By Daniel Rook Seoul
(SMH) -NORTH KOREA has fired another short-range missile and threatened fresh steps if world powers impose sanctions for its nuclear test, amid signs it may be preparing to launch a long-range missile.
The US said it was sending its North Korea envoy to the jittery region, where Chinese fishing boats were fleeing a sensitive part of the Yellow Sea in fear of naval clashes.
Communist North Korea, which has warned it could launch an attack on South Korea, vowed to respond to any fresh sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council, saying "self-defence measures will be inevitable".
"The world will soon witness how our army and people stand up against oppression and despotism by the UNSC and uphold their dignity and independence," North Korea's Foreign Ministry said.
Tension has run high since Kim Jong-il's regime said it tested a nuclear bomb on Monday for the second time and renounced the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953.
North Korea test-fired another missile off its east coast on Friday, the sixth in a week, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said.
Two US defence officials said satellite photos suggested North Korea might be preparing to launch a long-range ballistic missile.
Vehicle movements at two missile sites resembled work done before North Korea fired a long-range rocket last month, said the officials, who did not want to be named.
With US and South Korean troops on high alert, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates was due to consult his counterparts from South Korea and Japan yesterday at a regional conference in Singapore.
Stephen Bosworth, the US special envoy on North Korea, and Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg will head to Tokyo and later visit China, South Korea and Russia, the State Department said.
The countries were part of six-nation talks that agreed in 2007 to provide aid and security guarantees to North Korea in return for it closing its nuclear weapons program.
It quit the accord last month in protest after the UN Security Council unanimously condemned its long-range missile launch.
The Security Council has been discussing a potential resolution to condemn the nuclear test.
Mr Gates, en route to Singapore, accused the North of "very provocative, aggressive" actions. But he also tried to calm nerves, stressing that the US was not planning any military action.
Mr Gates said he was unaware of any unusual troop movements in North Korea, which has about 1.1 million soldiers, compared with 680,000 South Korean and 28,500 US troops south of the border.
"I don't think there is a need for us to reinforce our military presence in the South," he said. "Should the North Koreans do something extremely provocative militarily, then we have the forces to deal with it."
Professor Yang Moo-jin, of the University of North Korean Studies, Seoul, said: "The North may put its military on a war footing, test-fire a long-range missile and restart the plutonium reprocessing facilities at Yongbyon."
31 May 2009
N Korea says its army will 'stand up' to UN sanctions
26 May 2009
North Korea clears sea for missile tests
(News.com) -NORTH Korea is preparing to test-fire short-range missiles in the Yellow Sea, one day after it staged a nuclear test, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said.
"North Korea has declared an off-limits area for vessels in the Yellow Sea off Jungsan county in South Pyongan province,'' it quoted a Seoul government source as saying.
"The North is likely to fire short-range missiles today or tomorrow.''
Jungsan is about 40km west of Pyongyang.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff said it could not comment on intelligence matters.
The North yesterday staged its second underground nuclear test, with an explosive force much larger than the first in October 2006.
It also fired three short-range ground-to-air missiles from locations near its east coast, Seoul's military said.
Several times in recent years, the North has test-fired ground-to-ship or ship-to-ship missiles in either the Yellow Sea or the Sea of Japan.
The launches are often staged to coincide with periods of regional tension.
Yonhap said the North was preparing to launch ground-to-ship missiles with a range of 160km, which use technology based on China's Silkworm missiles.
The South summoned an emergency meeting of top military commanders to review its defence posture, a Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesman said.
The meeting would stress the need to heighten vigilance against the North's "militarily provocative acts'', the spokesman said.
N Korea nuke 'comparable to Hiroshima'
(News.com) -WASHINGTON is seeking "a strong resolution with strong measures" by the United Nations against North Korea for the nuclear test it conducted yesterday, US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice said.
The hardline communist state, which stunned the world with its first atomic bomb test in October 2006, made good on its threat to stage another test after the Security Council censured it for an April rocket launch.
The North "successfully conducted one more underground nuclear test on May 25 as part of the measures to bolster up its nuclear deterrent for self-defence in every way,'' the official Korean Central News Agency said.
"The current nuclear test was safely conducted on a new higher level in terms of its explosive power and technology.''
Meeting in emergency session, the UN Security Council unanimously condemned the test, while council president Vitaly Churkin of Russia said members would immediately begin working on a resolution to address Pyongyang's latest move.
"The US thinks this is a grave violation of international law, and a threat to regional and international peace and security,'' Ms Rice said about the test.
"And therefore, the United States will seek a strong resolution with strong measures.''
The force of yesterday's blast was between 10 and 20 kilotons, according to Russia's defence ministry, vastly more than the estimated one-kiloton blast three years ago.
Japan's Meteorological Agency said that based on recorded seismic activity, the energy level of the test was four times bigger than the last one.
Baek Seung-Joo of the Korea Institute for Defence Analyses told AFP that if rough estimates by some private analysts were right, "the power of the second blast is comparable to the bombs which hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki".
ASEM Foreign Ministers Derailed by Burma, North Korean Nuclear Test
By Matt Steinglass
(VOA) -The foreign ministers of 45 Asian and European countries met in Hanoi Monday for talks on the global economy but found themselves wrapped up with the issues of Burma and North Korea.
The foreign ministers had expected to take up the question of how Europe and Asia could cooperate to pull the world's economy out of the downturn it has fallen into since the global financial crisis began. But the highest-profile session of the so-called ASEM group (Asia Europe Meeting), took place between representatives of the European Union and Burma.
The European Union called for the Burmese government to release opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. She is on trial for violating the terms of the house arrest under which the government has held her for 14 of the past 20 years.
Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said releasing Suu Kyi was crucial to pave the way for planned elections in Burma next year.
"What is necessary for those elections is to have an inclusive dialogue with all political forces in the country. That is the necessary precondition for the stability that I think everyone is seeking for the country to be able to move forward," Mr. Bildt said. "And for that to be possible, there must of course be freedom for the different political forces."
By the time Bildt and Czech Foreign Minister Jan Kohout finished meeting with the Burmese, North Korea announced it had tested a second nuclear bomb. Bildt had to respond to that issue, too.
General view of the opening ceremony of the 9th Asia-Europe ministerial meeting (ASEM) in Hanoi, 25 May 2009
Opening ceremony of the 9th Asia-Europe ministerial meeting (ASEM) in Hanoi, 25 May 2009
"It is alarming, it is a condemnation of the provocative regime in Pyongyang. I think it further isolates the country, I think it further aggravates the long-term situation of the country," Mr. Bildt said.
The North Korean move prompted the strongest response from the Japanese delegation. Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kazuo Kodama said Japan would press for the ASEM meeting to issue a joint statement condemning the nuclear test, apart from the conference's normal closing statement.
"This nuclear testing poses a grave threat, a challenge to the NEPT regime and also poses a grave threat to the peace and security, stability, not only in the Northeast Asian region, but also the whole global community," Kodama said.
The Chinese, South Korean and North Korean delegations were reported to have met on the sidelines of the ASEM meeting, but no results of that meeting were made public.
25 May 2009
North Korea conducts 'successful' nuclear test
Deterrent ... the Government of Kim Jong-il has carried out a nuclear test in North Korea / Reuters
(News.com) -NORTH Korea staged a "successful" underground nuclear test today, the communist state's official media said.
