Jasper Becker on Kim Jong-il of North Korea

It is easy to laugh at Kim Jong-il, North Korea's "living god", but he is possibly the world's most evil living dictator. Pictures of his victims are rarely aired in the news, but his fashion failures often are. The bouffant hair, platform shoes and tailored jumpsuits, his hunger to taste the perfect pizza or freshest sushi, his frustrated efforts to direct a great movie and his regular rants against the Bush-Hitler threat can make him seem endearing. Who doesn't know people with some or all of these failings?

Yet the 63-year-old leader is responsible for the deaths of four million of his citizens. If one includes the dead in the Korean war (1950-1953) and those who have died in labour camps since 1945, Kim Jong-il and his father Kim Il-sung are responsible for nine million deaths. Measured against the size of the North Korean population, the dynasty has outdone better-known Asian tyrants such as Pol Pot or Mao Zedong.

The father-and-son dictators had surprisingly obscure origins. Kim Il-sung spent 20 years as a Chinese Communist Party member and partisan fighter against the Japanese in Manchuria until his forces retreated across the border to the Soviet Union. Before Japan's sudden surrender in 1945, the Soviets planned to send him to fight the Japanese in China.

Kim Il-sung's eldest son was born in a Red Army base in the Russian Far East in 1942, the only Korean leader in history to be born outside the country. North Koreans are taught, however, that he was born in a partisan camp on Mount Paektu near the Chinese border, amid many heavenly portents. Soviet archives have revealed that Stalin and Beria installed the Kim family as their puppet regime in North Korea when the Red Army entered the country in 1945. But their charges were ill-prepared: Kim Il-sung needed coaching because he spoke such poor Korean, and his eldest son was educated in Russian together with children of the Soviet elite in Pyongyang.

In the early 1960s, Kim Jong-il took charge of propaganda in what had become the most regimented society in history. Koreans had to worship the whole family, going back generations, as divinely sanctioned saviours of the Korean nation and the whole universe. Kim became crown prince in 1974 and from then on acted as his father's chief secretary, gradually taking control of both the military and the party apparatus. As he tightened his grip, he organised purges, dispatching tens of thousands of North Koreans to die in penal settlements.

Kim Jr was also personally responsible for directing North Korea's intelligence operations. He had foreign nationals abducted to train his agents to assassinate the South Korean leadership and blow up South Korean planes. North Korea also played host to Japanese terrorists and trained many revolutionaries from the developing world. But Kim Jong-il's greatest coup was to persuade the Soviet Union, in 1984, to give him a nuclear reactor. By 1990, this had enabled North Korea to produce enough plutonium for a bomb.

Kim Jong-il told his father in the 1980s that he could double the size of the military even as the economy collapsed. By the late 1980s, North Koreans were already starving to death but Kim Jr prevented his father from learning about the plummeting harvests. Before his death, the elder Kim wanted to start reforms and build bridges with South Korea, and the two fell out. After his sudden death in 1994, on the eve of a summit with the South Korean president Kim Young-sam, many North Koreans believed that Kim Jong-il had killed his father.

Now, change is more unlikely than ever. Kim Jong-il fears he will end up like Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, strung up and shot, if he ever initiates reform. After soldiers and workers began starving to death in large numbers in 1992, he resisted any real change, although the country did appeal for international aid in 1995. In the face of civil unrest and army uprisings, Kim Jong-il organised a savage reign of terror. He sent tanks to occupy key industrial cities and the whole population was turned out to witness the public execution of people caught stealing food or trying to flee the country. By 1998, the economy was in ruins and some three million had perished, but Kim continued to spend heavily on his own lavish lifestyle and on the military. He tested the first long-range missiles which landed in the Sea of Japan in 1998, while continuing to rely heavily on aid from the outside world.

Little has changed since then. This year, some 10,000 North Koreans have died in floods and the survivors are on the brink of starvation, but Kim Jong-il is demanding more aid, while at the same time threatening his neighbours by launching new missile tests. International diplomacy remains focused on North Korea's nuclear threat, but like most dictators, Kim Jong-il has inflicted far more harm on his own people than on his enemies.

Jasper Becker is an Asian affairs analyst

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website