Not all the developments were bad, however. I learned that small, informal markets had begun to creep up here and there throughout the DPRK. Historically speaking, markets led to the abandonment of a planned national economy and to the disintegration of socialism. But this wasn’t history; there was no historical precedent for the Arduous March. I had to admit that the markets seemed like a helpful temporary measure to deal with the food situation. Every so often I had the military make clear that these bazaars were operating under privilege, that they could be shut down at any point. But I also made sure that any repercussions were kept mild.
As the third anniversary of President Kim Il Sung’s death approached, I couldn’t help but laugh at all the Korean “experts” worldwide. Whether it had been three weeks, three months or three years, their predictions about the DPRK’s collapse had all been proven wrong. I decided that that year’s memorial services should therefore held in a spirit of triumph. North Korea had taken the worst of what the world had to throw at us, strife both natural and manmade, and still we walked with our heads held high.
After three years, I felt that I could finally give in to the inevitable without disrespecting the Great Leader. Though I was Chairman of the National Defense Commission and Supreme Commander of the KPA, I didn’t yet hold the state leadership position. On October 8, 1997, I accepted the will of the Party members. Resolutions were passed throughout the DPRK acclaiming me as the General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea. The leadership succession was official at last.
I received many letters of congratulations, but more important to me were the endless letters of support. It was one particular letter from a North Hwanghae farmer that affected me greatly:
Dear Leader,
We can survive even if we send two or three months’ provisions to the military. Just after liberation, farmer Kim Je Won donated rice to the country in support of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, and today we will likewise donate rice to the army in support of you.
It wasn’t what the farmer wrote that I particularly found to be of interest. I received letters of the sort daily, and though they gave me comfort their contents were virtually identical. Yet something about this one letter gave me pause, though I couldn’t quite understand what it was. I sat there and reread it over and over until I deduced what was unusual: the letter had been written in pencil. I leaned across my desk and grabbed an entire stack of letters that I’d received that day. They’d all been written in pencil, each and every one of them. Not a single one had been written in ink.
I’d been spending the vast majority of my time delivering field guidance to the military, since there was little guidance that I could offer to factories that sat still. It seemed like here in writing was the consequence of my absence. Still unsure as to whether the letters pointed to a shortage or a coincidence, I phoned the pen plant to resolve the matter. “Has there been a problem with production?” I asked the director.
“Yes, comrade,” he told me. “But it couldn’t be helped. We haven’t gotten the metal we need from the steel mill.”
So I called the steel mill. “Tell me, why haven’t you sent metal to the pen plant?”
“We would be delighted to. But we haven’t received any ore.”
Next I got the smelter on the phone. “What’s been holding up the delivery of ore?”
“Comrade, we can’t acquisition any raw iron from the mine.”
The more locations I called, the more anxious I became. “The smelter hasn’t received any iron ore,” I told the mine official.
“I know,” he said. “The railway is broken down.”
Gritting my teeth, I got in touch with the railways minister. “Why hasn’t the railway been repaired?”
“Comrade,” he said, “we haven’t any railroad ties to replace the ones that were damaged.”
Finally I called the forestry minister. “Let me guess: you couldn’t produce timber for the railroad because you don’t have any gas.”
“It is fortunate indeed that our leader is so prescient and informed,” he said. “That is indeed our situation.”
It was time for industry in Korea to regroup and rebuild, now that the military could provide the proper foundation. To be honest, part of me didn’t want to know how badly the factories were doing. After looking over my options, I decided to go revisit the Hwanghae Iron Works first. The mill had been our first automated factory and was a symbol of the DPRK’s industrialization. Of all the factories in the northern part of Korea, I knew that it would be the one in the best condition.
As I drove up to the mill with several Party members, I noticed immediately that there weren’t any signs of activity within. It wasn’t that the iron works were simply idle. Instead, there was a stillness about the mill, as if it had been sitting there untouched for ages. I could practically feel the dust settling in the air. My comrades didn’t even attempt to put on an optimistic face. Their scowls told me that they felt exactly the same way that I did.
After we pulled up, I cautiously got out of the car. As I walked to the mill door I saw that it was already half-open. I reached inside, trying to turn on the lights but not expecting them to actually switch on. The lights didn’t turn on, of course, but the daylight was enough to show me all I needed to see.
The Hwanghae Iron Works were a gutted corpse. It was obvious at a glance that a majority of the machines had been stripped, dismantled and sold to the highest bidder. As I toured the location near tears, it further became obvious that not one single machine would have been operational even if there had been any electricity.
“We will find out what happened here,” said one official, “and the class enemies will be dealt with.”
“What happened here is obvious,” I said. “The managers sold what they could to the Chinese. Punish them if you want. That still won’t make this mill operational again.”
That same day, I had warnings issued: those involved in the stripping of the mill would be executed unless all the machinery was returned at once. Sure enough, most of the pieces found their way back to the mill—after which I had nineteen people publicly shot for the crime. But this punishment gained us nothing. Nineteen more dead wasn’t just irrelevant; it was statistically insignificant. As a child I could reassemble a car by myself. Now, as an adult, I found myself unable to reassemble a factory even with all of Korea behind me.
