Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH Soap, sleeze: North Korea's first family


	March 2, 2002	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH
Soap, sleeze: North Korea's first family
By Aidan Foster-Carter

Part 1: It's my party, so I'll cry if I want to

Dear Dear Leader:
Where were we? Ah yes. "The Supremo in his Labyrinth". That's how Time magazine headlined a story on your lifestyle that a birthday boy could well have done without. Remember Lee Young-kuk? Possibly not.

He was just one of hundreds of highly trained young toughs assigned to guard you, a job he did for 11 years. The Seoul daily Chosun Ilbo says that you have five different circles of bodyguards, who fan out as far as two kilometers away whenever you go walkabout. Seems a lot, considering your subjects adore you so much. Or is it to fend off the Yankee imperialists, who Lee says he was told in training suck blood from people's necks?

Lee was part of the inner sanctum, so he saw you as few others have. On a motorized body board, tooling around in the artificial waves of your personal pool, with a pretty nurse and lady doctor at hand in case of need. Unlike you, they practiced juche and swam under their own steam. Speaking as a man near to you in age and girth, for health's sake you really ought to roll off that board and shake a leg. Could be fun.

Not that you're short of fun. Your seven-story pleasure palace boasts a bar, karaoke machine, and (of course) a movie theater. Party? You betcha. Wine, women and song: it's all yours. We knew this. Until recently, the curious or prurient could even see a video of your leggy "pleasure squad" on the Koreascope website: a front for South Korean intelligence. It's still listed, but apparently no longer there.

In a total U-turn from the past - do you really appreciate this? - whereas Seoul gleefully used to publicize your every peccadillo, nowadays that nice Kim Dae-jung would rather draw a discreet veil. His successor may not.

But I'll not dwell on the sleazy stuff, which is pretty banal. What absolute leader doesn't pleasure himself to the max, even if his people are starving? Sure it's hypocritical; what's new? If we're intruding on your inner life, I'd rather ask, not unsympathetically: Dear leader, have you found love? I dare say not, from what we know of your tangled marital history. And we know quite a lot, thanks to a mother and daughter who were once very close to you: the sister and niece of your greatest flame, Song Hye-rim.

Interesting family, the Songs. From Seoul, for one thing. Song Yu-kyong and Kim Won-ju were southern communists who went north in 1950 when the Korean War broke out. Ms Kim became a top journalist and had two daughters. By 1970 one, Hye-rim, was a beautiful actress - and you were running cultural affairs, to coin a phrase. She was married, so were you, each with a little girl; but so what? She moved in, and in 1971 gave you every Korean father's wish: a son, Jong-nam.

Later, her family would move in too: mother, widowed elder sister Song Hye-rang, and Song's daughter Li Nam-ok as company for Jong-nam. But if you thought being a dad would help with your own dad, no dice. Though Kim Il-sung also spread his favors - years later, a young mistress was spotted shopping in Stockholm - he deemed your lifestyle unbefitting to an heir apparent, and made you marry a general's daughter, Kim Yong-suk.

According to Li Nam-ok, Jong-nam never met his grandpa. That's tough. The strain told, not least on Song Hye-rim as she got sidelined. By the 1980s she was going for psychiatric care to Moscow, where she now lives. In 1994, Li Nam-ok defected to Europe; her mom followed in 1996. Mother has two books out; daughter is writing, and has given interviews. They could be silenced, like Li's brother Il-nam: hiding in Seoul since 1982, in 1995 he broke cover, blabbed, and was mysteriously gunned down.

But the women are smarter. You wish they'd keep mum, but they pull their punches. Still, the Economist reckons the picture of you that emerges is "a lonely, unhappy and unpredictable man, driven to obsessive secrecy and fits of rage".

So whom are you close to now? Maybe only brother-in-law Chang Song-taek, who's rarely far from your side. But what about your son? As often, the story echoes yours with your own father. Jong-nam had his rebel phase and a drink problem. Now at 30 he's running information technology: a big job, with covert trips to Japan - till that embarrassing unmasking at Narita last May. Newsweek confirms he was often in Tokyo, and even quotes a hostess who praised his, er, bedside manner. Chip off the old block, eh? Or do you prefer your other lad: Jong-chol, now 20, son of yet another lady in your life, Ko Yong-hi? And how do this Cain and Abel get along? No better, I guess, than you with your own half-brother Kim Pyong-il; whom you posted to a succession of suitably distant European embassies - Sofia, Helsinki, Warsaw - just to be on the safe side.

All this factional intrigue reeks of olden Korea. One day in 1971, your infant son was ill in hospital. His stepmother Kim Yong-suk said she would visit him - whereupon grandma sprang into action. As Song Hye-rang tells it, "My mother knew a lot of tragic episodes in ancient palaces. She put little Jong-nam on her back with her trembling hands and escaped to the garden through the verandah. And she walked and walked, her heart trembling with fear, hoping that the poplar trees would hide her and little Jong-nam." Paranoia? Trouble is, in systems like yours it's may the best plotter win. But having won, he rarely sleeps easy.

And that's just the family. You've a country to run, too. We'll get to that in the final part (I promise) of this lengthy birthday card. Meanwhile, enjoy your swim. Try the breaststroke. Nurse will show you how.

NEXT: Try leading, dear leader