Failure to launch

THE North Korean capital of Pyongyang is emerging from a tough few months.

Winters in north-east Asia are seldom anything else, but this year, chronic electricity shortages have accompanied temperatures sinking to -20C. Last year, UN agencies estimated up to 6m North Koreans would need food aid.

If the regime was trying to divert attention from all this, the effort failed spectacularly when a satellite launch ended in failure on Friday. According to South Korea’s foreign ministry, a three-stage rocket broke apart in midair, minutes after launch, falling into the Yellow Sea, west of the Korean peninsula.

This has been a personal humiliation for Kim Jong-un, in power since the death of his father, the “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il on Dec 17. Following scenes of mass hysteria across the country, Jong-un was thrust into the role of “Great Successor”, although it is impossible to know how much real power a man believed to be in his late 20s can have over a country with a 1.4m-strong military and where two older brothers wait in the wings, both of whom may have supporters, inside and outside the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

No matter how dark and frigid Pyongyang becomes after dark, one light never goes out. On the banks of the River Taedong, a 170m-high tower rises, topped by a pulsating red beacon. This is the Tower of the Juche Idea, built by Jong-il’s father, Kim Il-sung, the nation’s Suryong (Great Leader), on the occasion of his 70th birthday. North Korea is filled with such monuments and all adults are required to wear badges displaying the face of the Suryong, nearly two decades after his death.

Juche roughly translates as “Self Reliance” and is ubiquitous in the pronouncements of the regime. Kim senior formulated Juche in the 1950s as an amalgamation of communism and nationalism. Its rhetoric is usually defiant, confrontational, and bellicose.

In that respect, the latest monument to the Juche philosophy stood on the launch pad at the Sohae satellite station. Despite warnings from Washington that food aid, promised earlier in the year, will be permanently suspended, the authorities even allowed 200 foreign media to visit.

The three stage Unha-3 (Galaxy) rocket was supposed to launch a satellite into a north-south orbit over East Asia, roughly coinciding with the centenary of the Suryong’s birth. The North claimed the Kwang-myongsong-3 satellite would have merely carried out earth observation, photographing crop yields and weather formations. Governments in the region, however, feared the launch, even if unsuccessful, was a dry run for a ballistic missile test, capable of vaulting a nuclear warhead across the Pacific Ocean.

North Korea tested underground nuclear devices in 2006 and 2009 and possesses, if not an intercontinental missile capability then an arsenal of medium-range missiles. With the new regime having lost face over the failure of the Unha-3 rocket, it is feared by some experts that the celebrations of Il-sung’s birth might be marked by a third nuclear test.

“I don’t think it’s certain they would do that,” says Aidan Foster Carter of Leeds University, a long-term commentator on Korea. “It would really upset China, their only friend. I think the Chinese would put the squeeze on them if it looked likely.”

In Apr 2009, one of North Korea’s Taepodong-2 missiles was launched over the western Pacific; it travelled about 3,800km before its second and third stages fell harmlessly into the ocean. On that occasion, the UN imposed sanctions on the regime. This latest test has already prompted a meeting of the UN Security Council. But this month’s launch was less what it seemed to be — a bout of petulant sabre-rattling by an otherwise isolated and impoverished state — than buttressing the power of North Korea’s new ruler.

The world’s youngest premier, Jong-un was formally anointed heir apparent only in Sept 2010, when he was made a general in the Korean People’s Army (KPA). Until his very public disgrace in 2001, the Dear Leader’s oldest son, Kim Jong-nam, was the obvious choice of heir. That year, however, Nam was arrested attempting to enter Tokyo’s Narita International Airport with a fake Dominican passport (supposedly en route to Tokyo Disneyland with one of his sons).

This contrasts starkly with the career trajectory of the late Kim Jong-il. The Dear Leader was designated as heir in Oct 1980. He had 14 years to prepare for power up to the death of his father, Kim Il-sung.

The position of the Suryong’s grandson in 2012 is a lot more precarious. Now in semi-exile in Macao, where he has business interests, Nam gave an interview to a Japanese journalist this year, predicting a short and unstable reign for his younger brother.

“Kim Jong-nam and Kim Jong-un are half brothers in the ruling dynasty so venomous rivalry between them is pretty natural,” says North Korean expert Dr Leonid Petrov.

“Kim Jong-un won’t waste bullets to hunt Kim Jong-un down but simply ban him from returning to Pyongyang. To gain the respect and backing of the KPA, Kim Jong-un needs to pay the elite and feed its 1.4 million conscripts.”

It is believed the elite of the KPA is the real power broker in North Korea. During Jong-il’s rule, his father’s state ideology of Juche began to be augmented in speeches and official publications by Songun, a word that rough means “Army First Politics”.

Pundits and journalists have long been wont to describe North Korea as neo-Stalinist, Marxist or a Soviet throwback. Such epithets do not properly describe the nature of a society characterised by extreme regimentation and ancestor worship dressed up in pseudo-communist rhetoric. Certainly, North Korea has the trappings of a pre-1989 communist state. These include collectivised agriculture, widespread black markets, and a fearsome culture of surveillance and informing.

Kim Il-sung built up a personality cult that differed from the Stalinist and Maoist versions insofar as it has survived his death. There was no North Korean Khrushchev condemning his predecessor. Nor has there been another Deng Xaoiping, opening up the economy, albeit without political reforms. On the contrary, during the globalisation of the 1990s, North Korea travelled in the opposite direction. Floods and the breakdown of an inefficient industrial base spiralled into a famine that claimed up to 2 million lives between 1995 and 1998.

In that sense, the death of the “Great Leader” death in Jul 1994 was well timed. Saturated by cradle-to-grave propaganda about his brilliance, North Koreans would also remember his rule as a time of reliable harvests and electricity.

Moreover Kim’s ideology drew less on Marx and Lenin than Confucius and to some extent Christianity. Kim had grown up in an era when Korea was a backwater in the expanding Japanese Empire. During the 1910-45 occupation, the Japanese had tolerated evangelical churches, aware that clamping down on them would bring Korea’s already bubbling nationalism to the boil. Pyongyang in the early 20th century was known as the “Jerusalem of the East” and although Kim would ban all religion in North Korea, he was attuned to the appeal of its images and iconography. He also drew on the Confucian codes of ancient Korea, recreating a society that was intensely regimented, isolationist, and ruled by a supreme emperor.

Thus, during his 46-year reign, he was sold to his subjects as the peasant boy who performed the miracle of Korea’s resurrection as a worker’s paradise. But his ideology of Juche also appealed to the pride of a people who felt not only humiliated by the Japanese occupation and the post-war partition, but traumatised by the 1950-53 war

The Kwangmyongsong-3 satellite launch had the likely purpose of assuring the army generals that their prominence remains undiminished under the new regime. But as more statues to both his father and grandfather rise across Pyongyang (it is estimated that 34,000 statues of Kim Il-sung already exist in North Korea), Kim Jong-un will also seek to spin whatever his regime does next as following in his grandfather’s footsteps, the self-reliant “Great Successor” and his subjects, united against the rest of the world.