DID Cracks Down on Cadres

The 5 February edition of Rodong Sinmun has two editorials encouraging upright behavior and decrying corruption and abuse of power among North Korean officials and cadres.  The 30th meeting of the Workers’ Party of Korea [WPK] Secretariat was a fairly significant event if it warrants such prominent treatment in state media and, assuredly, political education modules in routine basic party organization meetings.

The 30th Secretariat meeting was held in expanded session to include various cadres and officials of the Organization Guidance Department [OGD], Propaganda and Agitation Department [PAD], Discipline Inspection Department [DID] along with provincial and local party leadership and members of institutional party committees in the DPRK Government and national security community.

The DID was Kim Jong Un’s (KJU; Kim Cho’ng-u’n) initiative to crack down on corrupt behavior by personnel across the regime and mitigate the influence of patronage and social networks of North Korean elites.  Standing up the DID at the 8th Party Congress was also tied to the consolidation of the Central Auditing Commission [CAC] with the Central Inspection (Control) Commission. This tied party financial and resource controls with the status and behavior of WPK members.  The last time these organizations were consolidated was during the periods between the 1st and 2nd Party Congresses during the 1940s.  KJU has indulged his inner Yuri Andropov who initiated a major anti-corruption drive in the post-Brezhnev Soviet Union.

KJU has demonstrated a penchant for beta testing new and revamped organizations in the defense industry, the domestic economy and paramilitary organizations.  This could indicate a transitional period for DID to develop its processes and for other party and law enforcement units to migrate some of their duties to the department.

The department has turned over four directors since its since its inception four years ago.  This personnel turnover raises the question as to whether a DID Director is intended to have a short term of office or if the DID and its directorate were thwarted in their efforts.

In the former scenario, two directors (Pak Thae Dok and Kim Chul Sam) moved onto chief secretary positions in WPK Provincial Committees. Take the DID chair, involve one’s self in the gorey details of wayward cadres and the processes of cracking their knuckles and head to another position with the knowledge of how to deal with insubordinate functionaries in the city and county party committees.  In the latter scenario, DID and its directors may have run into institutional overlap with OGD components or North Korean law enforcement.  Add to that evasion and/or co-optation by savvy cadres.

The 30th Secretariat meeting finds DID and the CAC disciplinary mechanisms to have taken shape to become somewhat effective.  The Secretariat focused on two cases.

The first involved Onch’o’n County in which two transgressions were identified.  The county party committee meeting was inadequately prepared and held in “formalistic” fashion.  But then the “mega” incident happened “a reckless act, unheard of in the history of our party.”

According to state media reporting, this was a scorcher of a bacchanal (“drinking spree”) organized by  Ryu Song Chol (Yu So’ng-ch’o’l) ex Chief Secretary of the WPK County Committee, at the Yonggang Hot Springs that included up to 40 cadres and officials   State media referred to “irregularities” which means more than just cadres having a soak and breaking the seal on a few decanters.

If we take both Onch’o’n incidents as described, it indicates that Ryu Song Chol held a large unauthorized gathering to burnish his self-importance.  He assumed his party position would excuse his and his cohorts’ behavior and probably go unreported.   The transgressions committed were deemed so egregious (“a grave crime violating Party discipline and moral and cultural order”) that the Onch’o’n County WPK was disbanded.   This will probably take the form of Onch’o’n becoming a city district (kuyo’k) and under the more direct control of the Namp’o WPK Committee.

The second incident taken up by

the Secetariat was also a “mega” case in Usi County, Chagang.   This involved land management officials under the county people’s committee and agricultural inspectors under the audi County WPK Committee rezoned farmlands and residential units, confiscated equipment and tools and distributed resources to their own family members.

Recently-cashiered Usi County WPK Committee Chief Secretary Kang Myong Song (Kang Myo’ng-so’ng) initiated the scheme and, according to one report, allegedly financed it.   From Kang’s perspective, there is a certain degree of creativity and he assumed that in official reporting it would be balanced out as long as the county appeared to be satisfying Central Committee directives.

Putting  the Onch’o’n and Usi County incidents together,  we and the Secretariat are scrutinizing dual acts in one, a two-fer.   In Onch’o’n it is not that the county party committee meeting was held as a formality or that a few dozen cadres got wasted.  In Usi, it is not necessarily that inspectors aggressively allocated resources, but also that the responsible party secretary instigated the activity and assumed it would be undiscovered and unenforced.  Rather, it was that both county party committees engaged in two different acts.  To the DID and the Secretariat two acts of corruption in one represent a pattern of behavior; you can “phone in” a party committee meeting or get drunk and then handsy with hostesses, but you cannot do both.

In assessing the Secretariat meeting (#30 btw because we were not deigned reportage about 1 thru 29), we might conclude that The Center and the DID had picked selective scapegoats to convey that no cadre cohort was above or beyond DID’s reach.  After all, Usi County is located in a “closed” region of North Korea, close to the DPRK-China border.  Onch’o’n County is located within the outer security line around Pyongyang; the headquarters element of the III Army Corps and the locale of Onch’o’n Air Base which links with the Pyongyang Air Command are close by.  As such these counties sit at a higher wrung of whatever remains of the Songbun ladder.

The Secretariat meeting, however, was not the only event at which the behavior and discipline of party cadres and other officials dominated the agenda.   Other meetings at the level of the provincial and local party committees were held to suss out cadres’ disciplinary issues in the days following the Secretariat gathering.   These meetings were monitored via video conference by authorities in the Central Committee.

This indicates a coordinated effort.  It certainly suggests that DID and the CAC mechanism targeting corruption, abuse of power and disobedience among officials and cadres at different administrative and geographic levels, has taken shape and become effective.  The Secretariat meeting and coordinated gatherings is a message to incumbent Party officials and the government and security cadres under their purview that their positions are unsafe and that defying Central Committee edicts comes with a variety of severe penalties including dismissal, incarceration and loss of salary.

As North Korea prepares for the 9th Party Congress, it is an opportunity for the core leadership to eliminate dead weight and cadres who are corrupt and/or abuse the power with which they are entrusted.   However, this is a more short-term concern. Instead these meetings highlight expectations for party officials and cadres once the term of the 9th Congress commences.  More essentially to KJU and the core leadership this represents a teachable moment to the next generation of North Korean elites and to youthful low level officials and functionaries hoping to rise in the ranks of the regime.