Once-Feared Son Settles Down as N. Korea Leader

He was reputedly a bizarre and impulsive recluse, a terrorist who bombed airlines and coolly dispatched kidnappers and assassins around the world. He was portrayed as a playboy partial to Hennessy cognac, a film freak lost in a fantasy world of Elizabeth Taylor and Daffy Duck.

But as North Korean leader Kim Jong Il faces his 55th birthday today amid increasingly authoritative reports that he will finally assume full power later this year, his strongest image these days is neither frightening nor fantastic. He is proving himself, analysts say, a rational, if uninspired, ruler struggling to save a starving populace and sinking economy by opening up to the world.

“Kim Jong Il is doing his best to move forward with reform, but he is surrounded by an entrenched old guard, and he is not getting much encouragement from the outside,” said Selig Harrison, a guest scholar with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “But his leadership ability has yet to be proven. It is not clear he has the ability to mediate and mobilize the power groups in North Korea as his father did.”

Three years after his revered father, Kim Il Sung, suddenly died and threw into question the fate of the isolated regime, the younger Kim is widely expected to complete the Communist world’s only dynastic succession by assuming the final two titles of leadership: state president and secretary-general of the ruling Korean Workers’ Party. He was named commander of North Korea’s formidable armed forces of more than 1 million soldiers by his father before he died.

The shy, rotund man is neither respected nor beloved as his father was, and he lacks the elder man’s legendary charisma. But most analysts say that Kim has consolidated his power as the nation’s only possible unifying symbol, and, in contrast to his formerly fearsome image, he has not plunged the Korean peninsula into war or sponsored state terrorism abroad.

Rather than making his own mark, the analysts say, Kim has played the role of devoted and dutiful son aiming to implement his father’s dictates: to increase foreign trade and revive the sickly economy--so far unsuccessfully, in his biggest policy failures.

In his greatest successes, Kim has improved relations with the United States via proxy (he has reportedly met relatively few Westerners in his life and traveled abroad just once, to China). And in what many regard as brilliant judo diplomacy--turning weakness into strength--he settled a standoff over the North’s nuclear development program that reaped the impoverished nation a $5-billion bonanza of heavy oil and two light-water nuclear reactors from an international consortium.

“Most nations do not enjoy this kind of windfall unless they are victorious in a major war,” wrote Stephen Linton, a North Korea expert.

Few analysts expect Kim to plunge forward with more assertive initiatives after he formally ascends to power. In tightly sealed North Korea, however, it is unclear how decisions are made or how much Kim actually controls policies.

If last week’s apparent defection by Hwang Jang Yop--a close Kim aide who helped craft North Korea’s fanatically nationalist juche ideology of self-reliance and now is reportedly holed up under South Korean protection in Beijing--is successful, the myriad mysteries surrounding the murky inner workings in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, may yet be solved.

For now, though, analysis of Kim remains largely divination, as Pyongyang watchers pore over signs as uncertain as the stars: the frequency of Kim’s public appearances, for instance; subtle shifts in the regime’s purple propaganda; or hearsay from visitors to North Korea.

“The evaluation of Kim Jong Il is divided in two: an extremely dangerous, short-tempered and domineering playboy who likes sake and women, and a rational, diligent and honest worker,” said Pyon Jil In, publisher of the authoritative Korea Report newsletter in Tokyo. “I think he is rational. I was astonished to know that he has nine or 10 channels on in his office every day--CNN, Korea’s KBS, Japan’s NHK--so he can watch the daily news. He knows about the world.”

As Pyongyang’s birthday preparations reached a fever pitch, so did rumors surrounding Kim’s intentions. One report in a South Korean newspaper asserted that the leader would enact the largest amnesty affecting political prisoners in North Korean history to reduce opposition to his regime and show magnanimity befitting a scion said to have been born amid a mystical burst of double rainbows above the venerated ancestral peak of Mt. Paktu.

Others say Kim is slowly moving to ease out the aging revolutionaries in the ruling clique in favor of younger military leaders and what Linton calls a new “Kim Jong Il man”: a sophisticated business-bureaucrat who zips around the world wooing foreign investment and, in order to understand Americans better, jogs, drinks black coffee and tunes in to “Star Trek.”

Last week, Kim promoted four relatively young army officers to full generals in a generational shift that many analysts expect him to accelerate after he formally assumes power. The move also symbolized how Kim has strengthened the military--one of his main accomplishments, according to the pro-Pyongyang General Assn. of Korean Residents in Japan.

