Death of a dictator

Kim was a menace, not just to his own people but to the world. His death should be met with with relief not mourning.

A satellite image taken over North Korea at night shows the country plunged into darkness, while its neighbours are brightly illuminated. This is the legacy for which Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s brutal dictator who died on December 19 at the age of 69, should be remembered. Kim should have been just another tinpot dictator, impoverishing his people and giving the world a headache, but he turned out to be so much worse. Once he acquired nuclear weapons, Kim became untouchable and immune to outside pressure. This allowed him to further gorge himself at the expense of his impoverished people. It is hard to overstate just how much North Koreans suffered at the hands of Kim and, before that, his father.

Kim was a menace, not just to his own people but also to the outside world. South Korea, a country that showed how to transition from dictatorship to democracy and from basket case to economic powerhouse, lived in constant fear that Kim would strike at it with his nuclear weapons. Unpredictability was at the heart of everything Kim did. He was a movie buff who kidnapped actors and directors from South Korea and a scotch lover who spent aid, mostly from the Soviet Union and China, to procure more alcohol for himself. His death should be accompanied with relief not mourning.

North Koreans can take some measure of relief in the fact that whatever’s next is very unlikely to be any worse than Kim. But it may be some time before things get appreciably better. For North Korea to get the international aid it so desperately needs to survive, its new rulers will have to compromise on their nuclear programme and move towards some form of representative government. Simply having the military or a relative of Kim’s take over the reigns of power will not be sufficient. The transition from a militarised police state to a democracy must begin now. Certainly, it will be many years before North Korea can hope to match its neighbours in terms of liberty and economic growth. But Kim’s death has made it more likely that day will come.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 20^th, 2011.