Mystery surrounding N. Korea's strategy

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Being the president's son does not guarantee an easy life. Not, at least, if you are Korean. In both Communist North Korea and democratic South Korea, the sons are in deep, deep trouble.

Kim Jong-il should have it made. He inherited the entire country of North Korea from his dad, the late Kim Il-sung, without ever having to face an election or even pass a driving test. Whereas Kim Hyun-chul, son of South Korea's President Kim Young-sam, has been ordered by his father to leave the country in atonement for his involvement in an influence-peddling scandal.

It was a harsh judgment: "I will see that my son suspends all social activities, behaves himself, and keeps away from me," said President Kim Young-sam in his anguished apology to South Korean voters on Feb. 26. But real life has not been that kind to Kim Jong-il either.

Put yourself in the shoes of the North Korean leader for a moment. When he was a younger man it was all great fun: he had his way with the country's leading movie actresses, ate as much food as he wanted (food has always been rationed in North Korea), and grew a comfortable spare tire. But it's not much fun being the ruler of a country whose people are starving.

Given the obsessive secrecy of the world's last Stalinist regime, nobody can gauge exactly how bad the situation is, but the estimated shortfall of grain is close to half of North Korea's normal annual consumption. Foreign visitors who get out of pampered Pyongyang have seen evidence of widespread malnutrition in rural areas, and even North Korea's most hated enemies, South Korea and the United States, are sending emergency food aid.

The men who run North Korea are not going short of food, of course, nor is there any detectable risk of a popular uprising by the 25 million North Koreans: the country is too tightly controlled for that. But this undeniable evidence of gross economic failure is a weapon that rival factions within the ruling group can use against each other, and the struggle is getting so intense that for the first time a senior member of the regime has actually defected.

The confrontation between North and South Korea is not a struggle between "socialism and capitalism", wrote Hwang Jang- yop, former head of Pyongyang's Kim Il-sung University and the regime's chief ideologue, shortly before he walked into the South Korean embassy in Beijing last month and requested political asylum. It is a confrontation between "feudalism and capitalism".

Hwang was being precise when he chose the word 'feudalism'. North Korea, for all its communist rhetoric, is run along feudal lines. And in feudalism, the hereditary ruler does not inherit absolute power; just the right to try to impose his rule on an unruly collection of powerful barons and bishops.

Since the death of founder and 'Great Leader' Kim Il-sung in 1994, son and heir Kim Jong-il has been struggling with only limited success to cope with this typical feudal problem. He has finally been given the title 'Great Leader' by the North Korean media (though with different Korean words than his father's title).

But he has still not formally taken over his father's old positions as president and chairman of the Central People's Congress.

For a while Pyongyang-watchers passed this off as merely a decent reticence about taking the old man's chair before his body was cold, but three years later that explanation no longer works. And the recent rapid changes of personnel in the senior ranks of the North Korea regime confirm the impression that not all the barons are happy with the younger Kim.

Last month, Prime Minister Kang Song-san was replaced by an acting premier on the same day that Defense Minister Choe Kwang died of a heart attack. The list of members of Marshal Choe's funeral committee revealed that up to 30 of the top 85 jobs in the country have recently changed hands -- and a week later deputy defense minister Kim Kwang-jin also died of an "incurable illness".

Taken together with the unprecedented defection of Hwang Jang- yop, this suggests that the younger Kim is now waging a decisive battle to secure his power, trying to purge the Politburo and the Central Committee of people who are more loyal to his late father than to him. In this light, the meteoric rise of two soldiers who are personally close to him, Marshal Lee Ul-sol and Deputy Marshal Cho Myong-nok, shows that he is probably winning.

So what? Does it really matter whether Kim Jong-il or some other communist autocrat rules North Korea? Does North Korea, with half as many people as South Korea but an economy less than a 10th as big, really matter at all any more?

North Korea certainly still matters -- as a country with a nuclear weapons program (currently on hold), and as the one place in East Asia whose regime might plausibly launch a war rather than face extinction. Desperate people are dangerous people, and we definitely do not need a war at the point where three of Asia's four great powers -- China, Russia, and Japan -- intersect.

Especially not when there are also U.S. troops and American nuclear weapons on the scene (in South Korea).

Does Kim Jong-il's success or failure make any difference to the level of risk? That is harder to say, for nobody really knows the survival strategies, or even the membership, of the rival North Korean factions. But Kim junior is probably more open to change and to the outside world than the ancient soldiers (the equivalent of China's 'Long March' veterans) who surrounded his father.

A North Korean strategy designed to weave compromises and postpone collapse or war is better for everybody in Asia. We can't actually be sure that is Kim Jong-il's strategy, but the decision to send a delegation to New York to be briefed on March 5 on U.S.-South Korean proposals for talks on a permanent Korean peace treaty suggests that the right side (whoever they may be) is winning in Pyongyang.