Getting to Know Mr. Kim

N.Korea's Kim Jong-Il Isolated on 61st Birthday
Reuters
Feb 15 2003 11:18PM

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong-il turned 61 on Sunday, secure in power in the planet's only communist dynasty, and basking in the glow of state-controlled media that say his birthday is being celebrated from Bangladesh to France to Peru.

Kim has made the covers of magazines worldwide -- although in the case of the U.S. publication Newsweek last month, as "North Korea's Dr. Evil."

But no prose is purple enough for the communist state's media as North Korea greets its biggest national holiday, with streets, monuments and imposing public buildings in the capital Pyongyang draped with colorful banners.

This year Kim is called "the peerlessly great man who laid a firm foundation for bringing about a turn in the building of a powerful nation" and "the lodestar of national reunification," according to the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

Even North Korea's mid-1990s famine is described as an achievement.

"The arduous march and the forced march of the Korean people in recent years were a showdown with the enemies without a gun report in the sphere of ideology, idea, faith and will," it said. "Arduous march" is how North Korea describes the economic and food crisis that outsiders say claimed two million lives.

But the outside world views things differently and on Wednesday, Kim's nuclear brinkmanship became a matter for the United Nations Security Council.

Kim has kicked out U.N. nuclear inspectors and dismissed the International Atomic Energy Agency as a "cat's paw" of the United States. He is thumbing his nose at George W. Bush, a year after the U.S. president vilified him as an "axis of evil" leader.

The U.N. move represents deepening isolation for the country of 23 million, ruled by Kim's family since its inception in 1948.

The official biography says Kim was born in the deep forests of sacred Mount Paekdu on February 16, 1942, at a secret camp on the Chinese border as Korean guerrillas fought the Japanese.

Outside experts say he was actually born near Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East and spent the 1950-53 Korean War in China.

Groomed since 1980 by his father Kim Il-sung as the communist's world's first dynastic successor, he became North Korea's "Great Leader" in 1994 when the elder Kim died.

Kim Jong-il, who had already taken his father's place as supreme military commander in 1991, formally succeeded him as communist party secretary in 1998 but declined to assume the title of president.

Instead he abolished the post, designating Kim Il-sung "eternal president," and has since ruled as Chairman of the National Defense Commission.

Intelligence experts say Kim's resume also includes authorship of a 1983 bombing in Myanmar that killed 17 senior South Korean officials and a 1987 bombing of a Korean Air jetliner that killed 115. In September, he apologized to Japan for the kidnapping of more than a dozen Japanese decades earlier.

BUSH FEARED MORE THAN KIM

Kim was rarely seen or photographed before he burst on to the world stage in 2000, hosting an unprecedented summit with South Korean President Kim Dae-jung in June and a landmark visit by then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in October.

North Korea's official media describe him as a military, artistic and political renaissance man.

The official news agency KCNA reported that Kim has flown fighter aircraft, written operas and shot 11 holes-in-one in his first try at golf.

Despite Kim's reputed brilliance, his years in power have coincided with precipitous economic decline and deadly food shortages. About a third of all North Koreans are dependent on outside food aid, which is at risk of drying up.

"If his rule depended on reputation and effectiveness, he wouldn't last too long," said Koh Byung-chul, director of the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University in Seoul.

"There are not many true believers, only the elite who benefit from the status quo and many opportunists," he said.

State media also publish accounts of Kim's frugality, saying the hard-working leader cat-napped in his car, ate simple seaweed rice balls and had midnight haircuts at his desk to save time.

But a different account has emerged in a book by Russian presidential emissary Konstantin Pulikovsky, who accompanied Kim on a 24-day train ride across Russia in August 2001. He describes Kim enjoying 20-course meals with fine French wine and lobster.

Pyongyang's confrontation with the United States plays to deep-seated nationalism in South Korea, where polls and street interviews suggest Bush is feared more than Kim.

"To Bush, Kim Jong-il is a failed leader who starves his people and reneges on international pacts. Many young Koreans think Bush insults Korean leaders, one after the other," Seoul television executive Kim Myong-sik wrote last month.

02/15/03 23:16 ET