Father: Can the people of my country tell me how I am to rule?
Son: Do you not see that you are speaking like a child?
Father: Should I rule this land for others and not (for) myself?
Son: There is no state that belongs to a single man.
Father: Does the state not belong to its ruler?
Son: Alone in a desert, you would make a perfect ruler.
The above dialogue between King Creon and his son, Haemon, took place in Sophocles’ “Antigone” some 2,500 years ago. Can it be replicated between Gadhafi and one of his seven known children amid the ongoing civil war in divided Libya? Or, between Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un, 27, the youngest of his four known children and the successor-apparent in the gulag-like North Korea?
After 42 years of the Gaddafi dictatorship, his children are desperately engaged in saving his father and their necks by killing their own people while Kim Jong-il is hurriedly grooming his son, Jong-un, to be the successor to spare his own head and the moribund Kim dynasty.
Gaddafi seized power in Libya by coup in September 1969. Kim Jong-il inherited power in 1994 from his father, Kim Il-sung, who abruptly died “officially” of a heart attack.
Contrary to their official propaganda machines ― which call Gadhafi “the Brother Leader” in Libya and Kim Jong-il “the Great Leader” in North Korea ― both countries belong to the U.S. government’s current list of the world’s “rogue states” along with Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria
Democracy Index 2010 by the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked North Korea at the bottom at 167th and Libya at 158th.
At a closer look, North Korea is not Libya. Nor is Kim Jong-il the replica of Gadhafi. Culture, civilization, history and geopolitics aside, two fundamental political and military differences stand out.
One is China. So long as China regards its relations with North Korea as like “lips and teeth,” the Great Wall will stand behind the Kim dynasty’s self-proclaimed “paradise on earth.” Gaddafi and his children do not have such a wall to lean on.
North Korea, arguably the world’s most isolated, tightly sealed and regimented masses and its typical garrison-state with 1.2 million-strong active military forces are another. It even claims to be a “nuclear power” after conducting two tests of nuclear device in 2006 and 2009.
By contrast, Libya abandoned nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction programs in the mid-2000s and its ragtag military is in as much disarray under NATO airstrikes as the brave anti-Gaddafi forces.
The recently fallen dictators such as Tunisia’s exiled Ben Ali, Egypt’s detained Hosni Mubarak and his two sons, as well as the currently besieged autocrats like Yemen’s Abdullah Saleh and Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad raise an age-old question of political leadership succession.
Contrary to the biblical dictum: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” the political norm separating church and state did not exist during the Middle Ages in Europe. The church, then, even assumed supremacy over the secular order. Pope Gregory VII (1020?-1085) humiliated Henry IV (1050-1106), king of Germany and Holy Roman emperor, for attempting to challenge papal supremacy at Canossa in 1077. It was the case of the king’s scepter succumbing to Pope’s miter.
Henry VIII of England, by contrast, proclaimed the Act of Supremacy in 1532 to be independent from Roman papal authority and to assume full power over the Anglican Church. Perhaps, Amendment I of the U.S. Constitution in 1791 was the first written document, establishing the wall of separation between religion and politics.
Kings and queens exist even in this age of homo electronicus. But they, as in the United Kingdom and Japan, seldom rule but reign as their nations’ symbol of unity and continuity, although a few still rule such as in Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
In the Islamic world in particular, the wall of separation between spiritual and secular world is not yet defined. In theocratic Iran, ayatollah is inseparable from caliph.
In theory, one-party communist states have little or no room for civic order: the people exist for the state, not the reverse.
Specifically, the lack of an institutionalized leadership succession mechanism among the remaining one-party communist states of China, Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea is problematic.
Among these, party-government leadership transfers in China and Vietnam have been, by and large, peaceful and regularized.
In Cuba, the brother-to-brother power transfer from Fidel to Raul Castro has been in operation since February 2008. Let us hope that Raul Castro’s most recent promise of “systematic rejuvenation of the government” and two-consecutive-five-year-term limits for the top party and government leadership will be more real than hollow.
In North Korea, the first father-son power succession in 1994 was unprecedented in the annals of communist party rule, and has been a tragedy for the suffering and starving North Korean people. Kim Jong-il’s second father-son succession attempt now appears not just bizarre but doomed to failure.
As former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his entourage are about to visit the Hermit Kingdom this week, North Korea is reportedly to indict a detained Korean-American, Jun Young-su, on unspecified charges. This inhuman “hostage politics” is as anachronistic as its third-generation succession scheme.
After Laura Ling, Euna Lee and Robert Park in 2009 and Aijalon Gomes in 2010, Jun Young-su is the latest victim of the uniquely North Korean hostage politics. This utterly bestial act signals the terminal malady of its last-gasp bloodline politics. No one knows, however, when and how it will end.
By Yang Sung-chul
Yang Sung-chul, a former ambassador of the Republic of Korea to the United States and a distinguished professor at Korea University in Seoul, is the author of “The North and South Korean Political Systems: A Comparative Analysis.” ― Ed.
