When it executed former Workers' Party agriculture secretary Suh Kwang Hi in September 1997 for his alleged responsibility for the North's agricultural fiasco, Pyongyang is learned to have exhumed and punished the buried body of his predecessor Kim Man Kum, who recommended Suh as his successor. Kim died in November 1984.

As more and more people had starved to death due to the food shortages since president Kim Il Sung died in July 1994, the Workers' Party, in a bid to placate the public, trumped up an accusation that Suh and his predecessor Kim were "spies of the American imperialists," says Lee Song Su, 33 (pseudonym), who escaped from the North in 1999 and came to the South last year.

Under the false accusation, Pyongyang executed Suh, and exhumed the remains of Kim from the Patriots Cemetery and fired at them, a modern version of the ancient practice of exhuming and decapitating the dead body, says Lee. Some purged in the North have been reinstated after their death, with their remains re-buried in the Patriots Cemetery. But it's the first time in the North that a body buried in the Patriots Cemetery was exhumed and shot at.

Born in Anju, South Pyongyan province in 1912, Kim Man Kum joined the Ministry of Agriculture in 1912 and served in the top agriculture post for over 10 years between October 1962 and July 1970 and between December 1972 and August 1973, concurrently holding deputy premiership in the latter period. He has been reputed as the man who firmly established the so-called juche (self-reliance) agriculture in the North. Resigning his post in August 1973, he recommended Suh as his successor and remained as Suh's political tutor until his death.

Pyongyang made public the ‘execution’ of Suh and ‘posthumous’ shooting of Kim to leading members of the party, administration and military organizations via lecture meetings and internal circulars, and later to the public as well, according to Lee. North Korea appears to have done this with a view to publicly blaming the two top agriculture officials for the agricultural fiasco, while exonerating the party.

(Kim Kwang In, kki@chosun.com )