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Sep 7, 2007
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Amid nuclear wrangle, Kim Jong-il visits a duck farm

By
Reuters
Published
Sep 7, 2007

By Jon Herskovitz

SEOUL (Reuters) - While North Korea recovers from its worst flooding in decades and engages in tricky nuclear diplomacy, Kim Jong-il is showing his leadership skills visiting a duck farm and listening to soldiers sing.

Kim has an iron grip over the country but his public persona is of a leader who takes a hands-off approach to major problems and instead inspects factories and military bases for what the North's propaganda machine calls "field guidance."

In the past few weeks, the Dear Leader praised workers at a factory that makes equipment to drill into rocks, felt fabric at a textile mill, familiarized himself with smelting technology and sympathized with troops for having damp barracks.

Brian Myers, an expert on the cult of personality created for Kim and his father, "Eternal President" Kim Il-sung, said the North tries to portray its leaders as nurturing maternal figures.

"The emphasis is that he took time out of his busy schedule to this far-flung corner of this country," said Myers, an associate professor at South Korea's Dongseo University.

"The emphasis is usually placed on the concern that he expresses for the health and welfare of the people that he is visiting. The personality cult presents him as an omnipotent, all-protecting leader."

The North's propaganda says Kim gets little sleep as he travels the country by day and forms its policies at night. It shows that he shares the people's pain and understands their hardships, even though intelligence accounts say he lives a life of unabated luxury.

On his trips he appears a harried man of the people, wearing simple clothes and a tousled bouffant hairstyle.

The field guidance tours are also a way for Kim to remind the various locales that they cannot escape the authority of the central government. The trips to remote fertilizer plants and duck farms help to counter growing regional economic autonomy.

TEARS, TYRES AND GUNS

"The mass media give news of Kim Jong-il's on-spot guidance almost every day. Upon the news, the servicepersons and working people of all strata in the DPRK (North Korea) are always deeply moved," the North's official KCNA news agency said in August.

North Korea's official media is not topical when it comes to Kim. His rare overseas trips are reported only after they are over and Kim has safely returned to Pyongyang.

There have been no reports about what Kim did in response to floods in August that killed hundreds and wiped out crops in the impoverished state, or what he thinks about recent progress in international talks to end his state's nuclear arms program.

But there have been numerous visits, including reports this week of one to attend a military song show. The field guidance reports usually come out several days after the event.

The visit reports may seem trite, even laughable, but some North Koreans are moved to tears by the trips.

The Dear Leader typically tours a museum devoted to the communist ideal at a place like a tire factory and comments about the importance to the economy of the modern and scientific plant -- which typically uses decades-old technology.

He then poses for pictures with top officials and leans back so his bulging belly presses against his jumpsuit. At military bases, he often leaves a machine gun and binoculars as presents.

"I think if we make fun of those things, then we are missing the point." Myers said.

"It is as if the government is trying to stress that he is on the go all the time, so that people get the impression that he is always close and always taking care of them."

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