Asia Times: Fat Bear: No meeting Mickey Mouse any time soon


	May 11, 2001	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH
Fat Bear: No meeting Mickey Mouse any time soon
By Aidan Foster-Carter

You couldn't make it up, could you? Not for the first time, North Korean truth is stranger than fiction. Last week, when a journalist called from Tokyo as the Kim Jong-nam story broke, my initial thoughts - I was driving - were twofold. First: it can't be, surely. Not him, the crown prince. Not there, in Japan of all places: the supposed sworn enemy, daily denounced for all manner of sins by the Pyongyang media. And not now, just when back home daddy is basking in the global limelight from a top-level European visit: making offers on missiles, and doing his best to appear as a serious responsible statesman leading a normal country - albeit subverted, predictably, by the hordes of naughty journalists playing slip your minder and sneaking off to report a grimmer and weirder reality, just as in last year's Albright visit.

Second thought: But if it really is him, then why? Cynic that I am, it had to be either a secret mission - or to defect. Either would threaten a major international incident: Pyongyang would claim he'd been kidnapped and all hell would break loose. So the actual denouement was a relief, turning drama into farce. Like any dad, he just wanted to take his little boy to Tokyo Disneyland. Not his first visit either, it seems, on the forged Dominican Republic passport (a snip at US$2,000) in the name of Pang Xiong - which I'm told means "Fat Bear" in Chinese. Weighing in at about 90 kilograms but barely five feet tall, that's both apt and suggests a sense of humor: whether his own or at his expense, depending who picked it.

Kim Jong-il, we may safely predict, like Queen Victoria is not amused. His prodigal son - who flew home on Tuesday, after giving reporters the slip in Beijing at the weekend - will have got an almighty dressing-down, and won't be meeting Mickey Mouse any time soon. He'll be grounded, but no worse: for dad, though anxious, dotes on him. But his minders' heads will roll for failing to keep him home. The whole bizarre business highlights the twilight world of real life in North Korea, and between it and its neighbors. The arrent hypocrisy hardly needs dwelling on. A regime which denies liberty and even life (by a wholly avoidable famine) to its subjects, preaches puritan communist morality,and excoriates capitalism and the West, lets its playboy princeling swan into so-called enemy territory on a tacky fake passport; with son, two young women (neither his wife), a trunkful of cash (you want dollars or yen?), and all the vulgar display - Rolex watch, Louis Vuitton bags - of the nouveau riche. Bah, humbug.

The reaction of the governments was instructive. Pyongyang of course said nothing - it never happened - but behind the scenes it is said to be angry with Tokyo for creating an incident this time, when previously it had let Kim Jong-nam in. The idea of Japan tacitly colluding at such forays is intriguing: It suggests a duality in ties between these neighbors, with formal hostility masking more subtle real-life relations. Tactically, it makes sense both to gather intelligence on a future leader, and to expose him to the joys of Japan. So why blow it this time? A plausible account is discord between the foreign ministry and security services, with the latter keen to detain Kim - and tipping off the press when this was nixed.

Also angry were the relatives of Japanese allegedly abducted to North Korea, who attacked Tokyo for not holding onto such an ace bargaining chip. But realistically, the new Koizumi administration, yet to spell out its policy on Pyongyang - and which currently has trouble enough with the other Korea in a row over a new right-wing revisionist Japanese school textbook - could hardly start out on such a hostile footing. So promptly putting the embarrassing visitors on a plane to Beijing was predictable - as was the hand-wringing in Seoul, worried that US President George W Bush will now be even less inclined to talk to such weirdos.

Then again, as a fellow daddy's boy and gilded princeling who as a young man did little but have fun, on a human level George W might even sympathize. Actually, Kim Jong-nam is better travelled than the US president, thanks to several years' schooling in Moscow and Geneva. The Swiss connection is one that I'm surprised journalists haven't followed up: Even now, other North Korean elite kids are thought to be at school there, living in swanky lakeside villas - plus, of course, the bank accounts.

But other than this glimpse of a wider world, Kim Jong-nam mostly grew up in a gilded cage. That's the title of a forthcoming autobiography by his cousin Li Nam-ok, who now lives in the West but who as a child was brought into the Pyongyang palace to provide company for a lonely little boy. In a 1997 interview, Ms Li describes how "Jong-nam lived enclosed in the [official] residence without any friends of his age" before her arrival. Tutored at home by his aunt (Ms Li's mother) Sung Hye-rang, he had books, videos, and toys. A 1,000 square meter playroom had all the latest gizmos: "Jong-nam was babied so much!" But not people. Later, according to his aunt - also now abroad and writing her memoirs - he rebelled against his confinement, which thereafter became stricter. That offers a clue. The Financial Times wondered aloud why he went during Golden Week, Japan's spring holiday, when Disneyland would be packed. All those people! The queues! Maybe he wanted, just for once, to be one of the crowd.

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