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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS