Duncan Gillies: It's party time in Pyongyang fantasyland

North Korean youths and students dancing in celebration of the re-election of Kim Jong Il as the General Secretary of the Workers Party. Photo / Getty Images.

Opinion

For a hermit state, North Korea sure knows how to throw a party.

Pyongyang was dressed up like a pinata this week for the first Workers Party conference in 30 years.

Streets and squares were adorned with national flags and propaganda posters, young couples danced in a grid-like formation with the gay abandon of mechanical toys and strategically placed citizens beamed with the kind of pride that only comes from living under a personality cult.

You might think when you are labelled a hermit by the outside world, any party you held would be a low-key event, inside a cave high up in some mountain range, so hidden that even the world's greatest armies couldn't find it, and that old men with long beards would sit cross-legged around a campfire.

But no, that was actually Osama bin Laden's last birthday party.

North Korea, on the other hand, hopes everyone is watching when it throws a party.

Because there's nothing a hermit state likes more than to grab the world's attention.

Nuclear test here, ship sinking there, talks on, talks off, talks on, talks off.

I'm convinced if world leaders got together and offered Kim Jong Il a deal on a reality TV show along the lines of the Osbournes, there would be no more problems.

Either that or hit the country with a 50-megaton Ritalin bomb.

This week all the fuss was about the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il's son, Kim Jong Un.

The world was hoping to see if Kim, 68 and in poor health after suffering a stroke two years ago, would pave the way to power for his youngest son, just as his father, Kim Il Sung, the Eternal President and the state's founder, did for him at the last party conference 30 years ago.

And there is every indication power will pass to Kim Jong Un, but at this stage it seems he is still too young to take the reins.

Instead, Kim's youngest sister, Kim Kyong Hui, and her husband, Chang Song Taek, will help guide him along the way.

Kim Jong Un, believed to be just 27 and with no military experience, was also considered too young to choose his own term of endearment just yet, though Brilliant Comrade has been suggested.

But to make up for the disappointment his dad made him a four-star general and named him a vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission of the party.

Western analysts are trying to work out if this means he will be allowed to play with any nuclear weapons.

Little is known of Kim Jong Un except that he went to school in Switzerland. Reports that he asked to be called the Eternal Student and the Dear Head Boy have never been substantiated. His father, though, will hope be hoping he hasn't been softened up by his European education.

Kim Jong Il has had to suffer a series of disappointments with when it comes to his sons.

In the 2003 book I Was Kim Jong Il's Cook, Kenji Fujimoto told of how his boss felt his middle son, Kim Jong Chol, was too girlish.

That was after his eldest, Kim Jong Nam, was caught trying to enter Japan on a false passport, reportedly to visit Disneyland.

Now 39 and living in exile in Macau, Kim Jong Nam was seen as Kim's natural heir.

Nowadays, he spends his nights rolling the dice in the island's casinos or singing in its karaoke bars.

You have to wonder if sometimes he regrets having thrown it all away for the chance to meet Mickey and his friends. After all, it was all meant to be his, the power, the title, the movie collection, the wardrobe. And he was already living in his own fantasyland.