PROFILE: KIM IL SUNG NORTH. KOREA’S LEADER IS A MAN OF MYSTERY

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31598, 8 February 1968, Page 10

PROFILE: KIM IL SUNG NORTH. KOREA’S LEADER IS A MAN OF MYSTERY

(By SIMON KAVANAUGH) . . . The most remote and secret place in the world” said a distinguished Asiatic professor recently, “is North Korea.” It is, he said, the dungeon of a Communist prison, the remotest cell of a vast monastery, a hole in the ground of a desert island.

The professor was biased; he is South Korean. Nevertheless, to the West at least, North Korea has an Iron Curtain that makes the Berlin Wall look like a garden fence. Its implacable hatred of democracy is unrivalled even by Mao Tse-tung, whose bravado has not yet run to seizing an American warship and imprisoning the crew.

Those who know the Koreans describe them as gentle, hospitable, fun-loving people, whose painful history has made them resigned, longsuffering and apprehensive of war. How, then, has' the chrysalis become a dragon? What was the metamorphosis that has made a tiny nation recklessly challenge America without apparent fear or regard for the consequences? The answer is in one man; Kim II Sung. A Unique Position Of all the Communist dictators, the West knows least about him, perhaps because his inaccessible country is easily discounted in the weighty world-wide balance of terror. Yet he holds a unique position between the warring Sino-Soviet factions. His country was the scene of the first United Nations war, his forces pin down hundreds of thousands of opposing troops by their mere presence; and one action by his navy led President Johnson to call up 14,000 reservists. Marshal Kim might well feel self-important. Appropriately for such a man of mystery, there is even doubt about the existence of Kim II Sung. He was originally a legendary guerrilla leader in the World War II fight against the Japanese, who put a price of SUSIOO,OOO on his head. A skull was duly delivered (and Japanese intelligence men were satisfied enough to pay the reward) but who, then, was the young man who rode into Korea with the occupying Red Army troops in 1945? There are few men, even in North Korea, who are around today to vouch for his authenticity. Kim’s reign has been one of the ' bloodiest — for his friends—since the Medicis. When in 1945 he moved into Korea on a Russian tank, at the age of—presumably—32, both he and Stalin were determined that he should create a Stalinist state to the north of Japan, and certainly, in both official Russian and underground Chinese political academies, he had learned enough to be well-equipped for the task. Within two years, Kim II Sung had forged a United

Communist Party from a dozen splinter factions by the simple expedient of inviting them, one by one, to join him, then either assassinating the leaders or framing them with charges ranging from corruption to being “tools of imperialist powers” (one man was shot for “leftish-rightest tendences”). In this way he inherited a massive, largelyilliterate following without leaders. The overwhelmingly peasant population of 10 million had suffered, as in China, centuries of domination by absentee landlords; Kim promised them land in return for their allegiance. When the revolution came to fruition, the landlords were duly hanged and their property parcelled out to their employees—but only for a year: then Kim published a decree confiscating all lands for the State, and forming collectives. Thus the squeeze began, a grip so tight, so relentless, that after nearly 20 years of power North Korean newspapers still report, without even a trace of a questionmark between the lines, that he has received 100 per cent of the votes in the national elections. Far-reaching Influence The fat, sleepy-eyed Premier wields an altogether disproportionate influence far beyond the electorate; while North Korea, China, Cuba and Albania have had open rows with the Kremlin on many occasions since 1960, only North Korea has managed to snub China at the same time and dared to accuse its leaders of revisionism. Yet such is the country’s strategic importance that like Vietnam, neither China nor Russia can afford to be bad friends for long. During its worst harvests China has always spared rice for North Korea. Russia has equipped whole divisions with sophisticated equipment, though Moscow cannot be certain that one day they will not be under Chinese control. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin and the cult of personality, Kim blandly told the critics who associated him with the old monster and the new crime that “this is the plot of imperialists to split the movement” and waved them off to gaol.

