Pyongyang's Never-Ending Purges

CHOE RYONG-HAE, North Korea’s second- or third-ranked figure, did not attend a state funeral in November, and, more significantly, his name did not appear on the list of the event’s organizing committee. Choe’s sin? A water leak at the newly constructed Mount Paektu Hero Youth Power Station.

A South Korean government spokesman said the omission of Choe’s name was unprecedented, but transfers, demotions and executions of senior regime figures—in the top levels of the Korean Workers’ Party and especially the Korean People’s Army—have become all too common under young leader Kim Jong-un, who came to power on the unexpected death of his father, Kim Jong-il, in December 2011.

Many thought that Choe had been executed. The speculation was only natural. Since Kim Jong-un took over, many senior figures have lost their lives, like Kim Yang-gon, who died in what was portrayed as an early-morning car crash in late December. The death is considered suspicious, as Kim Jong-il often used vehicular accidents to rid himself of unwanted officials.

Politics have become brutish in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service reported sixty-eight senior officials were killed from 2012 to 2014. Last April, a South Korean intelligence assessment indicated the young North Korean leader had ordered the execution of fifteen senior officials so far that year. In addition to those deaths, high-ranking army officers have disappeared.

Disappearances often mean death. “Most of these executions are not public,” says Bruce Bechtol of Angelo State University. “Guys disappear or they end up in a camp where they die.” Some Korea watchers like Bechtol estimate that once junior officials and officers are counted, the total number of deaths could be closer to five hundred.

As it turns out, Choe was sent to a reeducation program at the Kim Il-sung Higher Party School and then either forced to toil on a farm or sent down to work in a mine. It is thought he was brought back to Pyongyang to fill a spot created by Kim Yang-gon’s untimely passing.

Choe was fortunate to be needed at a crucial moment. Some, however, see in his relatively mild punishment evidence of a significant shift in the now deadly game of regime politics. The narrative is that Kim Jong-un has slowed the pace of executions because, as NK News’s John G. Grisafi notes, “Kim and the rest of the core leadership now feel more secure and stable.”

Most Korea watchers have for some time believed that Kim Jong-un was able to establish control quickly. Choe Sang-hun of the New York Times, for instance, at the end of 2013 reported that Kim “has swiftly consolidated his grip.” That opinion is consistent with the views of the South Korean foreign ministry, which in its white paper issued in the middle of that year stated Kim was firmly in command of both the military and the Party apparatus. And last year, South Korea’s intelligence service noted that Kim, because of the lack of an opposition, was not in any imminent difficulty.

“The strategy seems to be working: There’s little sign of any real opposition to Kim’s rule among the Pyongyang elite,” wrote the oft-quoted Andrei Lankov last May. Lankov, based in Seoul at Kookmin University, thinks purges are signs that the leader in Pyongyang is solidifying his position by removing disloyal elements.

YET SUCH VIEWS are surely a misreading of the disturbing changes in the regime. In addition to the sudden removal of Choe Ryong-hae and the death of Kim Yang-gon, the killing of two senior generals last year indicates the situation in Pyongyang remains unsettled.

Pyon In-son, a four-star general, was put to death, probably in January, for refusing to obey orders to replace junior officers. Next, General Hyon Yong-chol, then the North’s defense minister, was executed at a military academy near Pyongyang sometime at the end of last April, apparently killed for disrespecting Kim—snoozing at a public event—and for insubordination. Specifically, he was charged, in Pyongyang-speak, with advocating “militarism-oriented bureaucracy.” Pyon’s execution occurred out of sight, but Hyon’s was meant to send a message, evident from the gruesome method of his killing, by antiaircraft fire at extremely close range, and from the semipublic spectacle of the event. The general was reportedly put to death in front of hundreds. The fact that Kim had to send a message as late as the middle of last year is a clear indication that he was not, as analysts thought, in firm control in 2013.

In fact, the transition of power to Kim Jong-un should have been completed by now. Kim Jong-il was able to secure his position within three years of the death of his father, Kim Il-sung, the founder of the North Korean state. Kim Jong-un, now ruling four years, looks far less established than his father was at this point in his tenure. There are two principal reasons why this time the father-to-son leadership transition has been especially troubled. First, Kim Jong-un was not ready to rule when he took over. Great Leader Kim Il-sung took more than two decades to get his son, Kim Jong-il, ready to succeed him. The training started sometime in the early 1960s, and by the time of his father’s fatal heart attack in July 1994, Kim Jong-il was in a position to rule without training wheels.

