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Burning Journal -> Daily Journal -> Yeah, but what about Kim Jong-il? Is he hangin' tu?
Post Info TOPIC: Yeah, but what about Kim Jong-il? Is he hangin' tu?
Uke


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Yeah, but what about Kim Jong-il? Is he hangin' tu?
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No clear successor to Kim seen in North Korea
September 09, 2008 4:21 PM EDT

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea's Kim Jong Il - reclusive, eccentric and mercurial - has revealed little about who might succeed him as leader.

Kim, 66, has had at least four children with three women, but none has emerged as the obvious candidate to take the world's first communist hereditary dynasty into a third generation.

Kim was absent from Tuesday's celebration to mark North Korea's 60th anniversary, fueling speculation that he was gravely ill.

In Washington, a U.S. intelligence official said Tuesday it was possible Kim had suffered a stroke. That official and another U.S. source spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive intelligence gathering.

In Seoul, an official at the South Korean Unification Ministry said the ministry had intelligence that Kim's health has worsened. Spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon said officials were trying to confirm the report, and did not know the nature of the illness.

Kim's eldest son, 37-year-old Jong Nam, was long considered his favorite - until he tried to sneak into Japan using a fake Dominican passport in a bid to get to Tokyo's Disney resort in 2001.

His second son, 27-year-old Jong Chol, is believed to have spent part of his school years in Switzerland. He reportedly was appointed to a high position in the Korean Workers' Party last year, making him a likely candidate.

But Kenji Fujimoto, who says he was private sushi chef to Kim for 13 years, claims the "Dear Leader" believes the second son is too soft and instead favors his youngest son, Jong Un, 24, who apparently looks and acts just like his father.

However, none has been pushed forward publicly as the crown prince of the impoverished Stalinist nation founded 60 years ago.

After being groomed for the post for 20 years, Kim took over after the 1994 death of his father, Kim Il Sung, who was known as the "Great Leader."

"Trying to figure out North Korea politics ... is like playing with a ouija board. There's no set line of succession like we saw in 1994," said Dr. Michael G. Kulma of the Asia Society in New York.

And the lack of a clear successor in a nation that has made a cult of the two leaders raises the question of what will happen to the world's most isolated country if Kim dies suddenly at a time of sensitive international nuclear negotiations.

"The immediate impact is that it puts things on hold on the nuclear front ... but really it depends on who takes over: A hard-line faction? A moderate faction? A military collective? One of his sons?" Kulma said.

Kim Hak-sung, a political scientist at South Korea's Chungnam National University, predicts internal unrest if Kim is incapacitated or dead.

"Given that he hasn't anointed any of his sons as his successor, North Korea could be embroiled into internal confusion over the next year," he said.

Speculation about Kim Jong Il's health has been swirling for years.

Known as a lover of cigars and cognac, Kim reportedly has suffered for years from diabetes and heart disease. He last was seen in public about a month ago.

North Korean officials deny reports he is ill, and Kim himself dismissed the reports in October.

"They exaggerate my slightest movement. I think they're novelists, not journalists," he said during a summit with South Korea in Pyongyang.

At Waseda University in Tokyo, an expert on North Korea theorized that Kim has been dead for five years.

Professor Toshimitsu Shigemura wrote in a book that Kim disappeared from public for 42 days in 2003. He speculates that Kim actually died then - and that his many well-trained doubles have been acting as the leader, with a tight circle of advisers running the country.

North Korean officials have denied the claims, and there has been no confirmation of the theory even though Shigemura says a voice analysis of a 2004 meeting shows the man in the negotiations was not Kim.

Yoo Ho-yeol, a North Korea expert at Korea University, predicted that top military leaders will collectively run the North if Kim is as ill as reported.

"The military would do the crisis management," he said.

Marcus Noland, senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for International Economics, said elements of the Communist Party, Kim's family and the military would want to form coalitions in a potential succession scenario.

"It is quite possible that you end up with some sort of collective leadership centered around the National Defense Commission, or you have a member of the Kim family reigning but not ruling, essentially being used as a device to symbolize political continuity, being the front for elements calling the shots," he said.

Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea expert at Seoul's Dongguk University, said a military team could declare martial law.

While some analysts predicted turmoil, Koh said North Korea has been preparing for a shift of power by putting young junior officials in key government posts.

Kulma noted that Kim's absence is nothing new for a man who has cultivated an air of mystery.

"The initial reports about not attending celebrations are reason for speculation," Kulma said. "But at the same time, he has from time to time gone off the radar screen for extended periods."



