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Michael Horowitz
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Hudson Institute senior fellow Michael Horowitz, a key conservative figure connected with North Korean issues, said Thursday that the regime would implode within a year.
In a lecture entitled "It Ain't Christmas in Pyongyang: Will the Kim Jong-il Regime Last?" Horowitz said, "North Korea will implode before next Christmas and Kim Jong-il shall not enjoy Christmas next year."
The scholar had recently visited South Korea, where he criticized Seoul policies toward North Korea and called for regime change in Pyongyang. He said the collapse of North Korea's communist regime was historically inevitable, and that such a collapse would happen automatically and without much delay.
He also mentioned the possibility of a coup occurring in North Korea. He said that if the United States discovered generals it could trust to close North Korea's "concentration camps" and shut down its nuclear program, Washington could send a message to them that it would support such moves.
He said he was certain that China has already chosen a general to succeed Kim Jong-il as the political costs of propping up the North Korean regime increase over time. He claimed the Chinese have reviewed a scenario in which their favored general seizes power in Pyongyang, declares a state of emergency and requests that Beijing dispatch 200,000 troops to North Korea to seal the deal.
About the enacting of the North Korean Human Rights Act, Horowitz said the U.S. Senate unanimously passed in September an even stronger version of the law than the one passed by the House of Representatives, and this was a very strong signal that the end was near for the North Korean regime.
He also said that South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun's comments during his recent tour of Europe concerning how Kim would remain in power for a long time were perplexing for a "great nation" like South Korea, and stressed that Roh's approval rating was no more than 19 percent in December.
Meanwhile, an official from the Korean Embassy in Washington who attended the lecture said Roh's North Korea policy reflected the position of the majority of South Korean citizens, and Seoul was closely cooperating with the U.S. government.
He also pointed out that while North Korean human rights were important, because there were other issues such as weapons of mass destruction and intra-Korean cooperation, North Korea was a complex and delicate issue that needed to be viewed from a multi-dimensional perspective.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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