North Korea's end is nigh - or is it?
By Sunny Lee
BEIJING - Now is the last chance for North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to repent
for his sins of human-rights abuses such as torturing people in gulags because
the Kingdom of Heaven is near.
This is not a revelation from God, but from the South Korean media. Newspapers
and television channels in Seoul are reporting that North Korea is on its last
legs. It seems that, as South Korean President Lee Myung-bak cryptically
predicted twice in December, "Reunification is drawing near."
A raft of reports support Lee's view. According to an increasingly popular
view, South Korea will take the lead in a swift reunification following a
collapse or implosion of North Korea through a power
struggle, military coup or economic meltdown. All Seoul and Washington have to
do is to remain "strategically patient", waiting for the doomsday to transpire.
On December 31, South Korean media outlets rushed to report that there had been
a deployment of a tank unit in Yanggangdo province, purportedly to counter a
military coup. On January 1, the South's media said North Korean soldiers had
left their barracks en masse looking for food.
On Christmas Eve, South Korean daily Chosun Ilbo said many new defectors
believed North Korea would collapse in April 2012, the month marking the 100th
anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung, the founder of the country. The
newspaper also reported on December 27 that the government would designate the
New Year as "the first year of unification".
Kim Jong-il is currently suffering from an assortment of illnesses, including a
brain disorder, rheumatism, neuralgia and eye disease, Seoul's E-Daily said,
citing a "high-level North Korean source" whose name was withheld.
On Sunday, another major South Korean daily, Donga Ilbo, ran a cover story of
the possible "sudden" deaths of both Kim Jong-il and his son and heir Kim
Jong-eun this year. "There will be big unrest in North Korea this year. The
father and the son of the Kim clan can die in this turmoil," the report cited a
well-known fortuneteller named Oh Jae-hak as saying.
Perhaps sensing his days are numbered, even the Dear Leader hid inside an
underground bunker for nine days during the recent South Korea-US joint
military drills, for fear of bombing by F-22 Raptors of the US Air Force, the
Joongang Sunday magazine said on January 2.
All these reports were sparked by revelations on WikiLeaks that painted a
picture of the North's closet ideological ally, China, relenting to the idea of
North Korea's demise. According to WikiLeaks, Chun Yung-woo, now national
security adviser to President Lee, confided to US ambassador to South Korea
Kathleen Stephens in February that China "would be comfortable with a reunified
Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the US in a 'benign alliance' as long
as Korea was not hostile towards China".
The reports create a picture of the imminent collapse of North Korea. Now,
South Korean media outlets' only remaining task is to convince a handful of
experts on North Korea. Unfortunately, they don't seem to share the media's
apocalyptic predictions.
"It's true that North Korea is in very bad shape. It's also true that there is
some element of instability there," said Toshimitsu Shigemura, a professor of
international relations at Waseda University in Tokyo. "But there is no chance
North Korea will crumble down any time soon."
Shi Yinhong, a North Korea expert at Renmin University in Beijing, said that
the chances for instability in North Korea were greater than before. "North
Korea's political situation is unstable after it launched the succession
process for Kim Jong-eun. North Korea's economic hardship has been severe since
the botched financial reforms in late 2009," said Shi. "But North Korea has
always had this difficult situation. So, it's difficult to tell."
The South Korean president's remarks and the media reports made some observers
question whether South Korea had some exclusive intelligence about the dire
situation in North Korea, according to Shigemura. Yet Shigemura concluded: "But
I judge it as wishful thinking. It's just what the Lee Myung-bak government
wants."
Cheong Seong-chang, a senior analyst at the security think-tank Sejong
Institute in Seoul, said: "You can always find something that suits your
expectations," warning against the tendency of inordinately focusing on a part
that supports one's expectations and concluding the whole from it.
"During the mid-1990s, many North Korean soldiers also suffered malnutrition
and they had to be sent home. The food situation right now likewise is also
very bad. But that doesn't warrant us to conclude that North Korea is about to
collapse," said Cheong.
The media deluge of North Korea's collapse is also beginning to generate some
questions on whether there was an intention to sway public opinion, mainly by
South Korea, which is betting on instability in North Korea as the power
transition from Kim Jong-il to his son takes place.
Mike Chinoy, the author of Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean
Nuclear Crisis, writes on January 1 on CNN web site:
For the
past two years, according to US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, South
Korean officials have tried to convince the United States that North Korea was
wracked by unrest, with Kim Jong-il failing health and his plan to transfer
power to his son Kim Jong-eun in jeopardy.
With the North on the ropes, the argument went, it was increasingly vulnerable
- and hanging tough could force Pyongyang to moderate its behavior or even
trigger a collapse. This assessment appears to have been a key factor in South
Korean President Lee Myung-bak's hard-line policy towards Pyongyang - a policy
endorsed by the [Barack] Obama administration. [1]
From this
view, South Korean official Chun Yung-woo's remarks to the US ambassador in
Seoul last February could be seen as a "sales speech" to make the Barack Obama
administration go with South Korea's hard line on North Korea, rather than an
accurate reflection of the Chinese view.
"The WikiLeaks comments [by Chun] is the complete opposite to the Chinese
policy toward North Korea," said Shi at Beijing's Renmin University. "It is so
different from every indication in Chinese policy toward North Korea. In both
the internal debate in the Chinese leadership and in Chinese policy, there is
nothing that indicates that. It especially didn't reflect China's policy after
Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to Pyongyang in October, 2009." Chinoy argues South
Korea misled the US:
While much of the initial controversy about this
cable focused on whether Chun's comments accurately reflected Chinese thinking,
the more relevant point is that, like so many other South Korean officials, he
was seeking to convince the US that a North Korean collapse was inevitable,
that even China recognized this fact and could live with the consequences, and,
therefore, the U.S. should continue to support Lee's tough stance towards
Pyongyang.
Cheong at Seoul's Sejong think-tank believes that
the whole North Korea collapse drama was engineered by hawkish advisers to the
Lee Myung-bak administration who want regime change in North Korea. "After Kim
Jong-il was hit by a stroke in 2008, they have been harboring wishful thinking
that the collapse was imminent," said Cheong.
Yet some don't necessarily see the US as an innocent bystander which was
enticed by South Korea, but more of an accomplice. They point out that many of
these South Korean reports were actually translated from articles that were
originally reported by Radio Free Asia, a US government-sponsored news agency.
"So, it was a meeting between the wishful thinking of South Korea and the
wishful thinking of the US," said Shigemura, the Japanese analyst. Yoo Ho-yeol,
a North Korea expert at Korea University in Seoul, said the chemistry was
mutual. "My understanding is that the two have been coordinating their policy
approach on Pyongyang."
Dong Yong-seung, chief analyst on North Korea's economic security at the
Samsung Economic Research Institute in Seoul, says it was necessary and wise
for South Korea at the government level to prepare a list of scenarios to deal
with various unforeseen North Korean contingencies, including regime change,
particularly at the time when the WikiLeaks memo in question was made public.
"The WikiLeaks contents in question were from a year ago. It was at a time when
Kim Jong-il's health, after suffering a stroke in 2008, had not stabilized, and
the succession was unfolding precariously," said Dong.
Yoo believes commercialism in the media market also played a role: "North Korea
news is an attention-grabber."
Analysts find the current milieu similar to 1994, when the succession for Kim
Jong-il, created by his father Kim Il-sung's sudden death, spawned a widespread
belief that North Korea's collapse was imminent. Even then-South Korean
president Kim Young-sam compared North Korea to "an airplane on a crash
course".
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