Category: Kim Jong Il

The summer of their discontent: Is Kim Jong Un losing the elite classes?

Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen a spate of reports about defections from North Korea. Broadly, this is nothing new. The defection, for example, of three crew members of a fishing vessel is life-changing for three men, but is no more likely to rend the fabric of Kim Jong-Un’s regime than 27,000 other defections, almost all of them of people the regime had written off as expendable.  Recently, however, we’ve seen multiple reports suggesting something very different, and vastly more consequential...

Daily NK: Fire destroys Kim Jong Il’s fake birthplace (updated)

Update, September 2015: Subsequent reporting by NK News calls the Daily NK‘s report into question. ~   ~   ~ This report has been circulating in Korean-language sources for a few days, and the Donga Ilbo has reported that a large fire was burning (and had been extinguished) in that area, but this is the first time I’ve seen it reported in English. A raging wildfire that broke out on October 21st in North Korea’s Samjiyon County, Yangkang Province is...

Grafs from the new Kim Jong Nam book

Rather than spoon-feed you the parts that interest me, I’ll just link to this, this, and this and let you read and judge for yourself. You may also find this related article by Scott Snyder interesting. My reaction on reading these excerpts? Disappointment, mostly. Few of Jong Nam’s broader conclusions about North Korea are surprising or even divergent from the consensus of outside speculators. Most are either obvious, unsupported by any credible new revelations of fact, or both. An exception...

KIm Jong Il’s Funeral Ride Was in an American Made Car

Source: KCNA via NK Leadership Watch Well if this doesn’t take the cake!   I suspected it, but then thought twice about it — surely even the North Korean higher-ups wouldn’t go against their own propaganda for an event to be watched into perpetuity by every one of their subjects.  Yet commenter Thomas was the first here to come out and say it, and now ABC News Radio says it’s true: …But a curious detail was that the boxy black...

Kim Jong Il Dead

Good riddance to him. Any bets on who will actually run the place now? It’s hard to imagine that anyone can fill the psychological void he leaves. It doesn’t matter that most North Koreans undoubtedly despised him. He was still a tremendous, terrible presence that no one else can be. [KCNA, Reuters] [Reuters, Kim Kyung-Hoon] Update: Here are some posts that seem freshly relevant: – Boldly, I had predicted that Kim Jong Il would die. But we could see this...

Some Fascinating-if-True Reports from North Korea

Everyone knows that North Korea does a lot of things that we can’t explain without resorting to mostly groundless speculation about its internal power politics. This goes beyond cultural differences. I don’t know any South Koreans who can explain things like the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents, which imposed real (if insufficient) financial and diplomatic costs on the regime. In our conversations, not even Kim Kwang Jin claimed to understand for certain why Kim Jong Il does things that appear to...

Kim Jong Nam denounces his family’s rule

There is one North Korean who enjoys a measure of freedom of speech: North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s eldest son says the North should abandon the “Songun” or military first doctrine and pursue reforms and open up. Kim Jong-nam (39), who was passed over for the succession in favor of his 20-something brother, made the remarks in an interview with the Tokyo Shimbun. He also commented on the North Korean artillery attack on Yeonpyeong Island, referring to the waters surrounding...

Rumor: Kim Jong Il Just Three Years from Becoming “Eternal” Chairman

As much as I admire Open News for its reporting from North Korea’s towns, villages, and markets, these inside-baseball reports from within the royal court in Pyongyang aren’t the sort in which I tend to put much stock, so take this for what it’s worth: Doctors in North Korea have given the country’s leader Kim Jong-il three years to live, Open Radio for North Korea claimed Friday. Quoting what it said was a high-level North Korean source, the broadcaster said...

If there was ever any cognizable justice in holding Gomes in a prison cell for peacefully presenting a petition to North Korean border guards, it ended months ago. North Korea says an American man being held for illegally crossing its border has tried to kill himself. A statement issued by the regime’s official Korean Central News Agency says Aijalon Mahli Gomes’ suicide attempt was “driven by his strong guilty conscience,” plus disappointment and despair that the U.S. government “has not...

