Following High Profile Execution in North Korea: Will Mass Purges Follow?
Photo Credit: Lee Jin-man/AP
A 2,740-word statement by Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency on the anti-state crimes of Jang Song-thaek may indicate as much about the regime’s insecurity, in the view of many analysts, as it does about Mr. Kim’s ability to consolidate his power since the death of his long-ruling father, Kim Jong-il, on Dec. 17, 2011.
“They are afraid of any possible reaction by the forces of Jang,” says Kim Tae-woo, a North Korea military specialist formerly with the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses. “More executions are inevitable.” Jang is believed to have been executed by a firing squad.
Although Kim Jong-un “outwardly is in control,” says Mr. Kim, the statement on Mr. Jang’s trial by the military tribunal that ordered his death makes clear the regime’s fear that Jang – once vice chairman of the powerful national defense commission and a member of the politburo of the Workers’ Party – was plotting a coup d’etat with the support of his own group within the armed forces and Workers’ Party.
“I was going to stage the coup by using army officers who had close ties with me or by mobilizing armed forces under the control of my confidants,” the statement, in English, quotes Jang as saying. The quotes, which the tribunal presumably wrote under his name regardless of whether or not he actually uttered them, make Jang a scapegoat for failures that have brought the economy close to collapse.
Read more from this story HERE.
