Analyzing Kim Jong Un’s Absence

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This isn’t the first time that Kim Jong-un has gone missing but it’s just the North Korean leader is breaking his own record by staying out of the public eye for this long.

His father. Kim Jong-il, “went missing” for up to 80 days when he reportedly had a stroke in 2008. And a potential health issue remains the most likely reason for Kim Jong-un’s notable absence.

“No one knows why Kim Jong-un is out of sight, but he has been the most public of the three dynastic leaders,” Katherine Moon, a senior fellow for the Center for East Asia Policy Studies, told ABC News, referring to the line of leadership that began with Kim Jong-un’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung.

Moon said that Kim Jong-un’s increasing weight, alcoholism, heart or ankle problems and stress are all among the health factors that could be ailing him, though nothing has been confirmed. “He may also be facing personal challenges — he does have a family — a wife and at least one child. Perhaps there is illness or some other problem. Again, who knows?” Moon said.

North Korea expert Michael Madden, who runs a leadership watch blog and contributes to Johns Hopkins University’s Korean Studies site, told ABC News that there were two other times that he has gone missing since taking control of the country following his father’s death in December 2011. “There’s no reason to really think it was his health back then,” Madden said. “He was more muscular than he is now.”

One factor that makes Kim Jong-un’s ongoing absence different from the rest of the dictatorial pack is his age. Though his health is clearly a cause for concern — since he has grown noticeably larger and was seen limping in his last public appearance — his age makes the prospect of a grave medical issue less of a concern.

The Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s largest newspaper, reported on Tuesday, citing an unnamed source, that Kim had fractured both of his ankles and had surgery in Pyongyang in the middle of September to treat them.

When Kim Jong-il is believed to have had his stroke in 2008, North Korean press officials did their best to prevent any admission of ill health. Madden said that officials claimed Kim Jong-il attended two public events during his roughly 80-day absence, though there were no photos taken at one event and the images released from the second were believed to be doctored.

[ABC]

Rival Koreas trade fire over propaganda balloons

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North and South Korea traded machine-gun and rifle fire Friday after South Korean activists released anti-Pyongyang propaganda balloons across the border.

North Korea opened fire nearly two hours after the release of the balloons, Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said, and several 14.55 mm machine gun bullets fell south of the border near a South Korean base and a residential area. Kim said South Korea then fired 40 rounds from K-6 machine guns. The North then opened fire with rifles, which South Korean soldiers responded to in kind, Kim said. There were no reports of damages or injuries. It wasn’t immediately clear if North Korea was firing at the balloons.

The exchange of fire comes as speculation grows about the condition of North Korea’s authoritarian leader, Kim Jong Un, who has been out of public view for more than a month. He missed a major anniversary event on Friday for the first time in three years.

South Korean activists and North Korean defectors frequently release balloons carrying leaflets into the North, but Friday’s action was especially provoking because it came on the founding anniversary of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party.

South Korean civic organizations mainly made up of North Korean defectors sent 10 balloons northward from the South Korean side of the border. They contained 20,000 anti-North Korea leaflets, 1,000 U.S. $1 bills, 400 propaganda DVDs and 300 propaganda thumb drives.

North Korea’s Secretariat of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea released a statement Thursday criticizing the planned leaflet launch, calling it “little short of a declaration of a war.”

“If the South Korean authorities allow or connive at the projected leaflet-scattering operation, the north-south relations will again be pushed to an uncontrollable catastrophe and the provokers will be wholly accountable for it,” the statement said.

North Korea has issued similar warnings on the leaflets in the past but hasn’t acted on its threats.

[AP]

Why North Korea’s rare willing openness?

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With Kim Jong Un still out of sight, North Korean officials have gone on a publicity blitz — making a rare move to take questions at the United Nations, arranging human rights talks with the European Union, and taking a high-level trip to South Korea.

The overtures come at a time when its human rights record has received increased scrutiny. Pyongyang’s charm offensive has raised questions of what the regime seeks and what could be happening in the country’s inner circle.

Citing over 40 different sanctions against North Korea, Ri Tong Il, the North Korean deputy ambassador to the UN, said: “This is the most brutal sanction throughout the world. No country… has been living under these sanctions. … You can imagine how these obstacles are to the peaceful environment for the people of our country.”

He adamantly defended the country’s human rights record, saying it’s “doing its best to exceed” universal human rights conventions. North Korea had issued a rosy human rights report in September, boasting that it has “the most advantageous” system.

North Korea’s outreach at the U.N., EU and South Korea comes at a time when recommendations from the scathing UN Commission of Inquiry report  — for prosecution and more sanctions — are on its way to the U.N. General Assembly.

Another North Korean official had said last week that North Korea is ready to restart nuclear talks.

[CNN]

Chinese media blasts North Korea

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Chinese media has published a run of negative articles over its supposed ally North Korea, the BBC reports. The presence of these articles in China’s tightly controlled media could signal growing frustrations within Beijing over North Korea’s continuous confrontational stance with the rest of the world.

