Ten years have elapsed since Kim Jong Il
(1942-2011), the eternal Chairman of the National Defence Commission of the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, passed away.
Following are the reminiscences of Kim Jong Il by
international figures.
Umalatova’s Reminiscences
What was Kim Jong Il like seen by Sazhi Umalatova,
chairwoman of the Party for Peace and Unity of Russia?
Kim Jong Il was a staunch defender of justice and
truth.
When socialism began to collapse in succession in
the East European countries including former Soviet Union in the end of the 1980s
and the beginning of the 1990s, Kim Jong Il encouraged the socialists in Russia
and saved them from spiritual wandering.
Umalatova saw the profile of the saviour and
defender of socialism while reading the books written by Kim Jong Il, including
The Historical Lesson in Building
Socialism and the General Line of Our Party, Abuses of Socialism Are Intolerable and Socialism Is a Science.
His firm political conviction and will dealt a
severe blow at the renegades of socialism and capitulationists and instilled a
hope for the revival of socialism in the people who were aspiring after
progress.
What Umalatova, a Leftist figure, could not forget
was his ennobling human traits transcending ideology, ideal, political view and
religious belief.
Like many Russians, she still remembered August 4,
2001, when Kim Jong Il visited the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square in Moscow. When
the career and exploits of Lenin, the pioneer of the socialist cause and leader
of the international working class, were being debased by the renegade
socialists and they were even insisting that the mausoleum should be moved from
Red Square, Kim Jong Il visited the mausoleum and paid tribute to his memory.
She recalled: I am an atheist but I revere
Chairman Kim Jong Il as a divine being; he was a politician of strong
conviction and a leader who would carry out his position to the end.
Yazov’s
Reminiscences
Marshal Dmitry Yazov, former USSR Defence Minister,
wrote in his memoir: It was a great pleasure in my life to get acquainted with Comrade
Kim Jong Il; as the 13th defence minister of the former Soviet
Union, I was attracted to him while meeting him several times during my visits
to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; the resourcefulness and courage
of a great commander is estimated in a war or military expedition where rise
and fall of a nation is decided; then, who is a great commander in modern times
when political confrontation and military situation are acute? I dare say that
Comrade Kim Jong Il, Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, is a man of
that type.
A veteran military expert with rich battle
experience and military knowledge, which he had gained through his lifetime service
in the army, recognized the outstanding military talent and achievement of Kim
Jong Il, which would shine for ever in the world military history.
He recalled the whole process of the DPRK-US
confrontation in the 1990s.
As the world knows, many military experts and
analyzers characterized the confrontation in early 1993 as an event full of dramatic
shocks and sensations.
A military conflict was unavoidable owing to the
all-out political and military offensive and collective sanctions on the part
of the forces hostile to the DPRK, and the international community was
concerned and worried about the possible gun sound on the Korean peninsula and
its chain reaction in the international arena. But the situation changed
dramatically: the tense confrontation was peacefully removed; government-level
delegates of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the United States
sat at the negotiating table, and the DPRK-USA joint statement was made public
for the first time in the history of bilateral relations; the US president sent
a letter of assurance to Kim Jong Il, supreme leader of the DPRK, and many
other miraculous events took place.
The United States, the “only superpower” in the
world, lost the showdown.
Kim Jong Il defended the sovereignty and dignity
of his country and changed the dynamic structure of the Korean peninsula with iron
will and courage and outstanding insight. He won without firing a shot by combining
hard and soft lines.
Such ability is not easy to find in the world
military history and in other great commanders.
Hair-trigger situations were created on the Korean
peninsula for several times later, but a war did not break out thanks to his
military strategy.
The world community recognized that the factor was
the decisive role Kim Jong Il had played.
Yazov said that history recorded no great man possessed
of perfect political qualifications as the leader of a nation and ability of a brilliant
commander other than Kim Jong Il.
Vishwanath’s Statement
Kim Jong Il was a man sent by heaven to serve
mankind; such a great man is born once in ten centuries–this was what
Vishwanath, a prominent social figure in India, said when Kim Jong Il passed
away.
He stated.
It was entirely thanks to the wisdom of Chairman
Kim Jong Il that there had been no gun sound of a third world war or a world
nuclear war on the Korean peninsula, the hotspot in the world. He prevented the
wars by turning his country into a military power; had Kim Jong Il failed to
turn his country into one with a great military capability (though this could
never happen) and had the United States unleashed a war on the Korean
peninsula, the three gigantic transformations–material prosperity,
technological leap and spiritual civilization–which the world has achieved in a
peaceful environment over half a century at the highest-ever level in their
thousands of years of history would have been unthinkable on this planet; the DPRK
is willing to launch missiles over the Pacific and fight an all-out, missile
war against the US if the latter launches a preemptive strike; its great spear,
called ICBM, will make the first great hole in the golden shield, called NMD of
the US, in order to defend sovereignty of the country; as a result, though the
US is controlling the world at will and occupying medium-sized and small
countries by resorting to political high-handedness and military arbitrariness,
this high-handedness and arbitrariness are nothing but a broken sword in front
of Korea; having saved the whole world from the “earthquake” of a war to be
caused by tens of thousands of nuclear bombs is the political weight of the
ever-victorious politics pursued by the DPRK.
Indeed, Kim Jong Il was a messiah who, by
victoriously leading the DPRK-US showdown, defended the safety of 200-odd
countries of the world and secured peace for billions of people.
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