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A nation of two halves

As North Korea mourns the loss of its longtime leader and welcomes his successor, David Watts looks at the effects this will have on both sides of the Korean peninsula.

By David Watts

THE 'DEAR SUCCESSOR': Kim Jong Un is a chubby-faced 28-year-old with neither political nor military experience

North Korea's sacred mountain, Mount Paektu, was said to have turned blue with sorrow at the loss of the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il and even a migratory crane paused to mourn his passing.

Despite the television pictures of ritual Korean wailing and gnashing of teeth, precious few other people did.

Rare moments of change in North Korea always prompt predictions of nuclear holocaust in the Western press despite the oft-demonstrated fact that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) is far more politically stable and predictable than its North American antagonists in Washington.

Pyongyang has always managed its leadership change effectively, arguably not very hard to do when it involves merely passing the baton from one family member to another. But this time it could be different.

The 'Dear Successor' — as Kim Jong Un, the new Kim taking over the

family business, is rather unimaginatively known — is a chubby 28-year-old with neither political nor military experience, despite being appointed a four-star general. His claims to fame thus far, however, do not mark him out as standard North Korean fare since he had his education in Switzerland. This is unlikely to impress those with whom he is going to be working the closest — his fellow generals in the North Korean People's Army. But even they are unlikely to be moved to remove him from power — the Kim brand is too strong for that.

It is much more likely that the military will now move into much more overt control, not least because Jong Un's late father had not completed the process of moving his succession through the mechanisms of the workers' party. In that sense he had not been fully legitimized by the North Korean Workers' Party when he assumed power.

So the country will enter into a period of uncertainty because no-one can be sure that the military will not elect to use the hiatus for their own ends in some kind of military adventure, if only to signal that no-one should consider that the country has been weakened.

Also, it could be months or even years before the newcomer is formally inducted as the new leader at a party gathering. This formal accession to power is not likely to happen until the mourning period for Kim Jong Il comes to an end, and that could take months or years. Jong Il himself observed a three-year mourning period after the death of his own father.

Power groups in the party and army compete with each in North Korea, with the ruler, until recently Kim Jong Il, holding the ring. The leader will normally play off the competing groups against each other but all know that ultimately their position is dependent on the leader at the centre of national life.

For a man in his late twenties it will clearly take some time before he can establish that kind of influence, no matter what his antecedents.

Jong Un, then, will need all the allies he can muster to hold off men with decades of experience of the power game, having only been revealed as successor 15 months ago. He has no standing in either the party or the army and not everyone will believe that he has the necessary status to rule the country, whatever his background.

Recent images shown on national television and the press have shown Jong Un in company with the two figures who are expected to advise and guide him through the early part of his reign. State media have recently shown him travelling down a supermarket escalator with these two people: his paternal aunt Kim Kyong Hui and her husband Jang Song Thaek, a Soviet-trained technocrat — both 65. Both have risen to the top of the Pyongyang political and military elite since Jong Un was mooted as the successor. Both are seen as allies of the late leader and Thaek had been a rapidly rising star until he was demoted by his brother-in-law in 2004 for gaining too much influence.

He now oversees intelligence and the party's administrative department and has two brothers who are senior figures in the military, making his influence and knowledge invaluable to the neophyte leader. His wife, Jong Il's younger sister, is director of the North Workers' Party Central Committee light industry department and was appointed to the Political Bureau last year. She is also a general in the army like her nephew.

International factors, however, will most likely compel competing elements in the regime to stress stability over a desire to take greater power in the running of the country.

Anyone contending for power would have to consider the risk of instability, given what they see as the hostile international environment. The ever-paranoid members of the elite know that even the Chinese, the only nation they can count on as being friendly, is unhappy about the continuation of a family dynasty. The South Korean government is right-leaning and seen as hostile, while Pyongyang always believes that the United States is poised to invade at the least excuse — hence its determination to maintain its nuclear programme at all costs.

For decades North Korea has defied predictions that it will collapse and fought its way through continuous famines in a country that is short of food at the best of times. Most winters the government is dependent on foreign food aid, though one would never know that, given government propaganda and the skill with which such help is masked, as your correspondent witnessed on a rare visit to the north in the 1990s.

The political elite and the military remain clearly well nourished at least in the metropolitan areas, but outlying areas must survive as best they can in a country where infrastructure is limited and has been declining for years.

Any sudden political collapse would most likely precipitate unification. Though many believe that it is inevitable over the long term, the South Koreans constantly reiterate that they want decades to prepare.

Their point of reference is the unification of Germany which the Germans had to undertake rapidly and at enormous cost — something South Korea could not contemplate. The Germans had the advantage that people on both sides of the Berlin Wall could watch each other's television broadcasts while speaking the same language. The North Korean version of the Koreas' common language is so overladen with political jargon that southerners have trouble understanding it.

Decades of propaganda in a country where there is a single TV channel and radios are fixed to receive only the government broadcaster means that there has never been exposure to any other influence.

While East Germany had an industrial infrastructure, North Korea's is basically a peasant economy that cannot feed its own people: a country which is decades behind the south in development though it is potentially enormously rich in natural resources.

China urged Jong Il to emulate their economic model but he always refused on the grounds that it would result in the undermining of his power.

Though the North has about half the population of the south at 24.2m as against 48.9m, the wealth of the two halves of a nation divided after the Korean war could not be more different, with northern per capita gross national product at $1,097 and the south at $20,746. Northern steel production is a nominal 1.3m tons while the south makes 53.3m tons. Even in grain production the south produces 5.5m tons against 4.3m tons in the north.

Seoul has offered a $40 billion package for infrastructure improvement in return for further opening of the north, despite two military outrages by the north in the recent past: the torpedoing and sinking of a southerner destroyer and the shelling of an offshore island, which both resulted in considerable loss of life.

Jong Un's education in Europe and his youth have led some commentators to speculate that he will open a new era in North Korea, but it is a safe bet that he was chosen by his father for his new role because he would do no such thing. Yet the Korean peninsula, north and south, lives in hope of better things.

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