The surprise news set off a predictable wildfire of speculation and rumors south of the border.
Almost as soon as North Korea announced this week that its army chief had been dismissed due to “illness,” the aggressive South Korean media went into hyperdrive. By Friday a newspaper, citing “unconfirmed intelligence reports,” said Ri Yong-ho may have been wounded or killed in a blaze of gunfire when soldiers loyal to him resisted an armed attempt to detain him. So which is it — illness or a gun battle? Perhaps neither. North Korea watchers are skeptical of the illness claim, but even an unnamed government official cited in the South Korean account said the firefight “has still not been 100 percent confirmed.”
This is what happens when insatiably curious journalists in Seoul are starved for information about their tight-lipped, isolated rival to the north.
Many seemingly over-the-top news stories cite anonymous government or intelligence officials, North Korean defectors claiming to have sources in their former homeland or simply unexplained, unnamed “sources.” Few say where they get their information and many reports turn out to be wrong.
“The less we know about a country, the more rumors we tend to create about it,” said Kim Byeong-jo, a North Korea professor at the Korea National Defense University in Seoul. “When curiosity is especially strong, rumors grow more sensational ... Imagination takes over where facts are scarce and sources are unclear.”
North Korea has yet to provide details about Ri’s health or his future plans and it is still unclear what actually happened.
The capital, Pyongyang, portrayed a peaceful handover to new military chief Hyon Yong-chol. Soldiers celebrated in the streets with choreographed dances on Thursday after the announcement of Hyon’s new role and the promotion of young new leader Kim Jong-un to marshal.
North Korean officials have disappeared under chilling circumstances before, but the reports of their fates are often based on murky sources.
Amnesty International, citing “unconfirmed reports,” said earlier this year that state security officials had detained more than 200 officials in an effort to consolidate Kim Jong-un’s power before he became leader. The rights group cited more “unconfirmed reports” that 30 North Korean officials involved in talks with South Korea were “executed by firing squad or killed in staged traffic accidents.”
Many reports end up being false. A prominent example ran as a stand-alone special edition of the conservative South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo in 1986.
In what it called a “world exclusive,” the paper announced that Kim Il-sung, the current leader’s grandfather and the revered founder of the country, was shot dead on a train near the border with South Korea. A day later, Kim Il-sung was seen greeting a visiting official at Pyongyang’s airport; he died in 1994.
In February, rumors that Kim Jong-un had been assassinated in North Korea’s embassy in Beijing sparked a frenzy of speculation. AP journalists happened to be at the embassy at the time Kim Jong-un was said to have been killed and saw nothing unusual at the facility.
Friday’s reports on Ri were as dramatic as they were murky: Chosun Ilbo reported that 20 to 30 soldiers had died in a gunfight when Ri’s bodyguards resisted soldiers sent to isolate him. The report quoted a source as saying that the possibility of Ri being wounded or killed in the gunfight could not be ruled out.
As an example of how news can become cloudy when information is controlled, Kim Byeong-jo, the professor in Seoul, pointed to South Korea itself. In 1980, tens of thousands took to the streets in Gwangju to protest against the junta that seized power after authoritarian then-South Korean president Park Chung-hee was assassinated in office. About 200 people died, but there were rumors of thousands of deaths. Kim said a media blackout meant people outside the southwestern city knew little about the military operations going on against the city’s people.
“It takes time for real facts to emerge when information is controlled,” he said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to