North Korea Plays an Ode to the Son as Kim Turns 61

His birthday is a joyous event for fellow global leaders, his every act inspires millions, and he’s so great, he rivals the sun itself. Could this be Jesus? Muhammad? Moses?

No, it is North Korean strongman Kim Jong Il, who turns 61 today.

Everyone loves a birthday party, especially when the guest of honor is considered a demigod and one has no choice but to celebrate. But, by any standard, today’s celebration in North Korea comes at a tough time.

“You have to wonder what’s going on inside Kim Jong Il’s head,” said Hahm Chaibong, a professor at Seoul’s Yonsei University. “Everyone will do their best to put on a happy face, but they’re in crisis, and it’s very strange timing.”

Though turning 61 is a milestone for Koreans, a time for people to reflect on life, Kim’s 60th drew more celebrations because it also was the 90th anniversary of the birth of his father, North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994.

The younger Kim might not be all that eager to reflect on his accomplishments this past year, given a nuclear standoff, an ongoing drought and the threat of U.N. sanctions after Pyongyang said it had restarted its uranium-enrichment program.

One would never know any of that from the state-run media, which trip over themselves trying to explain how it came to be that about 60 nations -- including the likes of Syria and Cambodia -- have sent Kim congratulatory messages and presents and dispatched envoys. Last Wednesday, normally blank television screens in the electricity-starved North burst to life for a news flash: Russia had sent a present of three horses.

Glowing felicitations are not unusual for a country that lives by the cult of personality. Year after year, praise is heaped on the “Dear Leader,” the “sun of the 21st century,” a great comrade, a man of “immortal exploits, matchless courage and iron will,” and the supreme statesman who overwhelms his people’s lives with joy and optimism.

“The praises of the ‘Dear Leader’ are aimed at perpetuating his myth and currying his favor,” said Ralph A. Cossa, executive director of the Pacific Forum Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Honolulu think tank. “Who knows? Maybe he hands out rewards for the greatest exaggerations of his exploits each year.”

Three windowless offices deep inside South Korea’s Unification Ministry are filled with television monitors, videocassette recorders and radios. Stacked against walls are boxes of audio- and videotapes. The equipment is used to monitor the steady stream of screed, invective, hyperbole and glorification from the North’s propaganda machine.

Kim Tae Won, a member of the ministry’s Information Analysis Bureau, which listens in around the clock, has been monitoring North Korean birthday celebrations for a quarter of a century -- along with the ebb and flow of national campaigns. He is familiar with North Korean calls for armed struggle and warnings to remain ever more vigilant.

“To tell you the truth, it gets pretty boring,” he said. “The best way to spur anti-communism would be to make people listen to this stuff for a week.”

Up to a dozen times a day, he wears earphones in front of a bank of shortwave receivers and four reel-to-reel recorders to catch the signal from Radio Pyongyang.

A couple of doors down, his colleague, Choi Byung Seob, is doing the same thing on the television side.

The challenge, they say, is to pick up on subtle changes: new slogans or personnel moves that may signal a shift, weaker broadcasting signals that suggest power shortages, reduced meeting announcements hinting at food shortages.

One thing is clear, the bureau workers say: In decades of monitoring, they’ve never seen Pyongyang’s media hate anyone as much as they do President Bush, known variously in the North as “warmonger,” “imperialist,” “maniac,” “lunatic” or simply “that man.”

America is variously described as a land of “mad dogs,” “murderous devils” and “war addicts” behaving as though they were “conducting a robbery in broad daylight.” There’s talk of skinning the imperialists, cutting off their limbs, hitting and destroying them.

“Sometimes I imagine what the best job would be in North Korea, and one would be penning these diatribes,” said Michael Breen, author of “The Koreans.” “There must be a lot of creative people there, in the same way a lot of our writers and artists went into propaganda during the war.”

With the crumbling of the rest of the communist world, North Korea boasts the world’s most active propaganda machine, said Kim Chang Soon, director of Seoul’s Institute of North Korean Studies. “It’s the most oppressive use of controlled state information anywhere.”

The state views propaganda as vital to maintain control over people, distract their concerns over hunger and hardship, glorify the leadership and further the personality cult.

“Organization and propaganda are the two most important posts in the party,” said Lee Hang Koo, head of a Seoul-based think tank.

Outsiders in particular watch closely, given Kim Jong Il’s keen personal interest in film, media and “the arts” -- all part of the nation’s propaganda effort.

“His direct link is one reason you pay attention to this stuff,” said Nick Eberstadt, North Korea expert with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “There’s nothing that comes out of that country that he doesn’t have approval over.”

For outsiders, the propaganda is so over the top that it would be amusing were it not for the unstable and unpredictable regime behind the rhetoric.

When North Korea feels threatened, it often waits days to issue a response. Sometimes, the response amounts to little more than throwing the charge back, as happened when North Korea claimed that the United States was the real “axis of evil” and that Pyongyang could match any U.S. preemptive strike with one of its own. At other times, Pyongyang devises something more imaginative.

“The Americans will say they can fight a two-front war, and North Korea responds that it will end the world,” said Scott Snyder, a Seoul-based representative of the Asia Foundation. “How are you going to compete with that?”

There are few subtleties, as every message is delivered with the equivalent of bold type, exclamation points, marquee lighting and capital letters. Still, there’s also a repetitive quality, said the Unification Ministry’s Kim.

“This work isn’t much fun,” he said. “I’m sure there’s a North Korean up there with my job who monitors the South Korean media. I’m sure he’s having a lot more interesting time than I am.”

*

Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.