The North "successfully conducted another underground nuclear test on May 25 as part of its measures aimed at strengthening its self-defence nuclear deterrent in every way," the Korean Central News Agency said.
The test will "contribute to safeguarding our sovereignty and socialism and guaranteeing peace and safety on the Korean peninsula and the surrounding region," it said.
The four-paragraph story gave no details of the location.
"The current nuclear test was safely conducted on a new higher level in terms of its explosive power and technology of its control and the results of the test helped satisfactorily settle the scientific and technological problems arising in further increasing the power of nuclear weapons and steadily developing nuclear technology," it said.
"The successful nuclear test is greatly inspiring the army and people of the DPRK all out in the 150-day campaign, intensifying the drive for effecting a new revolutionary surge to open the gate to a thriving nation."
South Korean officials said a tremor was detected around the northeastern town of Kilju, near where the first test was conducted in October 2006.
YTN Television quoted the South Korean weather agency as saying it detected a tremor indicating a test at 12.54 GMT (10.58am AEST).
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak had called an emergency meeting of cabinet ministers over the test, Yonhap said.
North Korea had recently said it would again test a nuclear device - its first was in October 2006 - in reaction to tightened international sanctions after it fired a long-range rocket in April.
News of the test hit South Korean financial markets, sending the main KOSPI share index down 4per cent in late morning trade, while the won dropped more than 1 per cent against the dollar.
Japan's Government has set up a taskforce in the office of Prime Minister Taro Aso after the test.
North Korea detonates nuclear bomb
Nuclear test: This black and white satellite image shows the site.
Explosion: A satellite image showing the site of a previous North Korean weapons test (AFP)
By North Asia correspondent Mark Willacy and wires
(ABC Australia) -North Korea's state media has confirmed the communist state has conducted a nuclear weapons test.
It is believed the blast was much stronger than Pyongyang's first test in 2006.
South Korea says weather agency officials detected what they called an artificial earthquake in the communist North this morning.
The government in Seoul immediately accused North Korea of conducting a nuclear weapons test.
Two hours later the secretive communist regime confirmed via its state media that it had detonated a nuclear device, saying the underground test was successful and was part of the country's nuclear deterrent policy.
In response, South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak called an emergency national security council meeting, while Japan's government said it had set up a crisis task force.
The Stalinist North last staged a nuclear test in October 2006 but it is believed this blast was much bigger.
Location unknown
The brief report by Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) gave no details of the location of the test.
However, South Korean officials said a tremor was detected around the north-eastern town of Kilju, near where the first test was conducted in October 2006.
"The Democratic People's Republic of Korea successfully conducted one more underground nuclear test on May 25 as part of the measures to bolster up its nuclear deterrent for self-defence in every way as requested by its scientists and technicians," the KCNA report said.
A spokesman for Japan's foreign ministry said it would respond to North Korea's nuclear test "in a responsible fashion" at the United Nations.
Meanwhile, a US State Department spokesman said the Obama administration was not able to confirm "at this time" that a nuclear test had been carried out.
Second test threat
The North had threatened a second test in protest at the UN Security Council's decision to censure its April 5 long-range rocket launch.
It announced it was quitting six-nation nuclear disarmament talks and would restart its plutonium-making program.
The communist state said the test had greatly inspired the army and people.
"The successful nuclear test is greatly inspiring the army and people of the DPRK all out in the 150-day campaign, intensifying the drive for effecting a new revolutionary surge to open the gate to a thriving nation," the KCNA report said.
"The test will contribute to defending the sovereignty of the country and the nation and socialism and ensuring peace and security on the Korean Peninsula and the region around it with the might of [the military first policy] Songun."
Tremor
The US Geological Survey said it detected what it called a 4.7-magnitude earthquake in North Korea.
The tremor struck at 9:54am (local time), 375 kilometres north-east of Pyongyang at a depth of just 10 kilometres, it said.
"Both South Korean and US intelligence authorities are analysing and closely monitoring the situation," a presidential spokesman in Seoul said.
The test was staged while South Korea was in mourning for former President Roh Moo-Hyun, who died Saturday after being questioned in a corruption probe.
North Korea carried out what it called a rocket launch on April 5, but the United States, South Korea and Japan said it staged a disguised ballistic missile test.
After the UN Security Council condemned the launch and tightened sanctions, the North vowed to conduct a second nuclear test as well as ballistic missile tests unless the UN apologised.
The United States has been involved in negotiations with the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia aimed at scrapping North Korea's nuclear programme in exchange for energy aid under a landmark six-party agreement signed in 2007.
The negotiations deadlocked over a dispute with North Korea over how to verify disarmament, before taking a sharp turn for the worse with the long-range rocket launch.
Asia, EU Talks Focus on N Korea Nuclear Test, Burma
By BEN STOCKING / AP WRITER
The Irrawaddy News
HANOI — North Korea's announcement of a second nuclear test and Burma's trial of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi seized the attention of foreign ministers from Asia and Europe meeting Monday in Hanoi.
The government ministers and other high-ranking officials said the nuclear test, as well as North Korea's test of a ground-to-air missile, posed a threat to regional and global security.
Burma's Foreign Minister Nyan Win is followed by journalists as he leaves an EU "Troika" meeting held on the fringe of the Asia-Europe Meeting (Asem) Foreign Ministers' meeting in Hanoi on May 25. (Photo: Reuters)
"The Japanese government cannot condone another nuclear test by North Korea," said Kazuo Kodama, a spokesman for Japan's foreign ministry. "The test is a flagrant violation of existing United Nations Security Council resolutions, and the government of Japan strongly protests."
Kodama spoke shortly before the start of the Asia-Europe Meeting (Aseam), which has drawn representatives of 45 nations—including at least 30 foreign ministers from the European Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, China, Japan, and South Korea.
The ministers were slated to seek solutions to the economic slowdown and ways to enhance economic cooperation. Also on the agenda were climate change and communicable diseases such as swine flu.
But events were likely to overtake the agenda.
North Korea announced Monday that it successfully carried out a second underground nuclear test, following one in 2006, a move that will deepen international concern over the reclusive regime's weapons programs.
It came less than two months after Pyongyang launched a rocket widely believed to be a test of its long-range missile technology.
Ministers in Hanoi are also expected to broach the controversy over Burma's treatment of Suu Kyi, whose trial in Rangoon resumed Monday.
The ruling military junta has accused her of violating the conditions of her house arrest by allowing an American intruder to stay at her home without official permission. She faces up to five years in prison.
Critics have accused the junta of seeking to use the incident as a pretext to keep Suu Kyi in detention through elections scheduled for next year, the culmination of the junta's "roadmap to democracy," which has been criticized as a fig leaf for continued military rule.
In Brussels last week, EU foreign ministers discussed increasing sanctions against Burma's junta to pressure it to restore democracy in the Southeast Asian country, but failed to agree on new measures. Instead they signaled they would urge countries with close ties to Burma such as China, India and Thailand to exert influence over it to change its ways.
European and Asian governments have rarely seen eye-to-eye on how to deal with Burma's junta, which refused to accept a 1990 election victory by Suu Kyi's party.
