editorial

July 8 is the day when President Kim Il Sung passed away.

With the day coming near at hand, the Korean people yearn for the President who devoted his all to their happiness, finding himself among them all his life.

If there is a phrase that can condense his great life, it is “among the people”.

In July 1994, the last period of his great life, he recalled, saying that he struggled for the people believing in them and lived among them and that his life was the one devoted to the country and nation and the one in which he struggled together with them.

In his treatise “The Great President Kim Il Sung Is the Eternal Leader of Our Party and Our People” published in April 2012 to mark the centenary of the birth of the President, the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un wrote: To his enemies, he was the tiger of Mt Paektu, but to his men and people, he was a kindly and dear father. When talking to children, he became a child and to the elderly, their intimate friend; he cared for their innermost thoughts as a meticulous mother would do.

There was no gap between the President and the people, from children to the elderly. The people still tell countless stories associated with the people-oriented leadership of the President who boundlessly devoted his whole life to the people.

One day in May 1992, the President was giving field guidance to various sectors of the national economy in Kaesong.

The cars, which left Pyongyang early in the morning, suddenly stopped at a place near the city.

The President had suggested having breakfast on the road before reaching the city.

Officials tried to dissuade him from having breakfast on the grass, telling him that they had had breakfast prepared in the city.

Then the President said: A president’s field guidance should not be regarded as a king’s visit. In the old days, even during a local trip by a rural district magistrate, many official clerks accompanied him and spread tables to eat their fill and bustle about. However, we are not rulers lording it over the people but their servants.

Then he told the officials that he had boxes of breakfast prepared on the evening of the previous day and that he would distribute the boxes to them, adding that it would be good because they would make no trouble for the people and save time.

The whole life of the President was just filled with such stories.

It happened one day when he was on his foreign tour.

While looking out of the train window at wide fields, he said to an accompanying official that while visiting other countries, he really envied nothing but such vast stretches of arable land.

He went on to say: The food problem is the most important among the problems of clothing, food and housing. In the order of the three words, clothing is the first, food the second and housing the third, but we Koreans regard food as the first, clothing as the second and housing as the third.

He then looked at the window again, saying that the mortality rate was decreasing and the birth rate increasing every year under the socialist system. Now he opened a notebook to calculate the area of arable land and the per-capita area of the land in his country.

Even though he was far away from the homeland, the thought of his people never escaped him.

He would feel anxious about lumberjacks working in mountains when he heard the sound of snowstorm outside the window and worried if there was any house whose roof leaked during a passing shower.

He was the father of the people. With parental affection, he even opened a pot lid at a farm house and felt the temperature of the floor in a new house into which the owner had just moved. And at the mess hall and dormitory of a factory, he tasted the soup its employees were eating and examined the thickness of their quilts.

One day, the President hosted a luncheon for a foreign writer who visited the DPRK.

At that time, the writer courteously wished the President good health for the prosperity of the resourceful Korean people. The President thanked him for wishing him long life for the good of the people.

Later, while reporting on the fact, the writer said that the article about President Kim Il Sung should be a hymn for the people as he just became enlivened when the word people came up in conversation.

The field guidance tour the President made to visit the people day and night, regarding it as his motto to believe in the people as in Heaven, led to the formation of the great harmonious whole in which the leader and the people are united with affection and trust, and its might brought about world-startling changes and miracles in the annals of the revolution.

The President will always be with the people as the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un holds the people, whom the President and Chairman Kim Jong Il regarded as their God, in high esteem as much as he does the President and the Chairman by engraving the people on the mind as the images of the great leaders.