Excerpts:
A small secret of North Korean watchers: we, the outsiders, don’t know much about what is happening in the corridors of power in Pyongyang. Frankly, most of the time we are entirely ignorant, and a very large part of what is reported in the media is based on unreliable hearsay.
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What is the reason of our ignorance? It is often forgotten that the North Korean state is a very special place, much different from the Soviet Union and the Eastern Europe of the 1960s and 1970s.
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First of all, the North Korean system is deadly serious about secrecy–and almost everything is a secret in North Korea. No economic statistics have been published since the early 1960s.
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Second, for those who like to talk politics, North Korea has always been a dangerous place.
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Third, foreigners remain completely isolated from North Koreans and inhabit their own, closely monitored, world.
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This does not mean that, as is often said, “We don’t know anything about North Korea.” Actually we know a lot about some areas of North Korean life – like, say, the daily economy of North Korean family life. That said though, North Korean high politics is not one of such areas – to the great disappointment of newspaper editors, foreign ministers and intelligence service chiefs.
I would quibble with Dr. Lankov on one point. The Kim Family Regime has acted in a very consistent manner for the past 60+ years. A thorough study of the history can reveal patterns and likely actions in certain conditions and situations and helps to explain things like the pursuit of nuclear weapons. He is exactly right that we do not know very much at all about what is happening in the corridors of power in Pyongyang but we can make some very educated estimates based on our knowledge of how the regime functions and how it has acted thoughout its history. I would not want anyone to take from Dr. Lankov's commentary that the north is such a hard target that we should not make the attempt to study it and try to understand it. But we should be skeptical commentary because most commentators (myself included) cannot know what is really going on inside the regime. And while I am a great believer in the value of the study of history for insights in action I am also reminded of Adolf Von Harnack's warning about history:
“In history absolute judgments are impossible…History can only show how things have been; and even where we can throw light upon the past, and understand and criticize it, we must not presume to think that by any process of abstraction absolute judgments as to the value to be assigned to past events can be obtained from the results of a purely historical survey. "
V/R
Dave
Ignorant Experts–Andrei Lankov on Watching North Korea
By Andrei Lankov
The author has been studying North Korea for some 25 years, and for most of this time I have to put up with a rather unpleasant but recurrent experience: people ask questions which I cannot possibly answer. Those are questions about the personal politics in Pyongyang, questions dealing with relations between the political heavyweights in the North Korean leadership, questions about political views of some prominent North Korean officials.
It is understandable why journalists and diplomats want to know more about relations between Jang Song-taek and Ri Yong-ho, two top advisers to Kim Jong-un, or, say, about Jang’s attitude to the economic reforms. Alas, such questions cannot really be answered–at least, cannot be answered by a person who wants to remain honest and not pass his or her speculations (largely unfounded) for an objective and factual information.
Both the general public and, especially, decision makers feel themselves enlightened when they are told about factions, power rivalry, clashes of personal ambition and complicated political intrigues. When it comes to the vast majority of countries across the globe, such stuff indeed comprises the mainstay of political reporting. But North Korea is different.
A small secret of North Korean watchers: we, the outsiders, don’t know much about what is happening in the corridors of power in Pyongyang. Frankly, most of the time we are entirely ignorant, and a very large part of what is reported in the media is based on unreliable hearsay.
A few years ago, a senior Russian diplomat told me of how he visited a special cemetery in Pyongyang which serves as final resting place for North Korea’s top officials. The tombstones normally mention the highest positions the deceased ever had. The diplomat in question, who has spent 30 years going in and out of Pyongyang, said that after such an excursion he realized: even the Soviet embassy, arguably the best informed of all foreign missions in Pyongyang in the 1980s, had no clue about 2/3 of the people who held key positions in the North Korean bureaucracy of that period.
(Continued at link above)
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