Kim Jong Il’s on-the-spot guidance does for North Korean soccer what it did for North Korean agriculture and industry

At last, something interesting has happened at the World Cup after all. The North Korean team was crushed by Portugal in the most lopsided World Cup score in eight years, eliminating North Korea from the competition, and greatly advancing my personal objective of ignoring the rest of the World Cup. The question on everyone’s lips now is whether the North Korean players or their families will face retribution for this loss. I really don’t know the answer to that, and...

A Field Guide to the Septuagenarian Apparatchiks of North Korea

The Chosun Ilbo, profiling who sat where as the North Koreans (a very few of them) feasted in Beijing, gives us a great who’s who photo. The caption reads: Clockwise from top left, Kim Yong-chun, Hyon Chol-Hae and Ri Myong-su (directors of the National Defense Commission), Choe Thae-bok, Kim Ki-nam, Jang Song-taek, Kim Yang-gon, Kim Yong-il, Kang Sok-ju, Tae Jong-soo, Kim Pyong-hae (Workers’ Party secretary for North Pyongan Province), and Ju Kyu-chang /Yonhap There’s also more evidence that Jang Song-Thaek...

Has the Teflon Finally Worn Off the Wok?

For well over a decade, the South Korean street and government have let China get away with murder — literally — of North Korean refugees, and South Korean POW’s and their families. Koreans quickly forgot their anger after hundreds of Chinese “students” rioted in downtown Seoul and beat and kicked Korean citizens (but, said the Chinese government that bused the mobs in, they really meant well). But for once, I’m gratified to see South Koreans sharing my sense of outrage...

Kim Jong Il in China, Says Yonhap

The dead of the Cheonan haven’t been in the ground for a week, but the man who probably ordered their deaths is still a welcome and honored guest in Beijing: “We have confirmed the arrival of a special train at (the Chinese border city) Dandong, and we believe it is highly likely that Chairman Kim is on board,” a South Korean government official told Yonhap. [L.A. Times] The last such report turned out to be a false alarm. Recall that...

“Collective Spirit” Update

The Chosun Ilbo reports that despite international sanctions, Kim Jong Il still manages to import ample quantities of rice and infant formula add “between $200 and $300 million every year” to his personal slush fund: With the money, North Korea would be able to import between 400,000 to 600,000 tons of rice, which would be enough to cover half the country’s food shortage of 1 million tons of rice per year. What? Since when isn’t cognac food anymore? Isn’t it...

Must Read: Sanctions Could Cause N. Korean Regime to Collapse

The full report is here. I won’t have time to read it until this weekend, but here’s a teaser: The North “is facing several domestic problems that in isolation would each be manageable but together could threaten regime survival,” said Daniel Pinkston, the group’s northeast Asia deputy project director. “The North Korean government has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to survive, but the regime is under extreme pressure when it must also deal with looming succession issues.” The 68-year-old Kim, who...

Succession Watch

Yonhap is reporting that North Korea is busily printing portraits of the new emperor-in-waiting. If this is true, it would be the story I’ve been waiting for to convince me that Kim Jong-Eun is indeed being groomed as the spiritual successor to Kim Jong-Il, and it would also strongly suggest that Kim Jong-Il’s health is terrible. Jong-Eun is clearly unready to take real power, and probably is a net negative even as a spiritual figurehead. To elevate him is a...

Purported Video of Kim Jong Il Commemorating Reopening of Suspected Chemical Weapons Plant

Starting yesterday, several news outlets had reported that North Korea had released recent video of Kim Jong Il appearing in Hamhung to mark the re-opening of a textile factory in Hamhung, but to my intense aggravation, none provided a link to the actual video. YouTube, however, does not disappoint: The video shows Kim waving to an assembled crowd with his right arm, and moving his left arm slightly to applaud … himself, presumably. Heil me. There are no shots showing...