North Korea has made the decision to embalm its departed leader, Kim Jong Il. After all, he did proclaim that he was an “eternal ruler,” like his father. “Great leader Kim Jong Il will be preserved to look the same as when he was alive,” KCNA, the North Korea’s official news agency, announced on January 12.

Officials will also hang smiling portraits of him and put up ‘towers to his immortality’ around the country. His birthday, which falls on February 16, is to be commemorated as ‘the greatest auspicious holiday of the nation’ and named the Day of the Lodestar. The long-range rockets that North Korea started testing in the year 1998 also coincidentally share that same name.

There has been speculation for weeks over whether Kim Jong Il’s body would be embalmed like that of his father, Kim Il Sung. It took almost one year to preserve the elder Kim in Moscow, which purportedly cost the secretive nation $1 million. Some debated whether North Korea would be able to afford preserving his body, which might also explain the reports that the North Koreans might be the ones to do the embalming, instead of sending him to Moscow’s world-famous lab.

They will have to be very careful if they are going to cut costs and do it themselves. Mao Zedong’s body was filled with 22 liters of formaldehyde by Chinese undertakers during the mid-seventies and reportedly began leaking a little over 20 years later.

Kim Jong Il’s body will be put on permanent display inside a glass coffin at the Kumsusan Memorial Palace. The palace was erected in 1976 and was the official residence of Kim Jong Il’s father, who is North Korea’s first (and eternal) president and the founder of the nation. He passed away in 1994, which prompted his son to spend the exorbitant amount of around $100 million to convert Kumsusan into a mausoleum.

Unsurprisingly, the inside of the structure is quite eerie. The visitors of the mausoleum travel around the building on moving walkways, listening to narrations of mourning, and gaze at the bronze statues of sorrowful, grieving people. They also travel through a machine that blows dust at them. At the end of this morbid tour, they are brought to Kim Il Sung’s body, which lies in a glass sarcophagus.

As of now, it has not been determined if Kim Jong Il will be put to rest next to his father or if he will get to lie at the end of his own separate walkway. Either way, many North Koreans will be sure to visit and continue to mourn his passing.

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North Koreans laid Kim Jong-il to rest on Wednesday, December 28. According to the New York Times, the coffin of the late leader sat on the rooftop of a mid-1970s armored black Lincoln Continental. Kim Jong-un, the dynastic heir, walked alongside the Cadillac. According to Radio Pyongyang, two million mourners lined up the streets for this elaborate funeral.

Agence France Presse quoted Yang Moo-Jin of Seoul’s University of North Korean Studies, when he said, “The grief for Kim Il-sung was genuine, with many people expressing real sorrow. The mood this time appears to be slightly different”.

As the funeral progressed, Mr. Kim’s two elder sons, Kim Jong-nam and Kim Jong-chol, were out of sight. Neither have been pictured mourning his father’s death, nor were they a part of the official funeral committee. This absence raises suspicion about the kind of relationship the sons had with their late father. However, several military generals and party secretaries were present. The most well known figures were Ri Yong-ho, vice marshal in charge of North Korean military’s general staff, and Jang Song-taek, Kim Jong-un’s uncle and vice chairman of the powerful National Defense Commission.

Lee Dong-bok, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said, “Kim Jong-il died a little ahead of schedule; things weren’t ready for the smooth relay of power. The young man isn’t prepared to take control by himself. He needs help.”

Today, the 29-year-old Kim Jong-un is left with a title that took his father 20 years to prepare for, while he had merely three. Despite having exalted titles such as full general, he has little experience compared to what his father had in 1994, when his grandfather, Kim Il-sung died. Experts believe that the success of Kim Jong-un will depend on the guidance of his uncle, Jang Song-taek, and his wife, Kim Kyong-hui, the sister of the late Kim Jong-il.

CBS News reports that Kim Jong-il’s heartfelt presence is felt in every building, where his portraits hang and his visits to factories are commemorated with signs in his honor. Kim Jong Il’s funeral lasted for three hours and followed the same protocol set in 1994 with the death of his father. The late leader was laid to rest in an underground mausoleum.

Indeed, the late leader’s death marks an end of an era for North Korea, which has only known two leaders, Mr. Kim and his father, North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung. Today, a new era has already begun with the leadership of Mr. Kim’s youngest son, Kim Jong-un.

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The North Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) reported the “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il died on Saturday December 17 due to physical and mental overwork.

The 69-year-old North Korean Leader was on a train on his way to a “field guidance tour” to farms, factories and to the army when he suffered a heart attack that has been fatal to him. A distraught black dressed broadcaster announced his death and said that despite he was treated with “every possible first-aid measure” he couldn’t be saved.

The KCNA reported North Koreans were “writhing in pain”  for their leader’s death and the Chinese state television showed people’s tearful reaction to the news in the city of Pyongyang.

Kim Jong-Il had come to power in 1994, when his father, Kim Il-Sung, died struck down by a heart attack at the age of 82, and he ruled the country for 17 years. In 1974, he had been officially named his father’s heir and since the 80’s the Korean government, ruled by the elder Kim, began building a personality cult around him and he was acclaimed as “the great successor to the revolutionary cause”.

Under his long rule, North Korea was closed off to outside influences and led through a devastating famine that contributed to the death of millions of people and for which he also sought international aid. The country has been termed as a totalitarian Stalinist dictatorship by several outside organizations, including Freedom House and Amnesty International, and it has also been described as one of the lowest-ranking human rights records of any country in the world. According to Human Rights Watch, the country’s government under Kim Jong-Il was “among the world’s most repressive governments” and North Koreans are “some of the world’s most brutalized people” given that civil liberties and fundamental rights are not guaranteed and strongly restricted. Defectors also reported about tortures, deportation to internment and concentration camps, executions, forced labour, rapes, murders, starvation, and forced abortions and prostitution.