Much ado is also being made about the “Red Banner” philosophy unveiled in January that some interpret as an ideological challenge to elder theoreticians such as Hwang. Although Pyon says the philosophy is little more than an exhortation for citizens to work hard, some analysts believe the Pyongyang propaganda machine is preparing an ideology that Kim can claim as his own to ease him out from under the shadow of his towering father--and of the elders who lionize the senior Kim but reportedly disdain the son.

“Kim Jong Il seems to be completing his ‘my team’ personnel policy, filling important positions with people from his own age group or younger while isolating and neglecting first-generation revolutionaries his father befriended,” said Park Sok Kyun, a researcher with the Freedom League of Korea in Seoul. “Hwang’s defection indicated that.”

Tsutomu Nishioka of the Modern Korea journal in Tokyo still views Kim as an unreformed master of violence who has utterly failed to ease his people’s hardships and may have forced out Hwang--an intellectual, worldly man he argues belongs to an anti-Kim clique of economic reformers, disgruntled relatives and senior statesmen.

Others, however, speculated that Hwang was overcome with hopelessness and gloom over North Korea’s glacial pace of change and disillusioned with Kim’s distortions of socialist doctrine--including an elaborate personality cult that glorifies him with such myths as his alleged powers to stop rain, send away dark clouds and predict the discovery of natural resources.

Despite the continued official hagiography, however, even Seoul’s most rabid anti-Communists acknowledge that Kim’s regime has recently been startlingly forthcoming about its failures. An announcement last August pleading for food aid amid torrential rains that had reportedly swept through more than 117 cities and counties and wreaked $1.7 billion in damage was “the first time North Korea has ever announced flood damage so swiftly and concretely,” according to the Naewoe Press in Seoul, a government-run monitoring agency.

The secretive regime also has recently gone online, unveiling a home page for its official Korean Central News Agency.

So far, however, the reports have consisted mainly of new Kim myths and honors and of diatribes against “U.S. imperialists and their South Korean puppets.”

Meanwhile, small signs of reform--or at least an official blind eye to underground market activities--are becoming more evident as North Korea’s overwhelming economic problems and crushing food shortages threaten the regime’s stability.

In the past year, North Korea has downsized its agricultural work squads and allowed farmers to keep excess production, in a tentative step toward market incentives. According to reports by numerous defectors, private markets are flourishing as Pyongyang loses its ability to provide the all-encompassing welfare benefits that are supposed to characterize socialist nations.

North Korean officials have also launched aggressive attempts to woo more foreign investment through glossy pamphlets, international seminars and such incentives as 50-year land leases and visa-free entry for investors. But the results have been lackluster. A free-trade zone in the northeast, for instance, had drawn just $20 million in actual investments by 1995 after officials set an original target of $3.6 billion two years earlier.

Pyongyang does not intend to give up, however. “We are socialists, but [Kim] knows that a solitary economy cannot be continued these days. You need the cooperation of capitalist countries,” said So Chung On, spokesman for the pro-Pyongyang association in Japan.

Harrison says the United States is a chief culprit behind the poor investment results because it has continued to block business ventures through economic sanctions against North Korea--violating, he says, a pledge to begin easing trade restrictions made in the accord on the North’s nuclear program.

“The fact that the United States is sticking to its policy of economic sanctions is slowing down changes,” Harrison said. “Reformers in North Korea can only win over the other guys if they can show that dealing with the West and Japan gets rewards.”

Japanese investors, who were badly burned in the 1970s when North Koreans defaulted on millions of dollars in loans, are waiting for better infrastructure, more political stability and loan guarantees from their own government--which won’t be forthcoming until diplomatic relations are forged.

But many analysts believe that Japan and the United States will refrain from significant diplomatic progress until North-South relations improve--an unlikely scenario, many say, until a new South Korean president is elected in December. That, in turn, will delay any significant business investment and probably worsen Pyongyang’s plight, Pyon and others say.

Still, Pyon says, North Korea has few options other than to wait. Without U.S. approval, Japan will not cement ties with Pyongyang and global investors will not take the risk to help the beleaguered nation build up its economy.

“North Korea really has no sponsors left besides the United States,” Pyon said. “The U.S. holds the key to the Korean peninsula.”