The North: Unceasing Repression

Despite his penchant for authoritarianism, South Korea's President Park Chung Hee seems positively Jeffersonian compared with his counterpart north of the Demilitarized Zone. No other country can rival North Korea in its thoroughgoing control over every aspect of the lives of its 15 million citizens, or in the total deification of its leader, President Kim Il Sung, 63.

In nearly three decades of totalitarian rule, the Korean Workers' Party (as the Communist Party is called) has eliminated all traces of political opposition and most private property. The state owns and operates all manufacturing and service enterprises, while peasants have been forced to surrender all but a tiny portion of their land to collective or state farms.

The practice of Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity and animism has been suppressed. Movement about the country is impossible without a travel permit. Every forum for publicly criticizing the government or party has been destroyed. To break down the traditional Korean family structure, the Communist leadership ordered that lineage records be burned. Neighborhood mutual-surveillance teams have been established with the right to poke into the most private family affairs.

At the center of North Korean life looms Kim, head of both government and party and the most durable Communist leader except for Albania's Enver Hoxha (32 years in power to Kim's 30) and Yugoslavia's Tito (32 years). Pictures of the grinning, moonfaced leader are everywhere. Children reverently call him "our father," party officials refer to him as "the sun of our nation" and brides and grooms vow loyalty to him at wedding ceremonies. In Pyongyang, the 95 rooms and 2 1/2 miles of exhibits at the Museum of the Korean Revolution glorify every aspect of Kim's life. All North Koreans are required to devote two hours daily and four on Saturday to the study of Kim's philosophy--an amalgam of Marxist classics and chuch'e--an emphasis on national self-reliance and independence.

Kim originally derived his power from the Soviets. Until the Japanese surrender ended World War II, Kim had been a relatively minor figure in the Korean nationalist movement. But with Soviet backing, Kim easily eliminated rivals within both the nationalist and Communist organizations--often by having them shot.

Cronies and Aunts. Today, Kim still appears to retain absolute power. Top government and party posts are dominated by trusted old cronies and relatives. His brother sits in the Politburo, while his wife is chairwoman of the Central Committee of the Women's League. A host of nieces and aunts hold high posts in that organization. The only challenge to Kim may be health: there have been rumors that he suffers from a malignant tumor in his neck.

Despite his early dependence on the Soviets, Kim has become one of the world's most independent Communist rulers. This is partly a result of his deft ability to play Peking and Moscow off against each other. Probably more important, however, has been Kim's emphasis on chuch'e. As far back as the early 1950s, notes American University Political Scientist Rinn Sup Shinn, Kim became convinced that "North Korea's survival would be in peril if it did not achieve economic and military self-sufficiency." As a result, Kim has been driving his country's labor force at a brutal pace in order to industrialize.

To some extent, Kim has succeeded. From the nearly total ruins of the war, an industrial plant has been constructed that uses technologically obsolete methods to exploit the country's rich deposits of coal, copper, lead, zinc and a score of other important minerals. Historically a food-deficit area, North Korea today can at least feed its people a subsistence diet. To be sure, North Korean cities are depressingly drab, life remains hard, and even the most basic consumer goods are of poor quality and in chronically short supply. Moreover, Pyongyang is so overextended that it has been defaulting on foreign loans.

The North Koreans, nonetheless, enjoy low-cost housing, old-age pensions and free schooling and medical care. While its living standard lags far behind South Korea's and its foreign trade of $1.1 billion is only a tenth the size of Seoul's, the North has forged well ahead of such Asian Communist states as China, Mongolia and North Viet Nam.

Kim's major goal remains the unification of the Korean peninsula under his rule. Because U.S. troops as well as Seoul's armed forces frustrate that effort, Kim has waged a savagely virulent anti-U.S. campaign. His determination to harass and humiliate Washington into withdrawing its troops was probably behind North Korea's capture of the U.S.S. Pueblo and its crew in January 1968 and the downing of an unarmed U.S. reconnaissance plane over international waters 16 months later. This temporarily earned him a reputation as an "outlaw Communist," and a top U.S. official, appalled by his unpredictability, only last week referred to him as "a lunatic." Kim has successfully courted other countries, however: Pyongyang now has diplomatic relations with 81 nations, v. 93 for Seoul.

There are rumors that Kim's nepotism is so deep-dyed that he is grooming his son Kim Jong Il, 35, as his successor. But neither Western nor Asian observers are sure. In fact all they can say with complete certainty about Kim Il Sung is that he is xenophobic, chauvinistic, ambitious, egocentric and thoroughly unpredictable--a combustible mix in a man with a modern army of nearly half a million and reserves of 2 million at his command.

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