Kim’s Son: Not Ronery

The producers of South Park hilariously depicted North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il in their movie Team America: World Police in a musical sequence titled I’m So Ronery. Apparently, that song wouldn’t apply to Kim’s jet-setting son, whom the London Telegraph noted has the kind of latitude denied the subjects of his father’s regime:

The son of Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s reclusive dictator, has been living in five-star luxury in the gambling haven of Macau even as his people starve, according to reports in Hong Kong yesterday.
Kim Jong-nam, 35, was tracked to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where he has been staying on and off for three years.
While the international community alternates sanctions on his father for his nuclear weapons programme with economic aid for his starving subjects, the younger Kim has been spotted gambling in Macau’s numerous casinos and eating in local restaurants, according to the South China Morning Post.
Although travel is strictly proscribed for North Korean citizens, Kim Jong-nam has roamed the world.

Apparently, his father isn’t amused by Jong-nam’s lifestyle. He has replaced Jong-Nam in the succession with his half-brother, which might have happened after Jong-nam got caught with a forged passport in Japan five years ago. He told authorities that he wanted to take his own young son to Tokyo Disneyland.
The proximity to Macau sounds somewhat intriguing, however. Kim Jong-Il used a Macau bank as the center of his massive counterfeiting operation that flooded the globe with high-quality fakes of American $100 bills, an operation which resulted in sanctions that Pyongyang wants ended before any other talks on denuclearization can proceed. Jong-nam might be his father’s envoy to the financial world of Macau. It would explain his presence there rather than home in Pyongyang, working in the family business. One would assume that Daddy Kim would cut off his money if he wasn’t doing something useful in Macau, even if he has become something of a dissolute embarrassment to the regime.