SUPREME SISTER:

is Princess Kim Yo Jong poised to be North Korea’s next ruler?

North Korean princess Kim Yo Jong is seen as the brains behind her tyrannical brother Kim Jong Un. Amid rumours of his failing health, Genevieve Gannon asks, could his sister be the next Supreme Ruler?

Aweek before the 2018 Winter Olympics began, amid the snow-capped mountains of South Korea, the country’s brutal neighbours to the north made an extraordinary announcement. There was to be a last-minute addition to the North Korean delegation: Kim Yo Jong, the rarely seen sister of the Supreme Leader, would be attending. The news caused a frenzy. No member of the North’s ruling party had entered the South since the war ended in 1953.

Furthermore, the princess was so mysterious that even banal facts, such as her birth date, were disputed. What was known about her was that she had a special bond with her despotic big brother, Kim Jong Un, and was rumoured to be his heir. So when she stepped off the royal jet, Air Force Un, to begin three days of diplomatic appointments, the world’s press was eagerly waiting to capture every detail of the diminutive young woman who may one day lead the most brutal regime on earth.

“He had unleashed his secret weapon,” journalist Anna Fifield observed.

Kim Yo Jong cut a surprising figure. For a member of a dynasty known for its bizarre excesses and extreme cruelty, she was simply dressed. She paired utilitarian black outfits with the pulled-back hairstyle of a factory worker. Flanked by bodyguards in sky-blue ties, she wrote a message in the Olympic guestbook expressing a hope that the two nations would “get closer in our people’s hearts”. This set the tone for the visit, which won her praise for her light diplomatic touch. The press feted her apparent modesty, even as her name sat on a US Treasury blacklist for severe human rights violations.

The BBC called her tour a “charm offensive” in stark contrast to the language it used for her volatile brother.

When darkness fell, she retreated to the presidential suite of a five-star hotel. But, as Anna explains in her biography of Kim Jong Un, The Great Successor, instead of sleeping in the luxurious hotel bed, Kim Yo Jong spent her nights on a fold-out cot that had been flown in for her from North Korea. Before she left, her entourage wiped the room clean. Not a hair, nor a fingerprint, nor a speck of dust remained after the princess’ visit. The paranoid regime could not risk enemy spies getting their hands on any Kim DNA.

“Kim Yo Jong, like her brother, is part of the ‘pure’ bloodline directly descended from Mount Paektu,” writes Jung H. Pak, a former CIA operative-turned-academic.

As rumours of ill-health swirled around the hard-drinking, overweight dictator Kim Jong Un this year, the fascination with his more palatable, younger sister has increased. Many observers say the chauvinistic, totalitarian state will never allow a woman to reign, but Jung argues the country’s obsession with the myth of Mount Paektu works in Kim Yo Jong’s favour. “North Korea has long celebrated itself as a pure race,” Jung writes. When Stalin installed Kim Jong Un and Kim Yo Jong’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung, as the leader of North Korea in 1948, the citizens of the newly created communist kingdom were force-fed the story that he was a pure son of Mount Paektu, where the Korean race is said to have originated. The potent claim of divinity, purity and pre-destiny has become part of the hermit kingdom’s identity, seared onto the public psyche by the statecontrolled media.

“If she has to take over in a pinch, she will have decades of regime propaganda and ideology to back her up,” Jung wrote of Kim Yo Jong in

The Washington Post. She will also have a history of unflinching loyalty. The first sister has shown herself to be a dutiful servant of the ruthless family. When Kim Jong Un met with US President Donald Trump in 2018, she was seen following her brother around with an ashtray. What appeared to be a subservient role in fact indicated deep trust, according to Anna. The ash had been near the Supreme Leader’s mouth. They were on enemy territory. Much like the cot in the South Korean Presidential suite, the ashtray had an important role to play, and only a sister could be trusted with the sacred DNA it caught.

Bound together from birth

As powerful as the Mt Paektu bloodline is in North Korea, it is no guarantee of protection. When Kim Jong Un took control of the regime as an inexperienced 27-year-old, one of his first acts was to execute his uncle. He is also widely blamed for the assassination of his half-brother, Kim Jong Nam in 2017, with a nerve agent developed for chemical warfare. (North Korea denies involvement.)

But Kim Yo Jong has always been a favourite of the current ruler.

