Article content continued

As nervous officials and apparatchiks gather Tuesday in Pyongyang for the second anniversary of the death of Kim Jong Il, the as-yet unanswerable question now is, what comes next?

The charges against Jang must be taken with a large dose of skepticism; as always, the world only gets to see what the North Koreans want seen, and there’s no way to prove what’s true and what’s not. But the fact that the claims are being aired in public, and in such detail, opens up a new view of a struggling leadership in Pyongyang, one that outside government officials and analysts are scrambling to figure out.

Kim Jong-un “has managed to tarnish his own image, look like a modern Caligula and give the lie to 90 per cent of the bombast emanating from Pyongyang,” said Bruce Cumings, a Korea specialist and history professor at the University of Chicago, adding that the move indicates high-level and deep divisions.

“Whatever one thinks of this regime, from the standpoint of the top leadership this was a politically stupid, self-defeating move,” he said.

The closest historical parallel to Jang’s fall may be in North Korean show trials during the 1950s, which eliminated opponents of Kim Il Sung, the country’s founder and the current leader’s grandfather.

For many years, outside interpretations of internecine struggles were at best educated guesses. Analysts tried to determine who had fallen from favour by the physical distance between an official and the leader in pictures or from a void in state media or an announcement of sudden illness. Assumptions were also linked to the sometimes questionable assertions of North Korean defectors, many of whom had been out of the country for years and had axes to grind.