Kim Jong-il, however, did not start the transition process as early as his father. He delayed preparing his son until after his stroke, which occurred sometime in the second half of 2008. That meant Kim Jong-un had insufficient time to learn the ways of his family’s complex regime and to build his own political base. Because he started so late—and because Kim Jong-un was so young at the time—Kim Jong-il appointed his sister, Kim Kyong-hui, and her husband, Jang Song-thaek, to be his son’s regents. Young Kim’s protectors, especially the avaricious and ambitious Jang, caused even more instability for the new ruler. It is not clear what happened in the Richard III-like politics in Pyongyang, but now Kim Kyong-hui has disappeared from view, possibly killed, and Jang Song-thaek was executed in December 2013.

Jang’s execution, carried out not by ravenous dogs as first reported but by large-caliber rounds, is especially consequential. His elimination triggered months of instability once Kim Jong-un realized he had to kill or sideline Jang’s family members and members of his nationwide patronage network, which reached from the capital into far-flung hamlets. As he continued the executions, Kim also cut himself off from China, because he had entrusted Jang and his subordinates with the responsibility of maintaining relations with Beijing.

The continued killings, partially the result of the ill-planned transition from father Kim Jong-il, undermined confidence in Kim Jong-un—and not only with the Chinese. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service noted that senior leaders in Pyongyang doubted Kim’s “governing style,” as did the common folk. As one source in South Pyongan province told the Daily NK site, “People say that considering the fact that Kim had executed dozens of high-ranking officials within the few years since coming to power, ‘there’s no hope left.’” Koh Yu-hwan of Dongguk University in Seoul notes the regime could “reach its limit” if purges continue. Thus, the resort to the ultimate punishment puts Kim at risk. The spilling of blood—what South Korean President Park Geun-hye last May called a “reign of extreme terror”—creates a dynamic hard to stop. As was evident from Stalin’s Soviet Union, the act of killing intimidates subordinates, but at the same time it creates enemies, who then have to be eliminated. Blood demands more blood. Some attribute the light punishment of Choe Ryong-hae to Kim Jong-un’s realization that he had to put an end to the bloodletting. Kim, Grisafi notes, must demonstrate “that the regime is not indiscriminately ruthless and intent on killing everyone for even minor infractions.” “Even an authoritarian government,” the news site states, “can only carry out violent purges for so long and needs to limit them.”

The second principal reason why the ongoing leadership transition has been particularly difficult is that Kim Jong-un has been extraordinarily ambitious. He is not only trying to put his loyalists in place—something every new leader attempts—he has been changing the nature of the regime. His grandfather, Kim Il-sung, created a one-man system where no one element of the elite—the Korean People’s Army, the Korean Workers’ Party, or the security services—dominated politics. One-man regimes are generally the least stable forms of government, but the scheming leader was a master of keeping all the elements in check, surveilling, reporting on and challenging each other. He perfected the art of keeping everything in balance, which meant everything revolving around himself.

Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung’s son, was a far weaker figure, and as a result needed to create his own base of power. He did that the fast way by allowing generals and admirals to elbow the Korean Workers’ Party—and even the security services—to the sidelines. That is the concept behind Kim Jong-il’s iteration of songun, the military-first policy. Kim Jong-un, rejecting songun politics, has been returning the regime to what Kim Il-sung would find familiar, a balance of competing groups. To do so, young Kim has had to strip the military of power, prestige and cash, specifically, the trade flows the military appropriated during his father’s tenure.

Kim Jong-un’s purge has touched relatively few from the either the Korean Workers’ Party or the Ministry of State Security. But bloodshed, both literal and figurative, will continue to claim generals and admirals resisting attempts to deemphasize songun policies. Further deadly disagreements between the Kim family and the country’s most powerful institution cannot be good for the DPRK, as the regime calls itself. Kim Jong-un has been able to intimidate the officer corps, but the constant turnover also means he has not been able to find a flag officer he can trust. He is, after all, searching for a four-star general willing to act against the interests of the military, a tall order. So far, Kim has had to continue executing senior officers.

