Kim Jong Il to be displayed
North Korean honors like his father
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Thursday that it would place the body of Kim Jong Il on permanent display in a Pyongyang mausoleum and install his statues, portraits and memorial towers across the country.
Kim, who died on Dec. 17 at age 69, is the second North Korean leader whose embalmed body will be on a public display.
His father, the North’s founding president, Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994, was embalmed with the help of Russian experts and is in the Kumsusan Memorial Palace in Pyongyang.
Kim’s body will be on display there, too, the Politburo of the ruling Workers’ Party said Thursday in a report carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.
There was no indication of how much the impoverished North Korean government plans to spend on the memorials. But the enormous Kumsusan Palace is thought to have cost hundreds of millions to build, and bronze statues of Kim Il Sung and “towers of eternal life” in his memory were built in almost every North Korean city.
Similar statues and monuments will be erected for Kim Jong Il, the Politburo said. North Korea also designated Kim’s Feb. 16 birthday as “the Day of the Lodestar.”
The lodestar was a term North Korean propagandists had used for Kim. It is also the name of long-range rockets North Korea tested in 1998 and 2009.
His body had been on display there in a glass coffin until the state funeral on Dec. 28. Until Thursday, North Korea had not clarified what it would do with the body, although news reports in Russia and South Korea have said that a team of Russian specialists in charge of maintaining Lenin’s embalmed body was flown to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.
The announcement by the government in Pyongyang came as the regime stepped up a campaign to bolster the cult of personality surrounding the Kim dynasty.
As Kim’s son and designated heir, Kim Jong Un, consolidates power, he is relying heavily on the deified status of his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, to justify his hereditary rise to power.