Leader's heir gets slow build-up

The progress into North Korea's public consciousness of the favoured son of leader Kim Jong Il, designated to take over the family's monopoly on power, has been glacially slow.

But recent clues about his status, in a country whose carefully controlled people have learned to rely on hints and inferences leaked by the state, are pregnant with meaning.

A few weeks ago the central news agency reported an astronomical observation to which watchers of North Korea have given an astrological interpretation. It described how the "morning star" - Venus - had shed an unusually bright light on the lake that fills the crater on Mt Paektu.

The reported planetary event occurred on the 26th or 27th birthday (even such facts are elusive) of Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Il's youngest son, who is expected to succeed his father.

It is in this roundabout way that information on crucial events is communicated in an impoverished, paranoid place cut off almost entirely from the world, where all media and communications are directed by the state.

Since the ending of the Korean conflict in 1953, the country has been in thrall to a personality cult initially set up around Kim Jong Il's father - Kim Il Sung - and his Stalinist notion of resilience and independence (juche).

In a state where virtually everything is secret, the communication of important information by means of metaphor has become such a prominent feature that it has earned its own description - "semi-esoteric communication" - first applied to North Korea's subtle use of its mass media by the former CIA analyst Morgan Clippinger almost 30 years ago.

What Clippinger was describing was the gradual emergence of Kim Jong Il from the shadow of his father.

"When Kim Jong Il first began his rise, 30 years ago," says Aidan Foster-Carter, a North Korea expert at Leeds University, "the process started when he was in his 20s."

He was exposed to the public for 14 years before he finally took over.

But in the present case, with a substantial question mark over the health of the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, who is variously suspected of having suffered cancer or a stroke or both, the succession process appears to have been accelerated, even if the arcane means of bringing it about have not changed.

"There are questions," says Foster-Carter, "such as why Kim Jong Il did not bother to manage his own succession until now. We did not even know about the existence of this son until his father's sushi chef [Kenji Fujimoto, a Japanese man writing under a pen name] wrote about his experiences."

But other analysts have noted a stop-start media push to legitimise, if not Kim Jong Un's exclusive claim, then the principle that one of Kim Jong Il's three sons should follow him.

In 2001 a florid political essay was published entitled A Brilliant Succession, which underscored the father-son inheritance as a Korean tradition.

An essay followed that identified the ideal average age of youth leaders as "25", then Kim Jong Un's age, and a children's television programme, The Good Heart of the Third Child, which emphasised the moral virtues of the third child. Since then Kim Jong Un's name has emerged increasingly.

But it is how he has been subtly introduced to North Koreans that remains even more fascinating than the speculation in the West. Around the time of his birthday, Daily NK, an organisation based in South Korea's capital, Seoul, which monitors events in the north, reported a "central conference" in Pyongyang and other "commemorative events", including "lectures for residents" usually reserved for Kim Jong Il's birthday or that of the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994.

And an official New Year's Day editorial published in all North Korea's newspapers extolled the virtues of "youth" as "a shock brigade in the great revolutionary upsurge".

"Precisely what is going on at the centre of power in North Korea, I don't think anybody really knows," says one foreigner who until recently lived in Pyongyang's tiny community of foreign nationals, which rarely exceeds 120 people, including diplomats and aid workers.

He describes a fantasy world depicted in the country's media. "The last thing that North Koreans can cope with is hard fact. Fantasy is needed ... [the media] cannot write about the real world, so everything is very vague."

But despite the personality cult built up around the Great Leader, and then the Dear Leader, North Koreans are told nothing about the family.

"When you ask why people do not know, the answer, inevitably, is that people do not need to know."

He believes the flurry of semi-esoteric communication now going on can be explained in one of two ways. "It is either because the decision has already been taken and it is designed to acclimatise North Koreans to the succession ... The alternative explanation is that this reflects an attempt by one faction to impose its choice."

But he is uncertain even what factions exist. He believes, however - as does Foster-Carter - that the use of astrology, as in the published "events" surrounding Kim Jong Un's birthday, are reserved for "the big boys to build up their case".

He says: "What ordinary people look for to explain what is going on are these kinds of subtle messages.

"And it is amazing that, in a place without IT, without mobile phones [recalled by the Government in 2004 after a brief experiment], the word gets around amazingly quickly."

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