Posted on 01/25/2007 11:30:13 PM PST by HAL9000
The government has denied a Japanese report that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il could be ill or facing a military coup.A government official on Friday said that the Japanese report on Kim seems groundless as Seoul has detected nothing unusual in the North.
The official added that there is no evidence to back the report, though he cannot confirm whether the North Korean leader is in Pyongyang now.
Quoting a source in South Korea, Japan's Jiji Press reported that Kim may be under house arrest at his villa in Wonsan along the east coast.
there'd no point in placing him under arrest, in villa or anywhere else. If there's a lesson from coup attempts against chavez and gorbachev, it is that such types are to be liquidated at the earliest possible moment.
there'd=there's. adjacent keys.
Ping.
Thanks for your earlier translation.
Never happens in this world, either way.
Ceausescu. It does happen, you see.
North Korea is a special place. There could be some good reasons for keeping Kim alive, at least in the short term. Forcing him to step down or transfer power might provide a controlled crash, rather than just openly killing him and letting pandemonium take over.
Of course, that would imply that the plotters are not desperate men, but rational agents of a power that doesn't want Kim, but also doesn't want North Korea to collapse. I don't know who in the *cough cough China* that could possibly be, though.
liquidation does not have to be open, but it has to happen - if only to make the coup attempt irreversible. The official flavors could be any - resisting arrest, suicide, heart attack, whatever - but for the coup to succeed, it has to occur.
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