Once again, the world’s attention has turned to North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un—the man presiding over an inhuman regime of hereditary Stalinism, a prison-state where hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, men, women, their children and elderly parents alike, rot as captive slaves in concentration camps.
The trigger this time? A South Korean MP told journalists in Seoul that the country’s National Intelligence Service reckons Kim Jong-un has picked his 13-year-old daughter, Kim Ju-ae, as his successor to lead North Korea—which explains why she’s been popping up more and more at official events, glued to her father’s side.
Given that power in North Korea has passed through three generations of the Kim family, it’s hardly a shock—by that country’s standards, at any rate—that the current leader has already handpicked one of his children to take over when he… passes. We all know Kim Jong-un inherited power from his father, Kim Jong-il, who died of a stroke in 2011.
Kim Jong-il, in turn, had taken the reins from his own father, Kim Il-sung, when he died in 1994. Kim Il-sung was the founder of North Korea, ruling from 1948, imposing his ideology of “self-reliance” and transforming the country into what it remains today—the most closed society on the planet, with the cult of the leader as its religion.
What breaks the pattern of power transfer is this: for the first time in North Korea’s dismal history—a deeply patriarchal society—it appears the leader’s chosen successor is not one of his sons, but his daughter.
No one can predict with any certainty where this country will end up if a woman takes power, but personally, I hope it might lay the groundwork for liberating the place from the shackles of an inhuman regime that holds it captive in the darkest Middle Ages of humanity.
I should note that North Korea, along with two other communist states—China and Cuba—belongs to that group of countries where state-sponsored human trafficking and forced labour of citizens deemed dissenters from the regime, and therefore… “enemies of the people”… are imposed as policy.
But I’ll continue on this subject tomorrow, given that years ago I found myself at the dividing line of the 38th Parallel, crossing from the civilised state of South Korea into the state of shadow-people in the North one, representing the Union of Cyprus Journalists at an international press conference in Seoul.
