Kim Jong-il's Son Promoted as N.Korean Ruling Party Convenes

North Korea's official media say ruler Kim Jong-il has named his youngest son as a military general. The [North] Korean Central News Agency announced the move on Tuesday, just hours before the start of the ruling party's biggest gathering in 30 years. It lends credence to predictions that the Workers' Party meeting will be used to prepare for an eventual transfer of power to Kim's third and youngest son, Kim Jong-un.

The agency said that Kim Kyong-hui, which is the name of Kim Jong-il's sister, was also promoted to the rank of general. Some experts have said she or her husband could be given a prominent post to help prepare the North Korean leader's son, who is only in his 20s, to take over power.

Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Kurt Campbell told reporters that Washington is watching the developments carefully and will discuss them with its partners in the region. Campbell said it is too early to understand what is going on inside North Korea's leadership.

Analysts expect the delegates to fill a number of vacant posts and name younger officials to replace some elderly members.

Is the real Kim Jong-il dead, and his role being played by a double?

North Korea’s ruling party is to hold a conference next week to anoint Kim Jong-un, the twenty something son of the present leader, Kim Jong il, the next head of state. There won’t be any discussion of alternatives; it’s already a forgone conclusion.

Yet the occasion does raise the question of whether the original “Dear Leader” is still alive at all, or whether it is actually his double, acting as a puppet head of the state for the army, who has been sitting in the driving seat all these years.

At the World Economic Forum’s “summer Davos”, held in the Chinese city of Tianjin last week, Toshimitsu Shigemura, a professor at Waseda University in Japan and a self proclaimed “expert” on North Korea, insisted that the present Kim Jong il is in fact a double. There is no question of it, he says, for he has irrefutable proof of the fact.

It’s not just that there has been no recent photograph of the dear leader; computer analysis of his voice shows the present Kim Jong not to be the same man as the one of some years ago. “I’m willing to accept that his son is about to become leader, but who exactly is he succeeding?”, asked Professor Shigemura.

In the same discussion, Moon Chung-In, a professor of political science at Yonsei University, Republic of Korea, dismissed this claim as utter tosh. He’d met Kim Jong il on several occassions, and there was no question but that he was the same man on each of them. However, Professor Chung-il accepted that who ever the leader really was, it was largely academic, since he was in effect only the puppet of the military.

The same would be true of Kim Jong un (oh do keep up!), a bit of a waster by all accounts who has never done a serious job in his life. Could his succession nevertheless mark a thaw in relations with the West and South Korea? Is it even possible that in return for the removal of sanctions he could do a Colonel Gaddafi, come in from the cold and give up on North Korea’s nuclear ambitions?


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