In the Beijing News, an article warns that people should remain suspicious of North Korea and its “flip-flop attitude.” The article states, “Because of the lack of integrity, its [North Korea’s] verbal statements are not going to convince any country … the most important question is whether Pyongyang will give up its nuclear programme.”

A second article in the Global Times, a state-run tabloid, features an interview with Jin Qiangyi, an international affairs expert at Yanbian University. Qiangyi said that China is unlikely to offer meaningful support to North Korea because of the ongoing nuclear standoff.

Qiu Lin, a prominent political commentator, pointed out that “North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un has not visited China since coming to power. This shows that his heart is not with Beijing … as they are unhappy with Beijing’s warning over its nuclear programme.”

North Korea and China are still allies, even if their relationship has grown frostier in recent years. China is North Korea’s primary trade partner — but tensions between the two countries have been growing since Kim Jong-Un took power in 2011, with China likely deciding that a close alliance with a belligerent pariah state just isn’t worth the trouble anymore.

North Korea’s responded in kind. In April, the regime allegedly released a memo encouraging officials to “abandon the Chinese dream.” The memo went on to criticize China for its closeness with “imperialists” because of North Korea’s belief that Beijing has sided with the US against their nuclear program.

[Business Insider] 

North Korea acknowledges labor camps at UN

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A North Korean official publicly acknowledged to the international community the existence of his country’s “reform through labor” camps Tuesday, a mention that appeared to come in response to a highly critical U.N. human rights report earlier this year.

Choe Myong Nam, a North Korean foreign ministry official in charge of U.N. affairs and human rights issues, said at a briefing with reporters that his country has no prison camps and, in practice, “no prison, things like that.”

But he briefly discussed the “reform through labor” camps. “Both in law and practice, we do have reform through labor detention camps – no, detention centers – where people are improved through their mentality and look on their wrongdoings,” he said.

Such “re-education” labor camps are for common offenders and some political prisoners, but most political prisoners are held in a harsher system of political prison camps.

Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, said that the mention of the reform camps was the first direct acknowledgement by a North Korean official speaking before an international audience. Last month, a senior court official mentioned the reform camps’ existence in an interview with the pro-Pyongyang website Minjok Tongshin.

“While the North Korean human rights record remains abysmal, it is very important that senior North Korean officials are now speaking about human rights, and expressing even pro forma interest in dialogue,” Scarlatoiu said in an email. While he called the mention of the reform through labor camps “a modest step in the right direction,” he stressed that this wasn’t an acknowledgement by North Korea of the harsher system of political prison camps, which are estimated to hold 120,000 people.

Diplomats for the reclusive, impoverished country also told reporters that a top North Korea official has visited the headquarters of the European Union and expressed interest in dialogue, with discussions on human rights expected next year.

The North Korean officials took several questions but did not respond to one about the health of leader Kim Jong Un, who has made no public appearances since Sept. 3 and skipped a high-profile recent event he usually attends.

 [Associated Press]

Smuggled phones help North Korean defectors send remittance money

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A cellphone smuggled into North Korea helped Lee Seo Yeon take on two missions: one emotional, one financial.

Once the 40-year-old defector Lee was certain she was talking to her sister, a broker took the phone on the North Korean end. Lee transferred 2 million won ($1,880) to a South Korean bank account belonging to a Korean-Chinese who was working with the broker, who confirmed the transfer and handed the phone back. The arrangement gave Lee’s sister 70 percent of the money, with a 30 percent cut for the go-betweens.

Smuggled phones, combined with a resourceful underground network of brokers inside and outside North Korea, are allowing defectors not only to connect with long-lost relatives, but to send them desperately needed cash. The process remains risky, both for people within the arm of North Korean law and defectors worried about getting cheated.

The Chinese phones are illegal in North Korea, but cheap and widely available. Since late in the last decade, they have become an increasingly common way for many of the roughly 25,000 defectors in South Korea, and others hiding in China, to talk to and help relatives who stayed behind.

One recent survey by a Seoul civic group of about 400 defectors suggested that one in every two defector families in the South send home money, mostly between 500,000 won ($470) and 3 million won ($2,820) per year.

They do this even though most defectors struggle to make a living in the highly competitive, well-educated South: Their average monthly wage is about 1.4 million won ($1,320), about half the pay of an average South Korean worker.

“Even though we have very small incomes here, we still eat rice at every meal,” Seoul-based defector Choi Jung-hoon said. “If we don’t buy new clothes, we can save some money to send to our family members in the North. That’s a lot of money for them.”

[AP]

More on Kim Jong Un’s health

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The world is fascinated by North Korea, and often seems happy to believe the wilder stories – whether there is evidence or not. Kim’s absence is no different: One of the strangest stories doing the rounds is an ambiguously sourced one in a British newspaper that suggests that Kim has become addicted to Swiss cheese. “The tubby North Korean dictator has become hooked on Emmental,” the Daily Mirror reported this week, adding that Kim had “gorged on so much that he has ballooned in size and is now walking with a limp.”

