Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH<BR>Try leading, dear leader, before it's too late


	March 8, 2002	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH
Try leading, dear leader, before it's too late
By Aidan Foster-Carter

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

Part 2: Soap, sleeze: North Korea's first family

Dear Dear Leader:
Hello again. This is positively the last installment of my over-long and over-frank birthday card. On tone, two points. I intend no special disrespect, but I'm afraid in my country leaders (dear or not) are fair game. Even our royal family don't escape: did you ever see Spitting Image? If it's any consolation, the satirical magazine Private Eye now routinely refers to our very own prime minister Tony Blair as "dear leader". Anyway, word is that behind all the worship you do a nice line in self-deprecation. "Small as a dwarf's turd, aren't I?" was what you told South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee, the first time you two had dinner.

Physical stature isn't my concern. Political stature is. I'm after the real Kim Jong-il: the man behind the myth. I want to understand what makes him tick, because I've something to tell him. Nothing you've not heard many times before, mind.

As they say in the United States: Wake up and smell the coffee! Or in the eerie words of the prophet Dylan: "So let us not talk falsely now; the hour is getting late." It's now or never.

It is, Dear Leader. It really, really is. Take economics. In the first decade after you took the reins in 1980, North Korea's economy slowed like never before. In the next decade it went into reverse: GNP halved. In the mid-'90s came the ultimate blow: famine.

Meanwhile South Korea soared. Yours used to be the richer Korea; now the two of you won't fit on one graph. They trade more in two days than you in a year. Face it: economically, you're just a boil on Seoul's backside. And you know what? None of this had to happen. It's not your fault you inherited an economic model past its prime. But 20 years on, to still cling defiantly amid the ruins to a system that is plainly dead: this you call leadership? When China throughout those 20 years has shown you there's a better way. Twenty years! That's a whole generation: of output lost, opportunity squandered - and now, young bodies stunted. How could you? Why do you? What's in your head?

I fear you just don't get economics. By your own admission, it was never your thing. In a speech at Kim Il-sung University when famine first hit, you were quick to pass the buck: saying dad always told you to focus on the party and army, not the economy. Maybe you think it's like running a household: not men's work. So you scold officials for not working hard enough, or (menacingly) as not loyal enough.

You also have a science fixation, as if high-tech - and how will you afford it? - can solve everything. And yet a year ago, how you raised hopes! Times change, you said - and went off to Shanghai to see change in action: stock market, joint ventures, the lot. Then you came home and ... nothing. Just the same tired nonsense of speed-battles and fads: potatoes, ostriches, catfish. That won't work. Nor will one rumored misreading of Shanghai: Word is, you want to train more architects! But this isn't about big buildings. If it were, why would the 105-storey Ryugyong Hotel have been an unfinished shell on your skyline for over a decade? So wise up. You need capital; you need markets. Absent markets, you'll get no capital, nor would it work.

Or maybe you do get it - but vested interests are stopping you. You've hinted at that. In August 2000 you very frankly told some Southern visitors - talking about the ruling Workers' Party charter, which speaks of spreading communist revolution to the South - that "changing the platform is not easy. There are many senior party members who worked with the late president Kim Il-sung. If we change the charter many of these people must leave, and it would appear that I was purging them". You also said that the KWP's long overdue 7th Congress would be held that fall. It has yet to happen - which kind of makes your point.

Are you a free agent? Despite the rhetoric, I doubt it. We're into politics now, which is your other crux. Even with your dad's backing and in his lifetime, it wasn't easy to get KWP or KPA elders to accept this untried whippersnapper - with zero military background - as his successor. After he died in 1994, North Korean politics (or what passes for such) virtually shut down for four years. That's how long it took you to secure your position. But clearly you're still not ready to risk a full KWP Congress. Will you ever be?

Yet in one field, you moved fast. Dad died at a delicate moment. Jimmy Carter took the nuclear crisis off the boil - and within three months the US and North Korea signed the Agreed Framework. So you passed your first diplomatic test with flying colors. But then it went wrong. Why fire that mad rocket over Japan in 1998? If you wanted to cut a missile deal, why dither till Clinton ran out of time? Above all, why hold a summit with the South and promise all sorts - reunions, rail links, a return summit - only to pull the plug and the rug out from under Kim Dae-jung? He was your best chance ever, but you blew it.

Now there's Bush and September 11 and a whole new ballgame. The old beggar-mugger ploy just won't wash any more: it may even get very dangerous. Yet if you'd just come in from the cold - for real, mind - you'd get helping hands from all sides. Political risk, sure - but far less than if you carry on as is, growling and armed to the teeth.

Do you really not get that, either? If so, be very afraid - and risk the fate of a man you remind me of: the emperor Nero, fiddling as Rome burned. "Qualis artifex pereo" (what an artist dies here!) were his last words. Don't let them be yours. Dare to change - and go down in history as a truly great Dear Leader.

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