[USFK Forums] In North Korea, it's all about Kim Jong Il [SFC]

[C. Y. Lee]

Uploaded by C. Y. Lee on Saturday, January 28, 2006

In North Korea, it's all about Kim Jong Il

'Great Leader' fights constant battle to maintain image

Jehangir S. Pocha, Chronicle Foreign Service
San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, January 27, 2006

Pyongyang, North Korea -- At a model hospital here, government escorts kept showing visiting foreign journalists sets of newly delivered triplets.

The dutiful officials weren't trying to showcase North Korea's prowess in obstetrics. They were trying to quash a rumor that Kim Jong Il, the North's secretive leader, is having all triplets taken from their families and placed in secure "orphanages" because a seer had told him he would be toppled by a triplet.

The late Kim Il Sung, who founded communist rule in North Korea with Soviet help in 1945, and his son, Kim Jong Il, who succeeded him in 1994, are treated as all-powerful. Both the government and the dissidents who oppose the Kims -- mostly from self-imposed exile overseas -- use rumor, gossip and fable to bolster or blow apart the myths surrounding both men.

"It's a highly personalized rule, much more personalized than even Mao's time here," said Chu Shulong, professor of international studies at Qinghua University in Beijing. He was referring to the continuing adulation of Mao Zedong, the late ruler of communist China.

North Koreans are taught from childhood to look up to the Kims as messianic figures. Every North Korean wears a picture-badge of Kim Il Sung on the lapel of their suit, dress or uniform.

The government spends billions of dollars on extravaganzas, such as last fall's Arirang show, held to celebrate the North Korean Workers' Party's 60th anniversary in power. It portrayed Kim Il Sung as a giant who defeated two tyrannies in one lifetime -- Japan, which had annexed Korea in 1910 and ruled until it surrendered at the end of World War II in 1945, and the United States, which defended South Korea during the 1950-53 Korean War.

In fact, as U.S. journalist Don Oberdorfer, author of "The Two Koreas," noted, Kim Il Sung was a mediocre guerrilla officer in the Free Korean forces in the Chinese army, and only came to power because Stalin wanted a young man to head the new nation of North Korea in 1945.

That is not accepted history here. It also is taboo to refer to now-public Soviet-era records confirming that the nation's founder was born Kim Song Ju and changed his name to that of a famous Korean guerrilla leader of the early 20th century in an effort to steal the older man's glory.

"Why are you Americans always trying to discredit the Great Leader?" demanded Ryong Chol Li, one of the government officials escorting the foreign journalists. "Do you hear me saying anything bad or false about George Bush, about how he is a liar?"

At the center of this ingrown culture is a cult-like self-reliance ideology called juche, a nationalist idea the Kims propounded, ostensibly to make North Korea independent of the great powers surrounding it.

Thousands of North Koreans have been executed, and more than 150,000 are currently imprisoned for challenging the Kims' cult of personality and hold on power, according to the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a private, nonpartisan group. The U.N. Commission on Human Rights has censured North Korea for "widespread and grave violations," including torture, executions, forced abortions and slave labor in prisons.

With a reign of fear choking honest expression, many North Koreans publicly sing paeans to father and son at every possible occasion.

"The Great Leader made us meet our destiny," said Choe Hye Ok, a 26-year-old guide showing visitors around Pyongyang's Juche Tower, a soaring, gray stone tower capped with a giant flame that North Koreans say is the tallest stone tower in the world. "Without the juche idea, we'd be a lackey of the U.S."

As for Kim Jong Il, Choe said she wanted to marry someone just like him.
"That's if there is a man like him," she said emphatically. "He's a genius, a real genius, and he's so good looking. I really like his style."

The price of such unquestioning obedience comes at a cost. Every decision of government, economics and society has been made by the Kims themselves. Mistakes are never acknowledged and rarely corrected. As a result, North Korea is an economic basket case, and the floods and famine that gripped the country in the mid-1990s as a result of Stalinist agricultural practices and industrial policy caused the death of about 3 million people, according to the U.S. Institute of Peace.

But that hasn't affected the behavior of Kim Jong Il, who like his father did, lives in a sumptuous seven-story pleasure palace, according to Dr. Jerold Post, a former CIA psychologist who has studied the Korean leader. Post said the younger Kim collects erotic art and spends "between $650,000 and $720,000 a year" on exotic wines.

While ordinary North Koreans are denied access to any Western media, Kim -- who loves movies and sees himself as a great filmmaker -- has a personal movie library of more than 15,000 films, with "Rambo," Disney cartoons and the James Bond series ranking as his favorites, according to defectors such as ex-bodyguard Lee Young Kuk.

As banned South Korean soap operas, pirated DVDs of Hollywood movies, smuggled cell phones and illegal copies of magazines and newspapers from China seep into the country, the Kims' cult of isolation and hero worship is being questioned more and more.

"People have begun to realize that Kim Jong Il is wrong, that he is killing people," Kim Duk Hong, one of the highest-ranking official to have defected from North Korea, said recently.

Posters denouncing the Kims have begun to appear sporadically, even though their authors would face certain death if caught.

Even government officials privately say things need to change in North Korea.
"I say I don't believe in God, but every day I pray to God for change," said a North Korean who requested anonymity. "I hope God is more powerful than those who don't want any change."



(END)