UNTIL a few months ago, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il was widely portrayed as almost a monster. Accused of orchestrating numerous terrorist attacks, he was derided by South Korean propagandists as a womaniser with a weird haircut.
Now, not only has his outdated Mao-style jacket become a hit in fashion-conscious Seoul, but some of those same propagandists are busily trying to recast him as a 'moderate'.
A symposium last week saw journalists flown in from across Asia to see painted an ultra-optimistic picture of the thaw in relations with the North that has followed South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's landmark visit to Pyongyang in June.
Never mind that although the North has toned down its previously virulent rhetoric, this rapprochement has yielded few practical benefits. Only 200 of the more than 1.2 million divided families, with relatives on both sides of the border, have been allowed to meet. And Pyongyang has been slow to organise a second set of reunions apparently preferring to concentrate its efforts on improving relations with the United States.
However, some Seoul policymakers now seem to believe that someone who almost succeeded in wiping out one South Korean leader - Kim Jong-il is widely believed to have ordered the 1984 bomb blast that killed 16 of then-president Chun Doo-hwan's top aides in Rangoon - is just the man to help another, Kim Dae-jung, nudge Pyongyang out of its self-imposed isolation. Such wishful thinking saw South Korean academic Paik Hak-soon claim Kim Jong-il was a 'dove', who had taken on and defeated those opposed to opening the North to the world during allegedly heated internal debates in Pyongyang. Another, Yoo Ho-yeol of Seoul's Korea University, said it was time to trust the North's supposedly moderate leader: 'Our strategy is to persuade him to persuade others, such as his conservatives.'
Oh Seung-yul, of the government-affiliated Korea Institute for National Reunification, even compared Kim Jong-il to Deng Xiaoping, arguing the Northern leader faced a far more difficult task than the former Chinese patriarch in trying to kick-start economic reform.
