Mick Hartley

Despite Washington’s determination to push ahead with talks, there’s no sign in North Korea of any desire to compromise:

As Kim Jong-il quaffed red wine and played the statesman with visitors from Seoul last month, a team of his executioners were on a mission that was bizarre even by the standards of the North Korean regime.

Their task was to hunt down those responsible for signing a timber contract with China for delivery of logs from a forest at Yon Sa, in the famished border province of North Hamgyong.

Unknown or forgotten by these cadres, the trees stood in an area where Kim Il-sung, the deified founder of North Korea and father of its present dictator, once hid from Japanese occupiers. One of the felled trees is said to have borne an inscription commemorating the “Great Leader’s” hallowed presence.

In North Korea – where the state media claim that people drowned in recent floods were found still clutching household portraits of the two Kims – this was sacrilege.

When news reached Pyong-yang, a so-called “special investigation group with full powers” was dispatched by the National Defence Commission.

The agents are said to have identified and killed more than 10 officials implicated in the destruction of the sacred tree. They included the hapless customs officers and frontier guards who oversaw the delivery, which explains why accounts of the killings filtered out and are circulating among Chinese and North Korean cross-border traders.

The forestry trade official who signed the contract was dragged from his home and executed in front of his family, they say, the gunman emptying a whole AK-47 magazine into him. […]

Refugees from the North report that state repression is intensifying and exemplary punishments, like that dealt out by the “special investigation group”, are more frequent.

“Everybody will tell you that North Korea is reforming. It’s not,” said Andrei Lankov, a scholar of its politics who once lived and studied in Pyongyang.

“They have, for example, stopped inter-city phone dialling. There are only 500 mobile phone subscribers in a country of 23m. Essentially, it’s a feudal society. We should not forget the inertia of terror.” […]

Despite its crimes, catalogued once again in a United Nations general assembly resolution last week, the big powers are agreed on the course of diplomatic compromise with North Korea’s clan regime…

The stakes are so high that the United States has chosen to continue talking even after an Israeli air raid on Syria targeting a suspected nuclear installation supplied and manned by North Koreans. An Israeli delegation was in Seoul last week and presented the South Koreans with evidence connected to the raid which one participant in the meeting said he found “convincing”.

The game is complicated by the fact that on December 19 Kim’s old foes in South Korea go to the polls to elect a new president. Polls indicate that the ruling party’s candidate will lose to conservatives who accuse the present government of appeasement and want tougher talk towards the North.

The present agreements do not require Kim to give up an estimated 56kg of weapons-grade plutonium and whatever atomic devices his scientists have managed to build.

Meanwhile, the United States is reviewing its contingency plans for the Korean peninsula, which range from all-out war to coping with chaos in Pyongyang following Kim’s death or a coup.

“Nobody likes to talk about it, but one scenario is a collapse followed by a Chinese takeover,” said Lankov. “In the long run there will be no security while these people stay in power.”