And that’s if the negotiations go well. Another alternative is war without end. The potential was implicit in the event that prompted the queen to act–Diana’s unauthorized interview with the BBC last November. In it, Diana said she didn’t want a divorce but did want “clarity,” and that she awaited her husband’s decision. Charles must wait out two more years of legal separation to sever their relationship if she says no. She’ll probably say yes. “For now,” says one courtier loyal to Charles, “I think she’s enjoying letting everyone stew.” While her sons spent the holidays with Charles and the queen, Diana stayed in London for Christmas – and was spotted at her psychiatrist’s office. She then flew off for her own break–on the Caribbean island of Barbuda.
Divorce would eliminate the palace’s worst nightmare–that the queen could die and the estranged couple would actually accede to the throne together and become a warring king and consort. But divorce also holds its own perils:
Will Diana remarry? She reportedly wants to keep her title, and some royal-watchers ask whether this might give rise to a new form, “HRH Princess Diana, the Mrs. . . .” She and Charles are expected to keep sharing equal access to the heirs. But what would be the role of a royal stepfather?
Will Charles remarry? The Daily Express reported last week that the prince’s friend of long standing, Camilla Parker Bowles, has become impatient for a royal title of her own. Charles’s recent statement that he had “no intention” of remarrying sounded like a politician’s nondenial. “What the press wants is for other people to enter the picture,” says Majesty magazine editor Nigel Evans. “They probably will, and when it happens it’ll be huge.”
How will Diana make a living? To win her good will, the queen’s strategists reportedly are ready to be generous. Projections of a settlement range up to $80 million. But the palace also will insist on a confidentiality clause barring Diana from writing her memoirs. Diana has leverage here, too: her own family is well off. And she clearly now treasures her freedom. The lawyers are going to earn their pay.
title: “Mother Knows Best” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-06” author: “Katherine Morrow”
The directive’s apparent triviality almost disguises its serious message. The exact meaning is a controversial topic among analysts who have studied the document, leaked from North Korea and published in the latest issue of the South Korean opinion journal Monthly Chosun. But by all accounts the basic thrust is that a power struggle is emerging in Pyongyang between Kim Jong Nam, 32, and Kim Jong Chol, 22, the sons of North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Il. The half brothers have been on a collision course ever since Jong Nam was caught trying to enter Japan–“to go to Disneyland,” he claimed–in 2001. Now their public rivalry is adding to the peninsula’s jitters. Last week, as South Korea inaugurated a new president, Pyongyang marked the event by test-firing a cruise missile. The next day the senior Kim restarted a reactor at the Yongbyon nuclear complex, mothballed since 1994. Meanwhile the World Food Program and other U.N. agencies warn that a new humanitarian crisis is developing.
The risks make it all the more urgent to decode Pyongyang’s signals. The directive’s “beloved supreme commander” is obviously Kim Jong Il. Its language indicates that “Respected Mother” is alive, analysts say, so she couldn’t be Kim senior’s mother. Nor could she be Jong Nam’s mother, who died in Moscow last year, intelligence sources believe. That leaves the current First Lady, former professional folk dancer (and Jong Chol’s mother) Ko Young Hui. Her sudden official sanctification is viewed as a sign that Kim senior is smiling on his younger son. The older one used to be regarded as North Korea’s heir apparent–but that was before the disastrous Japan junket. Sporting a diamond-studded Rolex and carrying wads of cash, he was detained along with two women and a young boy (presumably wife, nanny and son) for three days. The expulsion was deeply embarrassing to Kim senior, who happened to be welcoming a large European Union delegation at the time.
A visiting scholar heard rumors of Jong Chol’s rise last summer from colleagues in Pyongyang. “I asked if anyone had ever had close contact with him, but nobody seemed to know what kind of man he is,” says the traveler. Only one picture of the second son has ever been published outside North Korea. Taken in 1994, it shows a lanky 13-year-old walking with classmates at the International School of Berne in Switzerland, where he was enrolled under a false name. His supposed parents were a cleaning woman and a chauffeur at the North Korean Embassy, but people noticed that the “father” always bowed reverently to the boy when picking him up at school.
Jong Chol’s low profile only emphasizes his older brother’s flaws. Korea watchers say Jong Nam was a spoiled, ill-mannered child. After a brief stint at an elite Moscow boarding school, he quit, reportedly because “the toilets were too dirty.” Recently he has played a leading role in efforts to develop a software industry in the North–a hopeless enterprise unless Pyongyang gets serious about opening itself to outside ideas for the first time in half a century.
Some observers predict serious trouble if the older brother is disinherited. “For the last 10 years, many party and military officials have supported him as heir apparent,” says a South Korean diplomat in Tokyo. “If the father suddenly chooses the second son, there will be a power struggle and possibly a coup.” Others argue that in effect, the power struggle has already happened–and that the younger Kim won. They theorize that hard-line Stalinists in the military’s top ranks have thrown their support behind Jong Chol to prevent his globe-trotting older brother from exposing North Koreans to the “pollution” of foreign contact. A third group of analysts says the whole question of succession is moot. “This is not the time to be worrying about which son should take over,” says Katsumi Sato, director of the Modern Korea Institute in Tokyo. “Once the United States and the rest of the world turn their eyes [from Baghdad] to Pyongyang, the ‘Great Leader’ will need to worry about his own a–.” Even so, Kim Jong Il has kept North Korea going until now on little more than threats and the will to survive. With Respected Mother on his side, who knows how long he’ll last?
