Dear Leader's party will be a blast By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - The early warning signs are clear. Get ready for a blast. A blast, that
is, to beat most of the annual celebrations marking the 67th birthday of Kim
Jong-il, North Korea's Dear Leader, the figure engraved so fondly in the minds
of millions to whom he's the hero of their time, a father beloved only slightly
less than his own father, the Great Leader Kim Il-sung.
Proof of planning for the blast is everywhere. There are lavish dinners for a
stream of foreign visitors. There are exhibitions in cities and towns of
flowers - Kimjongilia and Kimsungilia, the hybrid cultivar of tuberous begonia
named after Kim.
There are movies, such as Cherishing the Leader's Desire, and
there are parades, fireworks and visits to where Kim was born - in a cabin, as
everyone knows, on the slopes of sacred Mount Paektu, hard by the Chinese
border. Fine people everywhere are taking the oath, that is, the oath of fealty
to the Dear Leader, to the party and to the nation.
And then there's Kim, braving the wintry weather as he crosses his land to
visit the east coast port of Wonsan, providing on-the-spot guidance at a bottle
factory, at a shoe factory, a chemical factory, and then schmoozing with
students at the Wonsan University of Agriculture. Yet again, he is quoted as
telling the workers that the factory "proves the truth that a great leap
forward is sure to be effected in production and construction".
We have the Korean Central News Agency in the capital Pyongyang to thank for
this latest breathless bulletin of the build-up for the Dear Leader's birthday
on Monday. It's always an occasion for extreme celebrating, but this year the
festivities seem if anything more extreme than usual.
The great Pyongyang propaganda machine doesn't say so, but the reason for the
enthusiasm is clear. The world has to know, must know, that the Dear Leader has
never been busier, is in firm control, and has never been more prepared to defy
a hostile world.
The sum total of all the verbiage raises the question: Are the propagandists
protesting too much, is something wrong up there? Is the inner circle that
surrounds him so strong, so filled with loyalty and so unified as to be able to
prop him up in the coming weeks and months, maybe years?
The Dear Leader has been making many visits this year, 23 since January 1, as
opposed to just nine in the same period last year, we are told. This arouses
suspicions that he's following not his own wishes but those of the generals
whom he's deputized to carry out his program of songun, military first,
and rule the country.
Are they driving him on, telling him he's got to show up no matter how he
feels, just to convince everyone there's nothing wrong, that he did not suffer
a stroke in August and that if he did, he's now fully recovered?
That suspicion would not appear unreasonable considering the sudden promotions
this week of two top generals, Kim Yong-chin, named minister of the People's
Armed Forces (defense minister), and Ri Yong-ho, taking over as chief of the
general staff of the Korean People's Army, which covers the air force and navy
too.
It's as though the military structure is streamlining the top ranks, gearing up
for a face-off with South Korea, for potential unrest at home - or for both -
in an uncertain period in which Kim survives as a figurehead.
But what a figurehead. The more often Kim appears in public, the more inclined
are Western analysts to say he's fine now, whatever was said earlier. The more
his generals shake their fists at the South, the more firmly he's said to be
exercising control. And the more far-reaching the shakeup of the military chain
of command, according to this logic, the more skillfully he's again proving
himself at keeping his generals on their toes, playing one faction against the
other.
Just the opposite, however, may be the case. The unexpectedly quick rise of Kim
Yong-chun may suggest the generals are really taking over. Kim, after all, is
credited with micro-managing the two greatest assaults on South Korea since the
Korean War of the early 1950s, the naval battles in the Yellow (West) Sea that
left scores dead in June 1999 and June 2002. They weren't really great sea
battles, of course, by the standards of the two world wars.
In the first, South Korean boats chased a North Korean vessel back across the
Northern Limit Line (NLL), that string of dots on maps below which the United
Nations command decreed northern boats were banned, sinking a ship with maybe
40 North Korean sailors on board. In the second, a North Korean boat fired on a
South Korean boat, killing six sailors. The North Korean boat retreated north
under a blaze of gunfire that may have killed many more while the South Korean
boat sank while under tow back to port.
It's easy to predict that North Korea, having recently abrogated its 1991
non-aggression pact with South Korea and having declared the NLL "null and
void", is gearing up for another naval battle. That would probably be another
minor affair - a distraction that South Korea could counter as it did before.
Ri seems to have replaced the general who last month promised "an all-out
confrontational policy" against the South. It's always possible Ri has won out
in a power struggle as the armed forces gear up for more than just a few shots
at sea.
It's just as likely, though, all the sound and fury has to do with elections
for a new Supreme People's Assembly next month in which the ruling structure,
the armed forces, the Workers' Party and the government will have to come up
with a serious program for a dire economy - and worry about national leadership
in the post-Kim era.
It's even possible - some say likely - that the post-Kim era is already on us.
All the visitations may be the final act of a classic drama in which the Dear
Leader is implanting his legacy. The generals appear to be angling for their
own futures in an inner circle led by Kim Jong-il's brother-in-law as
regent-in-waiting, calling the shots on behalf of an hereditary heir, one of
the Dear Leader's three sons, probably the youngest.
In the meantime, Monday's birthday will be a blast. No, the Dear Leader will
not show up live on video, nor will he say a few words. The words will all flow
from the North Korean propaganda mill while the world awaits the real blast -
the launch of the Taepodong-2, the long-range missile that's now on site,
waiting for the engineers to get all the parts just right and for refueling to
begin.
It's a show that rivals the Academy Awards in terms of the build-up, and it may
be caught live on camera - not by paparazzi looking for every millimeter of
cleavage but by eye-in-the-sky satellite cameras poised to record the slightest
signs of activity.
Like Hollywood movie-makers on secret film sets, the directors of this
operation have been smart enough to keep the Taepodong-2 under wraps since
wheeling it up to the site by train. The engineers know they have to get it
right this time. Who can say what wrath they'd incur if the darn thing blew up
less than a minute after launch, as it did when they fired another Taepodong-2
on July 5, 2006. This was just months before the underground nuclear test of
October 9, 2006.
One cannot say confidently that there will be a blast-off to mark the birthday.
The airwaves, however, will echo with reports of all the wonderful ways in
which the Dear Leader's people celebrated.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of
forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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