Mao-like Egotism

His egotism matches Mao's; the hanging of pictures and photographs of him are compulsory in every office, school and factory and plaques commemorating national achievements as far back as the fifteenth century have cameos of his head attached. Typically, the titles of his bestknown books run: “The Selected Works of Kim II Sung,” “We Are Always With the Chief," “Let’s Learn From the Chief” and “The Chief Can Teach Us All." Shipwrecked fishermen, caught in a typhoon, were said by the Government news agency in March, 1963, to have read over and oyer dozens of times, the “Reminiscences of the Participants in Anti-Japanese Partisan Activities,” believing in their final rescue by the party and comrade Premier. The “Reminiscences” (author: Kim II Sung) were, at that time, compulsory reading for fishermen, shipwrecked or not. Kim appears to be valued by the Red hierarchy mainly for his geographical situation and his people are held up as examples of selfless fighters for Communism. But they are not so much fighters as casualties. Kim’s paper economics, when translated into reality, are a nightmare. In 15 years there have been 30 years of plans. Some were abandoned before they were started, some were scrapped halfway, some were just forgotten. In the most recent Plan, achievements were announced in percentages, dispensing with production figures.

Chullima System

Copper and lime mines dot the country, but almost half are either underworked or not worked at all through lack of coal, steel or electricity. To emulate the Chinese Great Leap Forward, Kim introduced the Chullima system. Chullima was a folklore horse who galloped a thousand Ri (500 miles) a day. Koreans, he ordered, should increase their production every day and every week; every target should surpass the last.

Unhappily for him, Kim could not recognise the point of exhaustion in his people; it had arrived after the Korean war. Party propagandists gave the game away by boasting of factories built with rusty metal salvaged from scrap heaps: Party Red Guards confirmed it by gaoling managers who did not fulfil their norms, and Kim II Sung himself revealed al! when he complained to a People’s Congress that “some are claiming as victories work done by 100 men in a week that could be done by three men in one day.”

Officials Accused

With the standard of living in ruins, he ranted at his senior civil servants, accusing

them of falsifying figures—and indeed some departments had some explaining to do; when he asked two ministries to give him figures on national coal stocks, one produced a schedule totalling 700,000 tons, the other 16,000 tons. The Food Ministry, anxious to assure him that his latest plan was working, told him in 1955 that polished grain production amounted to three million tons—more than pre-war. “We had fewer people then,” he is reported to have commented icily, “so why the food shortage?" Actually, Kim himself was to blame; his doctrinaire communism almost literally frightened his subjects to death. Top Party and military men tell him only what he wishes to hear. “I am the Stalin of Korea” he says, and there is no-one alive to dispute that. There is food for thought in that, when his power was once challenged by an abortive military coup, the young colonels fled to China. Triumph Claimed Western observers believe that on Vietnam, Kim would like to push China the whole way, and that the Pueblo incident was cooked up without the knowledge of either Moscow or Peking, both of whom, it is said, were appalled at yet another example of their disciple’s recklessness. Kim is an expert juggler, however, and can now claim America’s military inaction as a victory for his hard-line Stalinism. South Korean diplomats in London say that there were other issues behind the Pueblo affair. North Korea is among the most under-developed of Communist States, they say, and Kim’s policy chickens (he still insists on heavy industry first) are coming home to roost. For the last year he has loudly blamed national poverty and indebtedness to “defence commitments” made necessary by threats of imperialist aggression. However, imperialist aggression was nowhere near the horizon: even the lowestbrowed peasant could see that the wicked Americans had their hands full a long long way away. So it was necessary to create a spectacular but cheap diversion—first by attempting to assassinate the South Korean leader, then by hi-jacking the Pueblo. “In our country,” said a candid South Korean, “we have graft, corruption and poverty. But you won’t find many who would change it all for Kim. For our brothers in the north, the Chullima horse is running backwards.”