and keep his temper under control, he unleashed his imperial self at home, where the family’s wealth was on full display. Micaelo recalled that unlike other embassy kids, Kim “lived in a flat in a nice residential area near the school…surrounded by the best gadgets that the rest of us kids couldn’t afford—TVs, video recorder, a Sony PlayStation. He had a cook, a driver, a private teacher.” During school vacations, Jong Un and his family went swimming in the French Riviera, skied in the Alps, and enjoyed the thrills at Euro Disney and Tokyo Disneyland. Trips home meant going back to enjoy the family’s vast estates with horses, swimming pools, bowling alleys, even luxury vehicles adapted so that the boys could drive them from a young age. Summers were spent on the east coast of North Korea at their private resort on the beautiful beaches of Wonsan.
Of course, Kim was not a normal boy from a normal family. Worried about how they would fare in Kim Jong Il’s new regime, his aunt and caretaker defected to the United States in 1998. And indeed, under its new leader, their country was about to enter its most dangerous period since the Korean War.
THE FAMINE
While the Kim princes were tucked away in a cocoon of privilege and indulgence, whether in one of the family’s villas in Pyongyang, in resorts on the coast, or in western Europe in the mid- to late 1990s, average North Koreans were in the throes of one of the most devastating human-made disasters in history—the famine that reached its peak from 1995 through 1998. Although exact numbers are hard to verify, six hundred thousand to one million people died as a result, while the Kim family continued to spend lavishly on luxury items and on the military. As the anthropologist Sandra Fahy and others have argued, North Korea’s famine—what the regime called “the arduous march” to anoint it with a revolutionary flavor—was entirely preventable. Fahy claims that avoiding the famine would have required the regime’s abandoning its international isolation and loosening its grip on power. But instead, the government gave priority to its own survival, using the juche, or self-reliance, and songun, or military-first, ideologies to justify leaving the people to fend for themselves.
According to the interviews Fahy held with North Koreans who survived the famine, food was used as a political weapon and reward, distributed according to loyalty, gender, age, and geography—consistent with their songbun, the regime’s elaborate caste system constructed to ensure faithfulness to Kim Jong Il and the cult of Kim Il Sung. High government officials and those who lived in Pyongyang—only those with elite status had the privilege of living in the capital—received more government rations, while those in the isolated, rural northeast and the youngest, aged, and disabled were allotted the least.
Kim Jong Il was unwilling or unable to adapt to the new geopolitical landscape that followed the end of Soviet aid and concessionary loans from China. For example, trade with the Soviet Union, which accounted for more than 50 percent of North Korea’s total trade, decreased from $3.25 billion in 1990 to around $100 million by 1994. Both the confrontation with the United States over its nuclear program between 1992 and 1994 and the domestic uncertainty surrounding the succession process probably factored into the regime’s decision not to address the famine, the causes of which were clearly rooted in its reliance on foreign aid, unsustainable farming practices and outdated equipment, bad agricultural policies, and accumulating debts. Korea experts Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland have revealed that the regime’s public distribution system, which distributed food nationally in monthly or biweekly allotments, was unable to fulfill its mandate, steadily cutting rations to the extent that the government had to launch a “Let’s eat two meals a day” campaign. The flood of 1995 exacerbated the suffering, but the regime blamed the weather much more than was truly the case.
Although the international community responded to the famine with $2 billion in food aid over the course of the following decade, Kim stubbornly clung to North Korea’s old ways, refusing to acknowledge wrongdoing or misguided policies and ignoring the frustrated requests from international monitors of the incoming aid to ensure that it went to the most vulnerable populations. Instead, 10 to 30 percent of international donations did not reach their intended destinations, as local, party, and military officials siphoned off the items for personal use or to sell in the markets for profit, according to