North Korea celebrated its 60th birthday with a triumphal military parade on Tuesday just as the hermit state appears to be backing away from a disarmament deal, but leader Kim Jong-il failed to appear, Kyodo news reported.
South Korea’s military said the North had been massing weapons for days to show them off in its capital in a spectacle that followed a report Kim may be seriously ill.
South Korea’s largest daily, the Chosun Ilbo, said Kim (66) and suspected of suffering from chronic illness, collapsed last month, citing a South Korean diplomatic source in Beijing.
Kyodo reported from Pyongyang that Kim had failed to show up for the anniversary parade, which he has attended in the past, watching legions of goose-stepping soldiers and hundreds of thousands of fawning North Koreans shouting praises to him in unison.
Kim’s health is one of the most closely guarded secrets in Asia’s only communist dynasty, but Kim himself, at a summit with South Korea’s president in October 2007, dismissed persistent media speculation that he was ill.
”I make a little move and that gets huge coverage,” Kim said in rare comments. ”It seems like they’re fiction writers and not journalists.”
North Korean media last reported a public appearance by Kim about a month ago.
Analysts have cautioned not to read too much into the public appearances of Kim, who can drop out of sight for months and then show up in field guidance tours to military bases, farms and factories for visits described by the North’s propaganda machine as showing his tireless devotion to the communist state.
Rattling sabres
Military experts keep a close eye on these set-piece parades to see if the secretive North unveils any new weapons systems.
”The North probably wants to boost the image of its military might in order to cement unity within the country and secure a better position in the denuclearisation negotiations,” the Seoul daily JoongAng Ilbo cited a South Korean government official who is familiar with the North as saying.
North Korea began taking apart its Soviet-era Yongbyon nuclear plant last November as called for in a disarmament-for-aid deal it struck with five regional powers.
The North, which tested a nuclear device about two years ago, had completed most of the required disablement steps and experts said it would take a year or more for it to restart the plant.
It stopped disabling Yongbyon in August, angered by Washington’s failure to drop it from a US terrorism blacklist. The United States said North Korea must first agree on a system to verify Pyongyang’s disclosures about its nuclear programmes.
”[North Korea] has gotten about all she can get from President Bush. It’s time to try to rattle the next administration a little bit and see if she can’t get a little more,” Richard Armitage, a former senior State Department official in the Bush administration, said at a seminar in Seoul.
Armitage said North Korea might conduct a missile test in order to ratchet up pressure.
Under Kim, the North’s already anaemic economy has taken a turn for the worse, while the Pyongyang leadership has used the threat of its military arsenal to squeeze concessions out of regional powers. – Reuters