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Uke


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I'll bet my Kim souvenirs will be worth millions on EBay now! Eat yer heart out Britney fans!

http://www.korea-dpr.com/

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Oh no... First it was Fidel, now Kim? I can't bear this! I'm depressed... Wait a minute. Mugabe's still alive right?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Kim Jong Il may be gravely ill, jeopardizing talks

By PAMELA HESS AND MATTHEW LEE
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITERS

 photo
 In this Oct. 28, 2005 file photo released by China's Xinhua News Agnecy, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, shakes hands with Chinese President Hu Jintao, unseen, before their talks in Pyongyang, North Korea. There was no sign of Kim Jong Il at a closely watched parade in Pyongyang Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2008, marking the 60th anniversary of North Korea's founding, as a U.S. intelligence report said he may have suffered a stroke. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Yao Dawei, File)

WASHINGTON -- North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il may be gravely ill, perhaps the victim of a stroke, U.S. and other Western officials said Tuesday after he failed to appear for a major national parade. If so, it could jeopardize the already troubled international effort to get his nation to abandon nuclear weapons.

Kim's absence from a military parade for the country's 60th anniversary lent credence to reports that the man North Koreans call the "Dear Leader" had been incapacitated during the past few weeks.

The 66-year-old Kim, who has been rumored to be in varying degrees of ill health for years, has not been seen since mid-August. Though he appears rarely in public and his voice is seldom broadcast, Kim has shown up for previous landmark celebrations.

"There is reason to believe Kim Jong Il has suffered a serious health setback, possibly a stroke," one Western intelligence official said. A senior U.S. official said fresh rumors had been circulating about Kim's health and his control over North Korea's highly centralized government.

A former CIA official with recent access to intelligence on North Korea said that even before Tuesday the agency was confident that reports of a health crisis were accurate.

The officials spoke anonymously to summarize sensitive intelligence.

The reclusive Kim took power in 1994 after the death of his father, Kim Il Sung. It was communism's first hereditary transfer of power, and both Kims are revered in a personality cult perpetrated by the country's authoritarian government.

To the outside world Kim is best recognized as a silent, waving figure with a bouffant hairdo and a quasi-military suit reminiscent of communist leaders of an earlier time. Word of his possible health problems recalled the Soviet era, too, when U.S. analysts pored over photos of military parades for clues to who was up and who was down in the Kremlin.

Neither the White House nor the State Department would comment publicly on Kim's health, noting that the North Korean government is one of the most opaque and secretive on Earth.

But U.S. officials said privately they were concerned that Kim's apparently failing health jeopardized six-nation talks aimed at ridding North Korea of its nuclear weapons. The United States has been a wary partner in those talks, but their success is one of the Bush administration's signature foreign policy goals.

The talks are now stalled in a dispute over the North's obligation to allow intrusive foreign accounting of its known nuclear stockpile.

North Korea's powerful military is known to be opposed to the negotiations with China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States. Many analysts believed the process was continuing mainly due to Kim's support and his backing of moderates in the foreign ministry.

U.S. officials noted that shortly after the health rumors began to circulate in mid-August, North Korea started to adopt a tougher line in nuclear negotiations. The North first suspended disablement of its main nuclear reactor and then threatened to rebuild it, saying the U.S. had not kept a pledge to remove the country from a terrorism blacklist.

The reactor at Yongbyon was dismantled and its cooling tower blown up in June. In exchange, Washington was to strike North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism but only after Pyongyang agreed to a mechanism to verify that it was abandoning atomic weapons development. The North has yet to agree to the verification scheme.

On Aug. 26, Pyongyang's official news agency reported that the country would "consider soon a step to restore the nuclear facilities in Yongbyon to their original state as strongly requested by its relevant institutions."

The reference to "relevant institutions" suggested the military may have taken the upper hand and that Kim might no longer be wielding absolute authority.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States had recently seen a decline in "outputs" from North Korea on the denuclearization process, particularly on verification.

He added that since last week Pyongyang had been removing equipment from storage near Yongbyon while breaking U.N. seals on other items in what may be preparatory moves to reassembling the reactor.

"Certainly, those steps are not welcome," McCormack said. "Their energy needs to be focused on moving that process forward. Those actions of taking the equipment out of storage, breaking seals, that doesn't move the process forward."

In Seoul, Kim Ho-nyeon, a spokesman at South Korea's Unification Ministry, said Tuesday that officials there had obtained information that Kim's health condition had worsened.

South Korean media have reported in recent days that Kim's condition - South Korean intelligence says he suffers from diabetes and heart disease - may have worsened.

The Chosun Ilbo newspaper, South Korea's largest, said Tuesday that Kim collapsed on Aug. 22.

North Korea's state media were silent about Kim's absence from the televised parade.

Other key North Korean leaders, most notably the country's No. 2 official, Kim Yong Nam, were shown watching the ceremony at Pyongyang's main square. Kim Yong Nam was quoted by the Korean Central News Agency as telling a banquet later that the country "has a rosy future of a great prosperous powerful nation under the leadership of Kim Jong Il."

Kim's demise could lead to a succession crisis in North Korea. He has three sons by two women but has not designated a successor.

Gary Samore, a former senior official with the National Security Council and now an expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, said he doesn't think Kim's absence would change North Korea's strategy in nuclear negotiations. And he discounted the theory that Kim favored a moderate approach in the talks.

"I think the strategy that Kim Jong Il is following is likely to be pursued by any collective leadership," he said. "They will try to extract as much benefit as possible in the form of money, fertilizer and oil from the west and not give up their nuclear weapons."



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