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BACK in the mid-1970s, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was so impressed by a meticulously choreographed children’s gymnastics display he witnessed in Pyongyang that he sought, with limited success, to have it emulated in Pakistan.
It was in the same period that North Korea’s ‘Great Leader’ Kim Il-sung took a step unprecedented in the communist world by naming one of his sons, Kim Jong-il, as his political heir and putative successor.
There were, no doubt, many weird political practices in various communist countries, including the thoroughly un-Marxist trend of encouraging personality cults — a department in which Kim Il-sung had early on outperformed role models such as Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. But the feudal concept of hereditary leadership was a somewhat different matter.
In the event, the younger Kim was designated ‘Dear Leader’, and had 20 years to prepare himself for his destined role as the head of the family firm. Kim Jong-un, on the other hand, was formally acknowledged as Kim Jong-il’s crown prince barely a year before his father died last December.
He is under 30 years of age, with little or no administrative experience, and is believed to have spent considerable time abroad — which raises the possibility of greater open-mindedness than his father and grandfather, but also makes it likely he will be viewed with some suspicion by North Korea’s ruling elite.
He is expected to remain for some time under the tutelage of his aunt, Kim Kyung-hee, and her powerful husband, Jang Song-taek. Even the title bestowed on him, ‘Great Successor’, hints at a degree of reticence. Kim Jong-un may well feel insecure in his new position for years to come, even though the shoes he is expected to fill are not particularly large.
But if he is something of an unknown quantity, it’s worth remembering that his father’s personality remained elusive despite the two decades of grooming and nearly as long a period in power. Kim Jong-il never completely emerged from the shadow of his father, who was posthumously designated the ‘eternal president’ — which means he technically remains the head of state.
Ruled by a corpse: the symbolism is somehow appropriate, given that about two million North Koreans are said to have perished in the famine that followed within years of Kim Il-sung’s demise. The atrociously high figure is, inevitably, an estimate and may even be something of an exaggeration, but there are eyewitness accounts of unprecedented devastation across the countryside.
Although the mass hunger and its consequences tend to be associated with Kim Jong-il’s rule, the appalling circumstances also signified the final failure of his father’s much-vaunted Juche principle — ‘self-reliance’, it seems, proved unsustainable once Soviet aid dried up.
Until the 1980s, there wasn’t all that much difference between North and South Korea in terms of economic achievement, and although the ideologies varied, both populations bore the brunt of brutal military dictatorships. The Kim regime, however, proved more adept at stifling dissent.
In the South, a succession of US-backed generals eventually made way for US-supported civilian rule and the trappings of bourgeois democracy came to be accepted as the normal state of affairs amid rapid economic growth and the attendant prosperity. In the North, there was little scope for any dramatic deviations from the course set by Marshal Kim Il-sung.
That included the supremacy of the armed forces, and according to North Korean media, Kim Jong-un has vowed to honour his father’s dying wish that the ‘military first’ policy — which means the army gets priority in the allocation of resources — be unquestioningly maintained.
This is partly a throwback, of course, to the Korean War of 1950-53, when the North suffered some of the heaviest bombardment in 20th-century warfare. That war effectively concluded in an armistice that divided the country at the 38th Parallel, but it has never been formally ended and nearly 30,000 American troops remain stationed in South Korea.
During recent decades there have been sporadic multilateral discussions chiefly aimed at persuading Pyongyang to relinquish its nuclear weapons capability (evidently achieved with some assistance from Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan), with representatives of the two Koreas joined by officials from the US, China, Russia and Japan. Progress has been painstakingly slow.
Intermediaries such as former US president Jimmy Carter have received indications, however, that Pyongyang would be prepared to accept a denuclearised Korean Peninsula and a permanent ceasefire based on bilateral discussions between North Korea and the US. Washington has always baulked at the latter prospect, given the disparity between the two nations in terms of international status.
This mental block ought to be overcome. No one outside North Korea can possibly deem there to be any kind of equivalence between the Hermit Kingdom and the US (although, it is an open question whether a ‘President Newt Gingrich’ would be substantially superior to any given Kim), but where’s the harm in playing along if it improves the chances of a positive outcome?
International aid agencies have lately sounded warnings about the prospect of further bouts of mass starvation, and a challenge to the divine right of Kims — whether it comes from within the army or is based in some sort of popular resistance — could lead to the state’s collapse, with consequences that scare both China and South Korea.
Often dismissed as a bizarre anachronism, North Korea is in fact a grotesque tyranny. It is difficult to defend on moral grounds any action that prolongs that nation’s agony, yet it’s vital to facilitate by any means possible the least traumatic way out.
Confrontationist tactics are very likely to backfire.
One day most North Koreans will realise that the Kim who reduced them to compulsory tears last December, as well as his father, weren’t demigods with supernatural attributes but pathologically misguided mediocrities with feet of clay.
North Korea’s transformation into a relatively normal state is ultimately inevitable. The challenge for its friends, foes and neighbours is to help ensure the transition is as painless as possible for its long-suffering masses.
