It is ten years since Kim Jong-un inherited power in the world’s worst dictatorship. He turned out to be even more eccentric than his very special assumptions would suggest, writes Morten Strand.
REQUIRES ENTHUSIASM: Kim Jong-un greets his generals this summer. Photo: AP / NTB view more
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The crying orgy of the times took place when Kim Jong-il was laid to rest in Pyongyang on December 28, 2011. Generals, commanders, newscasts on television, all were eaten up by a boundless sobbing, tearful sorrow, which would never end. The death of a despot has its rituals.
– SLAVE LABOR: North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has opened a new city. Now he is accused of slavery. Video: NTB Scanpix and Dagbladet TV view more
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But if the king is dead, as is well known, the king still lives. And it was out of this orgy of grief over the god-king’s death that the new ruler of the North Korean Kim dynasty rose. Kim Jong-un was appointed successor because the other of Kim’s sons were too weak, and not tough enough, South Korean intelligence could tell us. Born in 1982 or ’83, the young Kim was not yet 30 years old when he inherited all power.
Who was he? Well, he was a boarding school boy who had spent at least five years in Switzerland in the 1990s. There he was remembered for his enormous preoccupation with basketball, and for his mediocre results in school subjects. In the 2000s, he had studied physics and military subjects at his grandfather’s university in Pyongyang. And he was chosen as a despot because his older brothers were all too “weak”, while dad Kim thought that Kim Jong-un was “tough” enough.
So, who was he? A spoiled boarding school boy who gave the bluff at school? The golden boy who had flattered himself to Dad’s heart by never contradicting him? A spoiled daddy boy who got everything he pointed out, who had a despotic authority even before has become a real despot? An intelligent young man who had cunningly outplayed his older brothers in what they all must have known was a battle for Dad’s favor? A Frankenstein who was screwed together by mysterious contradictory elements?
Ten years later, we know much more. And Kim turned out to be all this. In addition, he is fearless, and at least as cunning as his father and grandfather, the nation’s father, Kim Il-sung. He has killed his uncle, who was appointed as his guardian, reportedly with rockets while his uncle was tied up in a landslide. He has killed his half-brother in a spectacular poison attack at an airport in Malaysia. He has done everything required and expected of a despot to emphasize that he is completely boss.
Still, he has not come as far as he has had ambitions for. The visions of economic growth have been put to shame. A new famine catastrophe threatens the country just a generation after famine killed around two million North Koreans in the 1990s. And although he has built skyscrapers and amusement parks for the elite in Pyongyang, and Jørn Andersen from Fredrikstad has been the country’s national team coach in football, Russian diplomats themselves had to leave the country for muscle power on a trolley on the railway track to Vladivostok last winter. Kim did not even treat the diplomats, who were his guests, with diesel.
The pictures were obviously comical, but told a tragic story that the vast majority of the very few diplomats and aid workers who were in Pyongyang have had to leave the capital, which now lacks everything, such as food, medicine and fuel. For Kim would not have been a real Kim if he had not closed the country hermetically when an external danger like corona threatened, and the regime stubbornly claims that they have not had the virus within their borders.
The regime’s reflex works at least. Much like it also seemed when Kim would deceive the world into believing that he would get rid of the country’s nuclear weapons and missile capabilities when in 2018 and 2019 he tricked former President Donald Trump into joining our short century’s wildest diplomatic dance so far. But Kim would not have been a real Kim either if he had gotten rid of his own and the regime’s only security guarantee, the nuclear weapons.
Survival – at all costs – is after all the Kim dynasty’s most important reason. That Trump should understand this was perhaps too much to ask. For him, perhaps the show was the most important thing anyway. But that was not the case for Kim. For him, lifting the sanctions was the most important thing about the dance with Trump. But the game did not succeed. North Korea is still the world’s most isolated country.
Aided by the corona, admittedly, but far from just. Because it is the Kim dynasty’s most obvious reflex that makes Kim fall short. It is the demand for control – over everything and everyone – that has made the Kim dynasty a survival success. Therefore, father and grandfather Kim can nod appreciatively to the boy, after they left their earthly kingdom of heaven, for what we must believe is to struggle in hell.
