A World Without Kim

By JAMES WALSH

Grant at least this much to Kim Il Sung: he certainly knew how to go out with a bang. The last Stalinist dictator managed to die just when the parts of the world most unsympathetic to him would miss the ultimate totalitarian the most. A god-king to his own people, a monster to those he waged war on and a riddle to almost everyone else, the only leader that communist North Korea has ever known perished at such a delicate point of diplomacy that even his sternest ill-wishers were praying that it was not true. Late last week, as Radio Pyongyang nearly sobbed the announcement from a capital glum with rain, the news sent shock waves in widening circles from Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing to Washington, Geneva and the Group of Seven summit in Naples. "He was the greatest of the great men," intoned Radio Pyongyang. To the U.S. and others, he was merely a great, if unfortunate, necessity.

Kim's death, officially from heart seizure owing to blockage of an artery, came at a time when U.S. and North Korean negotiators were just beginning talks in Geneva on the dangerously mounting dispute over Pyongyang's nuclear program. The first session on Friday was "very useful and productive," according to U.S. team leader Robert Gallucci -- and then the report came of Kim's demise. The North Koreans asked for a suspension of talks, which the Americans understandingly gave. But what worried U.S. officials, including President Bill Clinton as he was awakened at 6:30 a.m. in Naples to hear the news, was who in North Korea or indeed on earth could be expected to command the authority that Kim had wielded in such matters.

The man styled by his police state for decades as the Great Leader had seemed to take personal charge of finding a way to end the showdown over accusations that his country was well on its way to building atom bombs. In his meeting last month with Jimmy Carter, Kim virtually overnight defused tensions by promising the former U.S. President that he would freeze the nuclear program. Washington then backed off from proposing economic sanctions to the U.N. and set in motion the new attempt at dialogue. The first-ever summit between North and South Korean leaders, slated for July 25, was another diplomatic triumph for the 82-year-old autocrat. The North has said it still wants to go ahead with the meeting, but with the Great Leader's funeral now scheduled for July 17, it will probably be postponed.

Internally, Kim's passing was definitely the end of an era. Foreign diplomats inside the country reported that children were breaking out spontaneously in tears and masses of stunned, flower-laden mourners were filing through the streets. Beyond that, though, the death also signaled a likely accession to power of the spectacularly mysterious Kim Jong Il, the Great Leader's son and anointed heir.

Would he venture peace, threats, war? Would he last for years, six months, six weeks? At a press conference in Naples, Clinton said he saw no reason to panic. Though South Korean President Kim Young Sam had ordered his forces on emergency alert just in case, Clinton said he agreed with Washington's top brass that events had revealed "no evident alarming change" and that nothing ) so far warranted beefing up the 35,000 U.S. forces now stationed in the South. Asked what he thought of Kim Jong Il's prospects, however, the President admitted, "I don't know how to answer that."

Very few do. Said Arnold Kanter, a Bush Administration Under Secretary of State who conducted previous talks with Pyongyang: "What we don't know about North Korea is so vast that it makes the Kremlin of the 1950s look like an open book." The communist northern tier of a peninsula once known as the Hermit Kingdom has lived up to that name with a vengeance, enveloping its 22 million people in a bell jar of propaganda, thought control and mythology glorifying the Kims, often in public pageants that would dwarf a Cecil B. DeMille production. What factions may exist in the leadership, who controls them and what they stand for -- all are practically pure guesswork on the part of the most diligent outside intelligence analysts. What is reputed about Jong Il -- known as the Dear Leader -- is itself a mass of contradictions: terrorist and warmonger, or would-be economic reformer and peacemaker? A pampered, pouting sorehead indifferent to responsibilities, or a relatively shrewd go-getter who has mastered much statecraft?

The weight of opinion holds that this candidate for the first dynastic succession in the dwindling communist world cannot hold a candle to his father. The North Korean myths exalting Jong Il are so elaborate as to be hilarious. As with Kim Il Sung, who was said to have nearly supernatural powers and be in several places at the same time, Kim Jong Il's life is swaddled in layers of official fable worthy of a demigod. His birth was foretold by a swallow. A double rainbow appeared over sacred Mount Paektu when he was born. The mythographers have not claimed that he was suckled by a she- wolf and tutored by centaurs, but their hyperbole in other matters is nearly that far a reach. Jong Il supposedly has mastered all knowledge, and his thoughts are studied at great world universities. In fact, his only travels outside his homeland -- a cause of real concern for other governments -- have been to communist countries, plus a stint of studies on Malta.

That lack of exposure to nations outside the world according to Marx might, in the most alarmist view, cause him to gamble disastrously on the nature of his adversaries and his chances of winning a war. At the very least, analysts believe, he seems sure to try to consolidate power by not antagonizing the military.

