Now that the ruler from Pyongyang is having some fun shocking the world, Labour has made its little great leap forward in denouncing Kim Jong Il’s crackpot antics.
Karl Schembri
Kim Jong Il, the North Korean dictator who has shocked the world with claims that his country detonated a nuclear bomb, owes some of his formation to our former dear leader, Dom Mintoff.
While wooing his father Kim Il Sung back in the eighties and signing secret military treatises, Mintoff was entertaining Jong Il and giving him his first lessons in brinksmanship, while also taking piano and English lessons as his compatriots were teaching our special forces martial arts at Ta’ Kandja.
Mintoff built a lavish five-bedroomed fortress villa which he called Xabbatur for the young leader in waiting on the boundaries of Bahrija overlooking Fomm ir-Rih, full of warped corridors meant to thwart any kind of bullet aimed at him, and with escape doors in virtually every room.
It was the time when the ruling Labour Party was flirting with all the mavericks of the world in a mischievous act of defiance against western powers – from Libya’s Col Muammar Gaddafi to Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu and China’s Mao Zedong. The time when Chinese children would greet il-Perit chanting “Ma taghmlu xejn mal-Perit Mintoff” upon his arrival in the pariah country, the time in North Korea when the Labour entourage arrived sporting lapel badges of Kim Il Sung, and carrying Maltese translations of The Juche Idea – an ideological hodgepodge mixing tenets of Neo-Confucianism, Soviet Stalinism and Maoism.
Now the ruler from Pyongyang is having some fun shocking the world, and the Malta Labour Party has made its little great leap forward in denouncing this crackpot’s antics, now that he has attracted world attention and condemnation as a nutcase.
But there’s much more than mental illness going on in the mind of this brutal dictator who is constantly howling for attention and inventing all sorts of weird stuff to dominate the headlines. Internally far less popular than his father, who was revered as God, Kim Jong Il has had to seize power rather than just inherit it.
As millions of his people die of hunger, this cognac-guzzling hypochondriac who wears platform shoes and dons a bouffant hairstyle to appear taller than he is, leaves observers at a loss about the thin red line between his madman’s irrationality and the cunning mind of a seasoned manipulator who has shrewdly calculated how to keep power, while destabilising a whole region with his nuclear aspirations.
The former editor of The Guardian attributes his “first lessons in sophisticated statecraft from Dom Mintoff” during his holiday years in Malta. “The Mintoff touch – flamboyant, mischievous, making great waves out of little water – hasn’t left him. It’s there again today. It demands to be noticed by the high and mighty of the world. It wants something in return.”
Preston wrote that four years ago, when the nuclear detonator was still a matter of speculation. Now speculation is still rife, but if the announced nuclear explosion is confirmed, one of the world’s most messed up countries will have become an unlikely member of the exclusive nuclear powers club. And that, if nothing else, will secure Kim Jong Il’s grasp on power – something Mintoff might still be toying with, though thankfully without the nukes.
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