Though in power for just over two months, the personality cult around Kim Jong-un is already thriving, reports the first Irish journalist inside the country since his accession
THE NATION he ruled may still be an international pariah, but to judge by the International Friendship Exhibition, the late Kim Jong-il was a popular man indeed.
The building housing the exhibition rises from the pine-forested hills of North Pyongan province, close to North Korea’s border with China. It appears as a huge box of burnished concrete, topped by a multi-coloured “hip saddle” roof. Like most buildings erected by the North Korean state, it seems like a cross-breeding of Soviet modernism and Korean tradition, a melding of the communist and the Confucian. Flanking the immense patterned doors are soldiers in fur hats, each carrying a silver-plated Kalashnikov rifle.
When Kim Jong-il, the “Dear Leader”, died on December 17th last, State television broadcast images from the snowy capital of Pyongyang. In the streets, in public squares and at various monuments, crowds of North Koreans wailed. The purpose of the exhibition parallels that footage, purporting to demonstrate that the love of foreigners for North Korea’s rulers almost matches that of its subjects.
The world's youngest head of state led the Dear Leader's funeral procession. At 29, Kim Jong-un has already been named Great Successor. An editorial in the Pyongyang Timeson December 24th stated: "The journey through our revolution is arduous and the present situation is grave, but no force in the world can check the revolutionary advance our party, army and people are making under the wise leadership of Kim Jong-un."
The exhibition indicates the nature of that advance so far. It was opened in 1978 at the behest of Kim Jong-un’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, who took power in September 1948 with Soviet backing, and ruled the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as Suryong (Great Leader) for the next 46 years.
Visitors must divest themselves of cameras and bags and place cloth “slippers” on their feet so as not to dirty the marble floors. In a cavernous room dominated by a statue of the Dear Leader, there are gifts from 170 nations. These include a flower vase from fellow “Axis of Evil” designate, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sent in February 2004. A bejewelled sword and scabbard was sent by Muammar Gadafy in January 1995. (The fate of Gadafy last year clearly caused consternation in North Korea; in April about 200 North Koreans living in Libya were ordered not to come home lest they bring news of revolts in the Arab world.)
On other floors, rooms contain cabinets of gifts from the world’s nations. In the one marked Ireland, there is crystal sent in October 1990 by the chairman of Sinn Féin, and some Royal Tara China from The Workers’ Party sent in January 1997. Large sections of the exhibition are closed due to “renovations”.
On February 16th, what would have been Kim Jong-il’s 70th birthday was marked with parades, gymnastic displays and the unveiling of statues. Worship of the Dear Leader plays an important part in buttressing the authority of the latest incarnation of North Korea’s personality cult.
THERE IS plenty of evidence of this phenomenon in Pyongyang. At first glance, the city gives the impression, accentuated by the fierce cold, that the clocks stopped ticking 30 years ago. China next door may have embraced all the trappings of consumer culture, but its flashing neon signs and billboards for cosmetics or soft drinks are almost non-existent here.
Yet cranes are visible on the skyline. In some parts of the city construction sites are alive with the splutter of jackhammers and helmeted construction workers. These could be sites in the South Korean capital of Seoul were it not for the bundles of red flags fluttering nearby.
Much of this building is going on in the central sectors of the capital and close to the banks of the river Taedong. Further out fresh apartments are going up: the government recently pledged to house an extra 100,000 people in the city of three million in 2012.
Visitors to Pyongyang have noticed an upsurge in the amount of Japanese and European vehicles on the capital’s once somnolent traffic lanes. “Far more than even 12 months ago,” says a British businessman who travels regularly to Pyongyang.
It is even possible to see some residents with mobile phones, even if these only function within North Korea. In December 2008, the Egyptian telecoms group Orascom agreed to set up a mobile network, Koryolink, in which it now holds a 75 per cent stake. More than three years on it is estimated that more than one million North Koreans have mobile phones.
As part of the $400 million deal, Orascom also agreed to finance the completion of the massive Ryugyong Hotel 20 years after it ground to a halt. During that time, the Ryugyong, more than any other building in Pyongyang, came to symbolise the regime’s self-defeating hubris.
The 105-storey pyramid had been conceived by Kim Il-sung as a magnet for foreign investment and tourism, but when Soviet funds and cheap raw materials dried up after 1991 the site fell silent. When the Ryugyong finally opens later this year it will offer visitors such niceties as revolving restaurants and business facilities.