Weirdly, there might be a kernel of truth there: Kim has clearly put on weight since becoming leader, and analysts say it may be causing wider health problems. “Any perceptive viewer of the evening news within the DPRK will already know that Kim Jong-un has been limping about, even requiring the use of a golf cart on several occasions,” says Adam Cathcart, editor in chief of North Korea-watching Web site Sino-NK.

There are suggestions that the North Korean leader could have gout or diabetes, though his health problems may be simpler. Kim “needs to lose weight, eat better and exercise more,” Aidan Foster Carter, an honorary senior research fellow in sociology and modern Korea at Leeds University, explains in an e-mail. “More no-brainer than mystery imho, this one,” he added.

[Adam Taylor, writing in The Washington Post]

Reading into Kim Jong-Un’s “uncomfortable illness”

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North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un is suffering a serious medical problem or faces a threat to his power from his highest aides – or maybe both.That’s the inference of an extraordinary acknowledgement from Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) that the portly 30-or-so-year-old heir to power over North Korea is in trouble one way or another.  After disappearing from public view for more than three weeks, KCNA blamed his absence on what it carefully described as an “uncomfortable physical condition.”

In a society in which the biggest stories tend to take most people by surprise, this report was shocking not just because of the news that the anointed leader was ill. The question was why was KCNA reporting his illness  considering that the long-running illness of his late father, Kim Jong-il, never made the news at all. Why, however, have the power brokers and rule-makers in Pyongyang failed to cover up his illness as they did his father’s prolonged absence from view?

Kim Jong-un, obviously overweight, photographed walking with a limp in several appearances before the last one on September 3, no doubt inherits some of his father’s unhealthy genes and lifestyle.The conventional wisdom, reported by South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, is that he may be suffering from gout.  That’s described by the Mayo Clinic as “characterized by sudden, severe attacks of pain, redness and tenderness in joints, often the joint at the base of the big toe.”

The pain would be terrible: “An acute attack of gout can wake you up in the middle of the night with the sensation that your big toe is on fire.” Causes relate to drinking and obesity – certainly a risk factor in Kim Jong-un, who some observers think has been gaining weight since taking over the reins after his father’s lavish funeral.

A power struggle at the top, however, may also be in play here.  The evidence lies in an artfully bland KCNA report on the “2nd session of the 13th Supreme People’s Assembly” held in Pyongyang this week. Kim Jong-un’s name does not come up until the tail end of the report. The absence of Kim Jong-un — or any mention of his name at the session — is strange indeed considering that he has the titles of first secretary of the Workers’ Party, first chairman of the national defense commission and supreme commander of the Korean people’s army – all represented on the occasion.

Stranger still, not until the final sentences of the lengthy report do we see the news of portentous shifts in the National Defense Commission, the real center of power. Choe Ryong-hae, a former vice marshal and head of the political bureau of the Korean People’s Army – the term covers the entire armed forces – had been “recalled,” said the report, in English, as vice chairman of the commission.

In his place, Hwang Pyong-so,  recently made a vice marshal, assumed the title of vice chairman and also that of head of the KPA’s politburo, a position seen as second only to the KPA commander, Kim Jong-un. The changes in the National Defense Commission were made “at the proposal of Kim Jong-un,” according to the KCNA report.

[Donald Kirk, writing in Forbes] 

Kim Jong-un misses North Korea Parliament meeting

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Kim Jong-un, who hasn’t been seen in public for more than three weeks, was absent from a gathering of top party and government officials on Thursday, state television showed, fuelling speculation that health problems may be keeping the 31-year-old out of the public eye.

Kim failed to attend a session of the North Korean parliament for the first time since coming to power almost three years ago, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported.

But analysts warned against reading too much into Kim’s absence. “Kim Jong Il didn’t attend every time, either,” said Chris Green, a North Korea expert at Seoul-based Daily NK website. “Moreover, we know that the SPA primarily performs a demonstrative function, it is not a true decision-making body.”

At the parliamentary meeting, state media said Choe Ryong Hae had been removed from the post of vice chairman of the National Defense Commission, a body chaired by Kim. Choe Ryong Hae  was replaced by Hwang Pyong So, member of a powerful faction created in the 1970s by the father of the current leader, to boost a personality cult around his family.

Choe had been widely seen as a new right-hand man to Kim Jong Un after he purged his uncle last year, but had since fallen back into the shadows.

[Reuters/Bloomberg]

Matthew Miller’s North Korean prison photo

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matthew miller jail uniform north KoreaA North Korean government official released a photo of Miller, taken on Wednesday. Dressed in a blue-gray prison garment with the number 107 and his head shaved, Miller is seen with his eyes downcast, staring away from the camera.

Details about where he’ll serve his sentence or what labor he will be required to do were not released.

Miller was convicted of committing “acts hostile” to North Korea and sentenced earlier this month. North Korea has accused him of ripping up his visa on arrival to the country so he could go to prison and expose human rights violations there, according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

KCNA described him as “rudely behaved,” saying he was sent to infiltrate prison as part of a United States campaign against North Korea. “He perpetrated the above-said acts in the hope of becoming a world famous guy and the second Snowden through intentional hooliganism,” state media said.

[CNN]