As of last weekend, however, the Dear Leader had still not sewn up his accession. The fact that the announcement of his father's death was delayed a full day and a half suggested to some outsiders that Kim Jong Il was busy lining up support behind the scenes. Several hours after the broadcast, a number of top Establishment figures came out with statements of allegiance to him. Even then, he was not styled President -- yet. That formality, assuming it comes, will have to wait for some quasi-coronation ceremonies at high councils of the party and state.

Significantly, China reacted gingerly to the news of Kim Il Sung's death and barely mentioned the son, even though he had already been named to head the funeral committee -- usually a solid sign in communist successions that the nominee is destined to become maximum leader. From the time Kim Il Sung sent his tanks rolling across the Demilitarized Zone in 1950, precipitating the cold war's first hot conflict and bloodshed on a grand scale, Beijing has been wedded to the fortunes of North Korea's founder, a man Mao Zedong embraced as a strong ally. Over the years the friendship sweetened and soured, but the alliance remained fast. Evidence that Deng Xiaoping's China was withholding approval of the designated heir was a potent signal. Of the dynastic passing of power, a Chinese academic remarked, "China cannot criticize, but we are not accustomed to this method." According to some reports, Deng advised Kim Il Sung in 1992 not to go through with the family legacy.

Was the Great Leader himself having second thoughts before he died? A few signs suggest it -- and some South Korean journalists and intelligence sources did not hesitate to wonder whether Kim Sr.'s death might have been given a helping hand as a result. While no proof of this exists, what is known is that Kim Il Sung emerged from a semiretirement of sorts earlier this year and adopted a stronger public role, not long after the nuclear dispute with the U.S. and other countries began sharpening. At the same time, some North Korean officials had asked Chinese physicians for advice on diagnosis of a peculiar brain injury -- a wound that insiders said Kim Jong Il had suffered in a car crash last September. The fact that the Dear Leader appeared in public and in seemingly fine condition soon afterward hinted at a possible face-saving attempt to sideline him from duty.

Of the official heir, former U.S. ambassador to Seoul Donald Gregg said he | is "a short, unprepossessing kid following a tremendously charismatic, long- tenured father, desperately trying to live up to him." In any case, as former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger noted, the changing of the guard "adds uncertainty at precisely the time we don't need it." Jong Il plainly will find some rough going in acquiring his father's stature. Noted Norman Levin, a senior analyst at Rand Corp. in California: "If Kim Il Sung said white is black, he could make it stick. No one now has that sort of authority."

Which is the big, potentially fateful trouble. North Korea has been organized so tightly into a pyramid of power with Kim Il Sung at its apex that the possibility of a cataclysmic social implosion cannot be ruled out. Not that many years ago, Pyongyang still confidently spread the word that Kim's homeland was a paradise on earth and that South Korea was a brutally poor, miserable place under Uncle Sam's bootheel. "The game is finished," observed one South Korean official. Not only is the South's economy 14 times stronger than the North's, he pointed out, but "the ideological game is also over. The only rational way for the North is to cooperate, save face and gradually integrate."

Nonetheless, rationality -- even in the face of what is now widespread North Korean deprivation and hunger to the point of starvation, by many accounts -- has not been Pyongyang's strong suit. With hardline communism having collapsed all over the world, Kim Il Sung's ruling philosophy of Juche, or self-reliance, became exposed as a transparent failure and fraud. With shortages of essential supplies that used to be delivered on soft terms from Moscow and Beijing, the theoretically supreme independence of the North has become deepening economic despair. Yet the regime has soldiered on with its old ways, apparently in dread for its survival.

"We have to acknowledge collapse and a German-style unification by absorption as a real possibility," says Sohn Hak Kyu, a spokesman for South Korea's ruling Liberal Democratic Party. "On the one hand, this would be a great historic event. On the other, it will cost a lot." One recent study in Seoul estimated that it would take $1.2 trillion and perhaps 20 years to raise the North's economy to parity with the South's -- an effort that would cripple Seoul's prosperity. Even short of that, a tidal wave of refugees crossing the DMZ is a possible nightmare to come.

Far from being a firm ally any longer, one of the North's new refugee | destinations, Russia, has lined up with U.S. efforts to leash the Kims. Denis Dragounsky, a political commentator in Moscow, says Russians are shrugging off the fall of Kim Il Sung with determined indifference: no sorrow was in evidence for one of their final remaining geopolitical embarrassments. But he conceded, "For the remaining Bolshevik believers, they will be depressed that they have lost the last true survivor. All that is left for them now is Cuba."

Whether the communist beat goes on north of the 38th parallel in Asia is currently of secondary importance. The Great Leader bequeathed his people one of the greatest confusions and challenges to face any society. The Dear Leader is not likely to save them from a painful future.

With reporting by James Carney with Clinton, Edward W. Desmond/Tokyo, Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing, Robert Guest/Seoul and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington