On 19 December last, I received an ominous text message. It read: “Kim Jong-il is dead. South Korea on emergency alert.”
Online forums and social networks throughout South Korea were about to see an almost unprecedented surge in traffic. And the timing couldn’t have been any worse for me personally, as my flight home from Seoul was just 48 hours from departing.
I had good reason to be concerned. On the morning of 23 November the year previously, I was in Dublin driving to the South Korean embassy to collect my second working visa for this country when news bulletins reported that North Korean forces had shelled the island of Yeonpyeong, situated in disputed waters off the west coast of the peninsula.
The North was retaliating after the South had carried out military manoeuvres in the area. Following a return of fire, there was a palpable sense of terror. The death toll was eventually confirmed as two marines and two civilians. The following morning I sat beside my already apprehensive mother looking at images of this attack on the front pages of all the main newspapers. Hardly an event to settle the minds of family and friends.
However, after over two years in Korea you begin to accept that the sinking of ships, testing of missiles and bloody rhetoric of burning Seoul are annoyances that, while sometimes tragic, can be overcome and will not – ¬ or at least, you hope will not –lead to a prolonged outbreak of hostilities.
Sensationalist reporting in the international press often paints a completely inaccurate picture of events on the peninsula, as I have noted here before. But 19 December was a little bit different. There was an eerie cloud of tension hanging over Korea, and perhaps most places in the Far East.
The normally placid and unflustered workforce at my school was visibly shaken when the news came though. What was equally worrying, perhaps, was the North Korean state broadcast which announced that Kim Jong-il had died almost 51 hours previously (on the Saturday morning) but the citizens of the South were finding out at the same time as the Korean intelligence service, and President Lee Myung-bak.
When I approached one colleague on the death of the ‘Dear Leader’, her response was swift and distracted: “Oooh, not good.” Her conclusion, mirrored by many others, was that peace may not have arrived with Kim Jong-il, but war was even less certain. Now, 48 million Koreans were preparing for the most mysterious handover of power in a lifetime, and for the first time since 1994, when Kim Il-sung died, they had absolutely no idea what was coming next.
=It would be an understatement to suggest that the mood directly following confirmation of Kim Jong-il’s death was one of uneasiness. Except, of course, if you’re a 10-year-old elementary school student taking pleasure informing the foreign teacher: “Kim Jong-il die. Bye bye.”
The weeks have passed by and, as you know and could have guessed, not a lot has really changed. The reality is no-one knows what is really happening inside North Korea. The garnishing of titles by successor Kim Jong-un could be a consequence of military leaders’ worries about his lack of experience, so this is an attempt to wade off potential threats, or that his position has already been strengthened and this is merely a formality.
The South Korean media recently reported that the North’s military is the strongest it has been in decades, and that the new ruling elite is issuing threats and/or offering hints of a resumption is dialogue. A new year, perhaps, but the same old story.
Andrew Farrell works as an English language teacher in Korea.
