Kim turns 10 years as an iron fist dictator in an even more isolated North Korea

“World knows little about the son chosen to succeed Kim,” read the first mention of Kim Jong-un in this leaf, in 2009, when he was appointed heir to the command of the North Korean dictatorship when Kim Jong-il died. “Most of the information comes from a sushiman who worked for the government,” the text underscored.

A little more than two years later, the man who until then had barely appeared in public was guiding the coffin of his father, who died on December 17, 2011, and was preparing to become the country’s new leader.

That first report heard political analysts say that “regardless of who happens to be the front figure” at North Korea’s head, the “really important decisions” would likely be made not by him but by strong men in the regime.

Over the past ten years, Respected Supreme Leader Comrade Kim Jong-un —as the state media often refer to him— has shown himself to be a powerful leader. In power, he accelerated the nuclear program and tried a way out of isolation when meeting with then-American President Donald Trump, but ended up closing even more the solid borders of the country.

“In general, Kim’s main achievement was to have survived,” he tells leaf Clark Sorensen, professor emeritus at the University of Washington and director of the institution’s Center for Korean Studies, who sees his consolidation in power as a great credit to the dictator.

Initially seen as a puppet of the country’s generals in his early years in office, Kim gained legitimacy at times through the use of violence, even leading to the execution for treason of his uncle and top political adviser, Jang Song-thaek —who was considered the leader of fact of the country in the last years of Kim Jong-il in power.

There was at least one other family execution, that of the dictator’s brother Kim Jong-nam, in 2017, in Malaysia, with a nervous agent. Investigations indicated that the North Korean government had commissioned the murder.

But what analysts believe helps set Kim’s decade ahead of North Korea is the nuclear race, with four tests of atomic weapons and the development of missiles that would have enough range to hit the United States.

At first, the movements further isolated the country, considered the most closed in the world, but later served as an asset for exactly the opposite: as a negotiating currency for the relief of international sanctions.

The culmination of Kim’s projection came from 2018, when he negotiated a possible denuclearization with Trump. The meetings drew attention, as months earlier the republican had promised “fire and fury” against the dictator, whom he referred to as “little rocket man” and “sick puppy”, among other less flattering epithets, in a period of escalating tensions that lit the alert for a possible war.

There were three meetings between the two leaders: in Singapore, Vietnam and in the demilitarized zone of Korea, when Trump was the first US president to set foot on North Korean soil.

The relationship, however, did not hitch, and the two countries never moved towards an agreement with concrete results. “This attempt to break the isolation turned out to have no long-term benefits for North Korea, perhaps because of unrealistic expectations about what Trump would do in terms of easing sanctions,” says Sorensen.

He further points out that the regime has no longer responded to South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s attempts at rapprochement and that today North Korea is more closed than at any time in its recent history.

Since Covid-19 erupted in neighboring China, North Korea has locked itself in and remains so, which has affected supplies and exacerbated the crisis. The country, like almost every nation in the world, saw its GDP drop 4.5% in the first year of the pandemic, according to a projection by Bank of Korea, consolidating the errant trajectory of an economy that has grown used in recent years to grow and shrink without a clear trend.

The country has not yet started to vaccinate its population and, isolated, it claims that it has not registered any case of Covid-19.

Even with the projection achieved during the rapprochement with the US under Trump, the North Korean regime maintains almost the same mystery about the regime’s leader highlighted by the report in leaf from 2009.

Information about her personal life is scarce and it is not known how many children she has. Kim himself spent weeks missing in 2020, as well as having stepped out of the spotlight on several occasions this year. When he resurfaced with 20 kilos lighter, rumors returned about his health — a South Korean tabloid even claimed that a stuntman had been appearing in the dictator’s place.

For the next ten years, observers are expected to double the bet and consolidate his position as the country’s sole leader. He has already reinforced public appearances, and Pyongyang came to use the term “Kimjongunism” to refer to the dominant political ideology in the country today (which would be independent of the “Kimjongilism” and “Kimilsungism” of his father and grandfather, respectively) .

The regime even removed from a conference room of the Korean Workers’ Party the photos of the two dictators who preceded it, in a process of erasure common in the country’s successions. Kim works with an iron fist so that her own photos won’t be replaced soon.