FAMILY CULT IN NORTH KOREA

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33985, 28 October 1975, Page 16

FAMILY CULT IN NORTH KOREA

(The "Economist." London. Reprinted by arrangement)

Two things did not happen at this month’s celebrations in Pyongyang of the thirtieth anniversary of the North Korean Workers’ Party. One was that the son of Marshall Kim II Sung, who has been moving relentlessly up the party hierarchy, failed to be officially nominated heir-apparent to his father.

The other was that, although Communist delegations attended from all over the world, there were no delegates from either Russia or China.

Pyongyang-watchers in Tokyo, where there are more Pyongyang-watchers than anywhere else, see the first non-event as being just a matter of time. They remain convinced that 36-year-old Kim Chong 11 will get the nomination, possibly at the plenary session of the North Korean Workers’ Party which is expected to be held late next year. The second non-event is ascribed to Mr Kim’s rather complex diplomatic manoeuvrings during the past six months, when he has failed to get either China’s or Russia’s support: for his presumed wish to have a bash at South Korea. Marshal Kim himself may not be unhappy at the stand-off in his relations with Russia and China. He has fought hard to keep his nation equidistant from both ever since 1960, when it first began to move out of the Russian orbit. But there is a weakness in Kim’s position which has shown up this year, as on other occasions

when the Korean problem has been hitting the headlines. This is his own lack of stature as a Communist leader. Marshal Kim is definitely not the Ho Chi Minh or the Mao Tse-tung of Korea, even though he has held power for 30 years and he has written his own brand of Communist ideology. Visitors who have met the ■ Marshal give him credit for

a streak of practicality. He is said, for example, to have implemented in his half of the country a drainage and irrigation blueprint drawn up by a pre-1945 Japanese Governor of Korea, which South Korea has never got round to doing. He also, unlike the aged Mao Tse-tung, is an inveterate traveller and addresser of public gatherings. But the thoughts of Kim II Sung have not gained the adherents the Marshal would have liked. The weakness of Marshal Kim on the ideological side (his office bookshelf is said not to contain a single work by Marx) may go some way to explaining why he has equipped himself ~ with the most extravagant personality

cult accorded to any living

Communist leader. This cult has been extended recently to embrace his whole family: not only his son, the politician, whose portraits are

ihung alongside his father's, | but also Kim’s own father, [who has acquired .a shiny [new revolutionary history and had a college named after him. But the most remarkable relative of all was clearly Kim’s first wife, who died 26 years ago last month. Among this woman’s services to the revolution were “screening the leader with her body and shooting down the enemy.” "Sometimes she washed the leader’s wet socks and dried them in her bosom, and sometimes she cut her hair off to spread it in the leader’s shoes.” But she did not serve the leader alone. “She held a : comrade-in-arms who was suffering from a fever to her bosom to protect him from the storm and rain . . . There are simply too many stories to relate of the warm love extended by Comrade Kim Chong Suk to the revolutionary comrades in arms.” Do tell us another.