Kim Jong-il - The Biographicon

Overview

Kim Jong-il (also written as Kim Jong Il) (born February 16, 1941, Vyatskoye, Soviet Union) is the leader of North Korea. He is the Chairman of the National Defense Commission, Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army, and General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea (the ruling party since 1948). He succeeded his father Kim Il-sung, founder of North Korea, who died in 1994, and commands the 4th largest standing army in the world.

Childhood

Birth

Contemporary North Korean society is dominated by an elaborate personality cult around Kim Jong-il, including a very flattering "official" biography of the man. Many of these official claims about Kim's life and activities are inconsistent with outside sources.

Kim Jong-il's official biography states that he was born atop Baekdu Mountain (백두산) at 6 o'clock in the morning in northern Korea on February 16, 1942. The official biography also holds that his birth at Baekdu Mountain was foretold by a swallow, and heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain and a new star in the heavens. However, Soviet records show he was born in the village of Vyatskoye, near Khabarovsk, in 1941, where his father, Kim Il-sung, commanded the 1st Battalion of the Soviet 88th Brigade, made up of Chinese and Korean exiles.

Kim Jong-il's mother, Kim Jong-suk, was Kim Il-sung's first wife. During his youth in the Soviet Union, Kim Jong-il was known as Yuri Irsenovich Kim (), taking his patronymic from his father's Russified name, Ir-sen.

Kim was only three in 1945 when World War II ended and Korea regained independence from Japan. His father returned to Pyongyang that September, and in late November Kim returned to Korea via a Soviet ship, landing at Sonbong (선봉군, also Unggi). The family moved into a former Japanese officer's mansion in Pyongyang, with a garden and pool. Kim Jong-il's brother, "Shura" Kim (the first Kim Pyong-il, but known by his Russian nickname), drowned there in 1948. Kim Jong-il began primary school that same year, and in 1949 his mother died in childbirth.

Education

Kim most likely received most of his education in the People's Republic of China, where he was sent away from his father for safety during the Korean War. According to the official biography, Kim graduated from Namsan School in Pyongyang, a special school for the children of Worker's Party officials. He later attended Kim Il-sung University and majored in Political Economy, graduating in 1964. His graduating class won the highest academic honor, "Double Chollima". By the time of his graduation, his father, revered in the government's official pronouncements as "the Great Leader" (위대한 수령, widaehan suryŏng), had firmly consolidated control over the government. He is also said to have received English language education at the University of Malta in the early 1970s, on his infrequent holidays in Malta as guest of Prime Minister Dom Mintoff.

The elder Kim had meanwhile remarried and had another son, Kim Pyong-il (named after Kim Jong-il's drowned brother). It is unclear if Jong-il was chosen over Pyong-il, or whether Pyong-il was ever seriously considered as successor by his father. Since 1988, Kim Pyong-il has served in a series of North Korean embassies in Europe and is currently the North Korean ambassador to Poland. It is suspected that Kim Pyong-il was sent to these distant posts by Kim Il-sung in order to avoid a power struggle between his two sons.

Early political career

After graduating in 1964, Kim Jong-il began his ascension through the ranks of the ruling Korean Workers' Party, working first in the party's Elite Organisation Department before being named a member of the Politburo in 1968. In 1969 he was appointed deputy director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department.

In 1973, Kim was made Party secretary of organisation and propaganda, and in 1974, he was officially designated his father's successor. During the next 15 years, he accumulated further positions, including Minister of Culture and head of party operations against South Korea.

Kim gradually made his presence felt within the Korean Workers Party from the Seventh Plenum of the Fifth Central Committee in September 1973, leading the "Three Revolution Team" campaigns. He was often referred to as the "Party Center", due to his growing influence over the daily operations of the Party.

By the time of the Sixth Party Congress in October 1980, Kim Jong-il's control of the Party operation was complete. He was given senior posts in the Politburo, the Military Commission and the party Secretariat. When he was made a member of the Seventh Supreme People's Assembly in February 1982, international observers deemed him the heir apparent of North Korea.

At this time Kim assumed the title "Dear Leader" (친애하는 지도자, ch'inaehanŭn chidoja), the government began building a personality cult around him patterned after that of his father, the "Great Leader". Kim Jong-il was regularly hailed by the media as the "fearless leader" and "the great successor to the revolutionary cause". He emerged as the most powerful figure behind his father in North Korea.

On Dec 24 1991, Kim was also named supreme commander of the North Korean armed forces. Since the Army is the real foundation of power in North Korea, this was a vital step. It appears that the veteran Defense Minister, Oh Jin-wu, one of Kim Il-sung's most loyal subordinates, engineered Kim Jong-il's acceptance by the Army as the next leader of North Korea, despite his lack of military service. The only other possible leadership candidate, Prime Minister Kim Il (no relation), was removed from his posts in 1976. In 1992, Kim Il-sung publicly stated that his son was in charge of all internal affairs in the Democratic People's Republic.