IN SHORT, Kim Jong-un may be no more secure than the day he took over. At no time since 1949, one year after the founding of the North Korean state, has a Kim ruler had less support than Kim Jong-un does today. It is said that Kim is so fearful that he will not travel to large portions of the DPRK. And there is good reason for his insecurity. Radio Free Asia reported that explosives were placed in a ceiling at the Wonsan International Airport in late 2015 in an apparent attempt on Kim’s life.

Throughout the history of North Korea, there have been assassinations, plots, coup attempts and even insurrections. None, however, has come close to dislodging the Kim dynasty. Part of the reason is that the North Korean government—if it can be called that—derives its legitimacy from the Kim lineage, the “Paektu bloodline,” as it is known.

The charismatic Kim Il-sung, as a means of consolidating his political position, created a theology for the Korean people. Building upon the roots of Christianity and appropriating elements of emperor worship from the Japanese, Kim deified himself. In his telling, he made himself all powerful, controlling the weather, arranging bountiful harvests and possessing the power to transcend both time and space. “We were told that he crossed the river on a bridge of leaves and then he threw pine cones and they turned into grenades,” says Ahn Hyeok, a North Korean and former political prisoner. “We heard this over and over, and we really believed that. So naturally we idolized him.” Kim Il-sung retained elements of Korean feudal and Confucian society in his universe, employed Leninist and Stalinist techniques of social mobilization and control and masterfully manipulated imagery. In other words, God was Kim.

Kim Il-sung’s son and grandson have progressively lost this mystique—by now no one believes Kim Jong-un is divine, for instance—but young Kim rules because he was chosen by Kim Il-sung’s successor and direct descendant, and because he is a direct descendant himself. And military officers, although severely disadvantaged by Kim’s moves to resuscitate the Korean Workers’ Party, believe they cannot sustain their favored position in society without Kim blood at the top of the ruling group.

But there are limits to the patience of the top brass. Because of the growing divide between Kim and his general officers, the current ruler undoubtedly understands he needs to pacify the officer corps in some way. That realization, in all probability, makes it even less likely he will accommodate the international community on what it wants most from him: the dismantling of his nuclear arsenal.

Although Kim Jong-il promised in September 2005 to give up his atomic stockpile, that pledge was quickly dishonored, and it’s clear he fully backed the nuclear-weapons program as well as the military’s effort to develop long-range missiles. To remain in power, Kim Jong-un has to retain the core policies of his father.

Kim Jong-un’s inability to give up his country’s nukes and missiles puts him in what looks like an impossible position. He remains committed to his byungjin line—“progress in tandem”—policy of developing the economy and nukes at the same time. This policy, announced March 2013, looks good on paper, but it is not working in practice. Growth of the North’s gross domestic product, according to the Bank of Korea, the authoritative tracker of Kim’s economy, averaged 1.1 percent from 2011, the year he took over, to 2014, the last year for which reliable figures are available.

That is better than the two years of contraction that preceded 2011, but it is not enough to keep a restless population satisfied. Moreover, Kim is under pressure because the downturn in the “royal economy” is apparently severe. There are reports that the Kim family is not taking care of its own as it once did, and that is crucial from a regime stability point of view. “Events that used to be punctuated with gifts, for example, have given way to expressions of appreciation,” notes Ken Gause of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Joshua Stanton of the One Free Korea site reports that Kim Jong-un may be drawing down his family’s offshore cash and gold reserves. “He doesn’t have the resources to be able to consolidate his power and buy relationships,” Gause notes. As a consequence, Kim Jong-un has had to kill or otherwise discipline officials instead of showering them with gifts.

In the past, Kim rulers funded their royal economy—and the broader economy as well—with aid from China, Russia, South Korea and the United Nations, but now it appears these donors have reduced support, in some cases substantially. South Korea’s conservative government is not inclined to rescue Kim Jong-un, and the UN cannot find sufficient contributions to its food and other programs. It’s true that Russia is said to be “looking east” and that Moscow and Pyongyang declared 2015 to be a “year of friendship.” Kim, however, has little to offer the Russians, and so they are not supporting him to the great extent he needs. The most they were willing to do was write off almost $10 billion of uncollectable Soviet-era loans in 2014. Pledges of new aid look empty. Finally, Pyongyang’s relations with Beijing have plunged into deep freeze, and resulting in some reduction in Chinese assistance in the last two years.

