Kim Jong-il's loneliness problem still persists

By Edward Neilan

Anointed prince unable to solve North's economic plunge, shunned by China and Russia, upstaged by events in South Korea.

TOKYO (JP): The loneliest Korean anywhere, by most measurements, is Kim Jong-il, who was given a country by his late father "Great Leader" Kim Il-sung, but has squandered the gift.

The situation today is a far cry from Junior Kim's headline- making heyday when he played nuclear brinkmanship with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), threatening to turn South Korea into a "sea of fire," masterminded terrorist bombings and was a shadowy prime minister and foreign minister rolled into one.

Increasingly isolated from the world community, Kim Jong-il seems cut off from reality. There is a danger he and his country will be left behind while the rest of the world enters the 21st century.

Even the loneliness of South Korea's living ex-presidents cannot be compared to the menacing solitude facing the ruler of North Korea.

Kim Young-sam found reform tougher than revolution and turned over power last month to Kim Dae-jung, his lifelong political opponent. Roh Tae-woo and Chun Doo-hwan saw their glory dimmed by greed and suffered the humiliation of prison terms. Choi Kyu- hah, president briefly after the assassination of Park Chung- hee, keeps out of the limelight by choice.

But all can take strolls through their neighborhoods, visit the old coffee shop on the corner, go hiking with colleagues.

Kim Jong-il cannot enjoy any of those luxuries. He is a prisoner of circumstances and of the quirks of his own personality, magnified by the shadow from the grave of his father's towering reputation.

North Korea's economy is in a mess (too primitively sick to allow an International Monetary Fund bailout of the type that is all the vogue throughout the rest of Asia), Kim's policies of threat and deception of yesteryear are now scoffed at, China and Russia have turned their backs on him, and some of his top aides and young officials have defected.

The official Pyongyang line is still that South Korea started the Korean War (1950-1953). In what may have been the final ideological affront, a recent Chinese Communist Party article, "Hundred Year Tide," under the pen name Qingshi, mentioned Mao Zedong's mistake in approving Kim Il-sung's scheme to start the Korean War and yielding to Stalin's plot to expand Soviet influence over Korea.

In many ways, Kim Jong-il has painted himself into a corner.

"Junior Kim was once the 'Saddam Hussein of Asia' but he was exposed as a pathetic paper tiger by the strength and patience of South Korea and the inadvertently sound diplomacy of the United States," said a Western diplomat in Tokyo.

Hwang Jang-yop, who defected to South Korea in February of 1996 rejecting his high-ranking office of Party secretary for international affairs, portrayed the junior Kim as "intolerable, radical, capricious and zealous." Most favored environments for him since his childhood days apparently made him so, Hwang explained. He added "Kim Jr. is a dictator, the same as his father, but he is more authoritative than the senior Kim and often slanders prominent foreign figures as well as historical Korean leaders."

Kim Jong-il himself furthered the loneliness theme in a slightly different context. In remarks to a group of Korean Workers (Communist) Party cadre late last year he said "Now the entire people unconditionally abide by the instructions of the Party Central Committee not because of the role of party officials but because of my personal authority. I see none of the party men helping me properly. I am now working alone."

It would be easy to presume under such conditions that Kim might be the target of a power struggle including, as some have suggested, a military coup d'etat, or assassination disguised as suicide or a traffic accident (Several North Korean officials have died suspiciously in "traffic accidents" although there are few automobiles on Pyongyang streets).

But as of last month, three years and seven months after the death of "Great Leader" Kim Il-sung, there were no developments that indicated any serious power struggle.

"North Korea's crisis is not of a political nature, but an economic one," said Deruo Kosaki, a research fellow at the Asian Economic Institute in Tokyo. He added that North Korea has no significant problems of political instability."

But Kim Jong-il's loneliness problem persists.