IN JUST a few months North Korea has moved from mourning to war fever under a new young leader who is visible on the streets of its dimly lit capital and is worrying governments around the world.
Freshly minted photographs of a chubby young man in black hang in shops and offices. Smiling in some, resolute in others, Kim Jong-un, who may be 27 or 28 years old, surveys his new subjects.
“Nobody can replace him,” said a woman in her forties working for a North Korean trading firm. “He has learnt to take control over the military and the regime very well.”
However, military glory for the regime — a Stalinist dynasty with nuclear weapons — comes at a price for its people.
When a chill darkness envelops its capital, only the brilliantly lit tower commemorating the Juche theory, North Korea’s ideology of racial superiority and self-sufficiency, shines out like a solitary beacon.
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At the Pyongyang railway station, often bustling with soldiers, a grand sign proclaims: “2012 is a very important year for making the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea into a powerful country.”
Two years ago the same sign predicted: “2012 is the year when the DPRK will be a powerful country.”
As the modified slogan and the dim lights suggest, the game has changed.
Although it has nuclear weapons, North Korea does not have electric power to light and heat its homes in the bleak Korean winter.
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It is so short of food that its children are risking death to scramble across a frozen river to hide in China.
The country exists on a lifeline from the Chinese government, its sole ally and patron.
Every day truckloads and trainloads of vital goods from China cross the Yalu River to the city of Sinuiju. From there they are hauled 125 miles to Pyongyang down potholed roads and rattling old tracks.
The journey spells out the dire plight of North Korea. Hundreds of women carrying baskets and boxes rush the carriages at Sinuiju, fighting for a place. Most lose out and must wait a whole day for the next train.
Power cuts mean the locomotive stops and starts all the way. It takes seven hours. The rice fields are shrouded in a ghostly coat of snow. A few carts are dragged by emaciated bullocks. Groups of men and women can be seen hacking at the frozen earth.
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When darkness falls the whole of the countryside vanishes with barely a pinprick of light.
Despite such poverty, North Korea can afford one luxury: a huge standing army. A modern-looking train carrying tanks rumbles north, heading, it is whispered, for a tank repair shop at Sinuiju.
Uniforms are seen on every station. Young soldiers, kissed and hugged by their mothers, are weighed down with food and packets of money as they board trains reserved for the military.
Their destination: the most heavily fortified frontier in the world, where North and South Korea confront each other across a barbed-wire demilitarised zone (DMZ), with more than 20,000 American troops poised on the South Korean side.
There are five checkpoints on the road south from Pyongyang as you near the DMZ, and they are no joke. Platoons of soldiers firmly gripping their automatic weapons scour every vehicle at each stop.
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“War can break out at any moment! Be ready to obey every order or it will be dangerous for you!” barks an officer.
Soldiers boast of their new young leader’s recent visit to the spot as they take visitors upstairs to an observation terrace looking down on the line where South Korean sentries stand impassively.
“Our great young general Kim Jong-un just stood here to watch the enemy and he warned South Korea if it crossed the line by just one centimetre we will counter-attack,” said an officer.
“We can defeat them within three days. Our thousands of artillery pieces can turn Seoul into a sea of fire in a few minutes,” he added.
On the road back to Pyongyang, however, the North Koreans have built pillboxes and fortifications, meaning a fighting retreat is not out of the question.
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Everyone believes that morale is high. The officer said almost 2m young students have put their names down for military service.
It may be the age of the internet, mobile phones and seamless communications, but the North Korean regime has succeeded in running its own reality show.
At a great cavern in the mountains, behind a thick steel door, a guide proudly shows off the gifts from dozens of foreign rulers and potentates to the Kim dynasty.
“Here is the gift from Colonel Gadaffi of Libya and here is the gift from President Ceausescu of Romania,” she said proudly, pointing to several firearms in glass cases.
Was she familiar, a visitor asked, with the present circumstances of those two leaders? She shook her head and smiled, happily unaware that Gadaffi was murdered by a mob last year and Ceausescu was shot by a firing squad in 1989.
Every effort of the Kim dynasty is intended to ensure that it does not meet the same end. Diplomats in Pyongyang believe the “young general” is playing a clever strategy worked out by the elderly clique of generals and cadres behind the throne.
Cruelty and repression, fuelled by war hysteria, have been stepped up since the death of Kim Jong-il, dashing any immediate hopes of reform and making his son secure.
At the same time the younger Kim has reached out to the United States, offering a freeze on ballistic missile tests and uranium enrichment, while allowing inspectors in to see North Korea’s atomic facilities.
In exchange, Barack Obama’s administration has agreed to send 240,000 tons of food to help Kim’s famished people. It maintains this is a humanitarian deed responding to warnings from the United Nations and aid agencies that hunger and illness are worsening once again.
The deal has attracted criticism from American conservatives and the liberal Washington Post denounced it.
“The Obama administration effectively ratified the next generation of one of the world’s worst tyrannies,” the Post said in an editorial.
Obama himself will be in Seoul later this month for a nuclear summit of 53 nations and will visit the DMZ in a high-profile show of his policy.
With adept timing, the regime has just announced a “satellite launch” that western powers say is a cover for another missile test. In effect, critics argue, it has already wrecked the bargain. The Chinese yesterday expressed concern about the launch.
They do not know it on the freezing streets of Pyongyang, but North Korea has just become another issue in the US presidential election.
Kim Jong-il, the father of the “young general”, is still enshrined in people’s memories as they talk about the grand funeral procession to the Kumsusan Memorial Palace after his death from a heart attack on December 17.
They had stood in the snowflakes as the dead dictator, swathed in a red banner, was borne atop a vintage American limousine to his rest.
It is widely expected here that he will be embalmed and placed on display alongside his father, Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea.
Last week hundreds of young people carrying flowers hurried through the streets on their way to practise for the “Day of the Sun” on April 15, marking Kim Il-sung’s 100th birthday.
Kim Il-sung, who was put in power by Stalin, officially continues in perpetuity as the Great Leader of his nation, but the sun is not shining on his heirs.