One of the best sources on the private lives of the Kim family is Kenji Fujimoto, who defected to Japan after serving as Kim Jong Il’s personal chef for 13 years. He has tantalised the global press with strange anecdotes from the insular state, such as the kitchen staff who had to inspect every individual grain of rice served to Kim Jong Il. Fujimoto says he was twice sentenced to forced labour during his time in North Korea, including a six-month stretch for failing to clean his room. He has also described an almost tender brother-sister relationship between the present Supreme Leader and Kim Yo Jong.

“When she was playing and her trousers or her nappies would start to fall down it was always Kim Jong Un who noticed,” Fujimoto told the BBC. “‘Watch out, watch out!’ he would say and he would pull them up. He was so fond of her and he’s still fond of her today.”

Fujimoto was more than just a chef to the Kims. His close contact with the family meant he came to occupy a role somewhere between a friend and a flunky to Kim Jong Il, and later his sons. Fujimoto and Kim Yo Jong were what passed for playmates during

Kim Jong Un’s lonely childhood.

“The intensely paranoid Kim Jong Il kept all his families separate from each other, meaning that the children grew up without knowing their half siblings or really anyone their own age,” Anna Fifield writes.

If Kim Jong Il was extreme in the way he shielded his children from the outside world, he had good reason. Since he had taken over from his revered father in 1994, the kingdom had decayed. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left Kim Jong Il without the largesse of his benefactor state, and the citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) faced a crisis. Famine ravaged the country, claiming untold lives. Information is so tightly controlled that the exact number is still unknown, but estimates range from a quarter of a million to 3.5 million deaths.

Fujimoto has described flying all over the world during this time to get ingredients for lavish meals in Kim Jong Il’s compounds. Iran for caviar, Denmark for pork and Thailand for mangoes and papayas. All this while the nation starved.

“The DPRK is what happens when the Godfather and his cronies manage to take over a whole country,” writes academic Robert E Kelly. “The Kims are the Korean version of the Corleones.”

As he grew, Kim Jong Un began to exhibit the same vices as his father. He was short-tempered, spoilt and prone to the same absurd boasting. Kim Jong Il

spent up to US$800,000 on cognac a year and claimed he could control the weather with his mind. The princeling, who began carrying a pistol at age 11, envisioned himself as the next leader and, according to Fujimoto, had a penchant for Yves Saint Laurent cigarettes.

But Kim Jong Un was by no means the obvious choice to become the next Generalissimo. He was not his father’s first son. He was not even the first son of the union between his dictator father and his mother, Ko Yong Hui, who was a low-ranking fourth consort. But he was the son of the favourite who leveraged her charm to her children’s advantage.

“The succession question had much more to do with the ambition of the mothers than the suitability of the sons,” Anna writes.

Those who closely watch North Korea agree the beautiful and cunning mother of Kim Jong Un and Kim Yo Jong helped lay the path for her son to rise to the head of the state.

Kim Jong Il had already fathered children to three women when he fell for Ko Yong Hui, one of the dancers in the prestigious Mansudae Art Troupe. He was a short man of 5’4” (164cm) who compensated by wearing platform shoes and a strange bouffant hairstyle. When he met the dancer who was compared to the most beautiful Japanese movie stars, he was besotted. Says Anna: “Her influence came to be seen everywhere. Such as in the way Donald Duck and Tom and Jerry cartoons suddenly appeared on television, dubbed into Korean, right around the time her children would have been watching them.” America was a great enemy, but Ko Yong Hui had convinced the ruler to broadcast their cartoons to entertain her children.

Kim Jong Il’s first son, Kim Jong Nam, born to his second consort, should have been the likely choice of successor but he removed himself from the running with a series of scandals. Some saw Ko Yong Hui’s hand in the first son’s downfall, expertly moving aside the rival, like a chess player manoeuvring pieces around the board. But it would be wrong to characterise Ko Yong Hui as a scheming Lady Macbeth. Her devotion to her husband was total.

As was her devotion to her children. Kim Jong Un and Kim Yo Jong were both sent to school in Switzerland, disguised as the children of diplomats. According to North Korea researcher Youngshik Bong, their time in Switzerland cemented the bond between future leader and sister.

“They were virtually in exile together, both knowing what the future had in store for them,” Youngshik explains. “They must have gained a tremendous sense of having a common fate.”

Very few details have emerged of the Kims’ education, though there are reports the studious Kim Yo Jong earned an engineering degree, while her brother, who was more preoccupied with basketball, didn’t even sit his final high school exams. From Switzerland, Kim Jong Un was sent to a military academy, another decision that has been credited to his mother. It was time for Kim Jong Il to choose his heir.

