The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (55 page)

Secretary of State Albright meets with Kim Jong Il’s envoy, DPRK National Defense Commission First Vice Chairman Jo Myong Rok in Washington, October 2000.
PHOTO BY MANNY CENETA, AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi meets with Kim Jong Il during his second visit to Pyongyang in May 2004.
AFP/GETTY IMAGES

President Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Jong Il converse at the October 2007 summit. The results of the summit were overturned only a few months later when a new ROK president took office.
BLUE HOUSE PRESS CORPS

WPK party secretaries Kim Ki Nam and Kim Yong Gon pay their respects in Seoul in August 2009 during the funeral of former ROK president Kim Dae Jung. The two envoys were sent by Kim Jong Il to explore the possibility of resuming high-level inter-Korean dialogue.
AFP/GETTY IMAGES

A few of the over 50,000 North Korean workers at a South Korean factory in the Kaesong Industrial Zone.
BLUE HOUSE PRESS CORPS

President Park Geun-hye, daughter of Park Choong Hee and South Korea’s first woman president, waves to the people at her February 2013 inauguration.
HANKOOK ILBO PHOTO

Members of the North Korean military band resting in the heat in Pyongyang before the sixty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Korean War.
PHOTO BY ED JONES, AFP/GETTY IMAGES

14

DEATH AND ACCORD

O
N THE MORNING OF
July 6, 1994, less than three weeks after he said good-bye to Jimmy Carter, Kim Il Sung sat behind the desk in his office and instructed senior officials on the economic goals for the year ahead. From all outward signs, the eighty-two-year-old Great Leader was in good form, wearing a light-blue Western-style suit and wagging his finger vigorously at two dozen officials arrayed before him.

“Agriculture first. Light industry first. Foreign trade first,” declared Kim, repeating the priorities he had announced in his New Year’s address after conceding that the economy was in trouble. In a rich, husky rumble, which had been the voice of command in North Korea for nearly a half century, he set forth specific targets for the year: 850,000 tons of fertilizer, 12 million tons of cement, completion of one hundred ships, and special priorities for railways and metal industries. In remarks that would take on important meaning later, Kim gave top priority to the urgent need for more electric power. Saying that the much-discussed light-water nuclear reactors would take too long to ease the shortage of energy, he laid down an immediate requirement for additional power plants burning heavy fuel oil (HFO).

The meeting with the economic aides was among the last activities of an aged head of state who had reengaged dramatically in the affairs of his country, as if somehow he sensed that his time was short. In the month of June, Kim had taken part in seventeen events and activities, including on-the-spot inspections at two collective farms and meetings with a variety of visitors from overseas, far more than in previous months.

Following the meeting with Carter, Kim’s preoccupation was to prepare for the unprecedented summit meeting with his South Korean
counterpart, Kim Young Sam, which had emerged from the talks with the former US president and was scheduled to begin in Pyongyang on July 25. After decades of haggling and disagreeing about such a meeting, the North and South this time had smoothly agreed on the overall plan and many of the details. Kim Il Sung personally intervened to facilitate agreement on some of the planning issues.

In Seoul Kim Young Sam was spending days meeting with his ministers, staff, and experts on North Korea in preparation for the momentous conference. The two sides had agreed that the South Korean president would lead a hundred-member delegation to Pyongyang, accompanied by an eighty-member press corps equipped for live television broadcasts to the public back home. The actual meetings, which were to take place over two or three days, would be one-on-one discussions, with only two or three aides and a note taker accompanying each president.

On the crucial subject of national reunification, Kim Young Sam was preparing to contest his counterpart’s confederation plan calling for one country with two systems, which South Koreans found biased and unworkable, and to propose instead gradual steps to reconciliation such as the exchange of visits by separated families, exchange of correspondence, and mutual access to television and radio programs of the other side. Kim believed it would take more than one meeting to iron out the historic trouble between the two Korean governments; he therefore planned to propose that this be the first of a series of summits. To ease the way, he was preparing to surprise North Korea by offering to supply 500,000 tons of rice to help feed its people, an amount more than double the 100,000 to 200,000 tons North Korea had been unofficially requesting through ROK businessmen.

Kim Il Sung was also making preparations. On the afternoon of July 6, after meeting his economic ministers in the morning, he traveled to his favorite place of respite from the summertime heat, the beautiful Myohyang Mountains, about a hundred miles north of Pyongyang. Kim’s villa there had spectacular mountain views nestled amid a pine forest. It was where he took special visitors whom he was seeking to impress, and he had decided it was just the place to take the South Korean president.

On July 7, Kim made one of his on-the-spot inspections of a nearby collective farm, where he may also have planned to take the South Korean president. The temperature was nearly one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. In the mountains, he personally inspected a guest villa, which was being prepared for his South Korean visitor, checking bedrooms and bathrooms, even making certain that the refrigerators would be stocked with plenty of mineral water.

After these strenuous activities and his dinner, Kim complained of being tired. A short time later, he collapsed with a massive heart attack.
Doctors were summoned, but heavy rains made helicopter flights impossible, and poor dirt roads delayed the arrival of a land convoy.
*
North Korean officials told Korean American journalist Julie Moon, who obtained details of Kim’s death, that doctors opened up his chest, hoping in vain to revive his heart, but it was too late. Kim Il Sung was pronounced dead at 2:00 on the morning of the eighth.

The death of the founding leader of the DPRK came at a time when the outside world was intruding increasingly on the unique dominion Kim had created in his unequaled reign of nearly a half century. In Kim’s final months, he was seeking to adjust to the rapid decline of long-standing diplomatic, military, and economic arrangements and to explore new relationships with the United States, South Korea, and the world of his former enemies. Whether he was a leader of great vision or of great folly, he was without question the dominating figure on the stage that he trod. The absence of his controlling hand immensely complicated the problems of North Korea in the second half of the 1990s.