According to defector Hwang Jang-yop, the North Korean system became even more centralized and autocratic under Kim Jong-il than it had been under his father. Although Kim Il-sung required his ministers to be loyal to him, he nonetheless sought their advice in decision-making; Kim Jong-il demands absolute obedience and agreement, and views any deviation from his thinking as a sign of disloyalty. According to Hwang, Kim Jong-il personally directs even minor details of state affairs, such as the size of houses for party secretaries and the delivery of gifts to his subordinates.

By the 1980s, North Korea began to experience severe economic stagnation. Kim Il-sung's policy of juche (self-reliance) cut the country off from almost all external trade, even with its traditional partners, the Soviet Union and China.

South Korea accused Kim of ordering the 1983 bombing in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar), which killed 17 visiting South Korean officials, including four cabinet members, and another in 1987 which killed all 115 on board Korean Air Flight 858 . A North Korean agent, Kim Hyon Hui, confessed to planting a bomb in the case of the second, saying the operation was ordered by Kim Jong-il personally .

In 1992, Kim Jong-il's voice was broadcast for the first and only time. During a military parade, he approached the microphone and said "Glory to the heroic soldiers of the People's Army!"

Ruler of North Korea

President Kim Il-sung died July 8, 1994, at age 82 of a heart attack. He was not replaced as President, and received the designation of "Eternal President", resting in the Kumsusan Memorial Palace in central Pyongyang. The active position has been abolished in deference to the memory of Kim Il-sung. Kim Jong-il officially took the titles of General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea and chairman of the National Defense Commission on October 8, 1997. In 1998, his Defense Commission position was declared to be "the highest post of the state", so Kim may be regarded as North Korea's head of state from that date. Since Kim is not the president, he is not constitutionally required to hold elections to confirm his legitimacy and has not done so.

Economy

North Korea's state-controlled economy struggled throughout the 1990s, primarily due to the loss of strategic trade arrangements with the USSR and strained relations with China following China's normalization with South Korea in 1992. In addition, North Korea experienced record-breaking floods (1995 and 1996) followed by several years of equally severe drought beginning in 1997. This, compounded with only 18 percent arable land and an inability to import the goods necessary to sustain industry, led to an immense famine and left North Korea in economic shambles. Faced with a country in decay, Kim adopted a "Military-First" policy (선군정치, Sŏn'gun chŏngch'i) to strengthen the country and reinforce the regime. On the national scale, this policy has produced a positive growth rate for the country since 1996, and the implementation of "landmark socialist-type market economic practices" in 2002 kept the North afloat despite a continued dependency on foreign aid for food.

In the wake of the devastation of the 1990s, the government began formally approving some activity of small-scale bartering and trade. As observed by Daniel Sneider, associate director for research at Stanford's Asia-Pacific Research Center, this flirtation with capitalism is "fairly limited, but — especially compared to the past — there are now remarkable markets that create the semblance of a free market system." In 2002, Kim Jong-il declared that "money should be capable of measuring the worth of all commodities." These gestures toward economic reform mirror similar actions taken by China's Deng Xiaoping in the late 1980s and early 90s. During a rare visit in 2006, Kim expressed admiration for China's rapid economic progress.

Foreign relations

In 1998, South Korean President Kim Dae-jung implemented the "Sunshine policy" (햇볕 정책, Haetpyŏt chŏngch'aek) to improve North-South relations and to allow South Korean companies to start projects in the North. Kim Jong-il announced plans to import and develop new technologies to develop North Korea's fledgling software industry. As a result of the new policy, the Kaesong Industrial Park was constructed in 2003 just north of the inter-Korean border, with the planned participation of 250 South Korean companies, employing 100,000 North Koreans, by 2007. However, by March 2007, the Park contained only 21 companies - employing 12,000 North Korean workers.

In 1994, North Korea and the United States signed an Agreed Framework which was designed to freeze and eventually dismantle the North's nuclear weapons program in exchange for aid in producing two power-generating nuclear reactors. In 2002, Kim Jong-il's government admitted to having produced nuclear weapons since the 1994 agreement. Kim's regime argued the secret production was necessary for security purposes - citing the presence of United States owned nuclear weapons in South Korea and the new tensions with the U.S. under President George W. Bush. On October 9, 2006, North Korea's Korean Central News Agency announced that it had successfully conducted an underground nuclear test.