The regime had established hereditary rule, but it was a tradition built on a powerful cult of personality, so when choosing his successor, Kim Jong Il had to consider which of his children could maintain the state’s might. Kim Jong Un and Kim Yo Jong have an older brother, Kim Jong Chol, but he was regarded as too “feminine” to lead.

Kim Jong Un was considered “the most aggressive” of Kim Jong Il’s offspring, according to Jung. In Switzerland, he reportedly spat at his classmates and kicked them in their shins in frustration that he couldn’t understand them, due to his own poor grasp of German.

In 2010, the regime seemed to confirm Kim Jong Un would become the next Supreme Leader, and both he and his sister began to appear at official events.

A broken inheritance

One year later Kim Jong Il dropped dead and Kim Jong Un was thrust into power. Footage from the funeral shows a stunned and grieving man marching in the funeral procession through the snow. He is followed closely by his sister. “He was in shock and not really ready to take over,” former foreign policy advisor and US academic Victor Cha told the BBC.

He had no military experience and was perhaps unsure of his position. He embarked on a “monstrous purge” of top-ranking military and party officials. “All of the generals that were with Kim Jong Un by the hearse of his father in the funeral procession are all gone,” Victor Cha says. Kim Jong Un’s uncle was among them.

The state that the young ruler had inherited was a heavily militarised land of privation, whose wealth was hoarded by the elite while most people went without food and electricity. Its notorious political prisons and criminal labour camps were known as the Korean “gulag peninsula”.

Kim Jong Un’s reign appeared to improve the standard of living, but he also ratcheted up military aggression. He has conducted twice as many successful nuclear tests as his father, and more than five times the number of missile tests. He had a propaganda slogan reminiscent of the Hollywood sign erected on a hillside, praising himself as “The Shining Sun!”

In his elevated role, he grew even more cartoonishly extravagant. His pudginess, tantrums and outlandish rhetoric have invited comparisons to a large, bratty baby. But trivialising him in this way is a mistake, says Jung. He is a callous agent of mass murder. A UN investigation into North Korea uncovered “unspeakable” human rights abuses including extermination, torture, murder, rape and enslavement.

The 2014 report stated: “The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”

By 2016 Kim Jong Un had presided over 340 executions, “sometimes for trivial reasons such as half-hearted clapping,” Jung wrote in 2018. South Korean media reported North Korean Defence Minister Hyon Yong Chol was publicly killed with an anti-aircraft gun because he dozed off during a meeting. Kim Jong Un has amassed between 20 and 60 nuclear weapons, and taunts South Koreas with threats he will turn it into a “sea of fire”.

As Kim Jong Un has consolidated his power, Kim Yo Jong has become an ever-important player. She remains a highly mysterious character. The family has never revealed if she has any children. A small bump on her petite frame during her South Korean tour sparked speculation that she was pregnant. It later emerged she had recently given birth. Google lists Kim Yo Jong as the mother of one “alleged” child. Experts believe she has two. Her husband is a senior apparatchik, and the son of North Korea’s President, Choe

Ryong Hae. She is said to play a senior role in both propaganda and the state’s finances, and has been described as her brother’s “gatekeeper”. If something were to happen to Kim

Jong Un, she seems the best qualified of the “pure blooded” Kims to take over. The Supreme Leader has a son, but he is only 10 years old.

In March this year, Kim Yo Jong released two statements through the state media, a move that hinted at her seniority but also revealed her to be less measured than her Olympic appearance had suggested. After South Korea had criticised North Korean military exercises, she blasted their “gangster-like assertions” and “imbecilic way of thinking” and said the state was behaving like a “mere child” and a “frightened dog”.

Such language supports experts’ warnings that she’s not the levelheaded diplomat she appeared to be at the Winter Olympics. Those scrutinising her clothing in 2018 would have noticed that, along with her simple watch and unadorned gold wedding band, she wore a badge featuring the faces of her father and grandfather. She is an influential insider, and she has been throughout her brother’s reign of terror.

When it comes to the question of succession, her gender poses a problem, but as a third-born son, Kim Jong Un was also, in some respects, an unpredictable candidate. The myth of Mt Paektu says she might well have what it takes, and the magnetism she inherited from her artful mother has already proved to be a potent tool.

As Jung observes, “Kim Yo Jong has revolutionary blood coursing through her veins.” AWW