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Reports of Kim's demise exaggerated
The Australian | November 18 2004
"DON'T have a reaction, I'll leave it to the analysts,"
responded US State Department official Adam Ereli to questions about the
significance of reports that North Korea's media had stopped calling Kim
Jong-il "Dear Leader".
Mr Ereli was wise to resist the lure of Korean Kremlinology
– the art of divining significance from scraps of enigmatic information
that sometimes escape the world's most hermetic regime.
Within hours, Yonhap, a South Korean news agency, reported
that Pyongyang newspapers were replete with the usual garlands reserved
for Mr Kim's glorification, including "Great General" and "Great
Leader".
His alleged titular downgrading had been taken as more
evidence something was amiss for the bouffant-styled, Cuban-heeled leader
of North Korea's collective dictatorship.
It began on Monday with a report by Russian agency Itar-Tass
that on some official walls in Pyongyang, 63-year-old Mr Kim's portrait
was no longer in its customary spot.
There were second- and third-hand reports of counter-revolutionary
scrawlings on official posters, though a diplomat noted wryly: "The
visitors who saw them couldn't read Korean so we don't know what they meant."
Factional strife within the 200 families who reputedly
run everything that matters in North Korea – perhaps, even an uprising?
More likely another sign of the threadbare nature of Korean Kremlinology,
says the International Crisis Group's northeast Asia project director, Peter
Beck, one of a couple of handfuls of American specialists who actually speak
Korean.
"Some pictures missing from a wall do not a coup make,"
said Mr Beck. "What do these factoids mean? Maybe something, if there's
enough of them, but at this stage probably nothing." In fact, as Mr
Beck suggested, the real action is happening in Washington.
There President George W. Bush is expressing his frustration
with the lack of progress in neutralising problems like the Dear Leader
with a great overhaul of his foreign and intelligence services.
That is the space Mr Kim is probably
watching most closely.
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