North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un: Determined, ruthless – and still there

At the age of less than 30, Kim Jong-Un moved to the top of North Korea at the end of 2011. He quickly proved to be a ruthless and at the same time agile dictator. He now admits that there are dramatic economic problems.

Cheers for the new ruler: It is Kim Jong Uns’s first appearance after he came to power, and he wants to show strength. He would “fight vigorously”, he promised in April 2012, “as the right descendant of a great leader and as the right warrior and disciple of a great general to unite the nation”.

The young ruler is sometimes close to the people, sometimes cruel. So a year later he had his uncle executed before he could be dangerous.

Mason Richey, associate professor of international politics at Hankuk University in Seoul, considers this mixture to be perhaps Kim’s most important achievement. It is “almost astonishing” that Kim is still in power, because North Korea is a “shark tank” and Kim has “held its own against many other sharks”.

Clever at the levers of power

Richey called the dictator in conversation with the ARD as multidimensional. As a man who by now knows exactly how to use the levers of power.

This of course also includes the four nuclear tests so far. He had the first done in 2013. Two more followed three years later. North Korea, says Richey, is now “partly on a par with the USA and China, and that is quite impressive for a small, poor country”.

The consequences of the Warmbier case

But this is not the only reason why relations, especially with the USA, are being severely tested. In the spring of 2016, the US student Otto Warmbier was sentenced to 15 years in a labor camp for stealing a poster in Pyongyang; a good year later he was released in a vegetative state and died a few days after his return to the USA.

Whatever the circumstances of his untimely death, they would have seriously damaged the reputation of North Korea, believes scientist Richey. Because this case still “fires” people in the USA who fight for human rights. But that makes it more difficult to advertise a lifting of the sanctions in the USA.

Constant threat

In the spring of 2017, Kim presumably had his half-brother Kim Jong Nam killed with a neurotoxin at an airport in Malaysia.

Various missile tests and a fourth atomic bomb test follow. The relationship with the USA is getting worse. In January 2018, Kim says:

Approaching Trump

US President Donald Trump threatens to return, but then suddenly the signs point to rapprochement. South Korean President Moon Jae-in takes on the role of mediator. He and Kim will meet on the demarcation line between the two states in April 2018, followed by the summit between Kim and Trump in Singapore in June.

One wants to leave the past behind, the world will experience a significant change, says Kim there. The world is therefore looking hopefully to the second summit between Trump and Kim in February 2019. But, to the surprise of many, it ends without an agreement.

A missed opportunity, according to the head of the North Korean news portal NK News, Chad O’Carroll, who despite all the criticism of Trump still thinks that it was good that a US president went “a different way.” Because even if this is a path with many stumbling blocks, it also takes creativity to solve this problem.

Return to nuclear diplomacy

Nothing happens for months, but Kim at least keeps his promise, despite tightened sanctions, to refrain from further weapon tests. He won’t talk about it again until January 2020.

And then goes underground a few months later. The rumor mill is simmering that the overweight dictator could be seriously ill. Again and again, his sister Kim Yo-jong comes into the limelight – his possible successor? After all, she comes from the same bloodline, which is very important in North Korea.

In spring 2021 Kim disappears again and then returns visibly slimmer. Perhaps he had his stomach made smaller, goes one theory.

The fact is: Kim is even now thicker than most of his compatriots, because North Korea is doing badly economically, even the dictator admitted that. No one has to go hungry, says journalist O’Carroll, but he fears that persistent malnutrition will have long-term consequences.

Isolated in the pandemic

What worries him at least as much: that the country has sealed itself off even further since the pandemic. Hardly anyone manages to escape and Kim is more firmly in the saddle than ever. The North Koreans saw “a terrible future”. It doesn’t look like anything will improve in the country for the foreseeable future.

Scientist Richey is also pessimistic and is already expecting further missile and even nuclear tests. This will happen if it makes strategic sense for the leadership – both from a technical and a diplomatic point of view. But probably not before the Olympic Games in Beijing, so as not to alienate its most important ally, China.