Obscure history: A local man looking at tombstones bearing the Ko family name at a remote area on the resort island of Jeju. — AFP
JEJU: North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un has threatened Seoul with fiery destruction, but as a remote graveyard on a resort island shows, he has closer links to the South than he might like to admit.
At a cemetery in a hard-to-find corner of South Korea’s Jeju island, there are 13 tombstones bearing the Ko family name – Kim’s relatives through his mother, Ko Yong-hui.
Kim is the third member of the Kim family to rule North Korea, after his father and grandfather – what official hagiography calls the “Paektu bloodline”. But the Jeju graves tell a wider story.
Kim’s mother was born in Osaka in 1952 to a native Jeju islander who emigrated to Japan in 1929, when the Korean peninsula was under Tokyo’s colonial rule.
Many of her family, including Kim’s maternal great-grandfather, are buried on Jeju, their overgrown graves a stark contrast to Pyongyang’s Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, where the embalmed bodies of Kim’s father and grandfather Kim Il-sung lie in state.
After Kim came to power in 2011 following the death of his father Kim Jong-il, many experts highlighted his mother’s South Korean and Japanese heritage. Pyongyang has never confirmed it.
The regime “must have feared confirmation would undermine its legitimacy”, Cheong Seong-chang of the Centre for North Korea Studies at the Sejong Institute, said.
The Kos were relatives of Kim through his mother.
The Kim dynasty bases its claim to power on Il-sung’s role as a guerrilla fighter driving out Japan and winning Korea its independence in 1945.
“Korea-Japan heritage runs counter to the North Korean myth of its leadership,” Cheong said.Kim’s mother grew up in the Japanese city of Osaka, but her family moved to North Korea in the 1960s as part of a decades-long repatriation programme by Pyongyang.The scheme urged ethnic Koreans living in Japan to move to North Korea, part of a drive to “claim supremacy” over the South, said Park Chul-hyun, a novelist and columnist in Tokyo.
“The North saw the Korean-Japanese community as a strategic battleground,” he said, and managed to convince nearly 100,000 ethnic Koreans to relocate to the “socialist paradise”.
The Ko family answered the call, and lived a relatively normal life in the North until their eldest daughter caught the eye of the country’s heir apparent.
Experts believe Ko, a performer with the Mansudae Art Troupe of musicians and dancers, first met Jong-il in Pyongyang in 1972.
She would become his partner in 1975 and although there is no official record of their marriage, the pair had three children. She died in 2004.
“There has been nothing about Ko Yong-hui in official state media,” said Rachel Minyoung Lee, a non-resident fellow with the 38 North Programme at the Washington-based Stimson Centre.
There is not much in state media about Kim’s background and heritage generally beyond attempts to show he is the legitimate heir to the Mount Paektu legacy, she added. — AFP
