Rogue state. Too often the term is tendentious: a label slapped on whomever the West dislikes.
North Korea is different. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — the first three words are mendacious for this tyrannical oppressive regime — is a state like no other. The Kim regime, now on its third Kim, scorns international law. Like his grandfather and father before him, Kim Jong-un does as he pleases and no one seems able to stop him.
North Korea has reminded us twice in quick succession of its global menace. On Sunday — Saturday night in Florida, where president Donald Trump was hosting Japan’s premier Shinzo Abe — it successfully launched a new intermediate-range missile. With rare detail, Pyongyang media trumpeted the Pukguksong-2’s technical advances. It uses solid rather than liquid fuel, making it more stable and quicker to launch from just about anywhere.
The next day, the United Nations Security Council, for the umpteenth time, unanimously condemned this flagrant breach of its past resolutions. But by then Mr Kim had lashed out on quite another front. On Monday morning, his exiled older half-brother Kim Jong-nam had a poisoned cloth shoved in his face at Kuala Lumpur airport, as he was due to fly to Macau, by two female assailants. He died on the way to hospital.
Much about this murder is obscure so far but more light should soon be shed. Malaysia is due to release the findings of the post mortem — which the North Korean embassy opposed. Yet the embassy looks set to get Jong-nam’s corpse, since no next of kin has come forward.
Secondly, three arrests have been made so far. They include the alleged attackers, whose passports present them as Vietnamese and Indonesian respectively. Both their testimonies will be crucial — assuming they talk. But if in fact they are loyal North Korean agents, they may stay defiantly silent.
Most people presume Mr Kim to be guilty until proven otherwise. That breaches conventional justice, but stands to reason on three counts. First, he had motive and means. Second, no one else did. (A jealous lover, or gangster creditor — Jong-nam had some dodgy dealings — would have pulled a gun or knife.) Third, North Korea and its leader have form here.
The motive was to eliminate a critic and potential rival. In the past, although not recently, Jong-nam had criticised North Korea’s succession. Yet he also wished his half-brother — whom he never actually met — best of luck. The feeling seems not to have been mutual.
Jong-nam also disavowed any interest in politics. But it is widely suggested, albeit on no solid evidence, that China preferred this amiable, pro-reform number one son to his fierce, nuclear-obsessed younger sibling. Beijing needs North Korea as a buffer state, but would dearly like a more pliant client in charge. However unlikely that scenario, Mr Kim — still uninvited to Beijing after five years in power — might have feared it could happen. Now that risk is gone.
But would they really do that? The precedents are plentiful. In 2013, Mr Kim executed his uncle and mentor Jang Song-thaek, whose power networks and links to China were a threat. North Koreans were told Jang was a traitor, corrupt and worse.
That happened on home turf, but North Korea has no scruples about violating other nations’ sovereignty. There have been three prior cases, mostly in South-east Asia in countries not unfriendly to Pyongyang. North Korea does not do respect, much less gratitude.
In the 1980s, the isolationist generals who ruled Myanmar saw North Korea as a kindred spirit. Yet in October 1983 a huge explosion at Yangon’s Martyrs’ Mausoleum targeted the visiting South Korean leader, Chun Doo-Hwan. Chun survived by arriving late, but 19 people died including four South Korean ministers. Two of the three bombers, both North Korean military officers, were captured alive. Pyongyang to this day brazenly denies any role in this atrocity, although one of them confessed.
Four years later in 1987 a Korean Air flight carrying workers returning from Libya exploded over the Andaman Sea, killing 115. Two North Korean agents, disguised as Japanese, were caught in Bahrain. They took poison but one survived. Kim Hyun-hee spilled many beans.
Then there was Hong Sun-kyung, a North Korean diplomat in Bangkok. In 1999, he and his family tried to defect. They were seized by colleagues and bundled into a van, which luckily overturned shortly before reaching the border with Laos. After a tense stand-off, the family reached Seoul. Thailand was furious, yet it remains inexplicably nice to North Korea, selling them rice which rarely gets paid for.
For that matter, a Malaysian university gave Mr Kim an honorary degree, even as his Swiss schoolmates paint him as hardly studious. Remarkably, Malaysia permits visa-free travel to and from North Korea. That must surely now end.
North Korea’s troublemaking is global. In the Middle East, it co-operates closely with Iran on missile technology. Such an alliance between mullahs and atheist idolaters smacks of deep cynicism on both sides. But so-called anti-imperialism always bred strange bedfellows.
Botswana severed all ties with Pyongyang in 2014 after the UN spotlighted North Korea’s brutal human rights abuses. More nations should follow this lead.
Now in his sixth year in power, Kim Jong-un has yet to meet a single foreign leader or travel abroad. If things stay that way, he might just begin to get the message.
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
