NEW LEADERSHIP FOR NORTH KOREA? ADRIAN MORGAN
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.7433/pub_detail.asp
“Failed states are dangerous, but a failed state that possesses nuclear bombs is a particularly dangerous entity.”
In 1994, the Communist dictator of North Korea, Kim il Sung, died of heart failure. Known to the masses as “Great Leader“, his passing was attended by displays of mourning that were – to cynical eyes – so extreme they became hysterically funny. Great Leader ‘s seat on the North Korean throne was filled by his wayward son, Kim Jong Il. The military apparently decided that the comic-loving, alcohol-imbibing wannabe playboy would somehow give a sense of continuity to the nation’s affairs. A little piece of Great Leader – not the best piece, perhaps – would live on, and take North Korea further along the path to imagined greatness.
Kim Jong Il was given a soubriquet, to fix him in the minds of the people as a charismatic figure. Sickly from years of poorly treated diabetes exacerbated by hard drinking, Kim Jong Il was called “Dear Leader.” Now, with 68-year old Dear Leader’s health worsening after a rumoured stroke two years ago, the de facto rulers of Korea are looking to groom a successor for the world’s only hereditary Communist monarchy.
The odds are on Dear Leader’s youngest son, Kim Jong-un, who is in his twenties. In order to make him seem acceptable to the gullible North Koreans – who are allowed no sources of information other than propaganda – the successor will be given a title designed to present him as someone the North Korean nation neds to embrace.
Already, according to South Korean intelligence sources, songs and poems in praise of Kim Jong-un are already being penned, ready to foist onto an undiscriminating populace. There are already calls in the state media for loyalty to the Kim family, suggesting that the meeting that will be held on September 28 will be the official inauguration of one of the Kim family as successor.
A meeting was due to be held earlier this month, but a typhoon and floods intervened. The meeting is expected to be the biggest in thirty years. In 1981, Kim Jong-il had been nominated as a successor to Great Leader in a similar meeting. Other changes in the country’s leadership are expected to be announced. Reuters has given a list of people who are likely to gain prominent positions.
Virtually nothing is known of Kim Jong-un, apart from his approximate age, that he has a birthday in January and he was educated in Switzerland. In April 2009, Kim Jong-un had been nominated to National Defense Commission. A young man with no history makes a better puppet to foist upon the North Korean people and the world. Kim Jong-un was not the first choice. Following monarchy’s rules of primogeniture, the first choice for the leadership was Dear Leader’s eldest son, 36-year old King Jon Nam.
In 2009, while at the casino resort of Macau where he often drinks with South Korean tourists, Kim Jong Nam said: “Personally, I am not interested in this issue (succession). Sorry, I am not interested in the politics.”It is easy to sneer at the idea of a communist dictatorship engaging in the games of hereditary rulership – the same system that inspired various revolutions, including the famous Russian revolution of 1917. But behind the tawdry theatricalities of Korean king-making, there is a very worrying scenario developing. North Korea has already decided to become more belligerent towards its neighbor South Korea. The bitter and bloody civil war of the 1950s, which saw the two nations part, still fuels bad feeling.
On March 26 this year, the North Koreans torpedoed a South Korean patrol vessel corvette, the Cheonan, with 46 of the boat’s crew of 104 lost. Though North Korea officially denied the act, subsequent recovery of the two parts of the corvette have proved that the boat was hit by a torpedo.
Dear Leader is old, and ill. A further stroke could completely debilitate him, and if he is replaced by a person in his twenties, with no experience of politics, there is the more worrying issue of the nation’s nuclear capacity. Would a spoiled young man from a family of borderline alcoholics be safe to put in charge of nuclear weapons? Would he be content to remain as a puppet while others (such as his maternal uncle Jang Song Thaek) wield more influence?
On May 25 2009, North Korea detonated its second nuclear bomb. The test was made underground, and was estimated to be as strong as that which destroyed Hiroshima. It created an earthquake of magnitude 4.5 in the northeast of the nation.
North Korea’s first nuclear test explosion took place on Monday October 9, 2006. Again, it was an underground test. It was smaller than the second bomb, producing an earthquake of 4.2 magnitude on the Richter scale. The Chinese had been warned about twenty minutes before the test at Hwaederi. There was an unsubstantiated claim at the time from a Chinese official that the device was a neutron bomb – a nuclear weapon which would destroy life but leave buildings intact. It is now believed that the device was a simple device on the lines of the Fat Man and Little Boy devices used on Japan in August 1945.
Pakistan’s Foreign Office condemned the test, and had tried to deny that the first North Korean bomb was created with the assistance of Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan. The Foreign Office spokeswoman even claimed that the Pakistan bomb tests were based upon uranium, and the Korean tested device used plutonium. There is no evidence for Korean bomb technology using plutonium.
Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan (pictured) is a Pakistan scientist who had stolen centrifuge technology from a firm in the Netherlands where he had worked and who had subsequently developed Pakistan’s nuclear program. Khan’s information led to Pakistan detonating its first nuclear device in May, 1998.
Khan (born 1935) had been working with a Dutch company called Physics Dynamic Research Laboratory (FDO) from 1972 to 1975. This company provided materials for uranium enrichment. Khan obtained from the company details of centrifuges which were used to extract uranium 235 from uranium hexaflouride gas. He left Holland in the mid 1970s to return to Pakistan, where he began work on developing Pakistan’s atomic bomb.
Khan had assistance to export nuclear technology – he was a friend of a businessman called Henk Slebos, who was briefly jailed in 205 for assisting Khan to gain nuclear technology. Khan admitted in February 2004 that he had sold nuclear know-how to Iran, Libya and North Korea. President Musharraf publicly forgave Khan for his actions. Later, Musharraf admitted that Khan had sent nearly two dozen P-1 centrifuges, and some of the more sophisticated P-11 centrifuges to North Korea. Musharraf claimed that Khan’s assistance had not helped North Korea, though this is doubtful. The former president was unsure whether or not Khan had supplied North Korea with Uranium hexafluoride gas, which has to be used in centrifuges to produce weapons-quality enriched uranium.
Whatever will happen in the meeting in North Korea on September 28, one thing is certain. North Korea will stop at nothing to gain power and influence in the region. Having nuclear weapons would be a strategic advantage in its fraught relations with South Korea.
When “Great Leader” was alive, there was a massive famine in North Korea in the 1990s. This killed up to 3 million people in North Korea. While the hapless populace of the People’s Democratic Republic starved, funds from foreign donors to alleviate this famine were diverted into the nuclear weapons program.
In other famines, people have resorted to eating rats and even dragonflies to survive. The military regime is more concerned about potential strategic advantage than the wellbeing of its people. If a nation can treat its own people with nothing but callousness and disregard, it is surely a country that would have few moral scruples in the way it treats its neighbors and enemies. If the regime could gain strategic advantage over South Korea by threatening to use its nuclear weaponry, it would.
North Korea by any economic or social benchmark is a failed state. Failed states are dangerous, but a failed state that possesses nuclear bombs is a particularly dangerous entity.
Adrian Morgan
Comments are closed.
