A North Korean leadership car crash
By Aidan Foster-Carter

Succession is the Achilles’ heel of dictatorships, for obvious reasons. In extreme cases, such as North Korea, even contemplating the mortality of the leader is seen as lese-majeste, as if this somehow threatens the quasi-monarch’s vaunted omnipotence and implicit immortality.

Yet such an ostrich attitude only makes matters worse. There aren’t many certainties about North Korea, but the fact that Kim Jong-il will die is one of them. The only issues are when and how he dies, and what will come after him. The latter needs planning for, right now.

But that is a messy business, which may explain why the Dear Leader has put it off for so long. Designating a successor means

passing over others who bridle at the choice. Even having nominal rules, such as male primogeniture in many traditional monarchies, may not stop rival claimants from plotting against the chosen dauphin. Succession is a can of worms, and some may turn.

In that context, I do wonder about Kim Jong-il’s daughter, Kim Sol-song, by repute a bright economist. How must she feel at being ruled out by her sex – some revolution! – leaving the field to her three half-brothers, none of them self-evidently top-drawer leadership material?

All this is tricky enough right now. When the Dear Leader finally dies, it will get far worse. Kim Jong-il is a micro-manager, so simply for North Korea to go on functioning will require his immediate replacement at the center of the intricate web of control he has constructed.

But it will not be business as usual for long. As after Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, the dictator’s death and the vacuum it creates will loosen the crippling constraints of power and terror, at least momentarily. Conflicts hitherto suppressed will burst forth. These are of at least three kinds, which in practice will overlap: personality, policy and the role of outside powers.

Leading North Korea is a poisoned chalice, yet Kim’s three sons and others will fight for it – if only for fear of the consequences of losing. Eldest son Kim Jong-nam, now out of the loop in Macau, is said to have been the target of two murder plots already. Think the Borgias.

As for policy, some in Pyongyang realize the present course is a road to nowhere. Reformers like ex-premier Pak Pong-ju – if still with us; he is unmentioned since his sacking in 2007 – surely know North Korea needs to embrace the market and make its peace with the world. So far the hawks rule the roost, but once Kim is gone the doves may fight back.

Then there are the neighbors. If Korean history is any guide, rivals for the throne will seek support from nearby powers. Kim Jong-nam, whose measured if few words suggest a keen mind behind his dire dress sense, is rumored to be China’s choice. Beijing yearns for a nice pliant client in Pyongyang, one who would do the sensible thing and stop causing trouble.

For all these reasons the death of Kim Jong-il will be North Korea’s moment of truth. The Democratic

People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has managed a succession before, but Kim Jong-il’s ascent was meticulously planned for decades, and even so may not have been smooth. After Kim Il-sung died in 1994, the country’s politics went into an odd quasi-hibernation until Kim Jong-il emerged formally in 1998.

By contrast, it’s a real puzzle how late the Dear Leader has left things this time. Whereas he himself gained valuable experience from the 1970s and exposure during the 1980s as a de facto prime minister, his third son, Kim Jong-eun, is wholly unknown and untried. Foisting such a greenhorn on the throne is a highly risky maneuver, with no guarantee of success.

When a rare second session this year of the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA), the DPRK’s rubber-stamp parliament, was called for June 7, I wondered if this would be Kim Jong-eun’s long overdue coming-out party. Not so. Evidently the lad isn’t ready for exposure just yet.

Instead, his big moment may not come until 2012, the centenary of Kim Il-sung’s birth. This is being hugely built up as the year the DPRK will become a great and prosperous nation (Kangsong Taeguk). Yet this too must risk being a moment of truth. As with the emperor’s clothes, the chasm between grandiose claim and threadbare reality will be hard to hide.

Meanwhile, the recent SPA session was indeed about the succession, only less directly. Kim Jong-il’s brother-in-law, Jang Song-thaek, a likely regent come the transition, was promoted vice chairman of the National Defence Commission (NDC); this is the DPRK’s highest executive organ, outranking the merely civilian cabinet under the songun (military-first) policy.

While this is undoubtedly promotion for Jang, who only joined the NDC as a rare civilian a year ago, some reports have exaggerated this. Jang is only one of several vice chairs, and he is not first vice chairman, a post apparently still held by Vice Marshal Jo Myong-rok despite longstanding reports that he is unwell. (It was Jo who in happier times in October 2000 took tea at the White House, wearing full army uniform, with president Bill Clinton, but that’s another story.)

