The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [15]
On July 8, 1994, the eighty-two year old Parent Leader passed away—from overwork, news announcers wailed—and the DPRK immediately contracted, to borrow a line from Hamlet, in one brow of woe. Orgies of weeping took place in city and town squares across the country. Some refugees who were children at the time remember desperately trying to force tears, but most adults appear to have been genuinely grief-stricken—or at least afraid of a future without the only leader they had ever known. It was perhaps fortunate for the regime that Kim died when he did. Had he lived a few years longer, the economic collapse would have done irrevocable damage to his reputation. As it was, the famine of 1995-1997 appeared to offer retroactive proof that the Parent Leader had indeed been single-handedly feeding and clothing his people up to his death.
THE ARDUOUS MARCH, 1994-1998
By the time Kim Il Sung died, it was already taken for granted, both inside and outside the DPRK, that his son would take over. Kim Jong Il had assumed command of the country’s armed forces in 1991, and his fiftieth birthday in 1992 had occasioned a massive celebration, complete with the bizarre (and utterly un-Confucian) spectacle of the Parent Leader penning a panegyric to his own son.1 The threat to withdraw the DPRK from the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1992, the placing of the country on a war footing in 1993: these and related measures, which were said to have brought Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang in June 1994 to negotiate the Yankee surrender, were largely credited to Kim Jong Il’s genius and resolve.2 The nuclear crisis thus endowed the heir to the throne with his own myth of national rescue, and not a moment too soon.
The Dear Leader took over in July 1994 without formally replacing his late father; to this day Kim Il Sung remains the “Eternal President” of the country. Meanwhile food production was in a free fall, not least because of the disruptions caused by mourning ceremonies. By the end of 1994 the ration system had all but ceased functioning outside Pyongyang. At first the regime tried to brazen out the crisis by trumpeting the record harvest sown by the Parent Leader in his last months.3 It soon realized, however, that to continue in such a vein would be to risk forfeiting its credibility altogether. Public expectations for the new leader had to be sharply reduced before the food shortage worsened into famine. After lying low for a few months, a somber Kim Jong Il appeared in 1995 at the head of a “military first” government compelled (or so the media claimed) to devote all its time and energy to national defense.
Ironically enough, relations between Washington and Pyongyang had never been better: the Agreed Framework had been signed in October 1994, President Clinton had sent Kim a groveling letter promising full compliance, and energy aid was already flowing in. Kim thus found himself in the awkward position of having to nurture Washington’s hope for better relations while at the same time whipping up anti-Americanism at home. Aware that the language barrier forced most outside observers to focus on the official news agency’s English-language service, Kim had it tone down its invective and refrain from vilifying the US president by name. Meanwhile, in domestic propaganda, the Agreed Framework was crowed over as an abject Yankee surrender. A glorious battle had been won, but not the war; for the “jackals” could never change their inherently rapacious nature. Hence the need for the Dear Leader to spend most of his time visiting military bases, from the Yalu River in the north to the DMZ in the south. Much as it pained him, the provinces would have to take self-reliance to the next level and begin feeding themselves. Official media lamented the hardship suffered by Kim on his tireless tour. His famed diet of “whatever the troops are eating” was