Has North Korea's Kim Jong-Un Been Toppled?

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/26259-has-north-koreas-kim-jong-un-been-toppled

Hwang Pyong So must be feeling pretty good about himself right now. At the latest Supreme People’s Assembly meeting, he was made vice chairman of the National Defense Commission. This was after his promotion to director of the General Political Bureau of the Korean People’s Army, making him the top political officer in the military. In a country where there is supposed to be no No. 2 official, he is called the second-most powerful figure.

Now he has crossed the border into South Korea on a one-day, short-notice trip, triggering hopes of reconciliation between the arch-rival republics—and heightening speculation about the fate of Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s young supremo, who has not been seen in public since September 3.

Hwang’s trip South on Saturday comes on the heels of a widely publicized report that Kim has been deposed. Jang Jin Sung, a former North Korean counterintelligence and propaganda official, is claiming that the Organization and Guidance Department of the Korean Workers’ Party, responsible for promotions within the regime, has taken over the country. Kim, according to Jang, is now merely a “puppet.”

Leading Korea watchers, however, say they doubt Kim has lost his position at the center of the state founded by his grandfather and passed down to his father, his immediate predecessor. “This kind of travel would be way too out there if anything serious was going on in North Korea, so I don’t think it’s a sign of a coup,” John Delury of Yonsei University in Seoul told The Washington Post of Hwang’s jaunt down to Incheon, near the South Korean capital. Andrei Lankov of nearby Kookmin University, meanwhile, called the surprise visit merely a part of Pyongyang’s recent “charm offensive.” “North Korean diplomacy has been engaged in concerted, well-arranged, well-managed efforts to improve relations with pretty much the entire outside world,” he told the Post. “And you would not expect it to happen with nobody in control.”