Tyrantcapable of deft brinkmanship - FT.

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11-12-27 3:51 AM

Last updated: December 19, 2011 7:38 pm

Tyrant!capable of deft brinkmanship

By Anna Fifield and Christian Oliver

Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader who died on Saturday, will enter the history books as one of the worlds cruellest tyrants, following a reign of terror during which he developed nuclear weapons while his compatriots starved. The reclusive Kim, who was either 69 or 70 years of age, was often portrayed in the west as a caricature of a mad dictator: a gluttonous playboy who compensated for his short stature with a bouffant hairdo and platform shoes; an internet addict who had more than 20,000 DVDs, and at one point was Hennessy cognacs best customer. But contrary to the popular impression of Kim as a madman, he was not delusional, according to Madeleine Albright, who met him in Pyongyang in 2000 while she was US secretary of state. In her memoir, Madam Secretary, she said: I found him very much on top of his brief. Others who met him describe being surprised by his bearing. Isao Iijima, a top aide to former Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi who met him twice, described Kim as having gentle eyes, like those of an elephant. He did not have vicious eyes. Kim used calculated brinkmanship to keep the world at bay while at home he wreaked havoc. He promoted a pervasive personality cult that saw him and his father, the states founder Kim Il-sung, revered as gods, and used an unimaginable level of fear to keep the populace under control. Any misstep, such as watching a South Korean film, could land not just the perpetrator but his or her entire family in a political prison.

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Kang Chol-hwan, who defected to South Korea in the 1990s, described being kept in Yodok, one of the most notorious camps, for a decade from the age of nine after his grandfather espoused capitalist ideals. He witnessed 15 executions and was so hungry he trapped and ate snakes and mice. In one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 20th century, Kim allowed as many as 3m people to starve to death during the mid-1990s in a famine resulting from decades of economic and agricultural mismanagement. All the while he was leading a lavish life. Konstantin Pulikovsky, a Russian official who accompanied Kim on a train journey to Moscow (Kim was terrified of flying), described how live lobsters and roasted donkey were flown in to supply the train each day. I am the object of criticism around the world, Mr Pulikovsky quoted Kim as saying. But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track. According to state propaganda, Kim was born on Mount Paekdu, the spiritual home of the Korean people, underneath a bright star. In reality, he was believed to have been born in 1941 in a Soviet Army camp near Khabarovsk, in the Russian far east, where his father was exiled. In his childhood, he was nicknamed Yura and, even following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the countries close ideological ties, still gravitated to Russians, spending hours in the sauna with Russian diplomats in Pyongyang. The Kim family returned to Pyongyang when Japan lost control of Korea at the end of the second world war, with Stalin anointing Kim Il-sung as the leader of the communist half of the peninsula, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. He spent parts of his childhood in China after his father invaded US-backed South Korea, sparking in 1950 the three-year Korean war, but later attended Kim Il-sung University, majoring in political science. He rose quickly through the Workers party ranks, taking charge of organisation and propaganda in 1973, before his father officially designated him as his successor in 1980. It was from this time that his portrait was compulsorily hung beside his fathers in buildings public and private around the country, and that he begun being called the Dear Leader, styled after his fathers Great Leader. Kim was believed to be behind the 1983 bomb attack in Rangoon, Burma, that killed 17 members of the South Korean cabinet, as well as the bombing of a South Korean airliner in
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1987. In 1991, Kim was put in charge of the military, despite never having served, until his father died in 1994. Three years of official mourning followed, before Kim took over the leadership of the Workers party. However, he named his father Eternal President and never took on the top title himself, instead calling himself the chairman of the National Defence Commission and general secretary of the Workers party. In the decade since he took formal control, North Korea has suffered repeated humanitarian crises, including the 1994-97 famine, during which the leadership kept the international community at arms length. With the collapse of the Soviet bartering system, North Koreas economy fell into ruin and it became reliant on China, now its closest ideological ally, for economic and political support. In 2002 Kim allowed some price and wage liberalisation, but the reforms were halfhearted and led to even greater economic problems as necessities such as rice spiralled beyond the reach of the common people. Kim captured the worlds attention when he responded to accusations he was running a secret uranium-based nuclear programme in addition to the known plutonium plants by withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. This sparked a nuclear crisis, which came to a head with his test of a nuclear device in October 2006. Although a technical failure, the test catapulted the rust-bucket country into the league of nuclear states. It prompted a diplomatic process with the US, marked by Kims habit of making deals, breaking them, extracting greater concessions, before eventually carrying out his end of the original deal. It is this pattern that has led some analysts to comment on Kims ability to play a weak hand of cards exceptionally skilfully. Still, he pushed the peninsula perilously close to war last year with the of killing 50 South Koreans in a submarine attack against a warship and the bombardment of a South Korean island. Kim married four times first to a woman chosen by his father, with whom he had a daughter. With his second wife he had a son, Kim Jong-nam, now about 40, who was considered the obvious heir until he was caught sneaking into Japan using a false Dominican passport.

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He had two more sons, Kim Jong-chul and Kim Jong-eun, with Ko Young-hee, a dancer who was called his favourite wife but is believed to have died from cancer in 2006. The same year, Kim married his secretary, more than 20 years his junior. Kim suffered a suspected stroke in 2008, forcing him to accelerate the promotion of Kim Jong-eun, now styled the Great Successor. Additional reporting by Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura in London

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