Read The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Online
Authors: Don Oberdorfer,Robert Carlin
As with other powerful authoritarian leaders, Kim’s health had long been a state secret and a matter of intense interest to the outside world. From at least the early 1970s, a large lumpy external tumor had been visible on the back of his neck, but doctors determined it to be benign. German doctors informed Kim it could be removed surgically in two hours; however, because they also said it was not dangerous, he told them to leave it alone. South Korean and US intelligence reports stating that Kim had heart trouble were confirmed by North Korea’s official postmortem medical bulletin, which said he had received treatment for arteriosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries.
Personal impressions of Kim’s health in his later years varied greatly, which may have reflected good days and bad days. A South Korean official who was among Kim’s luncheon guests in February 1992, shortly before his eightieth birthday, found him hardly as fit as had been reported. The official said Kim dribbled food on his clothing, made a half-dozen incomprehensible statements, and left his eyeglasses on the table when he left the room at the end of the meal. On the other hand, Korea expert William Taylor of the US Center for Strategic and International Studies reported after luncheon with Kim just four months later, in June 1992, that “he walks and moves vigorously for age 80. His handshake is firm. When I left,
he shook hands and pulled me toward him; his arm muscles are in good tone. His eyes are clear and his eye contact firm and compelling. Most important . . . his mind is quick and crystal clear.”
Kim Il Sung’s death was kept secret for thirty-four hours, evidently to make sure arrangements were in place for the first succession in the country’s history. On the morning of July 9, government ministries, offices, schools, and workplaces throughout North Korea were notified to watch television for an important announcement at noon. Many were expecting some good news, perhaps about the forthcoming summit meeting with the South. Instead, they were greeted by an announcer dressed in black, who solemnly intoned a shocking announcement:
The Central Committee of the Workers’ Party, the Central Military Commission of the Party, the National Defense Commission, the Central People’s Committee and the Administration Council of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea report to the entire people of the country with the deepest grief that the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea and President of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea passed away from a sudden attack of illness at 02:00 on July 8, 1994. Our respected fatherly leader who has devoted his whole life to the popular masses’ cause of independence and engaged himself in tireless activities for the prosperity of the motherland and happiness of the people, for the reunification of our country and independence of the world, till the last moments of his life, departed from us to our greatest sorrow.
There followed a lengthy obituary in praise of “a great revolutionary . . . genius in leadership . . . the greatest of great men . . . a great military strategist and ever-victorious iron-willed brilliant commander . . . the sun of the nation and lodestar of national reunification.” Somber music followed, interspersed with readings from Kim’s memoirs.
As the message sank in, officials broke down in front of the television sets and began weeping. Within a short time, residents of Pyongyang began converging on the giant statue of Kim on Mansu Hill near the city center, many of them crying hysterically. Before long, fifteen to twenty thousand people had gathered at the statue and in nearby streets, with lines of others stretching back as far as the eye could see. Ambulances were on duty, with aid workers assisting those who fainted or complained
of feeling weak. Within a few hours, Pyongyang hospitals were overrun with heart-attack victims. The areas around the many statues and other monuments to Kim elsewhere in the country were also overflowing with mourners.
In a strange coincidence, American and North Korean delegations headed by US assistant secretary of state Robert Gallucci and DPRK deputy foreign minister Kang Sok Ju finally met to begin the long-awaited third round of nuclear negotiations on July 8, the day Kim died. Oblivious to the momentous but still secret event at home, the Pyongyang delegation reconfirmed the arrangements reached during the Carter mission to freeze its existing nuclear program in return for light-water reactors. From the American standpoint, surprisingly good progress was made. Following the meeting and private talks at a reception that night, US Navy captain Thomas Flanigan, the Joint Chiefs of Staff representative on the US delegation, wrote an e-mail to his superior in the Pentagon, “They’re here to deal. We need to understand that. Now it’s an issue of what are we willing to negotiate.”
At 5:00 local time on the morning of July 9, which was to be the second day of the talks, the news of Kim’s death reached Geneva. Later in the morning, the shaken North Koreans, who had not been informed prior to the official announcement, prepared to return to Pyongyang, promising that the negotiations would continue as soon as possible. Before they left, in a gesture that would impress the North Koreans deeply, Gallucci went to their mission in Geneva and signed the condolence book.
In Washington it was shortly after 11:00
P.M.
local time when David E. Brown, the country director for Korea, got the news from the State Department Operations Center and began working on an official reaction. Senior officials were scattered around the world: President Clinton, Secretary of State Christopher, and their immediate staffs were in Naples at a Group of Seven summit meeting; Assistant Secretary for East Asian Affairs Winston Lord was en route home from a G-7 meeting between Clinton and Japanese prime minister Tomiichi Murayama; Ambassador Laney was in Ireland to receive an honorary degree; other senior staff members were asleep in their beds in Washington.
In a globe-girdling telephone conference call that lasted most of the night, with various figures joining or leaving as their schedules and state of exhaustion dictated, it was decided to send condolences to “the North Korean people,” in hopes of keeping the promising Geneva negotiations on track. A presidential statement was drafted and promptly made public by the traveling White House: “On behalf of the people of the United States, I extend sincere condolences to the people of North Korea on the death of President Kim Il Sung. We appreciate his leadership in resuming the talks between our governments. We hope they will continue as
appropriate.” There was no consultation about the condolence statement with South Korea, prompting anger in some circles in Seoul. If there had been full consultation, according to a US official involved in the decision, the statement might never have been issued.