"We are deeply disturbed by the arrest and trial of Aung San Suu Kyi," said Bill Rammel, Britain's minister of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs. "I think it indicates that the Burmese regime is looking for any pretext to further her detention."
Rammel made his comments to reporters Monday morning, shortly before the Asem was scheduled to formally open.
"We are calling very firmly for Aung San Suu Kyi's release, and indeed the release of all political prisoners."
Burmese Foreign Minister Nyan Win is due to attend the Hanoi meeting and is scheduled to hold talks with EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner.
Asean members generally refrain from criticizing each other's domestic policies, but last week Asean issued a statement expressing concern about Suu Kyi's trial.
Suu Kyi's current term of house arrest was to have ended May 27. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate has been in detention without trial for more than 13 of the past 19 years.
02 May 2009
Kim Jong Il 'names favourite son Jong Un as successor' in North Korea
January 16, 2009
Leo Lewis, in Tokyo
Times Online
North Korea’s enigmatic and ailing dictator, Kim Jong Il, is thought to have made a surprise selection to succeed him as leader of the nuclear-armed, Stalinist autocracy.
Intelligence sources in Seoul said yesterday that — very much against the expectations of South Korean analysis — Mr Kim, 66, had chosen his youngest and favourite son, Jong Un, to take over the all-pervasive family personality cult that controls the country when he is gone.
The potential heir, who is thought to be no more than 24, was educated in Switzerland and is the offspring of of Mr Kim’s third marriage and his supposedly favourite wife — a woman who died five years ago. The reclusive leader is believed to have three children.
In the regular and heated speculation among North Korea watchers Jong Un has been routinely dismissed as a likely successor because of his youth.
Little about his upbringing is thought to make him suited to the task of following in his father and grandfather’s footsteps. If Jong Un does assume control, he will inherit a persistently moribund economy, relations across the Korean peninsula that have plumbed new lows and an agricultural crisis that annually pushes the country dangerously close to outright famine.
Analysts at the Korea Institute for National Unification said that the critical date to watch was the March 8 parliamentary election: one KINU official said that if Jong Un is suddenly given a seat on the powerful National Defence Commission, it will be a sign that he has begun the process to succeed his father. Experts in North Korean propaganda said that the selection of a notably young successor for Mr Kim was a logical step for the regime: the cult surrounding the “Dear Leader” has consistently presented him as vigorous and hearty. If, as many suspect, Mr Kim has suffered a stroke and is rather frail, the only way to present that reality to ordinary North Koreans, said one government source in Seoul, is with his young, vigorous son at his side.
Rumours of the anointment were greeted with scepticism in some quarters, as were suggestions that the political and military hierarchies had been asked to pass the heir apparent’s name down through their ranks to prepare for a handover. In a nation defined by its opaqueness, the succession issue is perhaps the most closely guarded secret and many observers believe that South Korean intelligence scoops on the subject are liable to be flawed.
Others said that the selection of a successor was a natural move for Mr Kim, whose health and grip on power have been matters of intensifying speculation in recent months.
International man of mystery
— Jong Un was born to Kim’s third wife, Ko Yong Hi, a former star of Pyongyang’s premier song-and-dance troupe
— Jong Un was reportedly educated at the International School of Berne, which he attended under a pseudonym
— Since his return to Pyongyang in his late teens, North Korea has kept him shrouded in secrecy. No picture has ever been published or released
Source: Times database
The Women In Kim's Life
Kim Jong Il's cloistered home life has revolved around five women—from his war-hero mother to the official wife his father forced him to marry. To those who know him best, Kim can be a loving—and terrifyingly volatile—man
COURTESY OF SUNG HAE RANG FROM THE "THE WISTERIA HOUSE"
Movie star Sung Hae Rim, pictured here in Moscow, lived secretly with Kim for over two decades
Posted Monday, June 23, 2003
A HERO OF HER TIME
Kim Jong Sook
The peasant turned revolutionary fighter is venerated in North Korea as one of the country's "three generals," the others being Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. Born in 1917, she joined Kim Il Sung's guerrilla band at age 18, later marrying him and giving birth to Kim Jong Il in Khabarovsk, Soviet Union. She died at 32, when Kim junior was just seven years old, leaving him alone in the shadow of his all-powerful father
THE FIRST LADY
Kim Kyung Hee
Kim's younger sister is one of the country's most powerful figures. A senior member of the ruling Korean Workers' Party, she is often referred to as the "First Lady"—a distinction that Kim Jong Il has denied to his wives. She is married to Chang Song Taek, a member of the Dear Leader's inner circle
HIS SECRET LOVE
Sung Hae Rim
A North Korean movie star who lived with Kim for two decades, Sung Hae Rim was the mother of his eldest son. Yet Kim was terrified of revealing his secret relationship with her to his father. She died in exile in Moscow last year and is buried there
THE CHOSEN ONE
Kim Young Sook
The daughter of a high-ranking military official, Kim Young Sook was handpicked by Kim Il Sung in the early 1970s to marry his son. She is the mother of Kim Jong Il's only daughter, and is considered his "official" wife
DANCING GIRL
Ko Young Hee
Ko caught Kim Jong Il's eye when he saw her act in a state dance troupe. The mother of his likely heir apparent, 22-year-old Kim Jong Chul, she is said to accompany the Dear Leader on military inspections. An official campaign is now under way to glorify her as a "respected mother" and "loyal subject," so that she can one day join Kim Jong Il's mother in the nation's pantheon of heroes. That would help pave the way for Kim Jong Chul to eventually take over from his father as North Korea's leader.
Nobody—including Sung Hae Rang—knows for sure if Kim Jong Il and Sung Hae Rim held a clandestine wedding ceremony or if Kim opted to avoid the stamp of officialdom so that their secret life together would be easier to conceal. What is clear is that Kim could not afford to suffer his all-powerful father's disapproval by going public about his new family. Kim's mother had died when he was only seven and his father had remarried. As heir presumptive, he had to maneuver against an ambitious stepmother who wanted her own son, Kim's half-brother, to be her husband's political successor. Kim's fate, perhaps even his life, depended on not giving his enemies the means to diminish his standing with his father, whom he both feared and revered. He was, Sung says, "afraid of disappointing his father, and his behavior reflected that." Obsessively so. Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994, would never find out about the peculiar household his eldest son had set up with Sung Hae Rim in 1970.
Fear of his father couldn't keep Kim Jong Il from Sung Hae Rim. He was completely besotted with her. He was a film buff, passionate about the movies, and she was a beautiful and famous star of North Korean cinema. The two had become "pals," says Sung, through this mutual interest. Meanwhile, the actress saw the match partly as a way to lift political pressure from her own family. Her father was a wealthy South Korean landowner who sympathized with the Communists and moved north. In spite of that sacrifice, he was persecuted in his adopted country as a member of an enemy class. But politics was just one part of the actress's calculations, says Sung. Her sister was genuinely fond of Kim Jong Il and felt sorry for him because he grew up without his own mother. If it weren't for his father's potential disapproval, Sung Hae Rang believes, the match might have proved much happier. "If circumstances had been different," she wrote in her memoir, "they could've made a great couple." Instead, no one outside a tiny circle knew they were partners until after his father died and was succeeded by Kim.
