Some Doubt That North Korea Executed a Top General

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/14/world/asia/some-doubt-that-north-korea-executed-a-top-general.html

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SEOUL, South Korea — Even to longtime analysts familiar with the unpredictability of the North Korean government, the news was shocking: a top general, the country’s equivalent of a defense minister, who had delivered a speech at an international symposium in Moscow last month, was executed by an antiaircraft gun while hundreds of fellow generals and senior party officials watched.

At least, that is what South Korea’s National Intelligence Service said happened to the general, Hyon Yong-chol on April 30, according to South Korean lawmakers emerging from a closed-door parliamentary briefing by the spy agency on Wednesday.

There were analysts in South Korea who questioned the authenticity of the report and the spy agency’s motive in releasing it. Among other things, they said, General Hyon, the North Korean People’s Armed Forces minister, was still shown alongside North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, in old propaganda films broadcast this week. In the past, one of the first things the government did about people who had been purged was to remove their images or names from official records.

Still, National Intelligence Service officials said that although they could not reveal their sources, they felt confident enough about their information to share it with Parliament. One of the South Korean spy agency’s biggest triumphs in recent years was to predict, correctly, the purge of Mr. Kim’s uncle Jang Song-thaek in late 2013, days before the North acknowledged executing him on treason charges.

If General Hyon, 66, was executed, that would make him the most prominent official purged since Mr. Jang.

Even though they were not completely sure that it actually happened, South Korean analysts began a tea-leaf reading on what was going on inside the opaque government in Pyongyang. As in many things concerning the inner workings of the dictatorship, they differed widely over the political dynamics going on.

Yet they agreed on one thing: the general’s demise, if confirmed, would be another high-profile blow to the once-proud North Korean People’s Army leadership, which the analysts said had been humiliated repeatedly under Mr. Kim. What they did not agree on was whether a series of demotions, purges and executions was a sign of weakness or strength for the young North Korean leader.

“It could mean cracks developing in the solidarity of the Pyongyang regime or another proof that Kim Jong-un is consolidating power,” said Koh Yu-hwan, a longtime North Korea specialist at Dongguk University in Seoul. Purges have been part of the political life in Pyongyang going back to the days of Kim Il-sung, Mr. Kim’s grandfather and the founding president of North Korea, whose consolidation of power after the 1950-53 Korean War was accompanied by bloody crackdowns on rival factions. After he died, however, his son Kim Jong-il did not engineer major purges, partly because he had been consolidating power for two decades. He deftly mixed the old and new generations of elites, often retaining octogenarian loyalists from his father’s days in top posts, Mr. Koh said.

Kim Jong-un never had the gradual and extended grooming his father enjoyed under his grandfather. Rather, Mr. Kim, while still in his 20s, was catapulted onto the fast track to leadership after Kim Jong-il suffered a stroke in 2008. After his father died in 2011, Mr. Kim began a series of purges that has so far left at least 72 senior military and party officials dead, according to the South Korean spy agency.

The North Korean People’s Army, which enjoyed the biggest trust and perks under Kim Jong-il’s “songun,” or “military-first,” policy, bore the brunt of his son’s often bloodthirsty quest to consolidate his authority, analysts said.

The relationship between Mr. Kim and his generals has been epitomized by reams of photographs coming out of North Korea that showed Mr. Kim swaggering while generals twice his age meekly pretended to write down everything he said in their notebooks. General Hyon’s fate was sealed after he was seen dozing off during a military meeting in mid-April, South Korean intelligence officials said.

Kim Dong-yup, an analyst at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, saw method in Mr. Kim’s apparent madness: the North Korean leader, who considered his government’s survival dependent on whether he could revive his country’s moribund economy, has campaigned to wrest the vast trade and other economic rights the military accumulated under his father and restore them to the cabinet.

He also tried to help the ruling Workers’ Party reclaim control of the military by making a civilian party technocrat, Hwang Pyong-so, a vice marshal and installing him at the top of the military hierarchy.

“Kim Jong-un may have felt a need to suppress discontent and skepticism rising within the military elites about his rule by making an example out of their minister, General Hyon,” said Mr. Kim, the analyst. “This may be the beginning of a new round of disciplining the military.”

Cho Han-beom, a senior analyst at the government-financing Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, said that Mr. Kim was taming the generals with the help of the Ministry of State Security, the North’s secret police, and the Workers’ Party’s Department of Organization and Guidance, which was widely believed to have engineered the purge of his uncle, Mr. Jang, once the North’s second-most powerful official. The top ranks of the two agencies have so far survived Mr. Kim’s rule with few casualties.

“Unlike Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un is only wielding sticks without a firm grip on the military,” Mr. Cho said in an analysis posted on the website of his institute on Wednesday. That, Mr. Cho added, could leave Mr. Kim vulnerable to popular uprisings amid continuing economic hardships because he might not be able to rely on the kind of support the military provided for his father when he led his country through the great famine of the 1990s.

During the parliamentary hearing on Wednesday, National Intelligence Service officials cautioned that they did not think that Mr. Kim faced any immediate trouble, because no one dared challenge him.

Cheong Seong-chang, a North Korea watcher at the Sejong Institute in South Korea, was one of those who doubted the spy agency’s parliamentary report. After scouring the North Korean media, Mr. Cheong found that General Hyon’s name appeared in the main party newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, on April 30, the day South Korean intelligence officials said he was executed. “This means he was not arrested until April 29,” he said. “It means that he was arrested on April 30 and executed in the same day. This is hard to believe, unless he tried something unlikely, such as the assassination of Kim Jong-un.”