💾 Archived View for gmi.noulin.net › mobileNews › 1862.gmi captured on 2023-06-16 at 20:34:48. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
2010-03-10 12:31:14
By Donald Kirk Donald Kirk Tue Mar 9, 12:55 pm ET
Seoul, South Korea Firsthand expos s about the personal lives of North Korea
s leaders can put the lives of their authors at risk, even if they are far
away.The latest tell-all, published in Austria by two journalists to whom
former Army Col. Kim Jong-ryul told his story, is a case in point.
By his own account, Mr. Kim who describes the dozens of villas and beautiful
furnishings included in the lavish lifestyles of Kim Il-sung and his son Kim
Jong-il says he realizes the danger.
Maybe I ll be shot, killed in the next few days, Kim Jong-ryul, who escaped
North Korea in 1994 and now lives at a secret address, told reporters in Vienna
after the book came out. At least, "now I can die with a clear conscience," he
said. But without [publishing] this book, I didn t want to die.
The book adds to a growing body of evidence of the selfishness of the North's
Kim Il-sung, who ignored the suffering of his people while focusing on his own
comfort and safety. An engineer, Kim Jong-ryul said he was asked to design a
special filtration system for the shelter in which Kim Il-sung and his family
could hide in order to survive a nuclear attack.
The Great Leader, as Kim Il-sung was routinely called, placed special agents in
Europe just to buy the fancy items he wanted. An agent in Romania, for
instance, bought a small Cessna plane for him, as well as hunting rifles. Kim
himself sometimes spent months at a time looking for all the goods, big and
small, on the shopping list.
To go public with such juicy tidbits is enough to invite the death penalty
even for those who manage to flee the country. Activists agree such fear is not
the stuff of paranoia. It s very dangerous to write about North Korea, says
Peter Chung, who runs an organization in Seoul called Justice for North Korea,
which is dedicated to helping defectors.
In the Dictator s Service, written in German by Austrian journalists Ingrid
Steiner-Gashi and Dardan Gashi, reveals the dietary cravings and demands, the
parties and the lovely surroundings, in which Kim Il-sung existed for much of
the 49 years that he ruled North Korea. He died in 1994 after ensuring that his
son, Kim Jong-il, would succeed him.
A crime to have known anything
It may be even more dangerous to write about the man who's known in the North
as the Dear Leader.
The nephew of Song Hye-rim, a woman who became either Kim Jong-il s second wife
or longtime consort, and bore his oldest son, was assassinated in Seoul in 1997
after writing memoirs about the dictator. Lee Han-young had been living in
Seoul since defecting in 1982 until a pair of gunmen killed him outside the
apartment of a friend.
Kim Jong-il s private life is not normal, says Mr. Chung. It is a crime to
speak out about it.
It is even a crime to have known anything about it, according to a book
published here by Kim Young-seung, a schoolgirl friend of Ms. Song.
Ms. Kim, held for nine years in one of North Korea s infamous prison camps for
the worst political offenders, says she never was told the charge against her
but came to know during months of torture that her offense was that she had
been "a friend of the second wife of Kim Jong-il, and I knew about his private
life.
Her closest relatives were imprisoned as well. During her imprisonment, her
parents starved to death, one of her sons drowned, another was shot trying to
escape, and her husband "disappeared.
"Even the beasts would be ashamed to be there," Kim says.
Her story provides remarkable fresh clues into the private life of Kim Jong-il,
who left Song for his third consort, Ko Young-hee, a dancer and mother of sons
No. 2 and 3. The latter is the heir-apparent Kim Jong-un, who is in his 20s.
After being freed from prison around 1989, Kim escaped to China in 2001, a year
before Song died in exile in Moscow, and then to South Korea via Vietnam. Ms.
Ko, who was diagnosed with breast cancer, died two years later.
Kim Young-seung knows she may be at risk but does not feel afraid. This is my
story, she says, smiling slightly and pulling a copy of her book from her
handbag.
Villas and luxury cars amid poverty Kim Jong-ryul s story provides still more
glimmerings. Kim Il-sung only ate foreign food" and had his chefs study in
Vienna, he said. He had a passion for high-priced foreign cars, ranging from
Mercedes-Benz and Citroens to Cadillacs and Lincolns, made in the lairs of his
worst enemy, the United States.
The leader s shopping lists for Europe included luxury goods ranging from
carpets to gold-plated guns.
The former colonel s account, says Peters, the activist, highlights the
perverse contrast between the lives of the Kim family dynasty and the tens of
millions of beleaguered North Korean peasantry.
Kim Il-sung died just as North Korea was entering a famine in which 2 million
people are estimated to have died.