence was no longer justified. But, far from collapsing and being absorbed into South Korea, Kim kept his country whole and united. He did this primarily by putting the army above the Korean Workers’ Party and by letting his officers develop nuclear weapons.
This, of course, has served no interests except those of the few thousand elite North Koreans. From the point of view of every other subject ― although they won’t be saying it now ― he was a monumental failure as a leader.
When told he had suddenly become popular in South Korea in 2000 after the first inter-Korean summit, Kim Jong-il told a journalist, “After I appeared on TV screens, I'm sure, they came to know that I am not like a man with horns on the head.”
Indeed, there were no horns. Those who met him say Kim was rather artistic. A small man ― just five foot two inches ― with a boyish hairdo, he engaged visitors, was fussy on the small details as a ruler, and occasionally bad-tempered with those close to him. He was a dictator, but there is no evidence to suggest he was a monster.
That, of course, may be an academic distinction for the system he helped build up and which he has presided over since 1994 ranks among the most monstrous of the communist regimes. North Korea under Kim Jong-il has been so dysfunctional that it literally devours its own people: hundreds of thousands died in a famine in the mid-1990s brought on by incompetence; and hundreds of thousands labor under appalling conditions in the gulags.
Mysterious leader
Despite decades in the spotlight and the shelves of propaganda and daily column inches devoted to him in the North Korean media, he remained as much of a mystery to his own people as to the outside. The masses didn’t even hear his voice until 1992 when he issued a one-liner in a public broadcast on Armed Forces Day, saying, “Glory to the people’s heroic military!”
The mystery began with his birth. According to official accounts, he was born in a log cabin in a secret guerrilla camp on Mount Baekdu on February 16, 1942. (Russian accounts suggest that he was actually born in an army camp in Vyatskoye, near Khabarovsk in the former Soviet Union, where his father, Kim Il-sung and mother Kim Jong-suk, both partisans fighting against the Japanese, were based).
As a child, he went by the Russian nickname “Yura.” He had a younger brother, Man-il, whose nickname was Shura, and a sister, Kyung-hee. In 1947, three-year-old Shura fell into a pond in the back garden and drowned. Two years later, their mother died of complications from an ectopic pregnancy.
His father re-married and had three more children. Judging by the lower profile his stepmother, Kim Song-ae, adopted since his father’s death in 1994, we may assume that if there were not tensions in the blended family in the early days, the choice of Jong-il as the leader certainly created them.
North Korea’s communist leaders at first viewed hereditary succession as feudal, but began to change their minds when they saw how Stalin’s memory was trashed by his successor, Nikita Kruschchev. The need for a successor who would remain loyal to the founder became apparent. And the idea of Kim Jong-il as the best candidate ― because both parents were revolutionaries ― began to take hold in the late 1960s.
After graduation from college Kim worked in the Party Central Committee’s Department of Organization and Guidance, where he is credited with having, in 1967, purged some “vacillating elements influenced by external factionalism and opportunism” in the Party.
Although not made public until later, Kim was made a secretary of the Party’s Central Committee in 1973 and a member of the Political Committee of the Central Committee in the following year. At the time, the media began referring to him simply as the “Party Center.” Later, he became known as the “Dear Leader.” Finally, at a rare Party congress in 1980, his position as the successor to his father was made official. He then became number four in the Politburo, number two in the Party Secretariat, and number three in the Party’s Military Commission. He was 38.
Kim Jong-il’s first love was a movie star named Sung Hae-rim. They lived together in secret and had a love child, Kim Jong-nam.
In the early 1970s, his father told him he should marry the daughter of a military officer. He obeyed and with this official wife, Kim Young-sook, had at least one child living in a parallel household. A decade later, he took up with Ko Young-hee, a Japanese-born Korean whom he met when she was in a state dance troupe. The new successor Kim Jong-un is their younger son. Propaganda before her death from cancer in 2004, referring to her as “respected mother,” was the first clue that one of her sons was being groomed for the top job.
Psychological profiles
Kim Jong-il was widely seen as a lunatic with his finger on the button. An American CIA profile described him as a “malignant narcissist.” He had sent commandos against South Korean targets. He had orchestrated the terrorist bombing of a South Korean passenger airliner. He was thought to be a playboy. He was known to be the world’s biggest single purchaser of Hennessy’s pricey Paradis brand of cognac. He was such a movie buff that he had a top South Korean director and actress couple kidnapped so that they could upgrade the North Korean film industry.
But he remained an enigma. It says something of his secretive political style that when his father died, there was serious doubt overseas as to whether Kim Jong-il would be able to maintain power. This uncertainty persisted as Kim officially mourned for three years.
It did, however, reveal his priorities as a leader in that, by “mourning,” he chose to demonstrate faith to his father’s revolution rather than step up and solve the famine as a way to establish his credentials. In 1995, when time came for him to assume the presidency, he took this one flakey step further and had his dead father named “President for Eternity.” Already chairman of the all-powerful National Defense Commission, he took the post of general secretary of the ruling Korean Workers’ Party in December 1997.
It was now apparent that Kim Jong-il would not substantially reform his country. Coming out of the cold was more than the son of Kim Il-sung could do. And so, while North Korea went backward, the world moved on.
In October 2001, the Americans exposed a uranium-based nuclear weapons program which North Korea was working on in secret and in contravention of its international agreements. Efforts hosted by China and involving the US, South Korea, Japan and Russia to persuade Kim to drop his nuclear ambitions didn’t work out.
North Korea is now a nuclear-armed power. It remains unpredictable aggressive, but on a limited scale, as evidenced by the attack on the Cheonan and the shelling of a South Korean island last year.
The question now is whether the new leaders around Kim Jong-un, whoever they are, will push him to flex his muscles to keep the threat levels high and the people in line. Or, indeed, whether the new leaders may eventually lead North Korea in out of the cold.
Michael Breen is an author, former foreign correspondent and the chairman of Insight Communications, a public relations consulting company. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.