Stage Four Watch: The Great Purge of 2008?

The Korean edition of the Chosun Ilbo is reporting on the impending execution of a beautiful 35 year-old North Korean woman, “Miss Kim,” who grew wealthy as a defection and reunion broker in Moosan, North Hamgyeong Province. To put this delicately, Miss Kim shared both her substantial wealth and (rumor has it) her substantial physical blessings with a number of senior North Korean officers and officials, so as to ensure that each passage through the border would be, erm, well lubricated.

Now that I’ve done my part to trivialize this tragedy, I’ll just observe that real people are headed for real firing squads, and that Miss Kim is credited with helping prisoner of war Han Man Taek and other POW families (these perhaps?) escape from North Korea, in exchange for substantial fees of $30,000 to $40,000. The story suggests that some senior officers are also worried about being implicated. I’m sure that even Kim Jong Il probably plays a very careful game when it comes to any kind of military purge.

This is only one of several recent stories in the last week on the purging of corrupt officials in North Korea. The Daily NK reports that the Director of the Peoples’ Security Agency in Hoeryong was charged with using drugs, and even an official of the notorious Bureau 39 was fired for embezzlement.

At the beginning of this month, I posted about what North Korea billed as a drive against corruption in the handling of inter-Korean projects (sixth item). That story also appears to be widening:

North Korea is in the midst of a massive anti-corruption drive which has already resulted in the arrest of one of its top officials handling business with South Korea, informed sources in Seoul said Saturday.

The campaign, ordered by leader Kim Jong-il, was prompted by widespread allegations that some top party and administration officials took bribes as they pushed business projects with South Korean industrialists, said the sources well versed in North Korean affairs. [Yonhap]

No intelligent observer of North Korea should ever be satisfied with an official explanation, but of course, the usual absence of hard facts often leaves little choice but speculation. It did occur to me when I read this piece by Andrei Lankov and recent revelations about how Kaesong has stimulated the local black market that Kim Jong Il would eventually decide that inter-Korean projects were too poisonous to the system to be tolerated.

Also under investigation is the National Economic Cooperation Council, a government body that handles business with South Korean entrepreneurs, the sources said.

The Council’s chief, Jeong Woon-eop, remains under arrest pending investigation into allegations that he took “huge amounts” of bribes, said the sources, who wanted to remain anonymous.

Efforts to insulate the people from the prosperity of the Great Beyond are working imperfectly, even under the watchful eye of minders (who also have a degree of natural curiosity).

Another possibility is with the food supply dwindling and corruption evident, Kim Jong Il needs scapegoats.

According to the sources in Seoul, the North Korean leader was enraged after getting a report that some party and government officials allegedly pocketed bribes and diverted food and other aid from South Korea to black markets.

“Even those who have eaten for free 1 gram of flour from South Korea should cough it up,” one source in Seoul said, quoting its North Korean sources whom it did not identify.

All of this could be an ordinary purge with corruption being just a convenient excuse, but there isn’t much question that the diversion of South Korean and international aid to North Korea goes on on a massive scale. It’s not always clear, however, the extent to which the diversion is driven by the regime or corrupt individuals.

Most recently, South Korea revealed that millions of dollars meant for building a reunion center in Kumgang had disappeared. That much was predictable, but South Korea’s reaction to it is as unexpected as it is brilliant:

South Korea gave North Korea US$400,000 (€274,610) in cash along with construction materials worth US$3.4 million (€2.3 million) last year to help build the reunion center in Pyongyang under a 2006 deal, but North Korea has yet to live up to its pledge to disclose how the aid was used, South Korea’s Unification Ministry said.

“We have stressed to the North on several occasions that transparency in the provision of the construction materials should be ensured,” Seoul’s Unification Ministry said in a statement. “But there has been no clear notification from the North of the progress in construction.”

South Korea believes North Korea has not even started building the facility because it has never shown a possible site to visiting South Korean officials, said Lim Hae-sung, an official at the ministry’s separated family bureau. [AP, via IHT]

Safe to say, Comrade Chung would not have said that.

(For a background on the stages of North Korean collapse, click here.)