Life with Kim was luxurious. He stashed the family away in secluded villas and seaside pavilions, and occasionally granted permission for them to make overseas shopping trips. Their affluence was a marked contrast to the poverty of the huge majority of North Korean citizens. Sung says she was often baffled by Kim's indifference to the fate of his subjects. "He wastes money holding lavish festivals, forcing people to participate in these spectacles, while so many go hungry," she says. "My heart hurts when I think of the starvation. These are my people, and there's nothing I can do."
Sung's own existence, though hardly spartan, had its privations, too. Kim was obsessed with the family's movements and whereabouts. Though the members were allowed to travel, they could do so only with his approval. "We were hidden away, trapped," says Sung. There was the constant danger of discovery. Sung recalls when Jong Nam, Kim Jong Il's son, then four years old, was ill and had to be taken to the hospital. At the same time, Kim's stepmother and half-brother decided to take an official tour of that very hospital and were headed for the children's ward. Sung's own mother, sitting at Jong Nam's bedside, lifted the sick child onto her back and crept out of a window, taking refuge in a strand of poplar trees beside the hospital. "She took each step carefully, so the crunching of the leaves wouldn't be too loud," says Sung. After that, she recalls, "we couldn't even go to the hospital." Later, when the hospital became a convenient spot to avoid prying eyes, "that became the only place we were allowed to go."
As the years went by, Kim's ardor for his actress wife cooled. He was unfaithful. He started up at least two other families—and what little latitude Sung Hae Rang and her sister enjoyed shrank further still, as he plotted their schedules so that they would never run into the other women in his life. Sung Hae Rim never grew accustomed to such buffeting. She tried to cope with the fact that Kim Jong Il had to marry Kim Young Sook, a woman his father had picked out for him but whom he never really cared for. More devastating was his relationship with Ko Young Hee, a Japanese-born ethnic Korean and a dancer, who would displace Sung Hae Rim in his favor. Ko eventually became one of Kim's wives, although—as with Sung Hae Rim—it's not known whether or not he felt it necessary to officially marry her. For years, Kim Jong Il would never appear in public with any of his three consorts, denying them the secure status of "First Lady." That role was filled instead by Kim's politically powerful younger sister, Kim Kyung Hee.
Sung Hae Rang insists that her brother-in-law can be very affable and has an engaging curiosity about people: "He'll ask you about yourself, about your thoughts and opinions. He has a talent for making people feel at ease when he wants to." His curiosity also expressed itself in his obsession with the arts. He has an enormous personal library of movies, music and books—10,000 to 20,000 books, according to Sung, most collected by her mother, the former newspaper editor. Kim's love of food is also legendary: Sung says he enjoys cooking two Japanese specialties—sukiyaki and teppanyaki. A tennis fanatic when he was younger, his increasing corpulence later became a preoccupation, she says, so he exercised daily by swimming laps.
As for Kim the family man, Sung is anxious to give him credit for adoring his young son. When Jong Nam was an infant, Kim would patiently coo the child to sleep while carrying him on his back. As the boy grew older, Sung says Kim became increasingly convinced that Jong Nam was suffering from being cooped up in secluded villas. "We moved back and forth between the houses at east Pyongyang and Chungsangdong," she says. The boy "needed a change of scenery. He was going stir-crazy, not being allowed to go out." Kim granted a bit of leeway, allowing the sisters to travel with his son to residences in Geneva and Moscow.
But Kim's tenderheartedness could seem bizarre, even frightening. Sung Hae Rang remembers seeing her brother-in-law arrive home from a hunting trip in a state of agitation. After storming into the house, he immediately placed a call to a local hospital and asked, in a stricken tone, if "mother and baby" were alright. Everyone stared in bewilderment at the distraught Kim until he explained. While hunting, he had mistakenly shot a pregnant deer. In a fit of conscience, he had rushed doe and unborn fawn to the hospital, where the baby deer was put in an incubator in the maternity ward.
To those around him, Kim's ferocious mood swings represented a constant, and very real, menace. "I know of people who died because he abandoned them," Sung wrote in her memoirs. "Losing ... favor meant the end of one's career and sometimes life." Being a family member afforded little protection. When Kim caught his son with an unapproved girlfriend, he cut off food shipments to the house where Jong Nam lived with his mother and aunt, and threatened to send him to the country's brutal coal mines. Sung remembers begging on her knees with the rest of the family to spare the teen. Kim eventually relented and he forgot about the incident. Completely. Two months later, he scolded the family for not ordering their regular food shipments, apparently failing to recall that he had canceled the order himself.
Kim was at his most dangerous when he believed himself betrayed or deceived. "He hates—positively hates—liars," Sung says. "This is the thing that angers him like nothing else." In 1980 she went on a shopping trip to Helsinki without Kim's consent. Other North Koreans have been arrested for less serious infractions. Returning to Pyongyang, Sung packed her bags, expecting her banishment to a labor camp was imminent. Kim asked her where she had gone and why, although he already knew the answers. Sung, feeling she had nothing to lose, told her brother-in-law the truth—and it mollified him. She was allowed to stay.
Life for Sung's sister was even more perilous. Sung Hae Rim became terrified that Kim Jong Il would throw her into the streets in a fit of rage. Falling increasingly out of favor with her husband, she would take refuge in a house that he kept in Moscow. There, she would soothe her nerves for long periods to recover from his tantrums. She died last summer in her mid-60s in the Russian capital, where she was seeking treatment for stress-related disorders. Sung Hae Rang laments, "She died because of having to live like that for years with Kim Jong Il. That life killed her."
For Sung Hae Rang, there was another way out. In 1982, her own son, then 21, defected to South Korea. Her daughter escaped the North 10 years later, at the age of 26. During a 1996 visit to Kim's Geneva villa, Sung herself slipped away into the city streets and went into hiding in the European countryside. "I was really afraid for my life those first few years," she says. "I hid in a loft. I wandered the streets with a Japanese woman I knew, pretending to be Japanese also. The danger was all I could think about." Her fear was well founded. "The main reason I left [North Korea] was to be near my children," she says. But the year after she defected, her son was shot to death on the streets of Seoul by unidentified assailants.
Today, she says, "my biggest regret was leaving my sister Hae Rim behind." But there is another, more surprising source of sadness in Sung's life. She says she misses Kim's son as if he were her own child. She believes Jong Nam did not have a "normal" upbringing because of the isolation enforced by his father. Even now, she regularly scans newspapers looking for scraps of information about her nephew—and she was particularly distressed to see his photograph in the papers when he sneaked into Japan in May 2001 in an attempt to visit Tokyo Disneyland. The incident—and Jong Nam's subsequent expulsion from Japan—deeply embarrassed Kim Jong Il. Now 32, Jong Nam may no longer be the Dear Leader's heir apparent, displaced by a younger half-brother believed to be the son of Kim's third wife Ko. "I don't know what's become of him," Sung says of her former charge, "or what he's like these days. When I defected, I felt like I left him behind, like I betrayed him."
Her voice shakes and trails off. She takes off her glasses and dabs at her eyes. Unable to go on talking about her nephew, the dictator's son, she holds up her hands and brings her story to an end.
Source: Times.com
Kim's Secret Family
Secret Lives
Posted Monday, June 23, 2003
For two decades, Sung Hae Rang lived behind closed doors with the despot said to be the world's most dangerous madman.
