WILL KIM JONG-UN HELP NORTH KOREA?

HERE’S HOPING A YOUNGER KIM WILL HELP NORTH KOREA

Gordon Houlden

The Globe and Mail, December 21, 2011

The passing of Kim Jong-il constitutes a political earthquake in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The North Korean transition is being accompanied by the ritualized mourning that followed the death of his father, Kim Il-sung, in 1994. But this period immediately following Kim Jong-il’s death is also being closely scrutinized by foreign ministries and intelligence agencies, who will be alert to the implications for the stability of the Korean Peninsula given the million-strong Korean People’s Army, whose nuclear and missile capacity threatens South Korea, Japan and U.S. forces in East Asia.

Kim Jong-il was never as robust as his father, who served 46 years as top leader in North Korea until being named “Eternal President” in the DPRK constitution following his death. Kim Jong-il never achieved the same profile as his father, either within North Korea or internationally, but neither was he pushed aside by party or military rivals as many observers had expected he would be.

North Korea’s achievement of nuclear weapons status took place on Kim Jong-il’s watch, and perhaps more remarkably, a regime that many had predicted would collapse in the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union managed to survive, outlasting almost all communist states.

What Kim Jong-il never managed to do was to undertake a reform of North Korea’s feeble economic base. During visits to North Korea over two decades, I found little interest in reform of any sort. China repeatedly organized tours for him of China’s reformed state enterprises, and lively commercially focused cities, but with no significant or successful subsequent uptake by Pyongyang.

Surrounded by states that are either prosperous or en route to prosperity, North Korea maintained its brittle stability through self-imposed isolation from the international community. North Koreans are dependent on the scraps of information that filter through the official media, and are closely supervised by agents of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea.

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