North Korea after Kim Jong-il’s death

Ko Young-hwan, Seoul | Thu, 02/16/2012 10:31 AM A | A | A | - Klipping The Jakarta Post

On Dec. 17, 2011, Kim Jong-il died suddenly of cardiac arrest, just like his father, Kim Il-sung. After Kim Il-sung transferred his control of the North Korean Workers’ Party, the backbone of the country’s power hierarchy, to his son in 1973, Kim Jong-il ruled the nation with an iron fist for 37 years.

On Dec. 30, the day following his funeral, Kim Jong-un, the 28-year-old son of Kim Jong-il, became the supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army, marking the country’s hereditary succession of power to the third generation.

The first decision by the new leadership of North Korea following Jong-il’s death was to embalm and permanently preserve his body and to raise his statues and “portraits” all over the country. This was very much a replay of events 18 years earlier.

Upon Kim Il-sung’s demise in July 1994, Kim Jong-il mummified his father’s body to “enshrine him eternally,” and changed Kumsusan Assembly Hall, which served as an office building for his late father, into Kumsusan Memorial Palace at a cost of US$890 million.

After Kim Il-sung passed away, Kim Jong-il resorted to both a reign of terror and “politics of giving hope” in an attempt to maintain control over the North Korean people amid their suffering from food shortages and extreme hardship.

On one hand, Kim Jong-il created an atmosphere of fear all around the nation by ordering his subordinates to “make a gunshot sound all around the country”.

On the other hand, he attempted to give the North Korean people a ray of hope and expectation. This partly entailed his putting forward an “enormous goal” of making North Korea one of the world’s “strong and prosperous nations” by 2012, the centennial year of Kim Il-sung’s birthday.

Kim Jong-il promised to transform a poor and devastated nation where people die of hunger into a world-class power in fourteen years, but this proved to be an utter falsehood.

For 13 years following the promulgation of the goal of emerging as a “strong and prosperous nation,” the North Korean economy moved backward again and again.

As of the end of 2011, national industrial output, including steel, machinery, electric power, and fertilizer, was down 80 to 90 percent from the 1980s, when Kim Jong-il maintained a total monopoly on power.

What Kim Jong-il bequeathed upon his third son, Kim Jong-un, is a poverty-stricken country on the brink of collapse. It is in an even more parlous state than many African countries.

Even the North Korean leadership, a “master” of propaganda, had no alternative but to make a pitiful mention in the Rodong Sinmun (the official mouthpiece of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party) that the “achievements left by Kim Jong-il for the benefit of the people” were “nuclear weapons, artificial satellites, and mental power.” Nuclear weapons of unknown sophistication and readiness, and North Korean “artificial satellites” deemed non-existent in this world represent all the accomplishments of Kim Jong-il.

He not only drove the country onto the verge of collapse, but also handed over power to his son, as in a feudalistic dynasty.

As according to the old saying “Like father, like son,” the first thing Kim Jong-un did after he became the heir apparent was to construct his KRW170 billion mansion in Pyongyang.

Following Kim Jong-il’s death, Kim Jong-un initially embalmed his father’s body just like his grandfather’s and ordered the raising of statues and portraits of Kim Jong-il all over North Korea. Statues and portraits of Kim Il-sung remain in every corner of the country today.

His successor, Kim Jong-un, will not be able to adopt Chinese-style reform and opening, which Kim Jong-il vehemently opposed. Instead, he will keep alive his late father’s “military-first ideology.” This implies that he will consolidate the military and men in uniform while neglecting the economy and the people. Limited state property will be funnelled into his personality cult and the military, which in turn will put North Korea even deeper into crisis and spark a strong backlash against the third-generation power transfer of the Kims.

There is one problem. The North Korean people are more aware than they were at the time of Kim Il-sung’s demise. South Korea’s popular culture and news of its progress and China’s rapid development driven by reform and opening are percolating through like seeping water to the North Korean people through the Sino-North Korean border, North Korean farmers’ markets, and cell phones.

The people’s resistance is getting stronger, making it difficult for agents of the State Security Department and Public Security Ministry and cadres of the Workers’ Party to clamp down on the farmers’ markets

What’s worse, North Korea is celebrating Feb. 16, the birthday of the deceased Kim Jong-il, as the most magnificent “festivity” at this juncture where the entire international community is criticizing North Korea’s hereditary power succession over three generations. North Korea is a country where one dead person assumes more importance than countless living people.

The writer is senior research fellow, Institute for National Security Strategy.