THE BIG ISSUE: THE MAN WHO KILLS PEOPLE
>> Sending two women assassins he probably vetted personally after his halfbrother seems a weird act for the leader of a country. For Kim Jong-un and for his father and for his father’s father, it was Monday.
It’s keeping his job the bloody way. Dr Van Jackson, Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, Hawaii: “Eliminating potential centres of power is cold but shrewd.” If that’s the benchmark, they don’t come much shrewder than Leader Kim III.
Before Monday, he had already murdered his favourite uncle, and had two disloyal men executed by anti-aircraft fire. Some heads of government charge people who are only 99% of their power with lese majeste. But one of them just kills.
North Korea traffics drugs, sells guns, counterfeits money and orders diplomats to be big-time smugglers in order to raise hard currency.
Every government — every government that has shown an open hand to every Pyongyang regime has been betrayed for it in the most base manner. The sun never sets on countries where each of the three Leader Kims has conducted straight-up criminal acts.
In diplomatic history, there is no equivalent nation to North Korea in criminal acts approved by the home government. These have ranged from smuggling containers of cigarettes for the black market to blowing up an airplane and all its passengers and mass terrorist bombing. North Korea’s “eternal enemies list” is the US, Japan and South Korea. But the three Kims have gone further afield, essentially everywhere.
There is a case that North Korea has slapped and offended and laughed at Thailand more than others. Myanmar has felt more physical pain. North Korean terrorists bombed a Yangon cemetery during a solemn ceremony with visiting South Korean president Chun Doo-hwan in 1983. Then Kim Jong-il’s team blew up a Korean Airlines jetliner with 115 people on board as it flew up the Myanmar coast to a scheduled stop in Bangkok.
In both these mass killings by North Korea, an important note. Pyongyang sent the agents, provided the bombs through its Yangon and Baghdad embassies respectively, but did nothing to help the terrorists escape, just like in Kuala Lumpur last week. Minor correction: The aeroplane bombers, an elderly man and a young woman, both North Koreans, had cyanide suicide capsules, which the man consumed.
North Korea always leaves its terrorists and criminals out to dry. Always. Some young commentators earning their Conspiracy Theory Purple Belts suggested last week the Kuala Lumpur murder was clearly an attempt to besmirch the smiling young Pyongyang tyrant because so many clues pointed back to young Kim Jong-un. But that’s the way the Kim dynasty rolls. It always has.
In addition to the mass murder of airline passengers bound for Bangkok, North Korea has never treated Thailand as a diplomatic equal. Its disrespect and arrogance is never hidden, and the 1978 kidnapping and control of Anocha Panchoi is a good example.
There is no doubt that Kim Jong-un’s dad and original “Dear Leader” Jong-il dispatched heavies to abduct the Chiang Mai native in Macau. They took her to North Korea, raped her and sent her to brainwashing school. But no one knows why. North Korea won’t tell her family. She could be alive.
In March 2000, different heavy boys, imported from Pyongyang and the Singapore embassy, chased defecting North Korean diplomat Hong Sun-gyong around the Northeast at high speeds. Thai police arrested 10 North Koreans in that abduction attempt. These thugs were so incompetent that Thai police caught every man jack of them — most of whom had to be released because of their diplomatic passports. (Three years later, Pyongyang tried to send one of the criminals back to Thailand as an interpreter. Airport security threw him out.)
Before that, North Korea used Thailand to trans-ship 50 tonnes of ephedrine, precursor for the making of what experts call the world’s “best” methamphetamine tablets and ice. After that, Thailand was used to trans-ship weapons deemed illegal by the UN, to the Middle East. And after that Pyongyang agents dumped counterfeit US dollars (best quality in the world) on Thai banks and money changers.
Through all this, Thailand and 50 other countries have been diplomatically patient in the face of the greatest series of criminal conspiracies and actions ever launched without a declaration or resulting war. In 2000, Thailand invited North Korea to sit on the Asean Regional Forum, and North Korea is so thankful that sometimes it even attends meetings.