The diminutive woman nervously spills some sugar as she spoons it into her coffee. It has been several years since she defected from the inner court of one of the world's most secretive dictatorships, and until now she has not had the courage to give an interview to the Western press. Today, Sung Hae Rang lives far away from totalitarian North Korea, in an austere, white walled, one-bedroom apartment in a European location she insists not be identified in print. Now in her late 60s, she tries to speak well of the man she fears, whom some say is the greatest threat to global peace. "Everyone wants to know about Kim Jong Il—who he is, what he's capable of," she says of North Korea's ruler. "But you can't base his entire personality on your opinion of his leadership. I knew him as a person, as family."
COURTESY OF SUNG HAE RANG FROM THE "THE WISTERIA HOUSE"
Kim's sister-in-law Sung Hae Rang with his teenage son Jong Nam at a rare family outing at the beach in North Korea
Indeed, Sung lived in Kim's household. Her sister, a North Korean movie star, was one of his three wives. Sung helped raise Kim's son, and her own children—a son and a daughter—were part of the despot's extended family. Sung shared a difficult period in Kim's life as he survived the byzantine court of his father Kim Il Sung, founder of the Stalinist country, to become leader of North Korea himself. She insists there is more to him than the tyrant with the nuclear-cloud pompadour parodied around the world. Many regard Kim as a deluded and dangerous madman—he has stuffed his pockets with vast profits from drug trafficking while his people starve, and just last week he warned of "limitless" retaliation against the U.S. and Japan if they attempt a blockade of the North's illicit overseas trade. But "if you simply write him off as an evil, one-dimensional cartoon character," Sung says, "you are missing half the picture."
Sung remembers sitting with Kim and watching North Korean propaganda on television sometime after he succeeded his autocratic father. "Ridiculous images of well-dressed young children, artificially smiling and posing, flashed on the screen," she recalls. She remembers turning to Kim and saying, "It's so obviously fake. Can't you do something about it?" Kim, looking very tired, replied, "I know. But if I tell them to tone down the artificiality, they will go completely in the opposite direction and find the most dirty, wretched children they can, dressed in horrible rags."
Sung often feels sorry for the man North Koreans call their Dear Leader. "He's on a speeding train. Any move to stop it or get off, it will crash," she says, smacking her hands together. Still, she would rather not let her infamous in-law know her whereabouts. I had gained Sung's confidence only through the mediation of mutual relatives, who arranged for me to spend some 12 hours interviewing her. She agreed to provide a rare inside look at the intimate side of Kim Jong Il, but she speaks of certain subjects with trepidation. Only with prodding does she describe Kim's terrifying volatility. "When he is happy, he can treat you really, really well. But when he's angry," Sung shudders, "he can make every window in the house shake. He has a personality of extremes, all colliding within the same mind."
Sung first met Kim Jong Il in the early hours of May 10, 1971. Awakened by the honking of a car, she jumped out of bed so quickly that she nearly tore the linen dress she wore, hurrying down to meet a man she had until then seen only in pictures. Kim, then 29, asked her to climb inside the large, black car. She knew already that he had secretly taken her sister, Sung Hae Rim, to live with him as his wife and did not want his father to find out. But the situation had become more complicated, as Kim explained in the car. He and her sister had produced a child, named Kim Jong Nam. That revelation made Sung Hae Rang a guardian of what she says was at the time "the biggest secret in North Korea." And it would ultimately turn her life upside down. In 1976, at Kim's insistence, she was press-ganged into the household to help raise Kim Jong Nam because the boy, then five years old, couldn't be allowed to attend school lest the truth about his parentage get out. Sung, whose husband had been killed in an accident, brought her own son and daughter to her new home to provide Kim's boy with companionship. She was also joined by her mother, who had been a respected editor at the Rodong Daily News, North Korea's official press organ.
Sung and her family would spend the next two decades as part of North Korea's "First Family." In The Wisteria House, her Korean-language memoir that she is currently translating into English, Sung describes the experience as living in a "luxury prison," a shadow household built on a foundation of conspiracy and concealment. For puritanical reasons, Kim Il Sung would have vehemently disapproved of his son's nesting with Sung Hae Rim. The younger Kim's new love was six years his senior. And she was already married. That marriage ended, however, because Kim Jong Il forced her husband to give her up.
Nobody—including Sung Hae Rang—knows for sure if Kim Jong Il and Sung Hae Rim held a clandestine wedding ceremony or if Kim opted to avoid the stamp of officialdom so that their secret life together would be easier to conceal. What is clear is that Kim could not afford to suffer his all-powerful father's disapproval by going public about his new family. Kim's mother had died when he was only seven and his father had remarried. As heir presumptive, he had to maneuver against an ambitious stepmother who wanted her own son, Kim's half-brother, to be her husband's political successor. Kim's fate, perhaps even his life, depended on not giving his enemies the means to diminish his standing with his father, whom he both feared and revered. He was, Sung says, "afraid of disappointing his father, and his behavior reflected that." Obsessively so. Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994, would never find out about the peculiar household his eldest son had set up with Sung Hae Rim in 1970.
Fear of his father couldn't keep Kim Jong Il from Sung Hae Rim. He was completely besotted with her. He was a film buff, passionate about the movies, and she was a beautiful and famous star of North Korean cinema. The two had become "pals," says Sung, through this mutual interest. Meanwhile, the actress saw the match partly as a way to lift political pressure from her own family. Her father was a wealthy South Korean landowner who sympathized with the Communists and moved north. In spite of that sacrifice, he was persecuted in his adopted country as a member of an enemy class. But politics was just one part of the actress's calculations, says Sung. Her sister was genuinely fond of Kim Jong Il and felt sorry for him because he grew up without his own mother. If it weren't for his father's potential disapproval, Sung Hae Rang believes, the match might have proved much happier. "If circumstances had been different," she wrote in her memoir, "they could've made a great couple." Instead, no one outside a tiny circle knew they were partners until after his father died and was succeeded by Kim.
Life with Kim was luxurious. He stashed the family away in secluded villas and seaside pavilions, and occasionally granted permission for them to make overseas shopping trips. Their affluence was a marked contrast to the poverty of the huge majority of North Korean citizens. Sung says she was often baffled by Kim's indifference to the fate of his subjects. "He wastes money holding lavish festivals, forcing people to participate in these spectacles, while so many go hungry," she says. "My heart hurts when I think of the starvation. These are my people, and there's nothing I can do."
Sung's own existence, though hardly spartan, had its privations, too. Kim was obsessed with the family's movements and whereabouts. Though the members were allowed to travel, they could do so only with his approval. "We were hidden away, trapped," says Sung. There was the constant danger of discovery. Sung recalls when Jong Nam, Kim Jong Il's son, then four years old, was ill and had to be taken to the hospital. At the same time, Kim's stepmother and half-brother decided to take an official tour of that very hospital and were headed for the children's ward. Sung's own mother, sitting at Jong Nam's bedside, lifted the sick child onto her back and crept out of a window, taking refuge in a strand of poplar trees beside the hospital. "She took each step carefully, so the crunching of the leaves wouldn't be too loud," says Sung. After that, she recalls, "we couldn't even go to the hospital." Later, when the hospital became a convenient spot to avoid prying eyes, "that became the only place we were allowed to go."