However, it is very hard to have a clear and complete picture of the country’s  actual situation because the North Korean government strictly controls the access of foreigners, the media, and the people’s lives and relations.

Kim Jong-Il’s funeral will be held on December 28, but the national mourning period will last until December 29. The KNCN said he will buried next to his father Kim Il-Sung, the “Eternal President”.

Kim Jong-un, the third and youngest son of Kim Jong-Il who started his carreer as Daejang – the equivalent of four-star general – , has been designed as the Great Successor” by the KCNA, which lauded him as “the outstanding leader of our party, army and people”.

The agency also said the country and the people “must faithfully revere respectable comrade Kim Jong-un. At the leadership of comrade Kim Jong-un, we have to change sadness to strength and courage and overcome today’s difficulties” and find comfort in the “absolute surety that the leadership of Comrade Kim Jong-un will lead and succeed the great task of revolutionary enterprise”.

Kim Jong-un, unlike his father who had 20 years as official heir, became successor by taking on official titles only last year and doesn’t have any political experience. He takes over a heavy inheritance and it has to be seen whether and how he will be able to manage being the leader of the most isolated country of the world. Meanwhile, many countries concern about the future steps of the new North Korea’s leader.

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While most of Southeast Asia is experiencing economic growth and Westernization, one place remains a relic of a past political era responsible for the deaths of millions. The long shadow of Stalin manifests within history’s first and only patriarchal monarchy to enact the Communist Manifesto. Concentration camps dot the bleak landscape.

Ambitious highways remain empty of vehicles. Whole families are arrested, and hundreds of thousands toil in work camps as no other form of industry exists. Meanwhile, the entire country slowly starves to death. The world remains either unaware of such crimes against humanity, or is afraid of rousing North Korea’s powerful neighbor to the North, China.

No other country in the world has the same cult of personality as North Korea. Their leader, Kim Jong-il, is revered as nothing less than an omnipresent god. The Korean or ‘Forgotten War,’ of the early 1950s claimed 3 million lives and has never officially ended. The North, backed by the Communist powers of China and the USSR, fought the South, led by the Allied forces of the USA and Great Britain.

This was a ‘proxy’ war of opposing ideologies, a battleground for the world’s new superpowers to posture and display military might. North Korea has the fourth-largest standing army, and is the most militarized country in the world. A tense ceasefire remains to this day, and fire-fights occasionally burst along the 38^th parallel.

In 2009, Kim Jong-il launched missiles over Japan’s North Island, claiming he was testing new technology to launch satellites. North Korea fired upon a disputed island in 2010, sending 1,200 civilians scrambling to seek safety in bomb shelters. These are only recent provocations; there have been over thirty such incidents since the ceasefire of July 1953.

Under the rule of founding leader, Kim il-Sung, the country experienced a period of relative prosperity in the 1960s and 70s. The disintegration of a key ally, the Soviet Union, and agrarian mismanagement in the 1990s killed a million people, causing devastation and famine throughout the country. Accounts by escapees describe resorting to eating grass and boiling roots to survive.

This neglect of agricultural and commercial necessities are eerily similar to policies enacted by Stalin in the Ukraine during their massive Holodomor Genocide of the early 1930s. Collective farming and the arrest and murder of landowners led to the death of 8 million peasants as a result of the Marx-Engels manifesto.

Former leader Kim il-Sung wrote his thesis known as Juche,  a communist policy divergent from the Soviet style that is marked by an isolationist approach to all outside governments and strong North Korean nationalism. This ethos prohibits all contact with the outside world, thus very rarely is the voice of a North Korean heard.

The state-run media has no free press, and citizens are subject to ten-year work camp sentences if they are found to have tuned in to any broadcast outside the one and only state station. The few that escape and make it to the West tell of the most deplorable conditions imaginable.

Shin Dong-hyuk was born in a prison camp, tortured, and forced to watch the execution of his mother and brother after a failed escape attempt. He is now a human-rights activist, fighting for the liberation of his people. Refugees risk their life fleeing over the mountains north into China, and escape to South Korea is impossible.

A 160 mile long, 2.5 mile-wide fortified barrier keeps these two ethnically similar, yet politically opposed, countries apart. The only option is escaping into China, and eventually Mongolia where citizens can find refugee status. Many women become indentured servants or prostitutes.

China does not recognize North Koreans accordingly, and promptly return the captured back to North Korean authorities to face torture, starvation or execution. China’s actions have not gone unrecognized by the UN, which has condemned their policy.

Normally a very private dictatorship, conditions have become so dire that the regime allowed photographs of their children to be seen by the world due to a harsh winter and flooding of 2011. Analysts think this may be a last-ditch effort to garner money from the UN and South Korea, who have stopped their efforts after it was revealed that Kim Jung-il misappropriated such funds.

This October, UN undersecretary-general Valerie Amos claimed that 6 million North Koreans, particularly children, mothers and pregnant women, are at serious risk, and that wealthier countries need to put politics aside to provide aide.  ”This is about helping the people who are most in need.

It’s not about saying that this country has made a choice about spending its resources in one way rather than another. We don’t make those judgments in other countries, on humanitarian grounds. There’s no reason to begin to do it in,” Amos said, according to the AP.

Maxim Tupikov / Shutterstock.com

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