A year ago the scene would have filled me with depression. Now it only filled me with resolve. There were those who had made a bad situation better. But there were also those who had made it worse. It made me seethe with rage to compare how the military and the industrial sector had chosen to handle the Arduous March.
No wonder so much had gone wrong when everything I’d done had been right. The extreme pressure Korea faced wasn’t enough to explain all the hunger and the death that had occurred. There were still class enemies actively plotting against the people. It was they who had made this Arduous March far longer and more painful than it needed to be. It was all the fault of the enemies of Juche Korea, and not mine.
Now I was determined to end lives instead of trying to save them. I needed to figure out who exactly was to blame for all the suffering that the people underwent. I sent out the KPA to interrogate anyone that I suspected of disloyalty. To no surprise, each and every one of them admitted their misdeeds under interrogation.
Of these villains, the worst was our Minister of Agriculture. To my absolute horror, he confessed to providing the country with bad seeds. He also admitted that he’d purposely refrained from introducing high-yield seeds from abroad, and had made sure that any fertilizer that we distributed was ineffective. I immediately made his confession public so that the masses could further see that the Arduous March hadn’t been my fault. The minister was of course summarily executed. For good measure, we dug up the body of his predecessor—who was then shot and buried again. I didn’t stop until everyone who deserved blame received it.
Now it came time for me to take my
place as the leader who saved the masses from certain demise. I launched an international “crybaby operation” to get as much aid as possible. Previously, only our foreign service agents asked for help. Now, I made certain that all our people did so. Guests from abroad were no longer taken to the best places to meet healthy Korean people who insisted that they were living well. Instead, they were presented with the saddest pictures possible to generate the maximum amount of sympathy.
My strategy worked perfectly. Food and money poured in from the Red Cross and the WFP, even from hostile nations—which gave me that much more food and money to send to the military. I knew that there were enemies still conspiring against me. Some in the West and even some in the DPRK thought they could turn my own nation against me, using hunger as a cynical tool. There were many abroad who doubted the validity of my Songun politics. They argued that putting the military first was simply a mechanism for me to maintain my leadership position. They insisted that the money I spent wasn’t going for development at all, but for patronage to those loyal to myself. I was determined to prove to all of my opponents, both at home and abroad, that the path of revolution begun by General Kim Il Sung would continue forever—and that it would be continue under my leadership until the day that I died.
The First Session of the Tenth Supreme People’s Assembly—the first since the Great Leader’s death—would be held in the fall of 1998, with elections held to fill the seats in the interim. Accordingly, on July 14 I registered my candidacy in Constituency No. 666—and unanimously won the seat less than two weeks later. It was a foregone conclusion at home and abroad that the session would end with me being elected to the DPRK Presidency.
I grinned when I heard such reports, especially when they came from the West. All of their prattling about Korea had been consistently proven wrong, again and again, and yet they never seemed to think that, perhaps, they’d made some mistake in their reasoning. Maybe, just maybe, they even had flawed information. But such self-reflection was obviously out of reach for tools of US imperialism. It brought me enormous pleasure to know that I was about to publicly embarrass all these fools—and not once, but twice. It was time to go on the attack again, after the long march of defense.
If one is to defeat the enemy, one must know him well. I fully understood America’s psychological state. The only difference between who America considered a “rival” and who it called an “enemy” was the strength of that particular nation’s military. Russia and China were therefore “rivals”; Cuba and Libya were “enemies.” All four condemned and despised the US imperialists. But one pair was relatively strong, and the other much weaker.
I knew that the most effective way of attracting the US to my position would be in taking a cold attitude—and, if necessary, slapping it across the face. By demonstrating the DPRK’s strength, by proving that our weaponry was world-class and that our military was invincible, by showing that I would never change our ways—all these things would make the Americans regard Korea as a rival and not an enemy.
On August 31, 1998 I orchestrated a spectacle that could be seen from everywhere on the planet. On that day, the DPRK became the ninth country to launch a satellite into space. Kwangmyongsong No. 1 flew over the globe, transmitting The Song of General Kim Il Sung and The Song of General Kim Jong Il, as well as the words “Juche Korea” in Morse code.
My foes were beside themselves. They didn’t know what to do or say. Let me quote a foreign newspaper for the reaction, because they put it precisely right: “The DPRK’s earth satellite launch drove the Western world into a state of insanity.” I could have made no clearer announcement that the rebuilding of a great, prosperous and powerful nation had begun. Weak nations cannot venture into space—nor do “cronies” build satellites due to “patronage.”
The international scrambling was immediate. The US imperialists denied the existence of a satellite at all, claiming they detected nothing. The Japs insisted that it hadn’t been a satellite launch but a missile of some kind, one that crossed Japanese territory. The outrage from the two nations was as loud as it was incoherent, claiming the DPRK was a fraud or an aggressor or, somehow, both. They both made an enormous commotion about how “unacceptable” it all was—until I forced them to shut their mouths and to, in fact, accept it. They really had no choice. Who knew what else Korea were capable of, now that we’d crossed into space? Once again, peace had been won by struggle—not by begging, compromising or groveling—and guaranteed by arms.
