North Korea Shoots a Messenger
Surely there is some sensible middle ground between these two extremes of personnel management — in America, diplomats who push for policies that fail get promoted. We learn today that pressing for bold diplomatic initiatives turns out to be less career-enhancing in the Foreign Ministry of the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea:
North Korea executed its pointman on South Korea last year, holding him responsible for wrong predictions about Seoul’s new conservative government that has ditched a decade of engagement policy toward Pyongyang, sources said Monday.
Choe Sung-chol, who as vice chairman of the North’s Asia-Pacific Peace Committee had pushed for bold reconciliation with Seoul’s previous liberal governments, disappeared from public sight early last year amid reports that he was fired.
Rumors spread in January that he was forced to work at a chicken farm, but a number of sources privy to North Korean internal affairs told Yonhap News Agency that Choe was executed last year to shoulder the blame for inter-Korean relations, which changed drastically with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak’s inauguration. [Yonhap]
The rest of Yonhap’s story is now behind the premium content firewall, but other news services are characterizing the reasons for Choe’s execution differently. Bloomberg, citing Yonhap, reports that Choe was “accus[ed] of allowing the population to develop a favorable image of South Korea,” and for promoting excessive dependence on the South:
While Choe was officially charged with bribery, he was executed for ignoring opponents and pressing ahead with closer ties with South Korea that threatened to make the communist state too dependant on its richer neighbor, Yonhap reported. [Bloomberg, Bomi Lim and Heejin Koo]
A third report, also citing Yonhap, comes by way of Reuters, and characterizes Choe’s execution as punishment for supporting a softer line:
The Yonhap report … quoted a source familiar with the North, who said the real intention was to punish him for pushing a soft-line with the South. [….]
“Choe pressed on with improving ties with the Roh government despite objections by hardliners,” Yonhap news agency quoted the source as saying.
Relations between the two Koreas chilled after Roh left office in 2008 and was replaced by Lee Myung-bak, who ended a free flow of unconditional aid to the impoverished North and said handouts would come in return for Pyongyang taking apart its nuclear arms program.
“As ties with the South worsened after the change of government, he became the scapegoat who took all the responsibility for misjudgment in the South’s new policy on the North,” the source said. [Reuters, Jack Kim]
Me: I’d like to know which theory Yonhap actually advanced here, but they’re not all equally plausible. North Korea’s sabotage of North-South relations was too measured and calculated, too rationally related to North Korea’s own desire to isolate itself, for North Korea to be surprised by any of the recent adverse developments in that relationship. I can accept that Choe was shot for making excessively bold and wrong predictions that President Lee would pay extortion money just like President Roh would have — a prediction that, if made, cost Choe’s boss a lot of Hennessey money. I can accept that Choe got on the wrong side of a power struggle, or even that he really was shot for corruption (which is rampant in the North, to say nothing of the South). I certainly could accept that Choe was held responsible for promoting an aid-seeking policy that had an unpredictably severe impact on North Korea’s closely guarded isolation from the South. But I find it very hard to believe that there’s a faction of North Korean moderates waiting in the wings at the Supreme People’s Assembly, except in the mind of Selig Harrison.
In due course, the Daily NK will tell us what really happened.