LITTLE KIM JONG UN OF NORTH KOREA: BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO….EXECUTES EX-GIRLFRIEND
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324463604579043311215635616.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
Miley Cyrus, take note: Acting out lewdly at Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards might have garnered some stinging public criticism for the former Disney child star. But consider the fate of Hyon Song Wol in Pyongyang.
According to South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper, Hyon, a popular North Korean singer, was arrested August 17 and executed three days later, along with a dozen members of her orchestra. The charge was that she had made a sex tape, later released in China, with another musician, and, incongruously, that they also had Bibles in their possession. “‘They were executed with machine guns while the key members of [their bands] as well as the families of the victims looked on,'” the Chosun reports, citing a source. The families of the executed were then sent to prison camps.
Hyon was also the ex-girlfriend of “Great Successor” Kim Jong Un, the North’s 29 year-old dictator. The Chosun reports that the two had been an item a decade ago but were ordered to break it off by Kim’s late father, Kim Jong Il. The younger Kim then married Ri Sol Ju, a former bandmate of Hyon, who married a soldier.
This being North Korea, it’s hard to tell if the executions are a case of Kim’s vindictiveness as an ex-boyfriend, Ri’s jealousy as a wife, or something else. The executions coincide with the reported purging of Kim Ok, Kim Jong Il’s last wife and Kim Jong Un’s stepmother. That would be in keeping with Kim Jong Un’s broader effort to purge his father’s military and political cronies as he consolidates his power.
The manic cruelty of the North Korean regime, reaching from the bottom of society to its upper echelons, may sometimes seem like a subject best suited for parody. But it was no joke for Hyon, her fellow musicians or their families. That’s something for South Korea, the Obama Administration and the rest of the civilized world to remember when they seek the next rapprochement with the Kims.
A version of this article appeared August 30, 2013, on page A12 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Breaking Up Badly in Pyongyang.
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