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North Korea: Significance of the postponement of the KWP conference

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In Brief

By its nature, media is supposed to report on important or unusual events. When elections are held, terrorists bomb an airliner or an UFO is spotted over New York, it will make the news. Media outlets usually remain silent when an airliner arrives safely and no Martians are seen walking in Central Park.

But sometimes it is very important when an event does not happen – especially when the reasons for this breach of pattern are not clear. Last week we all were witnesses to such a non-event.

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The international media eagerly awaited news from Pyongyang where a conference of the ruling Korean Workers Party (KWP) was scheduled to take place. Indeed, in July the North Korean media officially informed the world that the KWP would soon have a party conference – the first party conference in 44 years and the first formal gathering of the KWP representatives in 30 years.

This was a rare event, so it attracted much attention. It was almost universally expected that Kim Jong Il will make public at the conference the name of his successor, and few people doubted that it is his youngest son, Kim Jong Eun, who will become the next ‘Sun of Korea’.

The North Korean official media was quite specific about the conference dates, stating  that the conference would be held in the first ten days of September.

Taking into consideration that authorities are clearly in control of the timing of such an event, the international media was on alert throughout the first days of September. Some sources leaked the supposed exact starting date, but people in the know remained skeptical, aware of how unreliable political rumors which emerge from North Korea are. Nonetheless, journalists, diplomats and spies expected that the conference would happen on the last week, as officially proclaimed.

It did not. The official deadline quietly passed, with nothing heard about the conference. For a while there were speculations that the conference met clandestinely. However on Friday, the 10th of September, Nodong sinmun, the mouthpiece of the North Korean government, published an editorial where it mentioned the conference as one of many glorious events which will happen in North Korea in near future. This editorial attracted much attention since it made clear that, first, the conference has not taken place and, second, that it was not cancelled, but postponed.

Predictably, the non-event did not become major news. Only a few specialised publications noticed it. Nonetheless, the decision to postpone the conference is unusual and might be politically significant.

Had the Pyongyang authorities not made a clear and unequivocal statement about the conference schedule, this would not attract much attention. Now the delay is sending the wrong signal to the people, who might start wondering why a much publicised event did not take place on time. The government’s obvious inability to keep its promises on such trivial matters will damage its standing in the eyes of the public.

Indeed, this is something to wonder about. It is difficult to believe that the conference was postponed due to logistical problems. It is not too difficult to house a couple of thousand representatives, and would hardly constitute a major challenge even for such a poor nation. So, there is good reason to suspect that something in Pyongyang went wrong again, and the longer the delay is, the greater the scale of these unknown problems is likely to be. However, even if the conference will open amongst the usual pomp later this week, the inability or unwillingness to convene it as initially scheduled still should not be ignored.

So, what might have gone wrong?

First, it is possible that the North Korean elite is far less united than it is usually assumed, and some factions are seriously unhappy about the likely choice of successor and/or expected composition of the new leadership (the formal appointment of new top officials is an important part of the conference ritual). They might have managed somehow to block the conference, while Kim Jong Il is unable or unwilling to restore the order. This fighting might unroll among the top functionaries of the regime, but it might as well be an internal feud within the ruling family among whose members, one must suspect, not everybody is happy about the recent choice of successor.

Second, the delay might reflect something more sinister – the growing inability of Kim Jong Il to pass reasonable judgments and make rational decisions, and his tendency to follow impulses and emotions. Indeed, in the last two years, strange and seemingly irrational things began to happen in North Korea with an alarming and growing frequency, and its policy becoming more erratic. For instance, the gross diplomatic mistakes of 2008-09, a badly planned (and unsuccessful) currency reform, and the recent sinking of the South Korean warship in disputed waters. The list can be easily continued. Many long-time Pyongyang watchers have recently developed the impression that the North Korean top leadership is doing strange things, things which do not make much sense, and it is not coincidental that the first signs of such erratic behavior appeared in early 2009, shortly after Kim Jong Il suffered a serious illness, presumably a stroke.

If this is the case, it is not impossible that Kim Jong Il just decided to have the conference when he felt like it, but then cancelled or postponed it, without thinking twice about the political impact of such decision. Such sudden changes of mind are not unexpected when we deal with a stroke patient, but this particular patient seemingly has complete control over the nuclear-powered nation of 24 million.

Last but not least, it is also possible that Kim Jong Il is now too sick to make an expected public appearance at the conference (this view seems widespread in South Korean circles). As recently as September 11 the North Korean media reported his trip to a mine in a distant northern part of the country, but no date of the trip was disclosed (and such reports can easily be fakes).

Many other plausible explanations can be – and, in all probability will be – suggested, too, but one thing seems to be fairly certain: something unusual is happening in Pyongyang. If the conference will not meet in the next couple of weeks we can be sure that the situation is very unusual indeed.

Andrei Lankov is an associate professor at Kookmin University in Seoul, and adjunct research fellow at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University.

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