Kim “has watched…what has happened around the world relative to nations that possess nuclear capabilities and the leverage they have” and added that the lesson from Libya for North Korea is: “If you had nukes, never give them up. If you don’t have them, get them.”
If we unpack this comparison, we can envision how much Kim Jong Un might have been affected by the death of Muammar al-Qaddafi. The once “king of kings in Africa,” who ruled Libya for four decades, was captured by rebels in October 2011, well into Jong Un’s grooming process and just two months before Kim Jong Il’s death. Graphic images of the bloodied Qaddafi ricocheted around the world, and one can imagine how the pictures might have been seared into Kim’s brain as he adopted his relatively new public status as the anointed leader of North Korea. As one contemporary account described:
A dazed and confused Gaddafi is led from the drain where he was captured, bleeding heavily from a deep wound on the left side of his head, from his arm, and, apparently, from other injuries to his neck and torso, staining his tunic red with blood. He is next seen on the ground, surrounded by men with weapons shouting “God is great” and firing in the air.
As the angry mob pummeled Qaddafi’s body, the once powerful man begged for mercy before he drifted out of consciousness. Befitting his gruesome and humiliating end, “the body of the former dictator once so feared by his Libyan opponents was facing a final indignity—being stored on the floor of a room-sized freezer in Misrata usually used by restaurants and shops to keep perishable goods.”
Washington’s promises of a better future if North Korea denuclearized probably sounded hollow to the regime in Pyongyang. The North’s Foreign Ministry said at the time that Qaddafi’s overthrow showed that the U.S.-led effort to coax Libya to give up its weapons of mass destruction had been “an invasion tactic to disarm the country.”
And for Jong Un and his generation, who had come of age in a nuclear North Korea, denuclearization is most likely a foreign concept, an artifact of a distant “pre-modern” time. Furthermore, Qaddafi’s death occurred in the context of the so-called Arab Spring, during a wave of popular protests against authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa, which must have highlighted for Kim the consequences of exercising insufficient suppression over a potentially powerful populace fueled by discontent and unfulfilled dreams. While nurturing the nuclear weapons program, Kim sought to fulfill those dreams of a socialist utopia, as he himself defined it.
Kim Jong Un could not have asked for a better year to emerge as North Korea’s leader, just in time to celebrate the centenary of his grandfather’s birth, April 15, 2012—the day that Jong Un chose to give his first public address. The regime, under his father, had long been preparing for this date, which for North Koreans is like Christmas and the Fourth of July rolled into one. It was a sad occasion, to be sure, coming just five months after Kim Jong Il died, but it presented an ideal opportunity for his son to harness sympathy, filial piety, and nationalism to his advantage.
So when North Koreans listened to Kim Jong Un deliver his speech that day, it was the first time that they had heard their leader’s voice since the days of Kim Il Sung. Adopting the mantle of the mythical, godlike leadership role that his grandfather and his father assumed and continued to hold even in death, Kim played up his likeness to his grandfather in appearance and demeanor to emphasize continuity and the bloodline, as if to proclaim himself the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung, whose policies were imprinted in his genes. Playing that role gave the new leader an aura of inevitability and predestination, while the centennial year imparted a sense of time being a flat circle.
But Kim Jong Un hasn’t been one to rest on his predecessors’ laurels. And while he has invoked the legacy of his grandfather and his father, he seems determined to chart his own path.
THE GUERRILLA’S GRANDSON
North Korea’s fashioning of Kim Jong Un to resemble his grandfather is most likely a deliberate attempt to brush away the inconvenience of his real background and experience. If Kim Jong Il’s propagandists had little to work with, given his own privileged upbringing and lack of guerrilla credentials when he succeeded his father, Jong Un was even more problematic. His mother