Son Visits Kim Jong-il's Body Lying In State

New Pictures Of Kim Jong-il Lying In State

Holly Williams, Asia correspondent
The son of Kim Jong-il who is tipped to be the late North Korean leader's successor has visited his father's body as he lies in state in a glass casket.
Kim Jong-un was joined by high-level officials and ministers as they paid their respects to Kim at the Kumsusan Memorial Palace in Pyongyang.
He then stepped forward and bowed, clearly trying to fight back tears as he watched his father, whose coffin is surrounded by red Kimjongilias - the begonias specially cultivated to celebrate his 46th birthday.
The former leader, known in North Korea as "Our Father", "the Dear Leader" and the "Great Successor To The Revolutionary Cause", was put on display at the giant mausoleum following his death from a massive heart attack on Saturday.
The palace is the same resting place for the dictator's father Kim Sung-il.
There will be 12 days allowed for mourning before a state funeral is held, including three minutes silence and cannon-fire, on December 28.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called for a stable transition to the new leadership following the dictator's death.
However, with many experts predicting an internal power struggle, North Korea could pose an even bigger menace to its neighbours and the world.
George W Bush said his dictatorship was one part of the Axis of Evil, while films like Team America saw Hollywood mock him as a lonely misfit filled with self-pity.
We will never know exactly how Kim Jong-il saw himself, but to most of the world he was an old-fashioned, ruthless tyrant - living in luxury while his people starved to death, presiding over a state that shamelessly engaged in criminal activities and threatening his neighbours with nuclear destruction.
Yet in North Korea - a sealed-off, Stalinist state whose people are immersed in propaganda - there has been an hysterical display of public grief following his death, with questions raised as to whether the wailing and weeping on the streets is spontaneous or choreographed.
Across the border in South Korea the authorities remain on high alert, worried that the transition of power could destabilise their erratic neighbour. But the tourists visiting the Demilitarised Zone - the 4km-wide strip of land that divides the two Koreas - seem unworried at the prospect of a new leader in Pyongyang.
One woman, who only gave her name as Chon, told Sky News she had defected from the North two years ago.
"I'm very happy that Kim Jong-il finally died," she said. "He was a dictator who made people starve to death. I'm only concerned about my family who are still there."
The paradox is that now Kim is gone, North Korea could pose an even bigger menace to its neighbours and the world, as at least when he was alive, everyone knew who was in charge of North Korea's giant standing army - the fourth largest in the world - and its small, but potentially deadly nuclear capacity.
His regime repeatedly threatened to turn South Korean capital Seoul into "a sea of fire".
Last year the country's military killed four South Koreans when it shelled Yeonpyeong Island, the heaviest bombardment since the 1953 armistice that ended the fighting in the Korean War.
And his regime was also implicated in the sinking of a South Korean battleship, the Cheonan, in which 46 sailors lost their lives.
But few thought that Kim would ever launch a large-scale unprovoked attack, let alone use the nuclear weapons at his disposal.
"He remained in power for much longer than anyone expected," said Daniel Pinkston, senior analyst with the Crisis Group in Seoul.
"He realised that if there was an escalation to full-scale war they would lose, and that would be suicidal for North Korea."
Shortly after announcing Kim Jong-il's death, North Korean state television called on the country to rally around the dictator's anointed successor, his youngest son Kim Jong-un.
Kim-the-younger is still in his twenties, and the product of a Swiss boarding school education.
He bears a striking resemblance to his grandfather Kim Il-sung, the revered founder of the North Korean state, and still the country's 'Eternal President' 17 years after his death.
Kim Jong-un's only known qualification is his lineage. The crucial question is whether he will be able to control North Korea as his father did.
There may be other figures in the secretive, military-dominated state that see the transition as an opportunity to seize power.
Yet like everything else in the North, that remains shrouded in mystery.
"The inner circle is really impenetrable," Barbara Demick, author of a recent book about the country, said. "They're all protecting each other. Whether they like each other or not, they know they if they hanged together."
North Korea's neighbours worry about the possibility of a drawn out leadership struggle, or a power vacuum in which it is not clear who is in charge of the country's nuclear weapons.
Even more frightening is a scenario in which one competing figure launches an attack as a show of strength.
The South Korean media has speculated that one challenger may come in the shape of Chang Sung-taek, who is married to Kim Jong-il's younger sister and supposed to be mentoring his young nephew.
Another potential rival, say some, is General O Kuk-ryol, a childhood friend of Kim Jong-il and the man behind North Korea's lucrative production of counterfeit US "superdollars".
Then there are Kim Jong-un's two older brothers. One of them, Kim Jong-nam, was originally the chosen successor.
But he then disgraced himself by travelling to Japan with his family on a counterfeit Dominican Republic passport in 2001.
He told officials there he wanted to visit Disneyland, before being publicly deported in front of massed television cameras.
He now lives the life of a playboy in the Chinese city of Macau, occasionally giving impromptu interviews to Japanese and South Korean journalists