Less than a week later came that Supreme People’s Assembly session. The fiftieth anniversary of the DPRK was mere days away, and I couldn’t help but notice how proud all those assembled seemed to be. It seemed like every Party member was giving me a subtle nod, an acknowledgment that they knew the worst was over.
The session brought with it my second major surprise. Those of us gathered in the Assembly adopted a new constitution—but we didn’t elect a new President. As the introduction to the Kim Il Sung Socialist Constitution put it: “The DPRK and the entire Korean people will uphold the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung as the eternal President of the Republic.” President Kim Il Sung was the only president that the Korean people had ever known. He would remain the only president that the Korean people had ever known. Under the new constitution he was the President for infinity even in death. I myself was reelected as Chairman of the National Defense Commission. The constitution now regarded my office as the pivot of the state, enshrining the fact that the military’s political authority came first.
I immediately launched a campaign after officially taking over. My picture became posted alongside that of President Kim Il Sung everywhere in the DPRK. Underneath the posters was my official campaign slogan: Do Not Expect Any Change From Me. Nations that were supplying us with food urged reform and an open policy, yet I intended to hold fast to the socialist principle in every possible domain of economics. The fact that capitalist Asia was then experiencing a financial meltdown as our economy was improving was a rude awakening to the would-be reformers. They realized how wise President Kim Il Sung’s policy of self-reliance was, and how wise I was for sticking to it.
Holding back my intrinsic sense of modesty, I increasingly had the newspapers report on my extraordinary feats. Over and over, the message was identical: “The Great Leader is precisely the Dear Leader and the Dear Leader is just the Great Leader. He is the same in terms of idea, personality, virtue and so on.” The effect was to stop the masses from seeing Kim Jong Il as a “new” leader. Rather, they were to feel was as if President Kim Il Sung had risen from the grave and been born again in me.
The satellite showed my foes that I was strong, and the new constitution showed them that Juche Korea was here to stay. Rather than seeing us as a regime on the verge of collapse, the DPRK’s enemies began to respect us as a powerful peer. This new air of mighty determination pervaded my entire administration. During a UN meeting, for example, one of our dialogue partners casually mentioned reform. The DPRK delegates simply stood up and left. My new hardline attitude was noticed worldwide—and most importantly, it was noticed by the US imperialists. My plan worked perfectly, for I understood how the Americans thought as much as they themselves failed to understand the DPRK. The harder a line I took, the closer they tried to get.
As the United States changed its attitude, so did other countries follow suit. As I’d been saying for decades, America’s allies were its puppets who did as commanded. Very quickly, all three of the DPRK’s biggest enemies—the US, Japan and “South Korea”—contacted me and begged for negotiations. Now, all three tried to calm tensions instead of their usual attempts at escalation. All three came to my capital in my country—to Pyongyang itself—to speak with me on my own terms. The truth of my Songun politics had been blatantly demonstrated for all the world to see. After four years of struggle, the long Arduous March had come to an end.
Victory was finally at hand.
Chapter 19
Delivering Diplomacy
Strategy entails the greatest possible gain at the lowest possible cost. My ultimate strategy in dealing with the US imperialists was to permanently settle the Korean conflict without any gunfire. Songun diplomacy meant compelling the Americans to reach peace by leveraging the threat of Korea’s weapons. Of course, I understood that any actual battle would devastate the Korean peninsula—but I still managed to convince the Americans that I wouldn’t hesitate to engage in war. It certainly helped my case when the Western media freely described me as “suicidal” and even “possibly psychotic.” How “psychotic” that a “suicidal” nation like the DPRK managed to outlive virtually every other socialist state!
The aftermath of our satellite launch announcement was a perfect case in point. I had a meeting in my office with one of my military officials. To my amusement, the man was tremendously stressed by the latest American volley. “Comrade” he said, “we’ve received word from the Yank bastards. They’ve changed their story once again. They claim that we didn’t launch a satellite at all, but that we fired a missile. Therefore, they’re demanding inspection of our underground facilities.”
I chuckled, and thought back to my days in the film industry. It was as if the Americans were reciting dialogue that I’d written for them—and they were delivering their lines perfectly. “The Yanks are acting as if these underground facilities are somehow new, correct?”
“This is correct, comrade.”
”And are they, in fact, new?” I asked the official.
He bristled. “Of course not!”
“How long has Korea been orchestrating such military actions?” The officer paused; these were simple facts that every Korean knew.
“At least since 1951, when General Kim Il Sung implemented Juche tunnelizing tactics during the battle to defend Height 1211. After the success of the battle, the General spread the experience to all parts of the country. The people build iron-walled, tunnelized defense facilities at the front, along the coast lines and in inland areas. Tunneling is a Juche-oriented, original tactic which cannot be found in the military manuals of any other country.”
Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il Page 31
