David Guttenfelder/National Geographic Creative. Joao remembers Un as quiet but said that he was very decisive and capable of making his point. Riesen said he often walked to school from the unassuming home he lived in with his aunt and other family members not far from the North Korean embassy. An eleven year-old primary four pupil at Kitante Primary School has been killed by robbers who attacked their home in Rubaga. Kim is 57 and his grandfather, who founded the country in 1948 and ruled to 1994, was 510, very tall for a North Korean. So Joao helped him with his German homework, while the newcomer helped his new friend with math. The views are solely those of theauthor. His world at age 5 has turned out to be his world at age 30 Everyone does exist to servehim.. The school, whose student population today spans about 40 nationalities, touts itself as being perfectly situated in a neutral country. Indeed, Switzerland, famous for its discretion about everything from bank accounts to the schooling of dictators children, was the ideal location for the secretive North Koreans. A class photo from that time shows the teenagers decked out in an array of 1990s fashion, with chambray shirts and oversized sweatshirts, assembled under a tree in the schoolyard. He was much more interested in football and basketball thanlessons.. His father and founder of the country Kim Il-sung had also died of a heart attack in 1994. It is true that Kim has been emboldened since 2011, and hes gotten away with a lot: scores of missile test launches, nuclear tests, the probable VX nerve agent attack against his half-brother in Malaysia, a 2015 incident involving a landmine in the DMZ, the Sony hack in 2014 in which North Korean entities wiped out half of Sonys global network in response to the release of The Interview, and the mistreatment and death of U.S. citizen Otto Warmbier, a student tourist who was detained and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for alleged hostile acts against the North Korean state. virtual villagers origins 2 hearty stew virtual villagers origins 2 hearty stew 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved, North Korea scrambles to address countrys worsening food shortage, Kim Jong Uns sister threatens to turn Pacific into firing range, US sends bombers up as North Korea touts fatal nuke capacity after missile test, North Korea threatens unprecedented action over allied military drills, kill and torture close friends and relatives. North Korea is what we at the CIA called the hardest of the hard targets. A former CIA analyst once said that trying to understand North Korea is like working on a jigsaw puzzle when you have a mere handful of pieces and your opponent is purposely throwing pieces from other puzzles into the box. The North Korean regimes opaqueness, self-imposed isolation, robust counterintelligence practices, and culture of fear and paranoia provided at best fragmentaryinformation. And make no mistake. Kim appears to want to reinforce the impression that he is young, vigorous, on the movequalities that he attributes to his country as well. Mathematically, this translates to a percentage pass of 24.3%. Be the first to share your experiences! We have to learn how to incorporate new information about what is driving Kim Jong-un and how we might counter this profoundand ever evolvingnational securitythreat. Or in his naivet he may simply want his people to enjoy the things to which he has had privileged access. Physically Kims trying to look like his grandfather, Cha said. His favourite subjects were; Math and Science. Sign Up Log In Messenger Facebook Lite Watch Places Games Marketplace Meta Pay Oculus Portal Instagram Bulletin Fundraisers Services Voting Information Center Privacy Policy Privacy Center Groups Kim Jong-Un, also spelled Kim Jong-Eun, (born January 8, 1984?, North Korea), North Korean political official who succeeded his father, Kim Jong Il, as leader of North Korea (2011- ). To find out more about what the young North Korean learned in school, I took the bus to Koniz one day and visited the municipality office. If you dont have them, getthem.. Even as tension with the United States went into overdrive after a sixth nuclear test and the launch of numerous ballistic missiles during the summer and fall of 2017, state media showed Kim and his wife touring a North Korean cosmetics factory. If he had followed Korean custom and tradition, Kim Jong-il would have named Kim Jong-nam, not Kim Jong-un, his successor, because Jong-nam was the eldest of his three sons. The Norths foreign ministry said at the time that the Libya crisis showed that the U.S.