Mick Hartley

Thae Yong-ho, the senior North Korean diplomat in London who defected in August, has been speaking at a conference in Seoul. A number of other diplomats, he said, have already defected to the South, but the news has been kept quiet. He also suggested that many more diplomats will soon be heading the same way. There'll be a lot of pressure on them this year to raise money for the regime: there are 15 red-letter days coming up, including the 75th birthday of former leader Kim Jong-il, the 105th birthday of nation founder Kim Il-sung and the 85th anniversary of the military, and the festivities all have to be paid for. In addition, of course, many will have realised that there's no future for them – or indeed for anybody else – in Kim's decaying socialist paradise.

He also raised an interesting point about Kim's bloodline. The problem is that Kim's mother Ko Yong-hui, a mistress of his father Kim Jong-il, was born in Japan, and so is regarded as having tainted blood in North Korea’s purity-obsessed ideology. "Kim Jong-un faces many obstacles if he is to follow in his father's footsteps and publicize who his mother is." He's been ruling for six years now but still can't declare his birthday an official holiday because he’s still having problems legitimizing his lineage.

More on Ko Yong-hui:

Ko was born in Ikuno, Osaka, Japan to parents of Korean descent….

She along with her family moved to North Korea in May 1961 or in 1962 as part of a repatriation program. In the early 1970s, she began to work as a dancer for the Mansudae Art Troupe in Pyongyang….

On 27 August 2004, various sources reported that she had died in Paris, probably of breast cancer. However, there is another report, stating that she was treated in Paris in 2004 Spring and then flown back to Pyongyang where she fell into coma and died in August 2004….

Under North Korea's songbun ascribed status system, Ko's Korean-Japanese heritage would make her part of the lowest "hostile" class. Furthermore, her grandfather worked in a sewing factory for the Imperial Japanese Army, which would give her the "lowest imaginable status qualities" for a North Korean.

Prior to an internal propaganda film released after ascension of Kim Jong-un, there were three attempts made to idolize Ko, in a style similar to that associated with Kang Pan-sok, mother of Kim Il-sung, and Kim Jong-suk, mother of Kim Jong-il and the first wife of Kim Il-sung. These previous attempts at idolization had failed, and they were stopped after Kim Jong-il's 2008 stroke.

The building of a cult of personality around Ko encounters the problem of her bad songbun, even though it is usually passed on by the father. Making her identity public would undermine the Kim dynasty's pure bloodline, and after Kim Jong-il's death, her personal information, including name, became state secrets. Ko's real name or other personal details have not been publicly revealed in North Korea, and she is referred to as "Mother of Great Songun Korea" or "Great Mother". The most recent propaganda film called its main character "Lee Eun-mi".

Given how important the purity of the bloodline is in North Korea, one wonders why more effort isn't being made by the South to make the facts about the Young Marshal's unfortunate ancestry better known to his subjects.

Thae Yong-ho, perhaps, is starting the ball rolling.