THE KINGDOM OF KIM
Chapman, William
The Kingdom of Kim North Korea is a communist dictatorship with a monarchial twist BY WILLIAM CHAPMAN On October 8, 1983, foreign diplomats in Peking picked up an unusual signal. The government...
...Recent visitors permitted reunions with North Korean relatives tell of the bugging of private homes...
...The Great Lead- _ er's presence was everywhere, Kim Won- ||H^Hhe North Korean economy pro-jo found...
...His photograph hangs in every office and every home...
...Two of the saboteurs were captured and identified as North Korean commando officers...
...Soviet troops were in command, Gayn found, but the countryside was plastered with billboards depicting a short, stocky man of about thirty-five, an omnipresent figure with a twenty-one-point program for national development...
...They trotted him to the president's birthplace, museums dedicated in his honor, and even his mother's house...
...The next day, an entirely different signal emerged—or rather, erupted—in Rangoon, Burma...
...A horrific explosion ripped apart a Burmese martyrs' mausoleum, killing seventeen visiting South Korean officials in what was apparently a botched attempt to assassinate the leader of the delegation, South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan...
...Schoolchildren are indoctrinated to be totally loyal to a single leader and to hate the West—especially the United States...
...A ten-story building houses the gifts Kim has received from admiring foreigners...
...Some analysts consider it the world's most volatile flashpoint...
...By the end of the decade, the country had fallen behind in its payments to Japanese and European lenders, and an estimated $3 billion in debts had to be rescheduled...
...William Chapman is an American correspondent living in Japan...
...Visitors to Pyongyang, the capital, are shadowed and guided to official sights...
...Following the bombing, Chun Doo Hwan declared that such acts would thereafter be met with retaliation in kind...
...Until then, most Western analysts believed a mutual fear of retaliation made an offensive attack by either side unlikely...
...With the two countries' powerful armies only miles apart, there would be little or no opportunity for negotiations once hostilities began...
...On his seventieth birthday, according to an account by Italian journalist Fernando Mezzetti, Kim presented government officials with dozens of Mercedes au-tos and 40,000 Swiss watches...
...Still, enough information can be gathered from independent sources to paint a general picture...
...Everybody knows all off, played nothing but odes to Kim II of our conversations are bugged,'he said...
...Specially trained commandos— sometimes estimated to number more than 100,000—could be launched quickly against South Korean coastal points or dispatched into its cities and countryside...
...The government's own statistics show that more than 14 per cent of the gross national product is devoted to the military...
...An entire generation has been reared in isolation, ignorance, and fear...
...Although sustained fighting ended with the 1953 armistice agreement, the two Koreas still glare at each other across a nominally demilitarized zone...
...Translated one step further, it means that the nation will be dominated by one man until tie dies and then by his son, Kim Chong-il, now forty-two...
...Many Japanese companies that once looked forward to lucrative trade with the North now do business on a cash-only basis...
...Kim Won-jo, a Japanese citizen of Korean heritage whose sympathies once lay with the North, was allowed to visit relatives there...
...Officials ride in special express trains and cruise down special highway lanes in expensive foreign automobiles...
...Among them, Mezzetti says, is a stuffed alligator which stands on two feet and offers drinks from a wooden tray...
...Radios in the hotel rooms, wired so they could not be turned was yelling into it...
...And that might have led to all-out war, possibly involving tactical nuclear weapons...
...vides the essentials to its people, Another recent visitor gave this ac- H but lags behind the rapidly ex-count of his meeting with his North Ko- H panding economies of South Korean brother: "As soon as my younger rea, Taiwan, Singapore, and other East brother entered my hotel room, he turned Asian states...
...Kim II Sung was a guerrilla fighter during the years of Japanese colonialism, emerging after liberation in 1945 as the most skillful of a group of pro-communist nationalists...
...One reason for North Korea's economic stagnation is its enormous military budget...
...Current troop strength is estimated at 780,000, compared to 620,000 South Korean troops backed by 39,000 Americans...
...The beginnings of Kim's one-man state were already apparent in 1946, when American reporter Mark Gayn ventured across the thirty-eighth parallel...
...Each has an enormous army and is chaperoned by nuclear powers—the North by China and the Soviet Union, the South by the United States...
...The prevailing ideology is Kim's philosophy of "juche," which is usually translated as "self-reliance" and means, if anything, that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea must follow its own peculiar path of development...
...There are few signs of poverty, giving credence to Kim's boast of cradle-to-grave security, but class distinctions abound...
...Pyongyang, they report, is a handsome but colorless city with none of the liveliness and hurly-burly that characterizes Seoul, capital of the South...
...The North's fighter planes are only minutes away from Seoul...
...Journalists allowed into North Korea are given guided tours and denied contact with ordinary citizens...
...The Soviets, having driven their forces to the thirty-eighth parallel as the war ended, found him the most dynamic of several candidates and supported his push for power...
...North Korea is a highly developed police state, from which there has never been a verified report of dissent...
...With considerable aid from the Soviet Union, North Korea maintains one of the world's most formidable armies...
...The Rangoon assault last October has prompted a reassessment of the dangers of war on the peninsula...
...Indeed, had the attempt on President Chun's life succeeded, it might have been followed by commando attacks calculated to take advantage of anticipated turmoil in the South...
...And if war did start, it is hard to imagine how—given the current state of relations between Washington and the Kremlin—the superpowers could find a way to stay out...
...To the West, North Korea remains the "hermit kingdom," and contacts are rare...
...The "Great Leader," as he is called, is shown advising workers on the proper way to build a subway, make steel, and grow crops...
...It is the first time in history that a Marxist ruler anointed his own kin as his successor...
...Great Leader, Kim II Sung.' I asked him In the 1970s, Kim launched a large-scale what he was doing...
...The architect of this brave new world, seventy-two-year-old Kim II Sung, presides over a party and state apparatus devoted to, and dependent on, his personal rule...
...While much is known about South Korea—its remarkable economic growth and continuing suppression of internal dissent—information about its secretive neighbor is scarce...
...The capital city is strewn with monuments to his works, including a vast museum filled with chairs he sat on and the butts of cigarettes he smoked...
...South Korea's gross national to the picture of Kim II Sung over the door product, for instance, is believed to be five and began yelling, over and over, 'Our times higher than the North's...
...It was regarded as an important and hopeful sign because North Korea had persistently refused to recognize, much less deal with, its pro-Western enemy to the south...
...The gov-yelled, 'Our Great Leader, Kim II Sung.' ernment borrowed heavily to get the pro-Then he told me in a very low voice that gram off the ground, but it was largely a there must be a wall-snooper and that he failure...
...The government of North Korea appeared ready to negotiate for improved relations with the United States and South Korea...
...Kim's propaganda machine was already in full swing...
...Children in elementary school wear his picture pinned to their clothes...
...Sung's words and deeds...
...Government guides took him to bow before huge statues of Kim II Sung and view movies extolling his life...
...Since then, Kim has pursued personal glorification with a vigor that makes Ferdinand Marcos and Moammar Khadafy seem bashful...
...Rangoon altered that comfortable assumption...
...Everything worthwhile is described in official print as an accomplishment of Kim II Sung...
...Published accounts of North Korean life are suspect, since they usually come from the government or its avowed enemies in the South...
...The sequence of events highlighted the fragile nature of the "truce" in the corner of Asia most torn by Cold War antagonisms...
...He hushed me, putting modernization campaign to make North his forefinger to his mouth, and again Korea industrially self-sufficient...
Vol. 48 • October 1984 • No. 10
