EVEN IN death, mystery and uncertainty surrounded Kim Jong Il, much like the veil of secrecy with which his paranoid regime has sought to blanket North Korea.
When and how he died is unclear, officially December 17th, of overwork, at the age of 69, according to Pyongyang, or 70, say North Korea watchers, and then passing his mantle, apparently, to his little-known third son (age also unknown), “successor of the revolution” Kim Jong Un.
Little wonder then the jitters in Seoul where the army has been put on standby, and among regional observers who inevitably speculate about a power vacuum after a death seen as two years too early for the managed transition that Kim Jong Il set in train last year.
The death marks the end of a brutal 17-year rule in succession to, and in the spirit of, his father the late Kim Il Sung, the state’s founder. The latter fashioned an all-embracing totalitarianism that has had no equal since the days of Stalin and Mao, except perhaps the fierce regimentation of life in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. The country is simply a vast prison dotted by gulags for those who stray ideologically to the smallest degree or simply displease the regime. No sign here of even the tiniest echoes of the Arab Spring.
It has been a reign which saw the military-dominated state of 24 million people increase its diplomatic isolation, further developing and testing nuclear weapons while maintaining a quasi-war footing with the South. In 2010 relations with its neighbour were further destabilised when the North attacked a Southern island and sank a warship. Fifty South Koreans died in the two incidents. Whether part of a conscious strategy aimed at fuelling tensions, or driven by internal power struggles either within the army, or between the army and the state bureaucracy, also remains unclear.
Some two million citizens are believed to have died in famines in recent years in an economy where workers earn on average every month the equivalent of the price of a kilo of rice, and which has become increasingly dependent on external food aid. A combination of repression and such outside assistance has allowed the regime to demonstrate a longevity that defies both history and the logic of its own internal contradictions. Continuity will now be the order of the day as the young Kim consolidates his position with the rival currents of the military and bureaucracy, and then perhaps we will see the beginnings of slow, careful reform of the economy – no democracy, mind you. But in truth plus ça change. . .