North Korea Leader’s Uncle Executed as a Traitor

Boston Globe: North Korea Leader’s Uncle Executed as a Traitor

Associated Press    December 12, 2013

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un walked past his uncle Jang Song Thaek. State media reported that Jang has been executed.

PYONGYANG, North Korea — North Korea said Friday that it has executed Kim Jong Un’s uncle, calling the leader’s former mentor a traitor who tried to seize power and overthrow the state.

The stunning announcement came only days after Jang Song Thaek — long considered the country’s No. 2 power — was removed from all his posts because of a long list of allegations, including corruption, drug use, gambling and womanizing.

In an unusually detailed announcement, the official news agency KCNA said Jang had been tried for ‘‘such hideous crime as attempting to overthrow the state by all sorts of intrigues and despicable methods with a wild ambition to grab the supreme power of our party and state.’’

It called him a ‘‘traitor to the nation for all ages’’ and ‘‘worse than a dog.’’

Kim Jong Un has overseen other high-profile purges since taking after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, two years ago. But none of the purges have been as public — or as close to home — as the downfall of Jang, who was seen as helping the younger Kim consolidate power.

Analysts have said that Kim Jong Un has acted swiftly and ruthlessly to bolster his own power and show strength, but there has been fear in Seoul that the removal of Jang and his followers could lead to instability or lead to a miscalculation or attack on the South. Jang had been seen by outsiders as the leading supporter of Chinese-style economic reforms.

North Korea has recently turned to attempts at diplomacy with South Korea and the United States. But tensions have remained high since Pyongyang threatened nuclear strikes on Seoul and Washington last spring, and warn that it would restart nuclear bomb fuel production.

There was no immediate word about the fate of Jang’s wife, Kim Kyong Hui, the younger sister of Kim Jong Il. She was also seen as a key mentor to Kim Jong Un after her brother’s December 2011 death.

The White House said it could not independently confirm reports of Jang’s execution but it has ‘‘no reason to doubt’’ the report from the official Korean Central News Agency that it took place.

Patrick Ventrell, a National Security Council spokesman, said, ‘‘if confirmed, this is another example of the extreme brutality of the North Korean regime.’’

Ventrell said the U.S. was following developments in North Korea closely and consulting with allies and partners in the region.

The KCNA report called Jang a ‘‘despicable political careerist and trickster’’ and ‘‘despicable human scum.’’

It was also unusually specific and chilling in its allegations. For instance, the report said that at one point, Jang didn’t rise and applaud his nephew’s appointment to a senior position because he ‘‘thought that if Kim Jong Un’s base and system for leading the army were consolidated, this would lay a stumbling block in the way of grabbing the power.’’

Jang was described earlier this week by state media as ‘‘abusing his power,’’ being ‘‘engrossed in irregularities and corruption,’’ and taking drugs and squandering money at casinos while undergoing medical treatment in a foreign country.

He was so despicable , probably ate more than his share too !

Wall Street Journal: The Execution of Comrade Jang

The totalitarian mind hasn't vanished, even if we'd rather not notice.

Dec. 13, 2013 6:58 p.m. ET

The public frog-march and execution of the uncle of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is grotesque and shocking to Western sensibilities. But like the rest of North Korean life, it is also a reminder of what the totalitarian mind is capable of and why it continues to pose a danger to the world.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, it was fashionable to proclaim "the end of history," in Francis Fukuyama's famous phrase. Democratic capitalism had triumphed and there was no serious ideological challenger left in the world. And sure enough, the global trend toward freedom swept away other dictatorships, including apartheid in South Africa and Serb revanchism in the Balkans. In historic retrospect, the world may view the 1990s as the high point of the Pax Americana and global freedom.

September 11 was a rude awakening that history hadn't ended, and the 12 years since have proved the point. Dictators have reasserted themselves in much of the former Soviet Union, radical Islam is on the march and close to having a nuclear weapon, and pockets of mayhem are breaking out with greater frequency. Meanwhile, the American superpower has lost its will to lead a new world order, much less police it. As the U.S. retreats, disorder spreads.

It also turns out there is a challenge to democratic capitalism: the eternal human temptation to rule and subjugate other human beings. The motivating ideology varies, such as fanatical Islam, what is left of Communist belief in China and North Korea, tribalism in parts of Asia and Africa, or simply the quest for power and control.

North Korea's regime is instructive precisely because it has managed to survive and become even more threatening despite the post-Cold War currents of freedom. Partly this is due to its isolation, and partly to the protection of its patrons in Beijing. But its survival is also the result of the regime's sheer will to dynastic power at all costs, and the West's willingness to ignore its horrors.

The Clinton and Bush Administrations were seduced into providing aid in return for promises of nuclear disarmament. The regime pocketed the aid to sustain itself and expanded its arsenal. The United Nations has supplied it with money and food. For decades the world has largely ignored the horrors inside North Korea. Even South Korea has resisted a strategy of regime change for the North lest it have to absorb an influx of refugees.

In that sense, the bloody public demise of Jang Song Thaek and his allies is a useful education for a West that prefers to look away from such things. The scenes are right out of Solzhenitsyn or Arthur Koestler, with the state news agency castigating Jang for "unwillingly standing up from his seat and half-heartedly clapping" when his nephew was being honored. Killed for one-hand clapping.

Yet an Associated Press dispatch from Seoul this week said the purge sent a "chilling message. No one is beyond the rule of law, not even family." The rule of law? Such a purge represents the absence of law, and such a description suggests the lack of a Western vocabulary or willingness to tell the truth about the totalitarian mind.

That mind is increasingly a threat to all of us because it is quickly gaining the technology to kill people far beyond Pyongyang. North Korea already has nuclear warheads and before too long it will have a missile that can reach U.S. shores.

The Kim regime's resort to such a public demonstration of Jang's punishment suggests that it may be less stable than advertised, with perhaps much more internal dissent. The response from the West should be to heighten those contradictions by further limiting the regime's access to cash. Such a regime cannot be coaxed to reform with carrots and sticks. It has to be squeezed to collapse.