Seoul, Jan 08: North Korea announced Wednesday it will hold long overdue elections in March amid indications the impoverished regime plans to fill Parliament with finance-savvy legislators and has named new Cabinet ministers with economic know-how.
With foreign aid drying up amid a global economic crisis and a diplomatic standoff with South Korea, North Korea is turning inward to find a way out of economic hardship, analysts say.
Elections for seats in the Supreme People's Assembly — postponed last year amid speculation about leader Kim Jong Il's health — will be held March 8, state-run media said.
The poll, held every five years, last took place in August 2003 and had been due again in 2008 — around the time South Korean and US officials say the 66-year-old Kim suffered a stroke.
North Korea denies the leader was ill, and since early October has sent a steady stream of photos and footage showing Kim on a brisk tour of military units, farms and factories. In a photo released Tuesday, Kim is shown visiting a newlywed couple at home, a broad smile on his face.
Analysts say the elections are intended to prove to the world that Kim is doing fine months after his failure to appear at a September parade marking North Korea's 60th anniversary sparked alarm.
Observers are paying close attention to Kim's health because the autocratic leader — who has ruled the nation of 23 million since his father, Kim Il Sung, died in 1994 — has not publicly named a successor.
"North Korea is showing to the outside world that Kim has fully recovered, and that the country's (political) system is functioning normally," said Kim Yong-hyun, a professor at Seoul's Dongguk University.
The speculation about his health comes at a time of worsening economic hardship and heightened political tensions with wartime rival South Korea.
Mismanagement, drought and other natural disasters shattered North Korea's economy in the mid-1990s, forcing the country to rely on foreign assistance to feed its people. Its economy — just 2.6 percent of South Korea's — shrank for a second straight year in 2007, the most recent data available, Seoul's central Bank of Korea said in June.
The global economic crisis could also mean a drop in North Korea's mineral export prices, experts affiliated with South Korea's Foreign Ministry said. Meanwhile, a pact Pyongyang signed with five other nations in 2007 to dismantle its nuclear program in exchange for aid also remains stalled.
For a decade, Seoul poured money into the North as part of a "sunshine" policy aimed at fostering reconciliation with aid. But that came to a halt when conservative President Lee Myung-bak took office last February questioning the wisdom of providing unconditional aid to the nuclear-armed neighbour.
Inter-Korean relations are now at their lowest in more than a decade. Lee says he is open to repairing relations — but only if the regime responds to calls for dialogue.
Pyongyang has rebuffed calls from a man whom state media brands "human scum." Reaffirming its "juche" policy of self-reliance, North Korea resolved in a New Year's statement to rebuild its economy — a shift in focus reflected in an apparent Cabinet shake up in Pyongyang. At least five ministers have been named in recent weeks to posts overseeing electricity, agriculture, forestry, railroad and steel industries, South Korea's Unification Ministry said.
"Appointing technocrats to the posts means that the North is strengthening efforts to make the economy self-reliant," said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at Seoul's University of North Korean Studies.
North Korea's young economic elite will also prevail in the March elections, analysts at the Institute for National Security Strategy in Seoul predicted recently.
"We may think about the possibility that a generational change would be implemented," partly to prepare for a post-Kim Jong Il era, said Cheong Seong-chang, a North Korea expert at South Korea's Sejong Institute, in a report.
The elections are largely a formality because the candidates are hand-picked by Kim and the ruling Workers' Party, and Parliament meets only once or twice a year to rubber stamp legislation. In the 2003 poll, 687 deputies, including Kim, were elected with total support; voter turnout is typically near 100 percent.
But observers will be watching the outcome to get a sense for who is emerging as the new power elite.
The Stalinist nation is one of the world's most closed societies, and North Korea does not publicize political developments. South Korean officials rely on reconciliation talks to confirm political changes — but with Pyongyang cutting off ties last year; officials have had to scour state media for clues to changes in government.
Bureau Report