[It could not be independently confirmed whether Mr. Jang, long considered a champion of a Chinese-style economic reform in North Korea, actually made such a statement or whether the regime cooked up the assertion to justify his execution. But the long list of crimes that Mr. Jang and his followers were accused of having committed was tantamount to a highly unusual admission of what analysts said could be a serious and bloody power struggle over economic and other policies inside the impoverished but nuclear-armed country.]
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Li Xin/XinHua, via
Associated Press
Jang
Song-thaek in Beijing in 2012. North Korea’s state-run news agency said he
was
killed after being convicted of treason.
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SEOUL, South Korea — Perhaps one of the most intriguing
details in North Korea’s announcement of the execution of Jang Song-thaek, the
uncle and presumed mentor of the leader Kim Jong-un, was what its state-run
media reported that Mr. Jang said while confessing to plotting to overthrow Mr.
Kim’s government.
“I was going to stage the coup by using army
officers who had close ties with me or by mobilizing armed forces under the
control of my confidants,” the North’s Korean Central News Agency on Friday
quoted Mr. Jang as having said on Thursday during his court-martial. “I thought
the army might join in the coup if the living of the people and service
personnel further deteriorate in the future.”
It could not be independently confirmed whether
Mr. Jang, long considered a champion of a Chinese-style economic reform in
North Korea, actually made such a statement or whether the regime cooked up the
assertion to justify his execution. But the long list of crimes that Mr. Jang
and his followers were accused of having committed was tantamount to a highly
unusual admission of what analysts said could be a serious and bloody power
struggle over economic and other policies inside the impoverished but
nuclear-armed country.
The speed with which Mr. Kim — or whoever else
was engineering Mr. Jang’s downfall — hurried to execute him and make it public
was a sign of instability and a lack of confidence in Mr. Kim’s grip on power,
the analysts said. Normally, North Korea hides any signs of disloyalty to the
Kim dynasty.
“If Kim Jong-un was sure of his control of
power, he would not have needed to execute his uncle,” said Lee Byong-chul,
senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Cooperation in Seoul. “There will
be big and small bloody purges, and at a time like this, desperate extremists
may lash out. Pyongyang is no longer safe.”
North Korea on Friday hinted at such purges by
condemning “undesirable and alien elements” in “important posts of the party
and state,” in “ministries and national institutions,” and in agencies dealing
with foreign trade, as well as Mr. Jang’s acquaintances in the military.
Mr. Jang, 67, was executed Thursday immediately
after being convicted on treason charges, North Korea said. Suh Sang-kee, a
senior governing party lawmaker in Seoul, quoted South Korean intelligence
officials as saying that Mr. Jang was executed by a machine-gun firing squad.
Long thought to be the second most influential
man in the North, Mr. Jang was the most prominent North Korean purged and
executed under Mr. Kim, who South Korean officials said was resorting to “a
reign of terror” to consolidate his power. Mr. Jang was the husband of Kim
Kyong-hee, a sister of Kim Jong-il, Mr. Kim’s late father, who ruled the North
before his son. The fate of Ms. Kim was not known, though analysts say it would
be unlikely for Kim Jong-un to harm a blood relative.
“The way they dealt with Jang Song-thaek was
highly unusual and unprecedented in North Korean history,” said the Unification
Minister Ryoo Kilj-jae, South Korea’s top North Korea policy maker. “We are
watching the recent series of developments in the North with a deep concern.”
The State Department said Thursday that it could
not verify the execution, but a deputy spokeswoman, Marie Harf, said if it did
happen, “this is another example of the extreme brutality of the North Korean regime.”
Kim Kwan-jin, the South’s defense minister, said
that the South Korean military was being extra vigilant as it feared that the
North might attempt a military provocation against the South to defuse what
might be a domestic political crisis.
“The North Korean military may make a wrong
decision for various reasons,” he said. “There may be a competition within the
military to show loyalty to Kim.”