WATCHING ALL this, it could be tempting to surmise that perhaps the first stirrings of a Soviet-style glasnost or perestroika are under way. But such speculation would be premature. The surge in construction work around Pyongyang was authorised some years ago by Kim Jong-il.
Scaffolding and sheeting now cover the most hallowed of the estimated 34,000 separate statues of the dynasty’s founder. At Mansu hill, a 65-foot high statue of Kim Il-sung stands in burnished bronze, one arm held aloft. North Korea will mark the centenary of his birth in April. Far from indicating a new engagement with the outside world, the building work anticipates a further burst of cultic worship.
“What I’ve been struck by since January is how much Kim Jong-un has been paraded by the regime,” says Aidan Foster Carter, an expert on North Korea at Leeds University. “After Kim Il-sung died in 1994, the country effectively shut down for three years and Kim Jong-il was little seen. It’s the opposite now: the regime’s rhetoric has been very strong since 17th December.”
This dynastic regime is notorious for its belligerent nature, having conducted nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009 and with international talks to resolve the nuclear issue having stalled. North Korea also possesses intermediate-range ballistic missiles including the Taepodong-2, which could theoretically hit targets in Alaska.
The neophyte Kim Jong-un is surrounded by ageing and highly conservative generals and ministers, most notably his uncle, Jang Song-taek (66), the vice-chairman of the powerful National Defence Commission. His grandfather formulated a national ideology called Juche (self-reliance) and his father augmented this with a policy of Songun, roughly translating as “military first politics”. It is rumoured that Jang Song-taek was the de facto North Korean premier during Kim Jong-il’s final years, when he was debilitated by a stroke.
“Jang Song-taek is a purely political figure, very conservative and ostensibly anti-market,” says Leonid Petrov, a Korea expert at the University of Sydney. “In this, Jang Song-taek ensures Kim Jong-un’s accession and stability in North Korea. Any reform in North Korea will destabilise the situation.”
UNLIKE HIS father, who was formally inaugurated as heir apparent in 1980 and had 14 years to prepare for power, Kim Jong-un only became prominent two years ago. In September 2010 he was appointed to the Central Committee of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea and made a general in the Korean People’s Army. On November 23rd of that year, artillery shells and rockets bombarded Yeonpyeong, an island near the maritime border between the Koreas, killing two South Korean marines, two civilians and wounding 18 others.
South Korea responded with a barrage of its own. Relations with Seoul were already at their lowest ebb following the sinking of a South Korean naval corvette, the Cheonan, in March of that year, which South Korea blamed on a North Korean torpedo. Pyongyang furiously denied involvement, but there has been speculation the island bombardment evidenced Kim Jong-un’s efforts to prove himself as a force within the army.
“Based on my own experience of life in North Korea, there are no such things as errors or accidents. It must have been ordered by the people at the top,” says Kim Joo-il, a former captain who escaped to China in 2005 and now lives in London.
But Kim Jong-un’s rise to power was unexpected; the obvious heir was his oldest brother Kim Jong-nam, now 40. Nam fell out of favour with his father after his arrest in 2001 in Tokyo’s Narita Airport while travelling on a forged Dominican Republic passport. He was apparently en route to Tokyo Disneyland with his son. More recently, in a series of exchanges with the Japanese journalist Yoji-Gomi, the Macau-based Nam has spoken in disparaging terms of his younger brother’s prospects, predicting he will be a figurehead, while real power rests with the army hierarchy.
Once outside the capital, the North Korean countryside in winter is spectacularly bleak. The main highways usually do not see much traffic, but when they ice over groups of a dozen or more people materialise, hacking and pounding the roads with shovels. Bundles of red flags rise at intervals from the countryside. In fields and on the crests of hills, stone slabs rise decorated with Korean characters. These translate into such slogans as “Long Live Kim Il-sung” or “We will do as the party tells us”.
North Korea was ravaged by floods and famine in the late 1990s, killing between two and three million people. The situation is not as precarious today, but United Nations food agencies estimate three million people in North Korea will need food aid this year.
For the Great Successor, his authority will depend on more than monuments and gifts from abroad.
Tom Farrell is a freelance journalist