As the years went by, Kim's ardor for his actress wife cooled. He was unfaithful. He started up at least two other families—and what little latitude Sung Hae Rang and her sister enjoyed shrank further still, as he plotted their schedules so that they would never run into the other women in his life. Sung Hae Rim never grew accustomed to such buffeting. She tried to cope with the fact that Kim Jong Il had to marry Kim Young Sook, a woman his father had picked out for him but whom he never really cared for. More devastating was his relationship with Ko Young Hee, a Japanese-born ethnic Korean and a dancer, who would displace Sung Hae Rim in his favor. Ko eventually became one of Kim's wives, although—as with Sung Hae Rim—it's not known whether or not he felt it necessary to officially marry her. For years, Kim Jong Il would never appear in public with any of his three consorts, denying them the secure status of "First Lady." That role was filled instead by Kim's politically powerful younger sister, Kim Kyung Hee.
Sung Hae Rang insists that her brother-in-law can be very affable and has an engaging curiosity about people: "He'll ask you about yourself, about your thoughts and opinions. He has a talent for making people feel at ease when he wants to." His curiosity also expressed itself in his obsession with the arts. He has an enormous personal library of movies, music and books—10,000 to 20,000 books, according to Sung, most collected by her mother, the former newspaper editor. Kim's love of food is also legendary: Sung says he enjoys cooking two Japanese specialties—sukiyaki and teppanyaki. A tennis fanatic when he was younger, his increasing corpulence later became a preoccupation, she says, so he exercised daily by swimming laps.
As for Kim the family man, Sung is anxious to give him credit for adoring his young son. When Jong Nam was an infant, Kim would patiently coo the child to sleep while carrying him on his back. As the boy grew older, Sung says Kim became increasingly convinced that Jong Nam was suffering from being cooped up in secluded villas. "We moved back and forth between the houses at east Pyongyang and Chungsangdong," she says. The boy "needed a change of scenery. He was going stir-crazy, not being allowed to go out." Kim granted a bit of leeway, allowing the sisters to travel with his son to residences in Geneva and Moscow.
But Kim's tenderheartedness could seem bizarre, even frightening. Sung Hae Rang remembers seeing her brother-in-law arrive home from a hunting trip in a state of agitation. After storming into the house, he immediately placed a call to a local hospital and asked, in a stricken tone, if "mother and baby" were alright. Everyone stared in bewilderment at the distraught Kim until he explained. While hunting, he had mistakenly shot a pregnant deer. In a fit of conscience, he had rushed doe and unborn fawn to the hospital, where the baby deer was put in an incubator in the maternity ward.
To those around him, Kim's ferocious mood swings represented a constant, and very real, menace. "I know of people who died because he abandoned them," Sung wrote in her memoirs. "Losing ... favor meant the end of one's career and sometimes life." Being a family member afforded little protection. When Kim caught his son with an unapproved girlfriend, he cut off food shipments to the house where Jong Nam lived with his mother and aunt, and threatened to send him to the country's brutal coal mines. Sung remembers begging on her knees with the rest of the family to spare the teen. Kim eventually relented and he forgot about the incident. Completely. Two months later, he scolded the family for not ordering their regular food shipments, apparently failing to recall that he had canceled the order himself.
Kim was at his most dangerous when he believed himself betrayed or deceived. "He hates—positively hates—liars," Sung says. "This is the thing that angers him like nothing else." In 1980 she went on a shopping trip to Helsinki without Kim's consent. Other North Koreans have been arrested for less serious infractions. Returning to Pyongyang, Sung packed her bags, expecting her banishment to a labor camp was imminent. Kim asked her where she had gone and why, although he already knew the answers. Sung, feeling she had nothing to lose, told her brother-in-law the truth—and it mollified him. She was allowed to stay.
Life for Sung's sister was even more perilous. Sung Hae Rim became terrified that Kim Jong Il would throw her into the streets in a fit of rage. Falling increasingly out of favor with her husband, she would take refuge in a house that he kept in Moscow. There, she would soothe her nerves for long periods to recover from his tantrums. She died last summer in her mid-60s in the Russian capital, where she was seeking treatment for stress-related disorders. Sung Hae Rang laments, "She died because of having to live like that for years with Kim Jong Il. That life killed her."
For Sung Hae Rang, there was another way out. In 1982, her own son, then 21, defected to South Korea. Her daughter escaped the North 10 years later, at the age of 26. During a 1996 visit to Kim's Geneva villa, Sung herself slipped away into the city streets and went into hiding in the European countryside. "I was really afraid for my life those first few years," she says. "I hid in a loft. I wandered the streets with a Japanese woman I knew, pretending to be Japanese also. The danger was all I could think about." Her fear was well founded. "The main reason I left [North Korea] was to be near my children," she says. But the year after she defected, her son was shot to death on the streets of Seoul by unidentified assailants.
Today, she says, "my biggest regret was leaving my sister Hae Rim behind." But there is another, more surprising source of sadness in Sung's life. She says she misses Kim's son as if he were her own child. She believes Jong Nam did not have a "normal" upbringing because of the isolation enforced by his father. Even now, she regularly scans newspapers looking for scraps of information about her nephew—and she was particularly distressed to see his photograph in the papers when he sneaked into Japan in May 2001 in an attempt to visit Tokyo Disneyland. The incident—and Jong Nam's subsequent expulsion from Japan—deeply embarrassed Kim Jong Il. Now 32, Jong Nam may no longer be the Dear Leader's heir apparent, displaced by a younger half-brother believed to be the son of Kim's third wife Ko. "I don't know what's become of him," Sung says of her former charge, "or what he's like these days. When I defected, I felt like I left him behind, like I betrayed him."
Her voice shakes and trails off. She takes off her glasses and dabs at her eyes. Unable to go on talking about her nephew, the dictator's son, she holds up her hands and brings her story to an end.
Source: Time's Asia
North Korea
Democratic People's Republic of Korea
In this satellite photograph taken at night above the Korean peninsula, you can make out several white splotches. Those are cities... as in streetlights... as in electricity. All of them are below the border in South Korea. And what about that dark area above the dividing line? Let's just say that North Koreans save a fuckload of money on their utility bills.
* Kim Jong Il
* Kim Il Sung
* U.S.S. Pueblo Incident
* North Korea is an atomic power.
* They possess about 5,000 tons of biological and chemical weapons.
* In a State of the Union speech, President George W Bush lumped North Korea in with Iran and Iraq in the "Axis of Evil."
* Famines. Cannibalism.
* "Unification" with the South.
* Maintains the fifth-largest standing army (1,000,000 people). A little more than 30% of the national GDP is spent on the military.
* kidnappings
Since the cease-fire of the Korean War in 1953, North Korea has kidnapped about 3,750 Korean citizens in more than 470 cases. Most of them were crew members of fishing boats. Most fishermen returned home after undergoing intensive brain-washing in North Korea, but 442 of them are still held in North Korea.
North Korea kidnapped a total of 3,662 fishermen along with their fishing boats. The last victim was Dongjin-ho (skipper: Kim Soon-kun) and its 20 crew members. The boat was abducted near Paeknyon Island in January 1987, and all the crew members are still detained in North Korea.
