Left Flank

Foreign Policy asks Ken E. Gause, senior analyst at CNA, a nonprofit think tank in Alexandria, Va., director of its Foreign Leadership Studies Program, its «Seven Questions» about Kim Jong-il and the future of DPRK.

On the speculation about the correlation between Kim's non-appearances and his health/death:

You need to look at signals of not just what's happening today or in the last few weeks, but what has been happening over the last year or so. One of the first clues or tea leaves that Pyongyang-watchers identified was the fact that Kim Jong Il's half brother Kim Pyong Il, who is the ambassador to Poland, began making public appearances last year with his children. This seemed to be highly unusual compared to previous years.

Another tea leaf we would try to read is North Korea's 60th anniversary parade itself. There were some interesting figures on the leadership rostrum. Cho Myong-nok, who is the de facto No. 2 man in the regime, the head of the general political bureau, who has not been seen in public since April of last year, made a public appearance. He has been rumored to be in very ill health. He may have been showing leadership unity in the absence of Kim Jong Il.

There have been press accounts saying that regular North Korean military forces did not participate in the parade. If that's true, it could be an indication, if there's uncertainty within the leadership, of not wanting to have excess military troops inside the capital.

There doesn't appear to be any unusual troop movement or increase in communications chatter on North Korean military communication channels, which you might expect to see if a crisis were underway. That said, from everything that I understand about Kim Il Sung's death in 1994, there was also not a lot of unusual movement within the regime.

On Shigemura Toshimitsu's book claiming the Dear Leader died in 2003: «speculative»

On successors:

Various potential scenarios could emerge. One would be a collective leadership. Some people suggest there may even be some sort of collective leadership in place right now that is running day-to-day affairs within the regime.

Such a collective leadership might have people such as Chang Song-taek, who is the director of the Korean Workers' Party's administration department, a very powerful department that oversees many of the critical intelligence and security organizations within the regime. Or O Kuk-yol, who is the director of the Korean Workers' Party's operations department. This is kind of the elite special forces within the regime, and supposedly they also have a praetorian guard function. Or Yi Che-kang, who is the first deputy director of the Korean Workers' Party's organization guidance department, probably the most powerful organization within the party apparatus and maybe within North Korea itself. It's Kim Jong Il's eyes and ears on the regime. And there's Kim Yong-nam, who is the head of the Supreme People's Assembly, which is kind of like North Korea's legislature, and also the figurehead that meets many of the foreign dignitaries who come to Pyongyang.

Other people might be Kim Yong-chun, the former chief of the general staff and now a vice chairman of the National Defense Commission, or Cho Myong-nok, whom I've already mentioned is the head of the general political bureau and is the first vice chairman of the National Defense Commission and the de facto No. 2 man within the regime. There's also Kim Ok, who is Kim Jong Il's technical secretary and possible fifth wife. Apparently she plays a very strong role behind the scenes.

On the possibility of a «military strongman»:

Such people would be O Kuk-yol, who as I mentioned is the head of the operations department of the party. Or somebody like Kim Myong-kuk, who is the chief of the operation bureau of the general staff and would be in a position to control critical communications nodes within Pyongyang as far as the military goes. He held that position in 1994 when Kim Il Sung died and would be familiar with the procedures that might surround a succession crisis.

Finally, the worst-case scenario, chaos:

Various things could spin out of a succession crisis. You could have a collapse of the regime. It could be either an immediate collapse along the lines of what we saw in Romania, although you need to be very careful not to draw too strong parallels between those two cases. Or it could be a slow-motion collapse, where you have a regime that takes over and is much weaker. The fact that there is more movement within the population because of the economic crises and the increased information coming into the regime could cause it to be very unstable. A weaker regime may be unable to deal with that and eventually collapse.

A succession crisis could also lead to warlordism within North Korea as provincial leaders seek to carve out areas of control, and they may have access to weapons of mass destruction. This could possibly lead to a civil war within the regime that could be very destabilizing. If this regime implodes and collapses, having some sort of soft landing, where you would have an eventual reunification, could get really complicated.

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