Informed Speculation

The Dear Leader under house arrest?

A tantalizing rumor swept though the thin ranks of North Korea watchers in Asia and America a few days ago, speculating that the “Dear Leader” in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Il, had been placed under house arrest by disgruntled military officers.

The rumor was quickly denied in Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington but not before it raised intriguing questions–how did the rumor originate and why did it make serious analysts of North Korea sit up and take notice?

As with many rumors, it was not clear where this one started. One account said a South Korean intelligence agency planted it in a Japanese news service. Another said the Tokyo news service picked it up carelessly from an advertisement for a novel about North Korea. Whatever the facts, it rippled out swiftly from there.

Even if only a rumor, it underscored how little the outside world knows about the secretive hermit kingdom in Pyongyang; North Korea watchers thus grasp at every tidbit that leaks out. More important, it raised the question of “regime change,” meaning the overthrow of Kim Jong Il or otherwise seeing him pass from the scene.

Kim probably has more power centralized in his hands than any ruler in the world. So far as is known, however, he has fended off naming a successor even though he is reported to be in ill health as he approaches his 65th birthday on Feb. 16.

We’ll put that one in the ‘not bloody likely’ pile.  How about this one?

North Korea is ready to freeze a key nuclear facility and allow international inspectors limited access to the country in exchange for millions of barrels of oil and an easing of U.S. financial restrictions, a Japanese news report said Sunday.

The report came one day after the main U.S. negotiator on North Korea said he believed the next round of six-nation disarmament talks with the communist state starting Thursday in Beijing could produce real progress.

The Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun reported Pyongyang also will demand at the Beijing talks that it be removed from Washington’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Who knows? The real question is, in light of the fiasco that Clinton’s agreed framework became (an agreement observed mostly in the breach, it seems), how could any agreement with North Korea be taken at face value?…