-led effort to coax Libya to give up its weapons of mass destruction had been an invasion tactic to disarm thecountry.. When North Korean statemedia reported in December 2011 that leader Kim Jong-il had died at the age of 70 of a heart attack from overwork, I was a relatively new analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. Copyright 2019 by Anna Fifield. While North Koreans wept, fainted, and convulsed with grief, feigned or not, Kim Jong-un, the twenty-something-year-old son of Kim Jong-il, reportedly closed the countrys borders and declared a state of emergency. It was public, gruesome and humiliating. Kim has presided over high-profile artillery firepower demonstrations, been captured in photographs poring over military plans purported to depict attacks against the United States and South Korea, and has issued inflammatory threats in response to U.S. and internationalpressure. Would the elites accept Kim? Pupils walk around the school compound during break time at Kitante Primary School in Kampala, Uganda Monday, Jan. 10, 2022. During the 1990s famine, in which as many as 23 million North Koreans died as a result of starvation and hunger-related illnesses, Kim was in Switzerland. That transparency has been extended to the government. This was Kim Jong Uns home while he was in Switzerland. The U.S. has opportunities to reshape Kims calculus, constrain his ambitions, and cause him to question his current assumptions about his ability to absorb increasing externalpressure. At the 2017 Aspen Security Forum, Dan Coats, the U.S. director of National Intelligence, said that Kim has watched what has happened around the world relative to nations that possess nuclear capabilities and the leverage they have, and added that the lesson from Libya for North Korea is: If you had nukes, never give them up. The second son, Jong-chul, was deemed too effeminate; one of Jong-chuls friends recalled that [Jongchul] is not the type of guy who would do something to harm others. Graphic images of the bloodied Qaddafi ricocheted around the world. Kims competitive side came out on the basketball court. Early life. It could also be on track to have up to 100 nuclear weapons and a variety of missileslong-range, road-mobile, and submarine-launchedthat could be operational as early as 2020. In sixth grade, classes were split into two streams, and both Un and Joao were sent to the group of academically weaker students. 1,502 were here. Their teachers said they had no idea what happened to him, either. When I happen to glance at the purple book, I am reminded about how humility is inherent in intelligence analysisespecially in studying a target like North Koreasince it forces me to confront my doubts, remind myself about how I know what I know and what I dont know, confront my confidence level in my assessments, and evaluate how those unknowns might change myperspective. A painting of the late North Korean leaders Kim Il-sung (L) and Kim Jong-il hints at the opaqueness of the Hermit Kingdom. In 2001 Jong-nam had been detained in Japan with a fake passport in a failed attempt to go to Tokyo Disneyland. He was serious on the court, hardly ever laughing or even talking, just focused on the game. That, of course, is a bigif. Jung H. Pak is a senior fellow and the SK-Korea Foundation Chair in Korea Studies at the Brookings Institutions Center for East Asia Policy Studies. Under Kim Jong-un, the collapse of North Korea seemed more likely thanever. When the news first emerged that Kim Jong Un would be the successor to Kim Jong Il, many former acquaintances, who had known both brothers under different names and were now unsure which one had been named the successor, reported tidbits of information that were in fact about his brother. Kim has allowed himself to seem more transparent and accessible than his father. He had a hoop outside the apartment and would play out there often, sometimes making more noise than the neighbors would have preferred. His ball was also top of the line: a Spalding with the official mark of the NBA. For the past six years, Kim has poked and prodded, testing and pushing the boundaries of international tolerance for his actions, calculating that he can handle whatever punishment is meted out. His mother had been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer and was starting intensive medical treatment in France. And Washingtons promises of a brighter future for North Korea if it denuclearized probably seemed hollow to the regime in Pyongyang. Ri was registered as a driver at the North Korean Embassy and went by the name Pak Nam Chol. Reprinted by permission of PublicAffairs, New York, N.Y. All rights reserved. There had been signs before 2011 that Kim was grooming his son for the succession: he began to accompany his father on publicized inspections of military units, his birth home was designated a historical site, and he began to assume leadership titles and roles in the military, party, and security apparatus, including as a four-star general in2010. Kims aunt said that at his eighth birthday party, he wore a generals uniform with stars, and the real generals with real stars bowed to him and paid their respects to the boy. Only their oldest, who was then 14, the same age as Kim Jong Un, knew what was going to happen next. Just like that, Pak Un was gone. We were always in the second tier The teachers would see him struggling ashamedly and then move on. To cultivate these habits of mind, we were required to take courses to improve our thinking. As a scholar of U.S. history before I became an intelligence analyst, I couldnt help but think about Andrew Carnegies famous statement about the third generation in America as Kim 3.0 took the reins of power in North Korea. Kim Jong Un stands in the center of the back row wearing a tracksuit, gray and black with red piping and big red letters reading NIKE down the sleeve. The once king of kings in Africa, who ruled Libya for four decades, was captured by rebels in October 2011, a date well into the process of grooming Kim for leadership and just two months before Kim Jong-ils death. His childhood was marked by luxury and leisure: vast estates with horses, swimming pools, bowling