Without sufficient aid and with the devotion of still-substantial resources to the military and senior regime elements, there is not enough left in the till to get the civilian economy going. Today’s predicament resembled the one that plagued Kim Jong-un’s grandfather. From the end of the Korean War to the middle of the 1960s, North Korea had one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. A Soviet model of forced mobilization of resources and people actually worked at first, but then it ran up against its limitations and failed, a pattern that plagued Stalinist economies elsewhere.

Kim Il-sung could have restarted growth, but ultimately did not do so because, in addition to other reasons, he continued to spend excessively on the military. Twenty-two million people, many of them poor, supported what was then the world’s fifth-largest military. Kim devoted about a quarter of his nation’s output to the Korean People’s Army, and the military’s share of the economy was probably growing in the mid-nineties. No economy, no matter how efficient or productive, could have carried such a burden. The price of a permanent war footing was destitution.

Today, the situation in broad outline is the same. Kim Jong-un does not have the resources to make good on promises of higher standards of living. Without aid, he needs a more productive economy. He has dabbled in economic liberalization with his pojon reforms—the reduction of controls on agricultural and industrial concerns is a step in the right direction—but changes have so far been too timid to make a noticeable difference.

NORTH KOREA needs bold change if it is to have much of a future, making the late October announcement that the Workers’ Party will hold its next congress so intriguing. The congress, scheduled for May, last met in October 1980, and the long interval has created expectations that Kim Jong-un will use the occasion to outline landmark reforms. If he doesn’t, Kim will be condemning the economy to slow or no growth for decades. This must have implications for the stability of his regime. For the military, it could mean years of hardship as generals and admirals are forced to share resources with increasingly demanding civilians, as Kim’s byungjin line contemplates. That is yet another area of potential disagreement between the flag officers and the young leader, and therefore another element of risk for his rule.

Problems in North Korea have ways of radiating out from its borders and affecting both neighbors and others. If Kim Jong-un cannot restart the economy with limited reforms, he will become even more reliant on sales of weapons—conventional and otherwise—and dangerous technologies.

Some of those sales have the potential to destabilize regions far from North Asia. For instance, North Korea supplies Iran with, among other things, nuclear-weapons technology and ballistic missiles. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, thought to be Iran’s chief nuclear scientist, was almost certainly in North Korea in February 2013 for Pyongyang’s third test of an atomic device, and it appears Iranians were also on hand for the previous two detonations as well. We should not be surprised if we learn Fakhrizadeh was there for the fourth test, in January of this year. In any event, Iranian weapons technicians are reported to be stationed in a North Korean base near the Chinese border. Iranians have, in all probability, witnessed most if not all of the North’s tests of intermediate- and long-range ballistic missiles.

Iran, it appears, also paid Pyongyang for building the Deir al-Zor reactor in the Syrian desert, which bore striking similarities to the reactor in Yongbyon in North Korea. Ten North Koreans were reportedly killed by the Israeli air force when it bombed the site in September 2007. The North’s total annual take from nukes and missiles looks like it is about $3 billion, a figure more than a tenth of the country’s gross domestic product. The Kim regime, in part due to the failure of its internal economy, has become the world’s arch nuclear proliferator and a major seller of chemical weapons, such as those used by Syria’s Bashar al-Assad this past half-decade.

And the importance of this trade to the regime means that Pyongyang will continue to develop and test nuclear warheads, long-range missiles and assorted weaponry, thereby further undermining the world’s nonproliferation regime. No outsider can draw a straight line from infighting between the military and Kim Jong-un; to the execution of Jang Song-thaek; to deteriorating relations with Beijing; to the faltering economy; to weapons sales to Iran and others. Nonetheless, the purges and executions in North Korea look like they are pushing Kim and his ruling group in exceedingly dangerous directions. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has a history of surprising its neighbors and the United States. Add the element of a highly unstable political system, and there could be extremely unpalatable consequences.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World. Follow him on Twitter @GordonGChang.

Image: Flickr/Tormod Sandtorv.