* heroin smuggling
* counterfeiting
Then there is the counterfeiting of U.S. $100 bills. The North Koreans have stolen both the printing presses (from Switzerland) and the formula for the pulp and paper of the U.S. currency. Their quality is reputed to be so good that one South Korean Military intelligence official told WorldNetDaily, "The North Koreans must actually lower their counterfeiting standards -- their fake bills are better made than those in the U.S."
Gulags
The Ministry of National Political Security oversees a collection of death camps where 200,000 political and religious criminals are worked to death.
* Chungbong Mine
* Haengyong
* Hoeryong
* Huaong
Official Website
Timeline
Jan 1968 U.S.S. Pueblo Incident.
1969 EC-121 incident.
Dec 1969 North Korean operatives hijack a South Korean passenger airliner, YS-11, on its way from Kangnung to Seoul. 51 people aboard the craft are taken captive in North Korea, and only 39 are ever released.
18 Aug 1976 Poplar Tree incident.
9 Oct 1983 A North Korean assassin attempts to kill the president of South Korea during a visit to Rangoon. He only survives by being tardy when a time bomb goes off at a memorial. 17 South Korean diplomats and 4 Burmese are killed in the blast.
Nov 1987 114 are killed when Korean Airlines flight 858 blows up over the Indian Ocean. After this incident, the United States officially lists North Korea as a terrorist state.
Jun 1994 South Korea somehow persuades President Bill Clinton not to launch an air strike against North Korean nuclear sites.
Sep 1996 A North Korean spy submarine breaks down near Kangnung, prompting the 26-member crew to swim ashore. During the subsequent manhunt, 13 South Koreans are killed and 24 of the North Koreans are killed. 11 of the spies blew their own brains out on a mountain to avoid capture. One North Korean is captured alive, and is coerced into talking by force-feeding him soju. The last one somehow manages to escape. North Korea finally apologizes for the incident in December.
Apr 1997 North Korea finally admits that they have been suffering a deadly famine for almost a year.
29 Jan 2002 During his State of the Union speech, President George W Bush denounces North Korea as being part of an "Axis of Evil" along with the nations of Iran and Iraq.
Source: Rotten Library
Kim Jong Il
Say what you like about Kim Jong Il's appearance -- at least it's distinctive.
Absolutely no one in North Korea ever has to ask "Who's that squat little man in the glasses and khaki windbreaker?" Also, there's his signature hairstyle.
The dictator artfully conceals his diminutive stature by wearing platform shoes and whipping his hair into stiff peaks. So what if the autocrat feels a little self-conscious about his height? That's understandable -- he's only 5'2". Napoleon was four inches taller than that, for Christ's sake.
Granted, the man dresses like a retard. But that doesn't mean he actually is one. In fact, Kim does a surprisingly fine job of running North Korea. Some people regard nepotism as an invariably bad thing, especially when it comes to governance. They argue that you really don't want incompetent retards manning important government posts, because they tend to fuck up spectacularly.
But this is not the case in North Korea, whose ruthless dictator happened to inherit the job from his father, the equally ruthless Kim Il Sung. Kim Jong Il happens to be brilliant at his primary responsibility... that, of course, being: remaining in power.
Admittedly, he sucks at all the other ones. Kim's disastrous agricultural and economic policies have caused his people to suffer under one of the world's longest, deadliest famines. But that's just what you get when daddy's little boy grows up to take over the family business.
Anyway, that doesn't matter to the average man in Pyongyang. The North Koreans adore Kim. They swoon in his presence. He is, to them, something of a deity. A god-king. Don't believe us? Check out this article from the official government news agency in September 1997:
The Korean people regard it as their most worthwhile life to uphold Secretary Kim Jong Il and live and work in perfect harmony with him, said Rodong Sinmun in a signed article August 31. The author of the article said: The Korean people absolutely worship, trust and follow the General as god. These noble ideological feelings are ascribable to the fact that they have keenly felt the greatness of the General from the bottom of their hearts.
He is the great teacher who teaches them what the true life is, a father who provides them with the noblest political integrity and a tender-hearted benefactor who brings their worthwhile life into full bloom. The life of the Korean people who form a harmonious whole with the General is a revolutionary life to glorify their noblest political integrity. This is why they have unbendingly advanced the revolution with an unshakable faith, not wavering under any obstacles and trials. The General is the mental pillar and the eternal sun to the Korean people. As they are in harmonious whole with him, they are enjoying a true life based on pure conscience and obligation. They are upholding him as their great father and teacher, united around him in ideology, morality and obligation. So, their life is a true, fruitful and precious life without an equal in history.
Kim has 22 million toiling away for him, and the country's aggregate revenue is about $22 billion per annum. That works out to an average of $1,000 per person, which rates their productivity somewhere between Tuvalu and the West Bank. But just as in any business, no matter how poorly the company does, the upper management is always well-compensated for their labors.
And no one is paid better than the CEO. Which is fortunate for Kim Jong Il -- whose net worth approaches $4 billion -- because he has always had expensive tastes. He likes fast cars, gourmet foods, and fine liquors. Suffice it to say, none of these things is produced in North Korea and FedEx doesn't deliver there. As expensive as those luxuries are in the West, they cost even more to procure north of the 38th Parallel. But procure them they must. Evidently, the man loves to throw banquets and has a penchant for fine cognac (his favorite is Hennessy V.S.O.P).
Kim's obsession for fine dining comes off sounding kind of selfish when you consider that millions of his countrymen have been killed by lack of food. A series of droughts, coupled with Kim's irrational farming and draconian economic policies, have given no relief to a decade of famine. As a direct result, at least ten percent of the man's population has died. In 1999, South Korean intelligence services claimed that somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million North Koreans succumbed to starvation over the four previous years. This puts him third behind Mao and Josef Stalin for most people starved to death.
He has other rarefied tastes as well. Kim is a world-class cineaste; by the 1970s his collection had grown to more than 15,000 films (on reels -- this was before videocassettes and DVDs). He especially loves Hollywood movies. His favorites include Rambo, Friday the 13th, the James Bond series, and Hong Kong action films. His favorite stars are Elizabeth Taylor and Sean Connery.
Kim also adores children's cartoons, especially Daffy Duck. (Evidently, the Dear Leader has amassed the world's largest collection of Daffy cartoons.) And he's a giant Michael Jackson fan.
He also loves pornography. In addition, according to rumor, Kim also keeps a harem of beautiful women for the purpose of fucking. The dictator is regularly serviced by a nubile "Pleasure Squad," a stable of babes composed primarily of young Asians and Europeans.
In his free time Kim wrote six operas, over a span of only two years. This he could accomplish because he's a goddamned genius. As one North Korean diplomat expressed his nation's gratitude during Kim's 61st birthday celebration: "We're able to face the U.S. superpower and the hostile U.S. policies because of our brilliant commander, Chairman Kim Jong Il. He is a thinker on a par with Marx and Lenin."
But of course, none of this is why he gets paid the big bucks. His job security is based on convincing the world that his regime is extremely dangerous and unpredictable. In playing chicken with the global superpowers, Kim's primary objectives are twofold:
1. Make North Korea a credible nuclear power.
Most analysts believe the DPRK is pretty close to having nuclear-tipped ICBMs, unless they already do. The fact is, nobody knows for sure. They've intentionally kept things under wraps to keep us guessing. Are they working on their fifth warhead? Their fiftieth? Their first? Fuck if we know.
