Brilliant Commander Kim Jong Il

Kim Jong Il (1942-2011), eternal chairman of the National Defence Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, was gifted with unusual military wisdom and plucks. 

Born in Mt Paektu, a stronghold of the armed struggle to liberate Korea under the military occupation of the Japanese imperialists (1905-1945), he spent his boyhood hearing the gun reports of the anti-Japanese war. And during the Korean war (1950-1953), the fiercest one of its kind after the Second World War, he learned military affairs at the operations table of the Supreme Headquarters of the Korean People’s Army.

As he grew up in such an environment, he, in his early years, had a standpoint of attaching importance to military affairs and profound knowledge of it. In his days at Kim Il Sung University he made public many works, a considerable number of which concerned military affairs.

Having started his Songun-based leadership through his inspection of the Seoul Ryu Kyong Su Guards 105th Tank Division of the KPA on August 25, 1960, he demonstrated wisdom, courage and pluck as befits a brilliant commander.

In January 1968 the US armed spy ship Pueblo was captured by the KPA Navy while engaging in acts of espionage in the territorial waters of the DPRK. The US amassed its huge forces around the Korean peninsula, claiming “retaliation.” Apprehensive of the possible outbreak of a new war on the peninsula, some countries advised the DPRK government to send the ship back to the US.  

At that time Kim Jong Il declared:

As the Korean People’s Army did not capture the Pueblo on the sea off the US but captured it while it was committing acts of espionage in the territorial waters of our country, we do not need to make any concession to the Americans nor pander to them. Those who encroached on the sovereignty of our Republic and intruded into our territorial waters to perpetrate acts of espionage must be dealt with according to the DPRK law whoever they are. This is an independent right of our Republic, which no one can deny.

The DPRK responded with a resolute declaration that it would return the enemy’s “retaliation” with retaliation and their “all-out war” with an all-out war.

In December that year the US, dispirited by the DPRK’s resolute reaction, signed a document, in which it acknowledged the hostile acts of espionage it had committed and assured that no US ship would intrude into the DPRK’s territorial waters in the future. 

The then US President Lyndon Johnson lamented that it was the first-ever letter of apology in the US history.

When a nuclear crisis broke out in the Korean peninsula between 1993 and 1994, the US instigated the International Atomic Energy Agency to enforce on the DPRK a “special inspection” of the latter’s important military bases, claiming about its “suspicious nuclear development” and at the same time, staged a large-scale war game. 

At that time Kim Jong Il declared a semi-war state across the country on an order of the Supreme Commander of the KPA. 

It was followed by the DPRK government statement on the country’s withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. 

The successive declarations of the DPRK made the US come to the negotiating table for settlement of the crisis, and signed the DPRK-USA Agreed Framework, in which it agreed to solve the nuclear issue of the Korean peninsula in a peaceful way. And the then US president Bill Clinton sent to Kim Jong Il a letter of assurance, in which he promised that the US government would ensure sincere implementation of its commitments under the framework agreement.

Entering the new century, the new US administration, branding the DPRK as part of the “Axis of Evil” and putting the country on the list of “targets of preemptive nuclear strike,” resorted to reckless provocative moves for a nuclear war. 

To cope with it, the DPRK withdrew from the NPT formally and possessed nuclear weapons. And then it conducted the launch of missiles and underground nuclear test, dealing a blow at the high-handedness and rackets of nuclear threat by the US. 

The Bush administration had no other option but to officially announce that it deleted the DPRK from the list of “state sponsors of terrorism.” This was a symbolic event that showed that the US succumbed to the DPRK.

Witnessing this, the international community realized how tremendous the strength of the DPRK was in its response to the arrogance and arbitrariness of the US, the only superpower in the world.

Indeed, Kim Jong Il was a brilliant commander, who led the DPRK-US showdown—with Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush pere, Clinton, Bush fils and Obama, presidents of the US between the latter half of the 20th century and the early 21st century.

Hiroshi Wakabayashi, social figure of Japan, commented that there is no other country than the DPRK led by Kim Jong Il, whether big or small in the East and the West, that won victory in the frontal political, diplomatic and military confrontation with the US and that left it no other choice but to kneel down and ask for negotiated settlement.