Asia Times: It's my party, so I'll cry if I want to


	February 28, 2002	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH
It's my party, so I'll cry if I want to
By Aidan Foster-Carter

Dear Dear Leader:
Happy birthday, again. Hope you had a good one. Sure did, if public song and dance is anything to go by. Your country sets great store by that, and they didn't let you down.

"People's singing and joy were heard from across the country", gushed the official news agency KCNA on the occasion of Kim Jong-il's 60th birthday. "A splendid dancing party at Kim Il-sung square with large attendance" was the big event in Pyongyang, whose "parks and pleasure grounds ... turned into veritable seas of dancers and flowers".

Fireworks lit up the sky over Mount Paekdu, where you were born - officially. There were art performances, "loyal concerts and sport and amusement games ... at factories and enterprises, on co-op farms and in schools and construction sites" across the land. 10,000 kids - so few? (hey, this was indoors) - twirled in a gymnastic show: "We Will Glorify Korea With Arms".

Naturally, your very own flower was much in evidence. At least 600,000 people visited the sixth Kimjongilia show, where "14,300 potted Kimjongilias were on display". Plastic ones, too, for the synchronized swimming exhibition at the Changgwang health complex - a nice pool, that: I've swum there too, unsynchronized - where "more than a hundred performers presented beautiful rhythmic movements with plastic flowers of Kimjongilia, the immortal flower, in their hands to the tune of 'Cantata to Comrade Kim Jong-il'."

Then there were the tributes. The joint congratulatory message from everybody who's anybody (and note the order): the Central Committee of the Korean Workers' Party, the KWP Central Military Commission, the National Defense Commission, the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly - and the cabinet, last and least.

"The extraordinary trait of Kim Jong-il as a great man and his distinguished leadership ability are shining more brilliantly for his unprecedented revolutionary feats performed in the last decade of the 20th century, the most difficult period of the Korean revolution." And how. They praised you for - note priorities, again - "the greatest success in army-building and a new leap forward ... in the political, economic, cultural and all other fabrics of state and social life". I guess that's one way to describe famine.

On and on it rolled. Party paper Rodong Sinmun: "Kim Jong-il is the only great man in the world who enjoys undisputed prestige for his great history and immortal feats." The only, eh? Your right-hand chap in the army, Jo Myong-rok (glad he got over that kidney trouble): "Kim Jong-il has long given perfect answers to all the theoretical issues related to the building of the party, the state and the army through his energetic ideological and theoretical activities and successfully applied them to revolutionary practice, bringing about an epochal change in this land."

Foreign sycophants were flown in - you can't afford this often, any more - for a "Meeting to Congratulate the Sun of the 21st Century". One N T Mawema praised you as "not only the leader of socialism in the present times but a great guardian of human justice".

Makes you sick, doesn't it? And I do mean you, not me. You said as much to Shin Sang-ok: the top South Korean film director you kidnapped in 1978, with his actress ex-wife Choi Eun-hee - Seoul's Burton and Taylor - to boost North Korea's movie industry (but that's another story). At some pageant or other, as the crowds cheered, you whispered to Shin, "I'm not fooled. This is a lie." Your absence speaks volumes too: You hardly ever actually show up for any of it, do you? So different from your dear departed dad Kim Il-sung, who created all this guff - adapted it from Joe Stalin, if we're honest - and positively basked in it.

It's all for show. As AFP was unkind enough to report, the entire North Korean population, unless sick in bed, was under orders to turn out for at least one birthday event - with absence treated as a "near crime". Before, you never had to spell it out so bluntly.

But February is so cold, and people are tired and hungry. None dare voice it, yet; but the thought "So what's to celebrate, exactly?" will have been on many minds. And the old trinket trick - ooh look, a pencil from the Leader! And rice, when did we last see that? - may not work for ever; even if the budget for such "gifts" more than doubled this year to US$30 million, as Seoul claims.

What you really like is attention abroad. Sadly, the Paektusan Cup figure skating festival was a wee bit upstaged by the Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City. Unlike in the past, no North Korean even qualified for these Olympics. Still, the lads did you proud at football - beating the hosts 4-3 on penalty shots to win Thailand's King's Cup on February 16.

Elsewhere you've had plenty of attention, but not the kind you'd have chosen. That George W Bush is one big party-pooper, ain't he? First he brands you as part of an evil axis. Then he spoils your birthday by going to Seoul, strutting at the DMZ like they all do, and bad-mouthing you personally. Yet he says that he wants to talk! Mixed messages or what? What's his plan? Search me, guv. But it might pay to find out. Really.

Where the global media did note your birthday, the tone, alas, wasn't as respectful as you get at home. "So great he was born twice?" Thus Peter Hyun in the International Herald Tribune, who dared tell a guide at your pretend birthplace of Mount Paekdu the truth: that it was really Khabarovsk. And worse yet, Time found an ex-bodyguard to spill the beans on your lavish lifestyle.

NEXT: The supremo in his labyrinth