North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-il is poised to name his son as his successor, but it is difficult to tell what is really going on as a result of the country’s secretive regime, writes Nick Paton Walsh.
It’s like reading smoke signals in heavy rain, but finally today North Korea gave its clearest statement yet about succession. And even then, it was just a date.
On September 28th – Tuesday next week – there will be an unprecedented Workers Party Meeting in Pyongyang. And then, most likely, the ailing Kim Jong-il, 68, will present his son, Kim Jong-un, the young(est) one, as his dynastic tour de force and his successor.
There was quite some bustle earlier this month, you might recall, when the meeting had been slated to start. Rumours abounded about troops heading into the city, readying themselves for parades, presumably to celebrate the imminent announcement.
But then nothing happened. Not that you could really tell, as nothing seems to perennially happen in North Korea’s blackout.
Today that changed when the date was given. This weekend, the Rodong Sinmun, or Workers’ Newspaper, extolled the virtues of the dance troupes and bands that had “boosted the mood”, and in the Shimbun newspaper of Tokyo, there has been a report of a leaked party document, which names Kim Jong-un. (We don’t know much more about him, by the way, than he was educated in Switzerland, loves Michael Jordan, and is in his late twenties. That’s how they like it).
The document said, according to today’s Times: “He received a revolutionary education and influence from the beloved supreme commander [Kim Jong-il] and his respected mother to equip himself with the dignity and qualities necessary for a great successor to the Songun [military-first] revolution.”
It went on, in keeping with the DPRK’s great anachronisms, that Kim Jong-un has the “qualities of an all-conquering great commander and an outstanding statesman excellent both in the arts of pen and sword.” As if anyone uses pens any more.
The stage is then set, the protagonists known, the mood music as sombre as ever.
It is all quite funny, in that Stalinist vein of black humour to be found where there is no other humanity. But that is to forget the ongoing famine in the country, the suppurating anger and exhaustion over hope for change, and the deep groundswell of popular fury when the government recently decided to revalue the currency, rendering the savings of many useless.
The smoke signals of North Korea tell us the little the powers that be there want to reveal, but betray a truth far deeper about the sheer state of repression and fear inside that hermit of states.