alleys, summers at the familys private resort, luxury vehicles adapted so that he could drive when he was 7 years old. Kims overseas schooling gave him a good understanding of Western values whether or not he cared. Everyone knew that Kim had heart issueshe had suffered a stroke in 2008and that the day would probably come when his familys history of heart disease and his smoking, drinking, and partying would catch up with him. Nobody can access the Internet in the country but they can when they leave. She arrived on a passport that declared her to be Chong Il Son, assigned to the North Korean mission at the United Nations in Geneva since 1987, but the Swiss knew exactly who she was. It was frustrating to Kim Jong Un, who resented his inability to understand. They also knew who her children were. While Kim has avidly pursued nuclear weapons, he is also, in accord with his announced policy of byungjin, deeply invested in improving the North Korean economycertainly a tall order given the gravity of internal changes, the weight of sanctions, and Beijings willingness to apply stronger pressure than we have seen before. There have been reports that the minimum height requirement for a soldier is 48 or 49. In contrast with his battle-hardened elders, Kim Jong-un grew up in a cocoon of indulgence andprivilege. One snippeta penchant for the films of Jean-Claude van Dammedid, however, appear to apply to the two boys, both of whom apparently loved to watch movies featuring the Belgian action star. I acted like their mother, Kims aunt told me when I tracked her down in the United States almost 20 years later. Thanks for contacting us. We lived in a normal home and acted like a normal family. Even if he wanted to reform a country where many go hungry and even the homes of the political elites rarely have more than one hour of electricity a day, he couldnt. Of course, Kim still has enormous power and, like his father and grandfather, the willingness to hold onto it through extreme brutality. The apartment was more modest than he was used to back home, with no pictures on the walls, but the teenage Kim Jong Un had gadgets his classmates could only dream of: a mini-disc player, which was the cutting-edge way to store music in the years before iPods; a Sony PlayStation; and lots of movies that hadnt yet been released in theaters. Kim was shipped to Switzerland where an older brother had already gone to study around age 12 in 1996 during the devastating North Korean famine that killed up to 3 million people. Amazon,
Everythingour parents, family, home, neighborhood, school, countryrevolves around us. Bern was famous for its clock tower, known as the Zytglogge, which had led a young patent clerk called Albert Einstein to develop the theory of relativity some 90 years earlier. Her prognosis wasnt good. They know the education is fake, the mythology of the Kim family is fake. That way, he wouldnt have to explain why his parents had changed. Kim Jong Un was obsessed with basketball. David Guttenfelder/National Geographic Creative. He reportedly urged the industry to be world competitive, praised the factory for helping women realize their dream of being beautiful, and offered his own comments on thepackaging. A woman in Pyongyang walks past a billboard advertising North Koreas missile prowess. A nobody. All of them had been accredited to the North Korean mission to the United Nations in Geneva since 1991, and these diplomatic documents would have allowed them to travel freely in Europe. This 24.3% pass rate makes Kitante Primary School rank position 1736 in Uganda among all the Primary Schools. Democracy is part of our being here in Switzerland, Riesen said. The capital city is rife with stylized propaganda. Kim Jong Un was still very much a child when he departed for Bern, the capital of Switzerland, in the summer of 1996 to join his older brother Kim Jong Chol at school. He offered no explanation for his sudden recall. Now more than ever, facts and research matter. In Switzerland, Kim Jong Un could live a relatively normal existence. North Korea was poor and backward, isolated, unable to feed its people, while clinging to its nuclear and missile programs for legitimacy and prestige. Although that space launch failed, North Korea, despite international condemnation of the April test, had success with its next attempt, when it launched a satellite into orbit in December 2012. This story has been shared 177,659 times. Far from persuading him to change his country, these years would have shown him the necessity of perpetuating the system that had turned him, his father and grandfather into deities. But what of the lives of the averagepeople?), Kim may also be using the imagery of these amenities as a corrective, a way of undermining the dominant external narrative of a decaying, starving, economically hobbled North Korea. Its hard to know what Kim Jong Un thought during these lessons. The North Korean regime has often made reference to the fate of Iraq and Libyathe invasion and overthrow of its leadersas key examples of what happens to states that give up their nuclear weapons. He is the son of Kim Jong-il and companion Ko Yong-hui, who died in 2004.He was educated at the International School of Berne with younger brother Kim Jong Un. But he seems determined to chart his own path. For instance, the same Kim Jong Un who had his uncle and half-brother killed was also known as