2. Pretend to be completely, utterly, bugfuck crazy.
Nuclear weapons are useless as a deterrent unless your enemy believes you're crazy enough to actually use them. And if you're a small country, you can make up for a small stockpile by pretending to have a hair trigger.
Unfortunately, despite Kim's best efforts, nobody really believes he's nuts these days. He screwed his carefully-cultivated image by inviting Secretary of State Madeline Albright to Pyongyang in October 2000. Afterwards, she said:
I don't think he's delusional... we had very peculiar information about Kim Jong Il -- that he was a recluse. I think "delusional" actually was a word that was used. But [South Korean President] Kim Dae Jung had reported that it was possible to have perfectly decent, rational conversations with him... he's not delusional, and he's not someone who only is interested in watching bad movies.
Of course, even if he does everything right, nothing lasts forever. It will eventually end for Kim Jong Il, just as it ended for his father before him. Kim Il Sung died in July 1994. Incidentally, rumor has it that he suffered a massive heart attack during an animated argument with his son.
Kim is probably doomed to the same eventual fate as billionaire Howard Hughes, ultimately succumbing to crippling paranoid delusions. But for the time being, he's only about halfway there -- utterly obsessed with secrecy and his physical security, but not afraid to touch doorknobs yet. In planning for this eventuality, Kim is grooming one of his sons, Kim Jong Chul, to take over the family business. He will have quite a legacy to live up to.
But this plan may all go to shit. For some reason, Kim Jong Il believes he will be replaced by a triplet, and none of his children were triplets. So, like King Herod before him, Kim is covering his bets. He has ordered all triplets born in North Korea be rounded up and raised in state orphanages, where the government can keep an especially close eye on them. We are not making this up. According to a March 2003 story in the Herald Sun:
All triplets in North Korea are being forcibly removed from parents after their birth and dumped in bleak orphanages. The policy is carried out on the orders of Stalinist dictator Kim Jong-il, who has an irrational belief that a triplet could one day topple his regime.
Yeah, yeah. It sounds crazy, but the man is just being prudent. You'd probably do the same thing if you were in his platform shoes.
Timeline
16 Feb 1941 Kim Jong Il is born in Khabarovsk, Siberia.
1978 South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his film star wife, Choe Eun-hui, are kidnapped and brought to North Korea at the direction of Kim Jong Il. There the couple are forced to make propaganda films for the regime, until they finally escape in 1986.
24 Dec 1991 Kim Il Sung announces that his son Kim Jong Il will succeed him.
13 Apr 1992 Kim Jong Il takes control of North Korea's armed forces, and becomes the country's de facto dictator.
8 Jul 1994 Kim Il Sung dies. Kim Jong Il formally assumes power.
1996 Kim Jong Il announces his Red Banner initiative. It is explained as a "revolutionary, profound philosophy which clarifies the fundamental principle of the revolution based on Juche."
27 Sep 1997 North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il decrees that anyone caught outside their home town without a travel permit be thrown into detention facilities known as "927 camps."
Jun 2000 North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il tells South Korean reporters: "Some Europeans say that I'm reclusive, that this the first time I've appeared in public. In fact, I've been to China and Indonesia. I've made many secret visits abroad. How can people claim I'm reclusive?"
1 May 2001 Kim Jong Nam, son of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, is detained at passport control in Narita international airport for attempting to enter Japan with fraudulent identity papers. The 30-year-old arrived from Singapore with two women and a 4-year-old boy, as well as a set of forged passports from the Dominican Republic. Kim Jong Nam claims that he just wants to check out Tokyo Disneyland.
14 Aug 2001 Juche Tower unveiled.
29 Jan 2002 During his State of the Union speech, President George W Bush denounces North Korea as being part of an "Axis of Evil" along with the nations of Iran and Iraq.
Aug 2002 During an interview with journalist-author Bob Woodard, President George W Bush declares: "I loathe Kim Jong Il. I've got a visceral reaction to this guy, because he is starving his people. And I have seen intelligence of these prison camps -- they're huge -- that he uses to break up families and to torture people. It appalls me."
Source: The Rotten Library
Kim Jong Il
AKA Yuri Irsenowich Kim
Born: 16-Feb-1941
Birthplace: Khabarovsk, Siberia, Russia
Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: Asian
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Head of State
Nationality: North Korea
Executive summary: Dictator of North Korea
As a young man, Kim Jong-Il lived a playboy lifestyle, and many Koreans assumed that he would never be disciplined enough to lead his nation. But Kim studied political science at the university named for his father and rose rapidly through Communist Party ranks. He was designated his father's official successor in 1974, and took power upon the elder Kim's death in 1994. His early reign was marred by a three-year famine which killed perhaps 2 million citizens. He had about 80 high-ranking officials, including several relatives and his own brother-in-law, rounded up and purged in 2004. Long under international pressure to end its nuclear program, North Korea astonished the world by testing a nuclear bomb in 2006. Its point made, six-party talks resumed, leading to a modicum of detente by 2007.
Kim Jong-Il is often said to be stark raving bonkers, but this is a misconception. He is eccentric, certainly, and his government is extremely secretive and brutal to dissidents, but experts say Kim is bright, clear-headed, politically astute, and as sane as any leader with unchecked power. He drives trendy Mazdas, and prefers Hennessey cognac. He wears elevator shoes to hide his short stature (without the shoes, he stands about 5'2"). He is a big movie buff, and owns videos of at least 20,000 films. Kim is a moviemaker himself, the credited producer of Pulgasari, a 1985 Godzilla-esque story based on a 14th-century Korean legend about a monster who helps peasants overthrow their dictatorial king. Kim abducted South Korean director Shin Sang-Ok and actress Choe Un-Hee, and forced them to make the movie. They escaped several years later, when Kim allowed them to attend a film festival in Vienna.
Father:
Kim Il Sung (dictator, d. 8-Jul-1994)
Mother:
Kim Chong-suk (d. 1949, childbirth)
Brother:
Shura Kim (d. 1947, drowning)
Brother:
Kim Pyong-il
Wife:
Kim Yong Suk (div.)
Son:
Kim Jong-Nam (b. 1971, by Sung Hae-Rim)
Daughter:
Kim Sul-song (b. 1974)
Son:
Kim Jong-Chol (b. c. 1981, by Ko Young-hee)
Mistress:
Sung Hae-Rim
Mistress:
Ko Young-hee
Son:
Kim Jong-Woon
High School: Namsan Senior High School, Pyongyang, North Korea (1960)
University: BA Political Science, Kim Il-Sung University (1964)
President of North Korea 8-Jul-1994
Birthday Is Holiday
Korean Ancestry
Rotten Library Page:
Kim Jong Il
Appears on the cover of:
The Economist, 3-May-2003, DETAILS: Hell-bent
The Economist, 4-Jan-2003, DETAILS: The explosive Mr Kim (as if Saddam were not enough) [Kim's head in the midst of a nuclear explosion]
Time, 13-Jan-2003, DETAILS: The Bigger Threat? North Korea's dictator is a nuclear menace. Why he may be more dangerous than Saddam (shown pictured among warheads)
Source: NNDB Tracking the Entire World
