Choe Ryong-Hae’s latest non-appearance fuels purge speculation.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Alastair Gale reports:
Speculation about a possible new high-level purge in North Korea grew on Thursday after a close aide to leader Kim Jong Un appeared to miss a gathering of the Pyongyang leadership.
Since taking the North Korean leadership at the end of 2011, Mr. Kim has executed around 70 officials as part of efforts to solidify his position, according to South Korean authorities who closely monitor their neighbor for signs of instability.
Speculation over the fate of Choe Ryong Hae, who has been an emissary for Mr. Kim to China, Russia and South Korea in recent years, began on Sunday when his name was omitted from the list of around 170 names in the organizing committee for the funeral of a senior military figure. A South Korean government spokesman called the omission unprecedented.
Yonhap offers this explanation for Choe’s whereabouts:
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has sent his key confidant to the country’s top school for re-education, South Korea’s intelligence officials said Thursday, in an apparent lenient punishment that could set the stage for his political comeback in the coming months, if not years.
“Choe Ryong-hae is receiving education at Kim Il Sung Higher Party School,” an official said, referring to the top institution named after the country’s founder, Kim’s late grandfather.
Gale notes that Choe “is the son of a former North Korean armed forces minister who fought alongside Mr. Kim’s grandfather against occupying Japanese forces in the 1930s.” Oddly enough, while reading Jang Jin-Sung’s “Dear Leader” last weekend, I read this passage, which explains Choe’s longevity under Kim Jong-Il:
Old loyalties only go so far with the world’s only millennial hereditary despot. There is something awfully erratic, even impulsive, in the way Choe has fallen and risen during Kim Jong-Un’s reign. As noted before, one minute KCNA is announcing his “transfer” out of the National Defense Commission; the next thing, he’s showing up as a high-level emissary in Seoul, or even as a stand-in for His Corpulency in Beijing. I’ll let this quote from Gale’s article take us out.
Michael Madden, editor of the North Korea Leadership Watch website and an expert on top figures in the Pyongyang regime, said Mr. Choe’s apparent absence from the funeral was a strong suggestion that he had at least been sidelined.
“I don’t think we’ll be hearing from him for a long time,” he said.
I’ll bet Pyongyang’s legions of photo editors must be wishing they had some non-permanent ink right now.
If it were only Choe involved here, that would be one thing, but when a high-level official gets purged in North Korea, his family, his associates, and their families can suffer, too. This has the potential to affect a lot of people.
One day, we’ll know whether it’s an indicator of instability, too. I don’t think it profits Kim Jong-Un’s image of stable leadership to keep replacing the very men he sends abroad to negotiate with his adversaries and his frenemies.
My final point would be to note that the occasion for Choe’s vanishing was the funeral of Marshal Ri Ul Sol from cancer, itself an odd thing for a regime that’s now peddling miracle cures for cancer. Actual results may vary, I guess.