a teenager for lashing out at his classmates when they spoke in German, a language that he had struggled to master himself. He kicked us in the shins and even spat at us, said one former classmate. While Kim has been developing and demonstrating advanced nuclear weapons capabilities, he has also focused on diversifying the Norths toolkit of provocations to include cyberattacks, the use of chemical and biological weapons, and the modernization of North Koreas military, which is among the worlds largest armed forces with over 1 million warriors. Kim Jong Uns mother lived for six more years, dying in a Paris hospital in 2004. One day, around Easter 2001, with only a couple of months to go until he completed ninth grade, Kim told Micaelo that his father had ordered him back to North Korea and that he would leave soon. He was fat and smoking all the time and outwardly jovial, like Kim. Kim Jong-un seems determined to avoid thatfate. He is a nice guy who could never be a villain. Indeed, he seems to be playing an unspecified supporting role in his younger brothersregime. Kim Jong Uns Undercover Adolescent Years in Switzerland, Watch Trump and Biden take shots at each other, When Pete Buttigieg Ripped Americas Missionary Zeal, Trump touts 'beautiful letter' from Kim Jong Un, California's road to recovery runs through D.C. Republicans, Why New Jerseys ventilator guidelines may favor younger, whiter patients, Rhode Island ends specific restrictions on New Yorkers by making them national. Kim has the same problem. There was the usual lineup of classesGerman, math, science, health, foreign languages, music, art and sportsas well as units like The World Around Us, which taught world religions and cultures. Such confidence may be bolstered by the fact that Kim has yet to face a real crisis of the kind his father and grandfather had to confront and manage. Immediately after Kim Jong-ils death was announced, the North Korean state media made it clear that Jong-un was the successor: At the forefront of our revolution, there is our comrade Kim Jong-un standing as the great successor . The overthrow of regimes hitherto believed to be invincible probably highlighted for Jong-un the potential consequences of showing any signs of weakness, and reinforced the brutal suppression of dissent practiced by the Kimdynasty. Although Kim is aggressive, he is not reckless or a madman. In fact, he has been learning how and when to recalibrate. However, when the focus is on the frighteningly rapid pace and advancement of North Koreas cyber, nuclear, and conventional capabilities, Kim is portrayed as a ten-foot-tall giant with untold and unlimited power: unstoppable, undeterrable,omnipotent. Yet, despite all the chest-thumping and bad behavior, Kim is not looking for a military confrontation with the United States. Kim has been calledand not just by our presidentRocket Man, short and fat, a crazy fat boy, and Pyongyangs pig boy. A New Yorker cover from January 18, 2016, soon after North Koreas fourth nuclear test, portrayed him as a chubby baby, playing with his toys: nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and tanks. Kim Il-sung, the countrys founder and Jong-uns grandfather who ruled for nearly five decades until his death in 1994, was a revolutionary hero who fought Japanese imperialism, the South Korean puppets, and the American jackals in a military conflict that ended only because of anarmistice. Four generations of Kims: Aselective history*. Instead, Kim Jong Uns mother and aunt soon saw that basketball had become an addiction, toothe boy was sleeping with his basketball in his bedand one that came at the expense of his studies. While lessons were in High German, the more formal variety of the language spoken in official situations in Switzerland, families and friends spoke to each other in Swiss German, former classmates recalled. Anna Fifield is Beijing bureau chief at the Washington Post. He found himself in a chocolate-box picturesque city that that felt more like a quaint town than an international capital. This story has been shared 120,685 times. It still sits on my shelf at Brookings, within arms reach. Childhood and rise to power The youngest of Kim Jong Il 's three sons, Kim Jong-Un lived most of his life out of the public eye, and little was known about him. The analyst has to be comfortable with ambiguity and contradictions, constantly training her mind to question assumptions, consider alternative hypotheses and scenarios, and make the call in the absence of sufficient information, often in high-stakes situations. So for sure he came into contact with democracy.. So after nightfall on Sunday, May 17, Kim Jong Uns aunt and uncle packed their three children into a taxi and went to the U.S. Embassy. All the members of the Kim family had carefully constructed identities to conceal who they really were. And his rule through terror and repressionagainst the backdrop of that pastel wonderland of waterparksmeans that the terrorized and repressed will continue to feed Kims illusions and expectations, his grandiose visions of himself and North Koreasdestiny. Marisa Vifian, head of the Koniz education department, pulled out a big white binder containing the school curriculum from the 1990s. What, then, are the expectations and perceptions that we need to overcome to form an accurate assessment of Kim Jong-un and his regime? Kim studied abroad and spent family vacations