The New York Times
SEOUL — When he was introduced to the public in September, Kim Jong-un appeared destined to succeed his father, Kim Jong-il, as the leader of the irascible, destitute and nuclear-armed nation. But a growing number of experts in Seoul are beginning to question whether he has been fully certified, despite his elevation to high military rank and the urgency created by his father’s poor health.
“There are some minor but real reasons to ask if we are rushing our judgment about Kim Jong-un,” said Andrei Lankov, a professor and North Korea expert at Kookmin University in Seoul.
“The regime seems to be making preparations for the succession, but they haven’t reached the point of no return,” Mr. Lankov said. “Next year, they could very well say, ‘Kim Jong- un? Oh, he’s just one of 20 other generals.’”
Certainly, the Kim family has worked hard to make the succession appear inevitable. Despite having had no field experience in the military, the youngman was made a four-star general Sept. 28. His father also gave him two powerful posts in the ruling Workers’ Party.
Father and son appeared together the following week, reviewing a military parade in Pyongyang. The parade was shown live by several foreign broadcasters, a first for the notoriously secretive nation.
What the cameras showed was a rotund young man with an uncanny physical resemblance to his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea. Jowls, smile, posture, tunic, haircut — all nearly identical, right down to the dainty and perfunctory way he clapped his hands.
But that is where the learning curve ended, and experts have been confounded by the younger Mr. Kim’s low profile in the ensuing months. Interviews with scholars, analysts, diplomats and recent refugees suggest that Mr. Kim, much like his country, largely remains a riddle. “We know more about distant galaxies than we do about North Korea,” a Western diplomat said privately.
A hundred days after his elevation, the regime’s powerful mythmaking apparatus has hardly mentioned the heir apparent, to the surprise of most North Korea watchers. Ordinary citizens seemingly know little about him, and his personal biography still contains the same large, unexplained gaps it has since he was first mentioned as a potential successor: he studied as a teenager in Switzerland, or so it seems; he speaks several languages, or maybe just the one; he’s married, or perhaps he’s single; he dearly loves his oldest brother, or has plotted with Chinese agents to have him killed.
It is still unclear whether he turned 28 or 29 on his birthday this Saturday.
When a Chinese delegation attended a dinner in Pyongyang in October, “young Kim was there,” said Robert Carlin, a former State Department intelligence analyst who has worked extensively on North Korean nuclear issues. “No doubt the Chinese were paying close attention to how he handled himself and his chopsticks,” Mr. Carlin said.
In November, during a trip to North Korea, Mr. Carlin and two American colleagues were shown a previously unknown uranium enrichment facility outside Pyongyang. Kim Jong-un’s name did not come up during the visit, Mr. Carlin said.
There is some evidence that the regime is taking steps to build up Kim Jong-un in the public consciousness. The young general was toasted by a North Korean official at a recent dinner gathering of foreign diplomats in Pyongyang, according to one of the guests who attended.
“That certainly suggests to me that he is ‘the next one,’ even if the public rollout is being carefully paced and scripted,” said the guest, who requested anonymity in keeping with protocol.
Recent North Korean refugees and defectors have reported that he is now being discussed during required Communist study sessions at offices and factories. “We also hear that Kim Jong-un-related propaganda is especially intense in the military,” said Brian R. Myers, a professor at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea, and the author of “The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters.”
But it is noteworthy, experts said, that the son is not being hailed as the party “center” or “nucleus,” as his father was during his own carefully orchestrated rise to power.
On North Korean news broadcasts, Kim Jong-un’s name is not spoken with any special reverence, analysts said. When he accompanies his father on tours of farms and factories, the son is sometimes pictured next to the leader, but more often he is off to one side, almost as a bystander, or he is not shown at all.
“In the official news media, Kim Jong-un is no more prominent or celebrated a figure than Joe Biden is in our own,” said Mr. Myers, adding: “Let’s not forget, the official media has yet to state explicitly that Kim Jong-un is Kim Jong-il’s son,”
Mr. Lankov said there still were no billboards, posters, portraits or other noticeable displays featuring Kim Jong-un in the North. Reports of people wearing Kim Jong-un lapel badges are false, he said, noting that badges of Kim Jong-il himself are almost unknown in North Korea. The ubiquitous lapel pins feature only “the eternal president,” Kim Il-sung.
New North Korean calendars for 2011 do not mark Kim Jong-un’s birthday in red, as they do for his father and grandfather. And his name is not printed in boldface when it appears in North Korean dailies.
“Bold script — that’s important,” Mr. Lankov said.
But many North Korea scholars still consider Kim Jong-un’s elevation as a fait accompli, and that the slow roll out may be in deference to his father, who seems to have recovered to some extent from a 2008 stroke and does not appear ready to step aside.
“I don’t really see slogans for Kim Jong-un yet,” a North Korean trader, a man in his 40s, told a researcher from Human Rights Watch in November. “It’s because his father is still alive. Kim Jong-il is the sun of the 21st century. There cannot be two suns.”
Cheong Seong-chang, a researcher at the Sejong Institute near Seoul, is one of the closest observers of the succession drama in the North. He said Kim Jong-un, unbeknownst to the outside world, actually began his ascendance in 2006, upon his graduation from Kim Il-sung University. He was designated the heir apparent — at least for the regime’s ruling inner circle — on his birthday in 2009.
Guided by two trusted military aides to his father, Mr. Cheong said, Kim Jong-un was in effective control of the army by the end of 2009. He added that Mr. Kim’s very public appearance at the October military parade in Pyongyang “showed that he had been solidified as the No. 2.”
“That is what they wanted to show off — that stability — to the rest of the world,” Mr. Cheong said.
But the rest of the world was alarmed when North Korea shelled a South Korean island, Yeonpyeong, on Nov. 23. Four South Koreans were killed, and the peninsula suddenly seemed on the brink of war.
The incident seemed to raise the question: Had the newly minted general played a role?
“It’s highly likely that he was directly involved in directing the attack,” Mr. Cheong said. “It helped his image as the No. 2 and helped prioritize the military as a way to expand his own power.”
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