South Korea announced the detection of a recent change in the North Korean leadership, which Michael Madden on 38 North puts under the microscope, from alleged event to even the motivations of South Korea mentioning it:
If General Kim [Won Hong] has actually been removed from his position and is eventually replaced, it would represent a departure in how Kim Jong Un treats his most loyal aides and supporters. While several members of the elite have fallen by the wayside during the last five years, Kim Jong Un has not demoted, dismissed or “disappeared” this small cohort. If he has fired Kim Won Hong, it would mean that he has now turned on “his people” in the leadership. Interpretations of this are subjective. To some Pyongyang watchers this will only reaffirm their view that Kim Jong Un’s leadership of the DPRK is unstable and that Kim himself might be mentally unstable. Other Pyongyang watchers will interpret this as a sign that Kim Jong Un has cemented his power and dominance in the country’s political system; in this view, by dismissing someone so closely tied to his own rise to power he feels sufficiently secure to send a message to other DPRK elites that none of them should feel safe in their jobs.
Possible conclusion?
If Kim Won Hong has been dismissed, it means that Kim Jong Un is now laying into a group of previously untouchable loyalists. Internally, it signals to other senior elites that their jobs may not be as safe as they thought. It would indicate that Kim Jong Un is more isolated from North Korea’s power structure[10] than it seems, and works through a group of largely unnamed and unknown close aides[11] in the Personal Secretariat. While his father may have been physically distant from various officials, cadres and functionaries, Kim Jong Il maintained a flurry of contacts and communications with subordinates of varying ranks and stations. Kim Jong Un has a berth to reinvent the reporting and control channels in the regime, but it isn’t a wide berth.
Which suggests we may know less about how Kim Jong-un runs his bureaucracy than we thought, which makes me wonder how much we can really say we know about the entire setup? But Michael is very cautious about this announcement:
As always, reports of a senior North Korean official’s dismissal or death come with caveats. In contrast to previous occasions, the South Korean government has been rather candid about Kim Won Hong’s dismissal. Rather than let something float in the ether of anonymous sources and a competitive media market, they clarified and contextualized the available intelligence. And yet, one cannot ignore the correlation between the [Republic of Korea] President’s Office refusing to honor a search warrant at the Blue House and the [Ministry of Unification]’s announcement on Kim Won Hong; to deflect attention from an ongoing corruption investigation, perhaps someone in Seoul decided to officially leak a bit of intelligence on North Korea’s internal political affairs.
The President of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) has been engulfed in a nasty scandal – WaPo published a report back in October of 2016 on the problems of Park Geun-hye, who apparently is stubbornly holding on:
The essence of the scandal is this: It has emerged that Park, notoriously aloof even to her top aides, has been taking private counsel from Choi Soon-sil, a woman she’s known for four decades. Despite having no official position and no security clearance, Choi seems to have advised Park on everything from her wardrobe to speeches about the dream of reunification with North Korea.
Calls for her resignation — and even impeachment — are resonating from across the political spectrum, and her approval ratings have dropped to a record low of 17 percent, according to two polls released Friday.
If she’s refused a search warrant, it’s easy to see how the release of information about the war machine to the north – accurate or not – would be used to deflect and obscure criticism about refusing a search warrant.
It’s soap operas all over the world, folks. I see Russia may have broken a treaty today, too. I’m heading for bed.
