TOKYO — With North Korea deeply mourning its “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il, the government in Pyongyang tried to reassure its people Monday with a message about Kim’s son, the “Great Successor.”
“Under the leadership of Kim Jong Eun,” North Korea’s state-run media said, “we should turn our sorrow into strength.”
North Korea has had just two leaders in the past 63 years — Kim, and his father, Kim Il Sung. Now, the reclusive government says, the Dear Leader’s son — believed to be in his late 20s — will continue the dynasty and grapple with the challenge of holding the deeply impoverished, nuclear-armed country together.
Kim Jong Eun will be one of the world’s most unknown — and significant — power-holders, potentially capable of reforming the country, maintaining it, or letting it slip into chaos.
The youngest of Kim Jong Il’s three sons, he has neither the resume nor the experience to control the country in the rigid manner of his father and grandfather, experts say.
For security experts in Seoul and Washington, the younger Kim’s rise turns North Korea from a truculent state into a volatile one, far likelier to threaten its neighbors or show signs of civil unrest.
Until late last year, most North Koreans had never seen Kim Jong Eun’s adult photograph. Pyongyang’s propaganda office had begun taking cautious steps to build the successor’s personality cult — but the process was designed to last years, not months.
Analysts who have studied North Korea’s second attempted power transfer fear several scenarios, including a revolt by the military or a fight for power among older party members, who view Kim Jong Eun as vulnerable target, too young to have his own allies and loyalists.
“This is really the worst possible nightmare for the North Korean state — this sudden death, and for the son to be taking over,” said Victor Cha, the White House’s former director of Asian affairs. “This could collapse before our eyes.”
Before Kim Jong Il’s death, experts and government officials in Seoul and Washington agreed on at least one major point about the North Korean father-to-son power transfer: The longer Kim Jong Il lived, the better its chances.
When Kim Jong Il formally took power from his father in 1994, he’d already worked behind the scenes for almost two decades. He had visited foreign countries and orchestrated military attacks: He’d studied his father’s methods.
But the current power transfer began only 15 months ago, when North Korea held a massive political gathering in Pyongyang, naming Kim Jong Eun to several top military and Workers’ Party positions.
A plump young man now in his late 20s, Kim Jong Eun studied for a time in Switzerland at a German-speaking high school in Liebefeld, a suburb of the Swiss capital Bern. Former classmates remember a shy but determined boy obsessed with American basketball and expensive sports shoes. They say he spoke passable German and made some local friends, but was monitored closely by staff from the North Korean embassy in Bern.
Book Review
Religion and Science. Bertrand Russell. In this timely work, Russell, philosopher, agnostic, mathematician, and renowned peace advocate, offers a brief yet insightful study of the conflicts between science and traditional religion during the last four centuries.
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