The other main change at the SPA was the of the confusingly named premier Kim Yong-il, after three years in the job. (Another Kim Yong-il remains and is on the up, as party secretary for international affairs.) Dashing any hopes that the top economic job – which this is – would go to some energetic reforming young turk, the new premier is Choe Yong-rim, an 81-year-old veteran loyalist, latterly party secretary for Pyongyang, who was once Kim Il-sung’s bodyguard. Clearly this is a political appointment to manage the succession, rather than new blood to kick-start the economic revival that North Korea desperately needs.

Other personnel changes did center on the economy, although musical chairs won’t resolve its deep problems. Three vice premiers got the elbow, while four new ones were appointed.

Four economic ministers were sacked, a pair each on the production and consumption side: electronics, machinery, food and light industry. Sports supremo Pak Hak-son got the boot too – ahead of the football World Cup, oddly, where so far the so-called Chollima boys are doing well in South Africa.

But most Pyongyang politics happens offstage or behind the scenes. Michael Madden, who keeps an eagle eye on all this [1], notes a growing rate of attrition among the DPRK nomenklatura. No fewer than 11 – a full football squad, albeit elderly – senior figures have died, retired or moved in recent months.

Some of this is the inevitable result of gerontocracy. To an extraordinary degree, octogenarians today run North Korea: naturally they die off. But other cases are intriguing, and odd.

None is stranger than the sudden death of Ri Je-gang, not of natural causes – though he was 80 – but in a car crash at 12:45 am on June 2. Sometimes DPRK media supply more detail than you’d expect. Ri is hardly a household name, and his anodyne title – he was a first vice department director of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea – disguised an important role at Kim Jong-il’s side, reportedly helping to smooth the succession.

As such, on his last evening alive on June 1, Ri had enjoyed a typical night out with the boss. The official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported him as among Kim Jong-il’s entourage for a performance by army art squad Unit 963. The full flavor is worth quoting:

The squad put on the stage such colorful numbers of diverse genres as female quintet “We Serve the General”, male solo and mixed octet “We Will Remain True to the Leadership of the Party”, dialogic poem “Gigantic Footprints for Devoted Service”, Oungum and female sextet “Bright Moon over Our Country”, agitation through reminiscences “Comrades! Take This Revolver, Please!”, serial of wartime songs “My Song in the Trench”, “To a Decisive Battle” and “For My Only Motherland” and chorus “The Road of Victory” … [and] fully demonstrated the might of the soldier-artistes creditably performing their sacred mission as buglers in the Songun era.

(The oungum is a stringed instrument invented in the 1960s, allegedly by Kim Jong-il in person. It has a lot of tremolo and vibrato.)

Hours later, Ri was dead. Some suggest he was drunk at the wheel. Others allege a plot by Jang Song-thaek, who saw Ri as a rival. Countering that theory, during Jang’s brief purge from mid-2003 to early 2006, Ri also largely vanished; maybe Kim tired of their fighting. If indeed they were foes, it was clearly convenient to eliminate Ri before Jang got promoted.

A second rum case is Kim Il-chol. An admiral whose rise followed the seizure of the USS Pueblo in 1968, Kim served over a decade (1998-2009) as defense minister before being demoted to vice minister last year, an unusual step. On May 14, KCNA announced that Kim was relieved of all his posts, citing “his advanced age of 80”. Yet many older than him remain in post and Kim looked well enough on recent outings (including funerals of other elites). So this looks like a sacking. His being a navy man is intriguing too, in the aftermath of the sinking on March 25 of the South Korean corvette Cheonan for which North Korea has been blamed.

Space forbids detailing all the other personnel changes, save one. On April 6, So Se-phyong, unknown before his appointment in November 2008 to the important post of ambassador in Tehran, was moved after barely 16 months to Berne. His predecessor, Ri Chol, had served for 30 years in Switzerland, doubling as envoy to the United Nations in Geneva. More importantly he oversaw the schooling of Kim Jong-il’s three sons, and allegedly Kim’s Swiss bank accounts too. He was also instrumental in persuading the Egyptian multinational Orascom to become the top foreign investor in North Korea, first in cement and then mobile phones.

Ri is a key figure. Rather than punishment for a tough time defending the DPRK’s human-rights record in Geneva last December, his recall to Pyongyang – no new post has yet been announced – is probably so that he too can assist with the succession. Kim Jong-eun will need all the help he can get. The coming months will see more reshuffles in Pyongyang – and perhaps more mysterious car crashes in the wee hours. Fasten your seatbelts.

Note 1. North Korea Leadership Watch.

Aidan Foster-Carter is honorary senior research fellow in sociology and modern Korea at Leeds University, and a freelance consultant, writer and broadcaster on Korean affairs. A regular visitor to the peninsula, he has followed North Korea for over 40 years.