Internal politics

North Korea remains silent on the issue of an appointed successor. South Korean media have suggested that he is grooming his son, Kim Jong-chul; however, Kim Yong Hyun, a political expert at the Institute for North Korean Studies at Seoul's Dongguk University, believes any appointee would be outside the family. "Even the North Korean establishment would not advocate a continuation of the family dynasty at this point." His eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, was earlier believed to be the designated heir, but he appears to have fallen out of favor after being arrested at Narita International Airport in Narita, Japan, near Tokyo, in 2001 while traveling on a forged passport.

Criticism

Kim Jong-il has been routinely criticized by world governments and international NGOs for human rights abuses carried out under his rule, as well as for North Korea's production of nuclear weapons, contrary to previous legal, international obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and his own commitment to make the Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons. Camp 22 is North Korea's largest concentration camp, where up to 50,000 men, women and children accused of political "crimes" are held. Reports of gross violations of human rights by the guards have been reported, such as murdering babies born to inmates.

Kim's expensive taste has become a media target. In the context of United Nations sanctions restricting the trade in luxury items to North Korea following the country's October 2006 nuclear test, Reuters coverage noted that "No one enjoys luxury goods more than paramount leader Kim Jong-il, who boasts the country's finest wine cellar with space for 10,000 bottles. Kim has a penchant for fine food such as lobster, caviar and the most expensive cuts of sushi that he has flown in to him from Japan." His annual purchases of Hennessy cognac reportedly total to $700,000, while the average North Korean earns the rough estimate equivalent of $900 per year.

Personal life

There is no official information available about the marital history of the Kim Jong-il, but he is believed to have been officially married once with three mistresses: *Kim married his first wife, Kim Young-suk, after being forced by his father to marry the daughter of a senior military official - the two have been estranged for some years. Kim has a daughter from this marriage, Kim Sul-song (born 1974). *Kim's first mistress, Song Hye-rim, was not officially recognized and after years of estrangement she is believed to have died in Moscow in the Central Clinical Hospital in 2003. They had one son, Kim Jong-nam (born 1971) who is Kim Jong-il's eldest son. *His second mistress, Ko Young-hee, had taken over the role of First Lady until her death - reportedly of cancer - in 2004. They had two sons, Kim Jong-chul, in 1981, and Kim Jong-un (also "Jong Woon" or "Jong Woong"), in 1984. *Since Ko's death, Kim has been living with Kim Ok, his third mistress, who had served as his personal secretary since the 1980s.

Like his father, Kim has a profound fear of flying, and has always traveled by private armored train for state visits to Russia and China. The BBC reported that Konstantin Pulikovsky, a Russian emissary who traveled with Kim across Russia by train, told reporters that Kim had live lobsters air-lifted to the train every day which he ate with silver chopsticks - historically used in the Chinese Imperial Palace in the belief that they would detect poison.

Kim is said to be a fan of luxury cars and has been known for racing his cars at his palaces. Also Kim had spent $20,000,000 on importing 200 new Mercedes Benz S500 luxury sedans adding to North Korea's stock pile of 7,000 Mercedes. He is also said to be a fan of Cadillacs, Volkswagens, Toyotas, and Audis. Kim is said to be a huge film buff, owning a collection of more than 20,000 video tapes. His reported favorites are the slasher films of the Friday The 13th film series, Rambo, the James Bond and Godzilla series, any movie with Elizabeth Taylor, and Hong Kong action movies. He is the author of the book On the Art of the Cinema. In 1978, on the orders of Kim, South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choe Eun-hui were kidnapped in order to build a North Korean film industry. In 2006 he was involved in the production of the Juche (self-reliance) based movie Diary of a Girl Student – depicting the life of a girl whose parents are scientists – with a KCNA news report stating that Kim "improved its script and guided its production".

Kim reportedly enjoys basketball. Former United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ended her summit with Kim by presenting him with a basketball signed by NBA legend Michael Jordan. Also an apparent golfer, North Korean state media reports that Kim routinely shoots three or four holes-in-one per round. His official biography also claims Kim has composed six operas and enjoys staging elaborate musicals. Kim also refers to himself as an Internet expert.

Defectors claim that Kim has seventeen different palaces and residences, including a private resort near Mt. Paektu, a seaside lodge in the city of Wonsan, and a palace complex northeast of Pyongyang surrounded with multiple fence lines, bunkers, and anti-aircraft batteries.

Notes and references

External links

* * – Foreign Languages Publishing House, Pyongyang DPR Korea (1998) *Born in the USSR – Kim Jong-il's childhood. *The many family secrets of Kim Jong Il *<a class="externalLink" href="http://theseoultimes.com/ST/?url=/ST/db/read.php?idx=1643">"Hidden Daughter" Visits Kim Jong-il Every Year</a> (also includes photos of Kim during his youth) * Kim's family tree