Equally surprising, instead of spreading the word about the conference, North Korea has proposed another round of three-day reunions of families divided by the Korean War. The reunions, if held, would be the first in a year — and the second in three years when regular reunions sputtered to a halt amid worsening North-South relations.
Now, while South Korea still demands an apology from North Korea for sinking the South Korean navy corvette the Cheonan in March, North Korea is off on a peace offensive. The North steadfastly denies anything to do with the Cheonan episode but is calling for returning to six-party talks on its nuclear weapons that it’s boycotted since December 2008.
As for Kim Jong-Il, Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency reported that he had visited a coal mine “to acquaint himself in detail with technology and production”. There’s no hint, though, of whether he visited the mine before or after his China visit, in which he met President Hu Jintao and appealed for aid to fight flooding that has again ravaged the countryside.
The secrecy is so tight that it’s reasonable to ask if the party conference is going to happen and, if so, if Kim Jong-Un will show up. Neither his name nor his picture have ever appeared in the North Korean media, and the one or two photographs that were reported to be of him in the Japanese media were of someone else.
Might the conference come and go with no definitive word about Kim Jong-Un? The answer is “yes”, but that omission does not mean the conflab, if held, would not have everything to do with his place as successor to the throne held by Kim Jong-Il since the death of his father, long-ruling Great Leader Kim Il-Sung, in July 1994.
The best guess is that Kim Jong-Il wants to bolster support for Kim Jong-Un among party bureaucrats who might question his credentials. What, after all, has the kid, believed to be 27 years old, done to qualify him to take over from his ailing father, who had a stroke in August 2008, suffers from high blood pressure and diabetes and is on dialysis three times a week?
He’s reportedly gotten secondary posts — “inspector” is the term sometimes used — for the National Defense Commission, of which his father is chairman, and for the party, of which his father is general secretary. The real power resides in the defense commission, which necessarily dominates the armed forces through which Kim Jong-Il exercises his policy of songun (”military first”), a term that in recent years has eclipsed juche (”self-reliance”) as the country’s core credo.
It’s possible that one way for Kim Jong-Un to show his stuff on a broader scale would be to serve as one of the secretaries of the Workers’ Party. The mere mention of his name in a new list of secretaries would confirm his ascendancy as next in line to power whenever his father leaves the scene.
With his acute sense of political survival, however, Kim Jong-Il may have other ideas. It’s possible Kim Jong-Un will get the post but that it won’t be announced, and it’s equally possible he won’t actually get a title befitting his role as next in line to power.
Reluctance to ruffle sensitivities among party faithful is not going to inhibit the propaganda buildup needed to make the case for succession.
North Koreans for a year now have been humming and singing ”Footsteps”, a song whose title indicates that someone is getting ready to follow in the footsteps of their Dear Leader. There are reports that certain North Koreans are referring to him as ”commander”, and it’s even rumored, via surreptitious cell phone contact to South Koreans, that pins with his likeness are ready for distribution — to go along with the Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il-Sung pins that all North Koreans wear.
The word is also getting out that Kim Jong-Un is a pretty tough guy. Could he personally have encouraged, and maybe even ordered, the attack on the Cheonan in which 46 young sailors died? It doesn’t hurt Kim Jong-Un’s image for word to spread that he’s as tough as any of the military people whom his father is accustomed to ordering around and that, when it comes to dealing with the country’s main enemies, the U.S. and South Korea, he appreciates the virtues of armed struggle.
Kim Jong-Un will need all the build-up he can get. He’s said to have had to go through North Korea’s military academy, but there’s no clue as to the rigor of the training he received. Nor can he claim anything remotely like the combat experience of senior officers who survived the Korean War in the early 1950s.
As far as anyone knows, Kim Jong-Un’s life was fairly genteel. He did go to an elite private school in Switzerland, where he somehow became a fan of professional American basketball. The only photograph that’s confirmed to be of him shows a smiling boy of 12 amid classmates at school.
Not that the paparazzi haven’t been after him. A horde of Japanese and South Korean reporters and photographers dogged the caravan of limos and armored cars and chase vehicles that accompanied Kim Jong-Il on his five-day trip earlier this month to northeastern China.
No one seems to doubt that Kim Jong-Un was along for the ride and may have been with his father during the meeting with Hu Jintao, who flew to Changchun to see Kim Jong-Il for the second time in six months.
If there is any reason to question this speculation, however, it is that none of the paparazzi, with their fancy long-lens cameras shooting non-stop images of every visible moment of the mission, caught a trace of Kim Jong-Un’s presence. Nor did his name appear on any guest list. The Chinese, moreover, have refused to confirm whether he was there or not.
Clearly, at his father’s behest, Kim Jong-Un is keeping a very low profile. The suspicion is that too many people are gunning for him. One potential rivalry is between the kid and his father’s brother-in-law, Jang Song-Taek, who’s a vice chairman of the National Defense Commission. Jang is believed by some to be ready to operate as a regent after Kim Jong-Il passes away.
Kim Jong-Un, however, may resent Jang’s power. To get where he’s presumed to be, he had to beat out two other possible claimants.
The first is his older brother, who got nailed by Japanese customs officials entering Japan on a fake Dominican passport on his way to taking his children to Tokyo Disneyland — not a good place for a true communist to want to go. The second claimant would be number two brother, reportedly deemed ”too effeminate” for the job.
Now, perhaps, Kim Jong-Un may want to get rid of Jang, who owes his position to his wife, Kim Jong-Il’s younger sister. Jong-Un may form his own alliances with military officers chafing under Jang’s influence.
Open Radio for North Korea, which broadcasts from Seoul to North Korea two hours every day, features a long-running serial on Kim Jong-Un versus Jang Song-Taek. Kim Jong-Un’s appearance at the conference, however brief, would be prime-time drama above and below the line that still divides the two Koreas six decades after the Korean War.
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