A third Kim has North by the throat

By Dale McFeatters

Stalinist dictator Kim Jong-il's death at age 69 offers the people of North Korea some small, faint hope that their lives may get better. Certainly they can't get much worse.

Kim died Sunday aboard his special luxury train, officially from a stroke due to the stress of overwork, which seems unlikely given his sybaritic lifestyle. (For several years he was the world's largest purchaser of Hennessey cognac, a luxury unknown to his crushed populace.)

Kim ruled for 17 years with really one objective: to keep the country his father, Kim Il-sung, founded in 1948 firmly in the hands of the Kim family. Toward that end, he diverted what foreign aid the country could scrounge to the military and senior party officials whose loyalty was essential to keeping him in power.

"Great Leader" Kim ruled for 46 years and passed the country on to "Dear Leader" Kim who, faced with two unacceptable sons as leaders, belatedly arranged for the baton to be passed to "Dear Successor," Kim Jong-un, who, believed to be in his late 20s, was made a four-star general in 2010, despite a complete lack of military experience.

Young Kim seems to be surrounded by a military regency overseen by his uncle, Jang Song-thaek, all of whom may have their own ideas about who should rule North Korea. To see young Kim, with his unlined, untroubled moon face, lined up with his hard-faced, hard-eyed generals does not inspire total confidence in his grasp on power.

Indeed, many diplomats fear he may resort to one of his fathers' regular gambits, small attacks on South Korea, random missile launches, perhaps even a third nuclear test to display his mettle.

What is stunning after more than 60 years is how little we know about North Korea. Until the last two years, no one knew what Kim Jong-un looked like as an adult. Through a policy of brutally enforced isolationism, Pyongyang kept its people from leaving and information about the outside world from getting in. The system was enforced by a gulag of slave labor camps, from which few emerged.

The regime's indifference to the welfare of its people was breathtaking. In a famine in the mid-1990s at least 1 million people starved to death, but credible estimates say the number may be more like 2 to 3 million. Not bad in a nation of only 24 million.

The administration of President George W. Bush tried repeatedly to deal with Pyongyang, promising generous amounts of aid if it would give up its nuclear weapons program. Kim repeatedly broke his promises, and the Obama administration has conditioned aid on a verifiable abandonment of his nuclear weapons program.

Cruelly, the young Kim's greatest weapons may not be his handful of nuclear weapons or his 1.2 million member armed forces but his destitute and starving population.

Immediate neighbors South Korea and China greatly fear that if the Kim regime falters, they will be overrun by hundreds of thousands of desperate North Korean refugees. Maybe the bloodlines are running thin, but among the Kim family a ruthless determination to hold on to power seems the dominant gene.

Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer for Scripps Howard News Service (www.scrippsnews.com).