NORTH KOREA’s ruling party will meet next week to elect a “supreme leadership body” amid intensifying questions about who will succeed Kim Jong-il, the country’s dictator.
North Korean state media yesterday said the congress, which was delayed this month, would be held on September 28th. The meeting would be the most important such conclave since 1980 when Mr Kim received the party roles that marked him out as the successor to Kim Il-sung, his father. The elder Kim died in 1994.
Most analysts had expected Kim Jong-eun, thought to be the North Korean leader’s third son, to receive some party and military roles at the congress.
South Korean intelligence services say they have accumulated increasing evidence that he is being styled for the leadership, with officials teaching children songs in his honour and giving Workers’ Party cadres documents laying out why he is fit to rule. However, much of this evidence is ambiguous and refers only to a “young general”.
Those forecasting that Kim Jong-eun will get new roles expect his father to elevate a couple of hundred officials from a loyal elite to the leadership council to help the young man, believed to be 27 years old, to steer the nuclear-armed country of 24 million people that suffers frequent food shortages and flooding.
Pyongyang had originally said the party meeting would be held in early September – but the delay and a reported denial of Kim Jong-eun’s ascension by Kim Jong-il himself suggest nothing can be taken for granted.
Jimmy Carter, the former US president, recently said Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, had told him that Kim Jong-il had called the claims about the succession of Kim Jong-eun, a “false rumour from the West”.
But Mr Kim has a record of misleading world leaders – and even allies.
Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s president, in 2000, said the North Korean dictator had promised him he would surrender his missile programme. Mr Kim later said that he had been joking.
North Korean defectors believe the Workers’ Party congress was delayed by typhoon damage and severe flooding. Some analysts have speculated the delay was due to internal fighting or to Mr Kim’s health. Pyongyang has tried to scotch rumours that the delay was due to ill health. Mr Kim reportedly suffered a stroke in 2008.
The state news agency has distributed unusually high volumes of photographs of the leader visiting facilities countrywide to try to dispel talk that he is too frail to convene the summit.
Analysts increasingly focus on whether Kim Jong-eun’s accession would be universally acceptable to the country’s various elites.
STEEP LEARNING CURVE: HEIR APPARENT COULD BE ON FAR RISKIER ROAD THAN HIS FATHER TOOK
EVEN IF Kim Jong-il successfully uses next week's party congress to anoint Kim Jong-eun, his third son, as his successor, the big question will remain: has he left it too late for his successor to be able to form the necessary alliances?
The difference with Kim Jong-il's own gradually timetabled succession could not be greater. Kim Jong-il had been identified as leader from the mid-1970s, two decades before the death of his father, Kim Il-sung, in 1994. Few people reckon the ailing Kim Jong-il, believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008, has got quite that long.
From the mid-1970s, Kim Jong-il was called the "party centre", although the term was so ambiguously Orwellian that few people knew it specifically referred to one man. The son of the "Great Leader" had cut his teeth as a propagandist – one of the most important political roles in Pyongyang – while developing a penchant for film. His own children are not known to have done anything so practical.
The party congress of 1980 put everything beyond doubt. The younger Kim received roles in the workers' party secretariat and the military. Many observers argue these two institutions are at odds in North Korea, probably to enable the Kim family to divide and rule.
If Kim Jong-eun is to become successor, many analysts expect him to receive a role in both the party and military, giving him influence in both. An announcement of such appointments in state media would in effect confirm his succession. Kim Jong-il was given 20 years to find his feet and build alliances within a system that is more divided than most outsiders assume.
His son could be embarking on a far more precipitous road.
– CHRISTIAN OLIVER