North Korea, under its thirtysomething Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, is no country for old men. The latest casualty in Kim’s ongoing purge of the senior military command was the defense minister, Hyon Yong-chol, who reportedly committed the classic old man’s offense of falling asleep in a meeting. South Korean intelligence reported that this so angered Kim that, on April 30th, Hyon was executed by anti-aircraft guns.
Although the report of Hyon’s death remains unconfirmed, there is no doubt that Kim has been eliminating the leadership ranks he inherited from his father. Of the seven elder statesmen who carried Kim Jong-il’s coffin down the snowy streets of Pyongyang in December, 2011, five have been fired, retired, demoted, or killed. In late April, according to the Times, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service told the country’s lawmakers that fifteen high-ranking officials have been executed this year alone. They reportedly included one vice-minister who complained about Kim Jong-un’s policy on forestation, and another who objected to Kim’s decision to change the roof design of a building under construction in Pyongyang. The intelligence officials also claimed that there were sixty-eight such executions between 2012 and 2014.
The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and AllSource Analysis, Inc., reported recently on satellite photographs that suggest public executions have been carried out by anti-aircraft guns at the Kanggon Military Academy, thirteen miles north of Pyongyang. The executions detected on the satellite imagery took place in October. “Anyone who has witnessed the damage one single U.S. .50 caliber round does to the human body will shudder just trying to imagine a battery of 24 heavy machine guns being fired at human beings. Bodies would be nearly pulverized,” the report said.
The dozing defense minister, Hyon Yong-chol, was sixty-six years old, relatively young for a North Korean official. A career military man, Hyon was Minister of the People’s Armed Forces for less than a year, according to the Web site North Korea Leadership Watch. In April, he led a delegation to a security conference in Moscow, where he delivered a speech lambasting the United States and attended a birthday commemoration for North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, at the North Korean Embassy—presumably business as usual for military brass.
Reports of Hyon’s execution came out Wednesday, after officials from the National Intelligence Service briefed lawmakers in Seoul. “He was definitely purged and reliable intelligence says he was executed publicly in front of hundreds of military officers,” Kim Gwang-lim, a lawmaker who attended the briefing, told reporters afterward, according to the Washington Post.
On Thursday, South Korea’s state media backed away from its earlier claims of execution by anti-aircraft fire but insisted that Hyon had been purged. “I have high degree of confidence that Gen. Hyon has been removed from office, just not certain how that removal occurred,” Michael Madden, who runs North Korea Leadership Watch, told me in an e-mail. “The more fundamental issue here is the vertiginous personnel shuffle that has unfolded in the DPRK’s national security community, in general, and the KPA (Korea Peoples’ Army) high command in particular.” Madden counted five different defense ministers who have served under Kim Jong-un during his three and a half years in power.
DailyNK, an online newspaper published out of Seoul, reported Friday that military officers stationed near the Chinese border had been informed of Hyon’s execution in a lecture earlier this month. “The lecture, delivered by political department officers of the highest-ranking military unit, referred to Hyon as ‘an autocratic warlord who refused orders from the Supreme Leader,’ ” the newspaper reported. DailyNK also quoted an unnamed source saying, “Personnel are unable to conceal their fears after catching wind of Hyon’s execution, saying, ‘I don’t know what’s going on; it seems that status as a high-ranking official is meaningless these days.’ ” The source continued, “They say that they’d likely be better off just living as ordinary members of society and laying as low as possible.”
“There is a lot of churn. You get the impression that the structure is imploding, that Kim Jong-un is paranoid about those around him,” Scott Snyder, the Korea analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations, said. “I don’t think it means that the system is collapsing, but it reflects an atmosphere where nobody feels secure.”
While Kim’s father allowed millions of North Koreans to perish during the famine of the nineteen-nineties, he was reportedly generous to his underlings and his relatives. North Korean officials served long terms and usually retired to the countryside, and executions of cabinet-level officials were rare. Kim Jong-un’s style is more suggestive of Saddam Hussein or his murderous son, Uday Hussein.
The most convincing theory about the violence, put forth by the respected North Korea scholar Andrei Lankov, is that Kim, who at the age of thirty-two, give or take a year, is the world's youngest head of state, is overcompensating for his youth. The most spectacular purge was of Jang Sung-taek, Kim’s uncle by marriage, who was shown on television being yanked out of his chair by his armpits and was later reported to have been executed. In a twenty-seven-hundred-word screed released after the execution, in December, 2013, Jang was accused of “halfheartedly clapping” at an event and doing "serious harm to the youth movement in our country, being part of the group of renegades and traitors in the field of youth work bribed by enemies."
While in power, Kim Jong-un has created a cult of youth in North Korea, devoting scarce resources to building a water park and a ski resort. One of his first priorities after taking over as leader was to oversee the renovations of Pyongyang’s amusement park, and photographs of young Kim riding the roller coaster were distributed by North Korea’s state news agency. Thumbing his nose at his elders, Kim repeatedly hosted Dennis Rodman, the former N.B.A. player, as his honored guest.
“He had to get rid of the grumpy old men. He couldn’t be a boss with subordinates who are twice his age, who don’t understand him and don’t take him seriously,” Lankov told me after Jang’s execution.