Mr. Jang had been a fixture in the North Korean
elite for the past 40 years, serving in major party posts under Kim Jong-il and
gaining more power under his son, Kim Jong-un. During a party meeting on
Sunday, North Korea stripped Mr. Jang of all his powerful posts and expelled
him from the ruling Workers’ Party, calling him an “anti-party,
counterrevolutionary factional leader.” On Monday, state-run television showed
the spectacle of the once-powerful man being hauled off from the party meeting
by uniformed guards.
Analysts said it was possible for North Korea to
have faked or exaggerated the charges against Mr. Jang, whose corrupt lifestyle
may have made him a valuable scapegoat for Mr. Kim. But they also noted that
Mr. Jang’s case marked the first time in recent decades that the North revealed
what it purported was an attempt to overthrow its leadership and the first
publicly announced execution of a member of the ruling family.
“Although high-ranking leaders, including
members of the Kim family, have been deposed before, we haven’t seen anything
this public or dramatic since Kim Jong-un’s grandfather Kim Il-sung purged his
last major rivals in the late 1950s,” said Prof. Charles K. Armstrong, a North
Korea expert at Columbia University in New York and the author of “Tyranny of
the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992.”
“This seems to indicate the divisions within the
Kim regime were more serious than previously thought,” Professor Armstrong
said. “Jang was particularly close to China and was pushing North Korea toward
a more Chinese-style economic reform. His ouster could reflect the reassertion
of control by hard-liners who want to distance North Korea from China and slow
down the reform process.”
China, the North’s longtime patron, was also
unnerved by growing evidence of an internal power struggle that could
destabilize its already troublesome ally and possibly increase the American
military presence in the region.
Since Mr. Kim took power following his father’s
death in December 2011, he has been enforcing a generational change in the
party, government and military leadership, retiring figures from his father’s
days and replacing them with people loyal to him.
“With Jang’s execution, Kim Jong-un is declaring
an end to his father’s era,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea expert at
Dongguk University in Seoul. “And he did it with a bang, sort of a shock therapy
against anyone who still might have doubts about his authority. The speedy way
he did it actually shows his daring and confidence.”
But analysts had lingering questions about who
was running the country behind Mr. Kim.
“If it has been another group — most likely,
conservatives within the North Korean regime — that has engineered Jang’s
removal, then they could now control what Kim Jong-un sees, hears and says,”
said Chang Yong-seok, a senior researcher at the Institute for Peace and
Unification Studies at Seoul National University. With Mr. Jang, who was
something of a moderate, gone, Mr. Kim could find it hard to control the
hard-liners, Mr. Chang added.
The North Korean announcement suggested that Mr.
Jang had started nurturing his own political ambitions even as Mr. Kim’s father
began grooming his son to succeed him. At the time many analysts believed Mr.
Jang and his wife had been handpicked by Kim Jong-il to help his young and
inexperienced son navigate the North’s treacherous politics and carry on the
family dynasty. The younger Mr. Kim took over the leadership of the country
after his father’s death in late 2011, making him the third generation to run
the state.
While Mr. Kim was inheriting power, his uncle
built a “little kingdom” of his own in the party, with his followers calling
him “No. 1 comrade,” North Korea said on Friday. Mr. Jang dreamed of first
becoming premier “when the economy goes totally bankrupt” and then solving “the
problem of people’s living at a certain level” by spending an enormous amount
of funds he has stashed away, it said.
“Jang dreamed such a foolish dream that once he
seizes power by a base method, his despicable true colors as ‘reformist’ known
to the outside world would help his ‘new government’ get ‘recognized’ by foreign
countries in a short span of time,” it said. That was tantamount to trying to
overthrow North Korea by “ideologically aligning himself with enemies,” North
Korea said.
Mr. Jang’s execution means the demise of an
influential voice for economic reform in North Korea, analysts said.
“He has been the only one in the North who could
talk about economic change,” Mr. Chang said. “So, when I heard of Mr. Jang’s
execution, my first thought was that it was a death notice for those of us who
have hoped for economic reform in the North.”
