Ruler Kim Jong-un has and exchange with an advisor in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photo / Getty Images
Ruler Kim Jong-un has and exchange with an advisor in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photo / Getty Images
Those who knew the North Korean leader as a child have shared their unpleasant recollections of the baby dictator in a new biography.
Kim Jong-un was a spoiled brat who started throwing his weight around from the tender age of six, according to a new book on the North Korean dictator.
Washington Post journalist Anna Fifield's newly released biography, The Great Successor: The Secret Rise and Rule of Kim Jong-un, claims his reclusive childhood and teenage years helped shape him into the tyrannical hermit king he is today.
It paints a picture of an entitled youngster who divided his time between posh European boarding schools and his father's luxury Pyongyang compound and treated household staff with contempt.
Kenji Fujimoto, a Japanese chef who worked for the Kim family for years, remembers a six-year-old refusing to shake his hand, as if to say: "you abhorrent Japanese".
He learned to drive when he was just seven years old and was given his first car — a Mercedes — aged 10. At 11, he was swaggering around with a Colt .45 pistol at his hip, Fifield writes.
When Kim turned 12 in 1996, he was sent to Bern, the capital of Switzerland, to join his older brother Kim Jong-chol at a private boarding school under a fake identity, allowing him to escape the scrutiny of authorities.
Kim Jong-un attends the Inter-Korean Summit in Panmunjom. Photo / Getty Images
The brothers stayed with their aunt while their mother Ko Yong-hui made regular trips to Bern to visit them.
"She arrived on a passport that declared her to be Chong Il Son, assigned to the North Korean mission at the United Nations in Geneva since 1987, but the Swiss knew exactly who she was," the author writes in The Great Successor.
"After all, she arrived in the country in a Russian-made Ilyushin 62 jet bearing the insignia of Air Koryo, the North Korean state airline. The plane, which bore the tail number P882, was for VIPs only. It even had a full bedroom on-board.
"All sorts of bags and merchandise would be loaded on and off the plane, watched carefully by Swiss intelligence. They monitored Ko Yong-hui closely, keeping records of everything from her shopping expeditions on Zurich's Bahnhofstrasse, one of the world's most exclusive shopping avenues, to her hospital bills at fancy private clinics on Lake Geneva.
"They also knew who her children were. In private conversation, they called Kim Jong-chol 'the tall, skinny one' and Kim Jong-un 'the short, fat one'."
According to Fifeld, Ko first encouraged Kim Jong-un to play basketball — an interest that would turn into an obsession.
"Kim Jong-un was short as a child, and his father was not a tall man — he was only 5 foot 3 and famously wore platform shoes to try to compensate — so Ko encouraged her son to play basketball in the hope the tale was true. He grew to be 5 foot 7, so maybe it worked a bit," she writes in the book.
João Micaelo, then the 14-year-old son of Portuguese immigrants, clearly remembers the Asian boy in a tracksuit and Nike shoes walking into class 6A in 1998.
The 22 other students were already seated at their desks when Kim was introduced as Pak Un, the son of North Korean diplomats.
There was a spare seat next to João, so the new boy, who simply went by the name of Un, sat in it. The 12-year-old had a bowl cut and beginnings of a double chin, Mr Micaelo told Fifield.
The pair grew close, not just because of the seating arrangement but because neither was particularly academic. In year 6, classes were split into two streams, and both Un and João were sent to the group of academically weaker students.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un crosses the border upon meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in. Photo / Getty Images
Un was embarrassed when he was called to answer questions in front of the class — not because he didn't know the answers necessarily but because he couldn't express himself in German.
So Mr Micaelo helped him with the language, and Kim helped him with his maths.
As he grew older, Kim's love of German did not grow.
Classmates recalled the teenage Kim lashing out at his peers often, kicking them in the shins and even spitting on them if they spoke in German.
Despite being subjected to a world-class education and European culture, Kim didn't embrace the progressive views on freedom or democracy and instead concluded "if he were to live in the outside world, he would have been entirely unremarkable. A nobody," Fifield writes.
"Far from persuading him to change his country, these years would have shown him the necessity of perpetuating the system that had turned him, his father and grandfather into deities."
