Kremlinology, Luxury Goods, and Stolen Rice
I don’t expect Resolution 1718’s luxury goods ban to have much of a short-term impact on North Korea, beyond focusing attention on all of the frivolous things Kim Jong Il would rather buy than rice. For the longer term, however, Korea watcher Ken Gause, in what is probably the definitive work of North Korean Kremlinology (ht) did a pretty good job before-the-fact of explaining the gradual trends we seem to be hoping we can advance (Gause actually spends almost none of his 50-page paper discussing any real possibilities of North Korean “warlordism,” although he does talk about Kim Jong Il’s painstaking measures aimed at preventing just that). Gause mostly discusses who served on what dead old revolutionary’s funeral committee, and what that may / may not tell us about each member’s career prospects, and those of his proteges and chums. It’s often surprising that this was released open-source, and it’s certainly worth reading for hard-core North Korea watchers.
One of Gause’s main premises is that under the “military first” policy, Pyongyang’s palace intrigues have favored senior military officers over the Korean Workers’ Party’s civilian leadership. In his conclusion, Gause talks about the mechanics of the resentment this may create:
The intensification of any rivalries in KWP-KPA relations will not be institutional, but personal in nature. Many of the vulnerabilities of the North Korean system reside with the elite. As the North Korean economy has deteriorated under Kim Jong Il, many elites have been forced to compete for privileges and access like never before. Under the military-first policy, KPA-affiliated companies have made rapid inroads into arenas for securing hard currency that were once reserved for the party. This, in turn, has led to increasing weakening of the cohesion of the privileged class. Since the North Korean system is based on “feudal service nobility,” where loyalty is ensured through privilege, if the regime loses its ability to placate the elite through goods and services, there is a real chance for the creation of factions.
At first these factions, which are really personality-based but will likely reveal themselves as institutionally-based, will compete with each other for the ever-declining privileges. If the situation persists, this factionalism could transform itself into centers of opposition to the regime.
Sure, Kim Jong Il can get goodies through other sources, but you don’t need to put Kim Jong Il in a plastic bubble to impede his capacity to murder. You just have to make the easy stuff hard and the hard stuff impossible, and hope that all the friction eventually takes a cumulative toll.
One of the key characters in Gause’s paper is Kim Ik Hyon, a survivor of North Korea’s “old revolutionary” generation. When reading the paper, one of the limitations that really strikes you is just how much witchcraft there is in trying to decide which gossip in this North Korean version of office politics is even reliable. For example, we don’t even know the names of most of North Korea’s corps commanders with any degree of certainty, so Gause opted not to name them. A good share of the personalities discussed haven’t been seen for months, or years, or are otherwise rumored to be out of favor based on sources of undisclosed reliability. Gause doesn’t claim to speak with any certainty, nor does he venture a guess as to who will succeed Kim Jong Il (a fun parlor game, but as Gause notes, we can’t even be sure that the job will go to one of Kim Jong Il’s sons, as none of them seem to be very strong candidates). Kim Ik Hyon has held a number of senior military posts, and was sent to Beijing to meet with Hu Jintao last September (p. 54). You may remember that this was right around the time North Korea signed that statement it reneged on less than a day later.
In the grander scheme of things, then, the disappearance of a bemedalled nonagenarian apparatchik from public view for a year isn’t an outlier. The South Korean Unification Ministry is seizing on that fact, however, to try to discredit a purported North Korean document from Kim Jong Il, directing Kim Ik Hyon to divert South Korean food aid to military use. The Daily NK has a pdf image of it.
If authentic, the document would be consistent with other known evidence, such as Marcus Noland’s conclusions about widespread aid diversion, and this secret videotape taken last year in South Hamgyeong province. Truthfully, there’s no way of knowing whether this document is authentic, however. I certainly have my doubts about how Kim Jong Il’s correspondence would leak out to Planet Earth. And after all, we aspire to higher standards than “fake but accurate.” This aint CBS, you know.
You would think that a South Korean academic who specializes in the North would have produced the most compelling forgery possible by addressing it to a senior army commander who’s been seen on the reviewing stand recently (Cho Myong Rok or Kim Ha Kyu, for example). At least — or so you’d think — a forger would have picked someone who doesn’t have to pee through a tube. This doesn’t necessarily mean the document isn’t forged (or is), but on the other hand, the Unification Ministry is less than completely honest when it fails to mention that Kim Ik Hyon still had enough mojo left to represent Kim Jong Il in Beijing just a year ago. Kim IH’s lack of detected appearances since then seems, therefore, like thin gruel on which to nourish a firm conclusion that the old battleaxe is out of favor, and that the document must therefore be a fake. How often has Kim Jong Il himself disappeared for months, only to reappear again (to the disappointment of almost everyone)? In other words, I don’t know, I’m betting the UniFiction Ministry doesn’t know, either, and Lee Jong-Seok has so thoroughly eradicated his ministry’s credibility that only a fool would actually pay attention to anything it claims now.
Rather than debate the unknowable, wouldn’t a more appropriate response be to expect more on monitoring and transparency?