N. Korea Boosts Kim to Top Party Position

More than three years after the death of North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung, his son, Kim Jong Il, was elected general secretary of the ruling Korean Workers’ Party, consolidating his dynastic succession, Pyongyang’s official news agency announced Wednesday.

The 55-year-old Kim Jong Il has been the de facto ruler of the Stalinist nation since his father’s death in July 1994, but until now the “Dear Leader” had claimed only military titles for himself. Even before his father’s death, however, the junior Kim was being enshrined with his father as a demigod in the state propaganda pantheon. His ascension to his father’s “throne” erases doubts raised immediately after Kim Il Sung’s death and shows that the son is firmly in control.

South Korean officials expressed guarded hopes that Kim’s coronation as general secretary, North Korea’s top post, will bring stability and the opportunity for better relations with the South. But Nicholas Eberstadt, a Korea watcher at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, said so little is known about how the reclusive leadership functions that it is impossible to predict whether Kim’s formal ascent to power will bring coherence to North Korea’s often bewildering behavior.

“He has an official party title now, and that means he has to assume official duties, including meeting with foreign human beings,” said Eberstadt. “The Hermit Kingdom at this moment has a hermit king, and he has to come out of his hermitage to some extent.”

Kim long has avoided meeting foreigners, though he recently gave a rare audience to a Russian Communist politician. Before his father’s death, he was often portrayed as a zombie-like and bizarre character, but there is little reliable information about him other than obviously doctored footage on state television and ultradoctrinaire articles that bear his name as author.

Recently, the official North Korean media have been reporting such miraculous phenomena as fruit trees blooming in autumn and the discovery of a rare albino sea cucumber as signs that Kim had a mandate from heaven to assume his father’s mantle as party leader.

Korea watchers say the party organs ceased functioning after the elder Kim’s death. Now the reclusive younger Kim may have to give speeches telling his 24 million subjects how he plans to combat poverty, famine and economic collapse.

“Kim Jong Il is going to have to explain: How do we get out of this mess we’re in,” Eberstadt said. “I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes.”

North Korea’s official media reported that citizens of Pyongyang, the capital, celebrated Wednesday’s news in the streets. The energy-starved city’s long-darkened neon lights reportedly were turned on for the occasion.

In South Korea, the long-expected announcement was greeted with a mixture of optimism and scorn.

“If North Korea stabilizes under Kim Jong Il, it will mean that we will have a counterpart for a summit meeting, a channel for direct North-South contact,” said Lee So Hang of the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security in Seoul.

“Kim Jong Il lacks his father’s charisma, and . . . he may believe that maintaining a little tension with South Korea will help solidify his position,” Lee said. “But he will adopt reform policies because it will help the economy. They need and want money.”

Others said political reform and reconciliation with South Korea probably will not be forthcoming.

“They will open up, albeit only a little, but they will not reform, and we must not confuse the two,” said Park Sok Kyun of the Freedom League of Korea, an anti-Communist organization based in Seoul.

In recent weeks, the North Koreans have continued to emit their customary mixed signals, seesawing between bellicose behavior and attempts to forge better ties with the outside world.

North Korean officials sabotaged attempts to hold four-way talks with the United States, China and South Korea, designed to pave the way for a peace treaty putting a formal end to the Korean War, by demanding the withdrawal of all 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea as a prerequisite for the talks.

Pyongyang also temporarily suspended work by a Western consortium on a $5-billion nuclear power plant in an isolated part of the country after finding a North Korean party newspaper in a garbage can used by South Korean workers at the site. The South Koreans claimed that they were simply chucking an old paper, but the North Koreans insisted that they had defiled a photograph of Kim Jong Il that was in the newspaper.

On Monday, Pyongyang abruptly reversed itself and said work on the reactors could resume--an apparent victory for the soft-liners who seek more engagement with the West.

And on Wednesday, North and South Koreans agreed to allow commercial airplanes to fly over their territories for the first time since the 1950-53 Korean War, South Korean officials said.

However, North Korean Red Cross officials have failed to come up with a plan for a handful of about 1,830 Japanese women who have immigrated to North Korea since the war to return home to Japan for a visit. Despite an agreement in principle between Pyongyang and Tokyo, the homecomings have been inexplicably delayed, according to Japanese sources.

Nevertheless, Japan announced Wednesday the resumption of emergency food aid to North Korea, which had been cut off due to friction over the wives issue and the alleged kidnapping of Japanese citizens by North Korean agents. Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto is expected as early as today to approve giving $27 million to the United Nations to buy rice for North Korea and another $784,000 to the Red Cross for North Korean famine relief.