skiing in the French Alps, going to EuroDisney in Paris, and swimming on the French Riviera, but this international experience didnt translate into political enlightenment or empathy for his countrymen at home when he took over after his fathers death. Yet even as he is modernizing his country at a furious pace, Kim has deepened North Koreas isolation. North Koreas highly provocative actions in the summer and fall of 2017demonstrating ICBMs, conducting a test of a probable thermonuclear device, and threatening to detonate a hydrogen bomb over the Pacificsuggest that Kims confidence has grown over the past six years. The pace of weapons testing is speeding up. It was his mother, Ko Yong Hui, who first sparked his interest in the sport. The regimes propaganda machine constructed and promoted the mythology, extolling his wisdom, his martial prowess, and his near supernatural capabilities, an example of which was his supposed ability to drive at agethree. Walk into any current or former CIA analysts office, and you will find a slim, purple book by Richards Heuer with the title Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. In famously discreet Switzerland, they were allowed to just be children even if they were the children of one of the worlds most notorious tyrants. andonKobo. His classmate at the Liebefeld-Steinhlzli school in Bern in 1998, Joao Micaelo, described him as a reserved kid who could be temperamental and was obsessed with basketball, especially Michael Jordan. The U.S. government didnt know at that stage who Kim Jong Un was, so Ko and Ri didnt initially mention that part. (This message was But two years into his stay in Switzerland, Kim Jong Uns world was turned upside. Ko Yong-hui (Korean: ; Korean pronunciation: [ko.jo.wi ]; 26 June 1952 - 13 August 2004), also spelled Ko Young-hee, was the consort of North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-il and the mother of his successor, Kim Jong-un.Within North Korea, she is only referred to by titles, such as "The Respected Mother who is the Most Faithful and Loyal 'Subject' to the Dear Leader Comrade . They left him in peace. Jong-un was apparently unbothered by his less-than stellar scores; as his classmate noted, He left without getting any exam results at all. He didnt go to school camp, parties, or discos, and he didnt touch a drop of alcohol. He could be aggressive and often indulged in trash talk. The August that Kim Jong Un arrived in Switzerland, Mission Impossible was in theaters, and Trainspotting was about to open. Kim has overseen three more nuclear tests, and debuted and tested new ballistic missiles of various ranges from multiple locations, including a submarine-launched ballistic missile and, in July and November 2017, intercontinental ballisticmissiles. Until 2001, it was assumed that Kim Jong-il's eventual heir would be his eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, whose mother was Song Hye-rim.But in May 2001, Kim Jong-nam was arrested at Narita . Instead, Kims use of repression and his conferring of financial benefits and special privileges to loyalists has probably encouraged sycophants and groupthink within his inner circle, fueling his preference for violence andaggression. The coexistence of these two sets of overlapping perceptionsthe ten-foot-tall babyhas shaped our understanding and misunderstanding of Kim and North Korea. The education that Kim received in Switzerland presented a worldview very different from the one he experienced in North Korea. There was also the spectacularly shocking public humiliation of Kims uncle Jang Song-thaek in 2013, who was labeled human scum and worse than a dog and then reportedly executed by an anti-aircraft gun for allegedly undermining the unitary leadership of the party and anti-party and counterrevolutionary factional acts. Kim probably also ordered the deadly attack by the application of a VX nerve agentone of the most toxic of the chemical warfare agentsagainst Jong-nam, his half-brother and erstwhile competitor for the position of supreme leader of North Korea. Un was embarrassed when he was called to answer questions in front of the classnot because he didnt know the answers necessarily but because he couldnt express himself. North Korean-born Jason Lee, whos a year younger than Kim and defected to South Korea and then the U.S. in 2014, said that much is made of Kims seemingly random four-year Swiss sojourn but its typical for someone from North Koreas tiny inner circle of high-ranking families. Kenji Fujimoto, Kim Jong-ils former sushi chef, who visited Pyongyang at the request of Kim Jong-un, has provided some of the most fascinating firsthand observations about Jong-un and his relationship with his father. Though Jong-il saw in his son a worthy successor to the dynasty, there are critical differences between the first two Kims and Kim Jong-un. The plane, which bore the tail number P882, was for VIPs only. As he moved into the upper years at school, Kim Jong Un improved his German enough that he was able to get by in class. The film came out in 1997, while Kim Jong Un was in Switzerland. Would he even want the burden of being North Koreas leader? When the focus is on Kims appearance, theres a tendency to portray him as a cartoon figure, ridiculing his weight and youth. Their link to the regime, the relationship that had vaulted them into this privileged position, was becoming weaker by the day.