Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader by Bradley K. Martin

Author:Bradley K. Martin [Martin, Bradley K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FIVE

I Die, You Die

Kim Jong-min was one of the higher-level defectors from North Korea. After rising to a rank equivalent to brigadier general during a career in the Ministry of Public Security, he had become a businessman as president of the Daeyang Trading Company. The company’s purpose—like that of some 150 other trading companies that had been set up in various units of the regime including the military since 1971—-was to raise foreign currency. Daeyang was assigned to acquire millions of dollars to help finance the 1989 youth festival. Kim went abroad on that mission in 1988. His efforts failed and, he told me, he believed he would be punished upon his return to North Korea. Thus he defected, via the Netherlands, to South Korea. In Seoul following his debriefing he was given a post at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies, researching and writing on North Korean political, economic and military matters.

Kim showed up for our first talk in November 1993 looking the part of a businessman in a crisp, starched white shirt, a nice silk tie and a well-tailored blue suit. He wore a gold wrist-watch. He showed a facial resemblance to members of the Kim Il-sung family and, tantalizingly he called attention to that resemblance. “Don’t you think I look like Kim Jong-il?” he asked me, noting that the Jong of his own middle name was the same character as the Jong in Kim Jong-il’s name. He quickly denied any blood relationship, though, saying the resemblance was mere coincidence. He told me he had known Kim Jong-il while growing up, especially between 1957 and 1961; they had hung out together, along with other children of elite officials, although Kim Jong-il was several years older. Kim Jong-min’s father was an editor of Nodong Shinmun, the party daily he told me.

Kim’s testimony was useful in helping me to understand the mindset of North Korean high officials at the time of the first nuclear weapons crisis. Ways of thinking in North Korea changed slowly and his remarks remained illuminating after the country’s nuclear weapons became, once again, the center of attention. Thus I offer much of our exchange in the following pages.

Q. You keep joking about how your middle name is the same as Kim Jong-il’s and you look like him, but you say you’re not one of his brothers. I’m trying to figure out how a less-than-top official like your father, who wasn’t the top editor of Nodong Shinmun, could live in the neighborhood with Kim Il-sung and the rest of the top leadership, the people you mentioned earlier as your neighbors.

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