N.K Leader Kim Jong-il, Selfish Dictator

President Roh arrived in the U.S. for a summit with President George W. Bush on May 11. The Washington Post on the same day presented a special feature story about the North Korean nuclear issue and the private life of its leader Kim Jong-il.

The story was entitled “Sins of Son” and was featured on half of the first page in the Style Section and completely took up the fourth page with five photographs. Its subtitle was “Kim`s N.K. is devastated, but why should we ruin his enjoyment? ” The followings are major details of the story:

When “Dear Leader” was born in a log house located on Baekdu Mountain in 1942, a shining star and double rainbows were shown in the sky with an auspicious swallow came down from the sky heralding “the birth of a general who will control the world”.

This is the official story by the North Korean regime about Kim Jong-il, who currently holds the world hostage with his nuclear weapons` program.

Rumors about Kim reported by the Korean press was that flowers would spring from wood and the snow would melt. Another one was that he received blood infusions from young women to maintain his youthful appearance, made a hole-in-one when he first played golf and brought blonde Swedish women to his country to satisfy his sexual desires.

The rumors may not be true, but his innate nature is weird enough. He prefers vulgar strategies to cruel reality: he is an aesthete who pretends to be an artist like Hitler. More than 1 million people have died from hunger in the country over the past decade, but he has not spare some tens of thousands of dollars to build a memorial tower and organize ecstatic events in stadiums as a way to deify his father and himself.

Kim Il-sung groomed his son, Kim Jong-il, to be his successor as a king or Mafia boss would and referred to him as a `genius with 10,000 gifts`. According to the myth believed by the rogue state, Kim Jong-il had already written some 1,500 books when he began studies at Kim Il-sung University.

Kim Jung-il was so generous that he provided his aides with Mercedez-Benz sedans with license plates starting with 2-16, the `Dear Leader`s` birthday.

He likes movies so much that he retains a collection of over 10,000 video tapes of all the Oscar-winning films.

Kim has devastated his country. The North Korean economy declined sharply in the 1990`s due to mis-management on the part of the government. Over 1 million people have died from hunger out of its total population of 22 million. But he does not care. Rather, he executed the then Agriculture Minister and argues that his father told him to concentrate on the army and party, which has left the running of the economy up to government officials, so his people`s hunger cannot be attributed to Kim in the slighest.

Even during the suffering of his people, Kim took measures to acquire his own food channel. In 1999, his aides brought in two Italian chefs to North Korea and had them run a high-quality pizza restaurant, to also teach North Korean chefs how to make the beloved dish.

maypole@donga.com