His father calls him a 'genius of geniuses', and he may well have to be if he takes over as head of the North Korean dynasty that has ruled the deeply troubled state for 60 years, writes DAVID McNEILL
IT IS ONE measure of the secrecy surrounding North Korea’s government that we barely know what the country’s putative new leader looks like, what he thinks or even exactly when he was born. Speculating on his suitability for the job of helming the crumbling Stalinist backwater is thus hardly relevant, except in the only sense that matters: as the youngest son of Kim Jong-il, current ruler in the world’s sole hereditary dictatorship, he has the one qualification that truly counts.
Kim Jong-un is 27 or 28, reportedly likes the Belgian martial-arts practitioner Jean-Claude Van Damme, can hold his soju– Korea's native alcoholic beverage – and speaks English, German and French. As a child he drove a specially adapted Mercedes-Benz around his father's estate and liked to play basketball, according to Kenji Fujimoto, Kim senior's former personal chef – a key source for the little we know about the Kim dynasty. Fujimoto is responsible for one of the very few verified images of Kim Jong-un, a snap he took in the 1990s while living with the family.
If, as reported, the one-time 11-year-old with the pudding-bowl haircut seen in Fujimoto’s photograph is to take over from his ailing father, his biographers will inevitably have to peer through the thick fog of disinformation and ornate propaganda that surrounds Pyongyang’s first family. Among the few sources they have are the South Korean press (which first broke the succession story, last year), Seoul’s network of defectors and spies, and the Japanese media, which diligently reports every tremor of North Korea’s twitchy countenance.
Japanese TV was among the first to reveal that Kim Jong-un had followed his two older brothers to the International School of Berne, in Switzerland, where he studied under a pseudonym with the privileged children of the world's elite. The daily Japanese Mainichinewspaper recently scooped its rivals to publish a photograph of him taken when he was at the school, aged 16. And it was the Japanese press that brought the world the infamous story of how Kim Jong-un's flaky eldest half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, had mortified his father by attempting to visit Tokyo Disneyland on a forged passport in 2001. Korea watchers believe that this stunt helped cost Kim Jong-nam his last chance of inheriting the mantle of the "Dear Leader".
South Korean sources say that Kim Jong-un’s mother was Koh Young-hee, a dancer and one-time consort of Kim senior. After her death, apparently from breast cancer, in 2004, the North Korean military began referring to her as “Respected Mother”, fuelling speculation that she was being elevated in the pantheon of state heroes to further her son’s political career. According to Fujimoto, who has been interviewed extensively in the Japanese media, the young prince is his father’s favourite, a sporty and strong-willed boy who knows “how to lead people”, unlike his “feminine” older brother, Kim Jong-chul.
Bradley K Martin, author of Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, also cites Fujimoto's opinion when he says: "All we know is what the sushi chef has told us, and that is that Kim Jong-un is the meanest of Kim's three sons."
Thereafter, the information trail begins to dry up. Kim Jong-un may or may not be a diabetic and an overeater, like his rotund father, who appears to have suffered a stroke last year. His January birthday reportedly became a national holiday this year, according to Free North Korea Radio, which monitors life across the Korean Demilitarised Zone. “We believe he has a good chance of taking over from his father, but many inside and outside the north are asking questions about his skills as a leader,” says the station’s founder and head, Kim Seong-min.
The lack of hard evidence about the internal workings of the Pyongyang regime means that official state events are carefully watched for their wider significance. Last month Kim Jong-il was seen inspecting a shoe factory with his youngest son, whom he reportedly calls “Captain” – a sign, according to the Institute for Far Eastern Studies, that Kim Jong-un’s ascent to power has “progressed to the point where he is being directly introduced to the people”.
Official propaganda has become suitably florid, with the anti-Kim online newspaper Daily NK quoting the regime’s welcome of Kim Jong-un as “the number-one guard of , stepping first to the General’s on-site guidance visits to every site without regard to any conditions; in all weather, any temperature or wind and any landscape”.
Kim senior is quoted as calling his son “a genius of geniuses” in propaganda distributed to party cadres, which also claims that “there is nobody on the planet who can defeat him in terms of faith, will and courage”.
Last year Kim Jong-un was appointed to the powerful National Defence Commission, and key members of the country's Workers' Party met for the first time in decades – both signs that the regime is preparing to anoint him official successor, according to speculation this week in the mass-circulation South Korean daily Chosun Ilbo.
According to the pro-democracy broadcaster Open Radio for North Korea, millions of portraits of Kim Jong-un have already been produced and are ready for hanging on walls beside those of his dad and his dead grandfather, Kim Il-sung.
If all this speculation proves correct, Kim Jong-un will take over a deeply troubled country. In the words of the Pyongyang expert Gavan McCormack, North Korea is now “beyond the pale of civilisation, closed, threatening, idolatrous; yet, at the same time . . . also, on the surface at least, an urban, educated society”. Nuclear armed, with the fourth- biggest standing army in the world, and obsessed with old enemies, the country has still to absorb the profound changes that have taken place since the 1980s, particularly the remarkable transformation of South Korea.
Increasing access to DVDs, radio and other sources now enables North Korea’s citizens to compare their impoverished lives with the growing prosperity elsewhere. Discontent is widespread following a botched currency reform and years of stagnation, a decline that accelerated following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Pyongyang’s main sponsor, and a mid-1990s famine that killed an estimated two to three million people. Caught in the headlights of this catastrophe, Kim Jong-un’s father has wavered between two paths, sometimes attempting to engage with the outside world, then retreating again to sharpen the spines of what McCormack calls “the porcupine state”.
In 1993-4 Kim Jong-il took the country to the brink of confrontation with the Clinton White House by producing plutonium for a long-planned nuclear weapon, before agreeing to a freeze in return for the construction of light-water nuclear reactors. The so-called Agreed Framework collapsed during the presidency of George W Bush, with allegations of bad faith on both sides. Bush and his team, who famously branded North Korea as one-third of the “Axis of Evil”, accused it of secretly restarting the weapons programme. Pyongyang, meanwhile, claimed that the US had reneged on its pledge to supply fuel and other aid. The exchange chilled relations, even before the election of a conservative South Korean president and the sinking of a South Korean frigate this year, which has brought talk of war back to the Korean peninsula.
How on earth will a young man with few known qualifications, except the right genes and a spell at a posh Swiss school, fix this mess? How will the old guard around Dear Leader Kim Jong-il react? And will the great mass of long-suffering North Koreans passively accept another dynastic handover of power or finally show that they won’t be taken for granted forever?
These are the questions that will make the rise of Kim Jong-un one of the planet’s most watched political dramas in the coming years.
Who is he? The youngest son and heir apparent of reclusive and ailing North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.
Why is he in the news? Kim senior is reportedly preparing to hand him the keys to the world’s only hereditary totalitarian state.
Most likely to say? “Put your feet up, Dad, I’ll take over from here.”
Least likely to say? “Let’s have a free election.”