Clinton’s condolences were sharply condemned by Senate Republican leader Bob Dole, the president’s eventual rival in the 1996 election. Dole called the statement “insensitive to the generation of Americans who suffered as a result of the Korean War” and heedless that “Kim Il Sung was a brutal dictator of a government that is neither a friend nor an ally of the United States—a government whose policies and actions have threatened and continue to threaten U.S. security and interests.” Clinton responded that his statement was appropriate in view of the ongoing negotiations and that “the veterans of the Korean War and their survivors, as much as any group of Americans, would very much want us to resolve this nuclear issue with North Korea and go forward.” What he did not know at the time was that his condolences made a lasting positive impression on Kim Jong Il.
In Seoul, Kim Young Sam placed the ROK armed forces on maximum alert minutes after the news of the North Korean leader’s death was broadcast. A National Security Council meeting was convened at the Blue House at 2:00
P.M
., followed by an emergency cabinet meeting at 5:00. The only unusual military development in the North was that DPRK forces virtually stopped visible activities, including training, probably both to mourn the Supreme Leader and as an internal security precaution.
As the days wore on, the reaction to Kim’s death became the subject of political controversy in the South. When an opposition legislator, Lee Boo Young, suggested that the government express condolences in view of the grief being expressed by North Koreans, he touched off an impassioned debate in which conservatives went on the attack. After a week’s delay, the government announced it would crack down on any domestic moves to pay tribute to Kim Il Sung and denounced the expression of condolences as “reckless” and “irresponsible behavior ignoring our history.” The government also blocked a plan by leftist students to send a condolence mission to the North, and police warned that any expression of condolence would be met sternly as a violation of the National Security Law.
With old wounds reopened, emotions ran high. The Korean Broadcasting System was forced to terminate its broadcast of a fifty-five-minute Polish documentary about Kim Il Sung after twenty-five minutes due to a flood of complaints from viewers who felt it was too favorable. The same film had run on KBS two years earlier without incident. In a move that fanned the flames, the South Korean government, on the day after Kim’s funeral, made public a hundred Soviet documents that had been given to Kim Young Sam during a visit to Moscow in early June, demonstrating
that Kim Il Sung had been the moving figure behind the launching of the Korean War. Russian officials complained to Seoul about the inappropriate timing of the documents’ release, which was decided without consultation with Moscow.
The actions and statements of Kim Young Sam’s government, at a time of intense mourning in the North, generated bitter resentment in Pyongyang. North Korean authorities resumed virulent anti-South propaganda, which had been suspended by agreement in preparation for the summit, and they began refusing to accept official telephone messages from Seoul. Privately, Kim Young Sam was unconcerned, since he was convinced that without its longtime leader, North Korea was on its last legs. The South Korean president’s national security assistant, Chung Chong Wook, told his US counterpart, Anthony Lake, in a secure-line telephone conversation that North Korea seemed heading for collapse, a view that was widely held throughout the government. No one in Seoul was operating under the naive assumption that collapse was imminent, but the conviction that the North’s time was running out made Kim Young Sam more inclined to undercut than to accommodate the new leaders in Pyongyang.
The drawn and haggard man who stood apart and ahead of all others at the state funeral and the memorial service in Kim Il Sung Square was the most important mourner. Despite some expectations to the contrary, however, the eldest son and political heir of the Great Leader said nothing about his father, his loss, or his priorities for the country. Rather, he looked on, distracted and deeply shaken by his father’s death, as others spoke in praise of the Great Leader and of the ordained succession process that had been established more than a decade earlier.
In many respects, father and son were a study in contrasts. Kim Il Sung was a guerrilla fighter, the founder of the state, and a charismatic, outgoing, outspoken figure until the day he died. Kim Jong Il grew up in privilege from his teenage years, had never served a day in the military until he was named supreme commander of the People’s Army in December 1991, and was notably uncomfortable amid the roar of the crowd. Even when important pronouncements were made in his name, they were read by an announcer while he remained out of sight. Stories circulated outside North Korea that Kim avoided speaking in public because his voice was strange or his thought processes addled. Neither was true. For reasons of his own choosing, the only time the North Korean public heard his voice, however, was in April 1992, when he uttered a single sentence during a ceremony marking the army’s sixtieth anniversary: “Glory to the people’s heroic military!”
To the outside world, Kim Jong Il’s emergence as a leader exemplified the mysterious aura that seemed to surround North Korea. His rise to power and selection as his father’s successor were long unacknowledged publicly, and his activities were masked under the vague euphemism “the party center.” For many years, he rarely traveled outside the North or met with foreigners, reinforcing the impression that he was “reclusive.” In 1965, at the age of twenty-three, he had accompanied his father to Indonesia and then Rangoon, and in 1984 he turned up briefly in his father’s entourage in Berlin. East German officials confirmed his presence only later by studying photographs taken aboard Kim Il Sung’s special train. Beginning in 2000, however, Kim would meet numerous high-level foreign delegations and travel several times to China and Russia, though by then the adjective “reclusive” was treated by foreign reporters as almost part of his title.
According to North Korean propaganda, Kim Jong Il was born in a log cabin on Mount Paekdu, the legendary birthplace of Tangun, the mythic father of the Korean people. More objective sources say the younger Kim was born on February 16, 1942, in a Russian military camp in the Far East, where his father’s guerrilla band had taken refuge from the Japanese. After the Japanese surrender, at age three Kim Jong Il moved to Korea with his father but was evacuated to China at age eight during the Korean War. In his early years, a younger brother accidentally drowned, and his mother died while giving birth to a stillborn child, leaving Jong Il and a younger sister. Kim Il Sung remarried in the early 1960s and had two sons and two daughters by his second wife, Kim Song Ae. As Kim Jong Il took over, he carefully “pruned the branches” of the Kim family tree, making sure there would be no challenge to his position. His half-brother Kim Pyong Il was sent into virtual exile starting in 1988, serving as ambassador in Hungary, Bulgaria, Finland, and then Poland.