Power has passed to yet another Kim in the Democratic People’s Republic People’s of Korea. (DPRK). Kim Jong-un, who inherited the leadership of the country following the sudden, though, it appears, not altogether shocking demise of his father, Kim Jong-il, becomes the third in a succession of Kims to take power in what is widely regarded as the world’s most isolated state.
The DPRK was fashioned in 1948 out of the partitioning of the Korean peninsula into two occupation zones following Japan’s surrender at the end of the Second World War. The USSR controlled the North and the USA, the South. The emergence of “The Great Leader,” Kim Il-sung, as the DPRK’s first ruler is encrusted in stories about his revolutionary heroism. Other assessments of how he came to be the ruler of the DPRK give greater credence to the story that he was favoured and effectively installed by the Soviet Union in keeping with the Cold War dictates of the post-World War 11 period.
Power, poverty and paranoia are the common characteristics that have come to be associated with the DPRK. “The Great Leader” and, after him, his, son, Kim Jong-il, “The Dear Leader,” governed the country in the fashion of a family fiefdom, permitting no centre of power beyond the Korean Workers Party and the army. Both remain tightly controlled through family members and trusted lieutenants.
Kim Il-sung was the author of a brand of self-reliance known as the Juche Idea branded as a spectacular failure following a famine in the mid-1990’s in which more than a million people are reported to have died.
The Kims have evinced an extreme paranoia about the security of their empire. At home, the Korean Workers Party has infused itself into every facet of national life. Both the country’s founder and his successor son have been deified as demi-gods through tributes to their accomplishments and the youngest Kim appears set for similar deification. North Korea’s army, one of the largest in the world, is a symbol of its fear of outside intervention, particularly from the United States, specifically through South Korea, which it views as a US surrogate.
Regime change in closed societies never fails to evoke levels of interest that go beyond the routine of replacing one dictator with another. It was the same after Kim Il-sung’s death, though the interest, now, is more acute. Kim Jong-il had been groomed for more than a decade to succeed his father. His official titles had been bestowed and his power cemented long before his father died in 1994. No great change was expected to come from Kim Jong-il’s accession to power.
This time around, though, it is different. Kim Jong-il, it seems, might have been rather less diligent in grooming a successor. There were at least three sons to choose from and it appears that he settled on the youngest, Kim Jong-un. Little is known about the new ruler of the DPRK beyond the fact that since around 2009, as rumours of his father’s less than robust physical health intensified, his political career was dramatically fast-tracked. Last year his succession to his father became more apparent after he was made a General in the Korean Army, Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission and a member of the Central Committee of the Korean Workers’ Party. On December 24, exactly one week after his father’s death Kim Jong-un was declared Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army.
This time around and for at least two reasons leadership succession in the DPRK has evoked a greater measure of international interest. The first has to do with Kim Jong-un himself. In the fashion of the thicket of deification in which the Kim dynasty has been smothered, the new ruler is now referred to, variously, as “The Great Successor” and a “great person born of heaven.” The reality is, however, that he is not yet thirty and lacks any real political experience. If the North Korean civilian and military leadership have not ever been known to be anything but loyal to their leader, sections of the western media have already begun to paint pictures (how reliable these pictures are is decidedly unclear) of a possible power struggle involving some of the more seasoned operators in the country’s leadership including Kim Jong-un’s uncle-in-law, Chang Sung-taek, reportedly one of Kim Jong-il’s most trusted aides and long-serving Vice President of the country’s National Defence Commission.
The greater significance of the change of leadership in the DPRK, however, reposes in the fact that, reportedly at less than thirty years of age, an inexperienced ruler of a dynastic regime, known for its eccentricity, inherits the reins of power in a country now known to possess a nuclear capacity. In 2006 the DPRK became the world’s eighth nuclear power, after it conducted an underground nuclear test; and while its ability to deliver a working nuclear weapon is still questioned in the west, its main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon has become the focus of international attention given its known capacity to produce fuel for nuclear weapons.
Even his critics concede that equipping the DPRK with some measure of nuclear capability has been Kim Jong-il’s most notable accomplishment. By developing that capacity Kim Jong-il not only sought to reduce the level of the DPRK’s paranoia over the likelihood of US military intervention – which it has always regarded as highly likely – to bring an end to the Kim dynasty; more than that the now departed ruler used that capability to secure a measure of global attention and relevance in circumstances where his country had little else with which to make a case for such attention. The DPRK’s perceived nuclear threat has, since 2006, been the bulwark of its foreign policy and the west has certainly not been inattentive to events inside what had previously been regarded as a forgotten, anachronistic regime.
It is the uncertainty of the direction which “The Great Successor” is likely to take, perhaps even the longer term security of his tenure and the likelihood which possible internal stability might pose for either the threat or the actual use of nuclear weapons – the prevailing uncertainty of the DPRK’s deployment capacity, notwithstanding – that renders Kim Jong-un’s accession to office a matter of global interest. Western analysts – again from the standpoint of what appears to be a less than adequate understanding of either the mindset of the new ruler or the workings of the political power structure inside the DPRK – have suggested that “The Great Successor” might even seek to demonstrate to both his internal detractors and his external foes that his succession is beyond question by using his nuclear ‘capacity’ to create a heightened sense of insecurity in South Korea and Japan and to ramp up its confrontation with the United States over nuclear weapons which has been blowing hot and cold since 1996.
For the time being, at least, the DPRK is keeping the world guessing and, ironically, a country that has traditionally gone to great extremes to remind the rest of the international community of its existence and ‘revolutionary achievements’ now finds itself in the international spotlight on account of what, save and except for its recently acquired nuclear ‘capacity,’ might have been no more than a routine leadership change. The DPRK, it seems, might find it to its advantage to keep the world and particularly the United States guessing, at least for a while longer, while Washington will presumably be trying to keep an even closer watch on events in Pyongyang in the foreseeable future. No one, it seems, is prepared to go much beyond speculation in seeking to determine what the rule of the DPRK’s third Kim will bring.
