It was North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un who ordered the killing of his half-brother Kim Jong-nam at Kuala Lumpur’s airport earlier this week. That’s according to South Korea’s intelligence chief, who also said that the assassination had been a “standing order” for some five years. Malaysian authorities, meanwhile, have arrested a suspect in the crime. She was said to be carrying Vietnamese identification papers (though they were likely forged) at the time of her detention.
Kim Jong-nam, Kim Jong-il’s first born son and one-time dauphin, fell out with his late father around 2001. A couple of years later, he fled the country, and led a peripatetic life, shuttling between Macau, mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia. He was brave: He said publicly that he opposed his younger half-brother, Kim Jong-un’s ascension to supreme rule in North Korea. And he predicted the demise of the regime as well. Perhaps needless to say, in North Korea, uttering either of those sentiments can be a capital offense. And apparently they can be outside of the country as well.
Did Kim Jong-un order his elder brother’s death out of sheer paranoia, or because some sort of active resistance to his rule was (and is) being organized? It’s too early to say. If nothing else, though, this is a reminder of what a malignant presence North Korea’s “embassies” are. It’s likely, after all, that this operation was run out of the North’s “diplomatic” compound in Malaysia. (Oh, and if that’s not enough, North Korea’s “diplomats” are also known to engage in drug smuggling, sanctions evading, passing counterfeit money, and . . . shirking parking tickets.)
North Korea is not so much a nation-state as it is an underworld organization. Other countries should treat it accordingly.
