South Detects No Immediate Threat
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 11, 2008
TOKYO, Sept. 11 -- North Korean leader Kim Jong Il probably suffered a cerebral hemorrhage last month, but his condition is not critical and there is "no power vacuum" in the communist North, according to the chief of the South Korean National Intelligence Service.
Briefing a parliamentary committee in Seoul, the intelligence chief, Kim Sung-ho, said Wednesday that Kim Jong Il's condition is "manageable" and he is recovering, according to Won Hye-young, a committee member who attended the briefing.
"Although he is not in a state to walk around, he is conscious. . . . We understand that he can control the situation and he is not in an unstable condition," the intelligence chief told the lawmakers, Won said.
The South Korean intelligence chief also told the committee that "Kim had an operation by foreign doctors," according to Yonhap, a Seoul-based news agency.
Late Wednesday, the office of South Korean President Lee Myung-bak said that the North Korean leader, who is 66 or 67 and has a history of health problems, is "not seen to be in a serious condition."
U.S. intelligence sources had said Tuesday that Kim might be gravely ill from a stroke he had in mid-August. He has not been seen in public since then, and his no-show on Tuesday night at an important anniversary parade in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang raised concern about the stability of his totalitarian government and the fate of stalled negotiations to end the country's nuclear weapons program.
The No. 2 leader in North Korea told a Japanese news agency on Wednesday that Kim is fine, and a top North Korean diplomat characterized reports of Kim's health as a "conspiracy plot."
In South Korea, where there are legions of government, academic and journalistic observers of North Korea, a consensus emerged Wednesday: Kim, who has a history of heart ailments, probably had a serious health setback in August, but the worst seems to be over and he is apparently lucid.
The South Korean government said it was on "high alert" as it tried to figure out what had happened to the leader of a government that has repeatedly threatened to reduce its neighbors to ashes. The South, though, reported no unusual movement of troops in the North or increased military radio traffic that would suggest disarray.
"The starting point on all this should be that we don't know diddly about what is going on inside that closed country," said Brad Glosserman, executive director of the Pacific Forum of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Honolulu. "Kim has a tendency to drop out of sight when there is a tough decision to make."
What is known with certainty is that Kim faces tough decisions about allowing outside verification that his government, which two years ago detonated a small nuclear device, is indeed abandoning its nuclear ambitions.
It is also known that North Korea's on-again, off-again cooperation with the United States, Japan, China, Russia and South Korea in the process of dismantling its nuclear weapons program is off track.
It began lurching that way after Kim's reported stroke.
On Aug. 14, North Korea halted work on disabling its Yongbyon nuclear reactor, and workers have since begun to reassemble the plant.
Less well known is another major diplomatic reversal that straddles the date of Kim's reputed illness.
A day before Kim's reported stroke, North Korea made a long-awaited commitment to Japan to resolve the single most important impediment to normal relations between the two countries. North Korea said it would establish an authority with the power to reinvestigate the abduction of Japanese citizens in the 1970s, a festering issue that has profound political significance inside Japan. The Japanese government, in turn, promised to ease sanctions on North Korea and allow its citizens to visit Japan.
Last week, however, North Korea backed out of that deal, even though substantive progress on the abductee issue could lead to the release of up to $10 billion that Japan has pledged as reparations to the impoverished country for colonial occupation between 1910 and 1945.
These reversals have fueled speculation by U.S. officials that there might be a power struggle inside Kim's government, with the North Korean military opposing nuclear disarmament and diplomatic engagement -- and taking advantage of the leader's poor health as a way to derail both.
But a number of analysts, in Japan, South Korea and the United States, say that there is an alternative explanation for why North Korea is digging in its heels on the nuclear issue and regional diplomacy -- one that has little to do with Kim's health.
At this stage of six-party negotiations, North Korea is being pressed to agree to a strict verification regimen -- allowing outside experts unfettered and unannounced access to nuclear sites and weapons anywhere in the country -- if it is to be removed from a U.S. list of states that sponsor terrorism and become eligible for assistance from lenders such as the International Monetary Fund.
"What we are demanding is that North Korea jump a big, big hurdle," said an official in the Japanese Foreign Ministry. "The very substance of the negotiations at this stage could be playing a major role in the reversals we are now seeing."
Glosserman of the Pacific Forum agreed that verification is a bitter pill that Kim's government may not be capable of swallowing. "You are dealing with a very conservative regime that will hunker down and stick as close to the status quo as possible," he said. "Any shift from the North Korean norm is usually followed by a shift backwards."
In Pyongyang on Wednesday, Kim Yong Nam, North Korea's No. 2 leader and ceremonial head of state, told Japan's Kyodo News that "the United States was supposed to take us off the list of state sponsors of terrorism . . . but it is delaying that."
He added that there is still the possibility of a resolution.
"Once time passes and we continue to try to find a way, I believe we can solve this," he said.
In Seoul, analysts said backsliding and delay by North Korea may also be linked to the U.S. presidential election, now less than two months away.
"Now that it is the end of the Bush administration, the North Koreans cannot give up everything just for getting delisted as a sponsor of terrorism," said Yoo Ho-yeol, a professor of North Korean studies at Korea University. "They want to keep something as a future negotiating card."
Special correspondent Stella Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.
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