This was not first attempt on Kim Jong Nam’s life. Five years ago, when he took power, Kim Jong Un issued a “standing order” to have his half brother assassinated, South Korean spy chief Lee Byung-ho told lawmakers in Seoul on Wednesday.
“It was a command that had to be pulled off no matter what,” Lee said, according to some of the lawmakers. “Their spy agency had consistently been preparing for the killing, and it just turned out to have been accomplished this time.”
One attempt, in 2012, prompted Kim Jong Nam to send a letter to his younger brother pleading with him to “spare me and my family,” lawmakers were told.
This week’s successful attack bore many of the hallmarks of other assassinations and attempts blamed on North Korea, including a foiled 2011 plot to kill a North Korean defector at a Seoul subway station with a poison needle hidden in a Parker pen.
Two days after the attack, just after 8 a.m. on Wednesday morning, a woman was arrested at the airport ― in the same terminal where the attack took place ― and positively identified as one of the suspects. She was traveling on a Vietnamese passport identifying her as 29-year-old Doan Thi Hoang, police said.
North Koreans have been caught traveling on Southeast Asian passports before, making it entirely possible that the woman is, in fact, North Korean.
Police said that she was traveling alone and had told them she was tricked into the attack, which she had been told was just a prank. On Thursday morning, police arrested a second woman but were looking for four men thought to have been involved.
As all this was happening at the airport, Kim Jong Nam’s body was being transferred in a white van, escorted by four police vehicles carrying officers with automatic weapons, from Putrajaya Hospital to Kuala Lumpur General Hospital, where an autopsy was scheduled.
Black sedans bearing North Korean diplomatic plates pulled up outside the general hospital, and the North Korean ambassador to Malaysia, Kang Chol, emerged from one. He refused to speak to reporters.
Police said the North Korean diplomats had tried to stop the autopsy, insisting that the body be released to them.
The police refused. The autopsy was finished by Wednesday night, but the results were not immediately released. A Malaysian police official told local reporters only that the poison was “more potent than cyanide” but declined to say what exactly it was.
Shortly after 8 p.m., four North Korean cars sped out of the hospital grounds, one driven by a visibly upset young man in his 20s wearing a pink T-shirt ― perhaps Kim Han Sol, the most visible of Kim Jong Nam’s six children.
But there was no such frenzy in Pyongyang, where the regime has been preparing to celebrate the birthday Thursday of Kim Jong Un’s late father, Kim Jong Il, an anniversary officially known in North Korea as the Day of the Shining Star.
The central squares have been cleared of snow, and pictures of trams and computers are on display at an industrial art exhibition commemorating the anniversary. Floral baskets from as far as Africa and Ecuador have been laid at the foot of statues of Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung, according to state media.
いま注目を集めている、混乱が続く香港。サッチャー政権のイギリスと中国共産党との協定を守らせようとする、香港市民による民主的生活維持運動。その舞台が街頭から香港の各大学へと移っている。中国共産党/警察当局が学生をターゲットにし始めたからに他ならない。前にも書いたが、これらの大学は世界の大学ランキングでも100位以内の高く評価されている大学群だ。東大よりも高いランキングの大学が含まれる。いまやその激しさは、高経大の学生が始めた当初の民主化運動というよりも、過去の全共闘の頂点を示す東大闘争の様相を呈している観がある。もちろん、香港で起こっていることは共産主義国の民主化運動であって、自由主義国の共産主義運動とは違うし、比較にならないほどの修羅場であるが。いずれにせよ、なかなか目が離せない悲しい情勢なのは間違いない。
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The New York Times Report
Hong Kong Colleges Become Besieged Citadels as Police Close In
Police have begun raiding the edges of the biggest campuses to make arrests, leading student activists to engage with them in pitched battles that resemble medieval sieges.
By Edward Wong and Ezra Cheung
Nov. 13, 2019 Updated 8:28 p.m. ET
HONG KONG — Seething with anger, the black-clad students hurled gasoline bombs, threw bricks and even aimed flaming arrows at the riot police, who answered with tear-gas volleys and rubber bullets that hurtled into Hong Kong’s university grounds for the first time.
And with those battles on Monday and Tuesday at the territory’s largest universities, another unspoken rule in the antigovernment protests that have been convulsing Hong Kong for six months was shattered: the sanctity of educational campuses from the police.
The clashes turned what had been sanctuaries for the students at the core of the movement into scenes that evoked medieval citadels under siege.
They opened a new chapter that threatens to further disrupt the Asian financial capital, which has struggled for normalcy despite the increasingly violent protests against the Chinese Communist authorities in Beijing who have the last word over Hong Kong’s future.
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Hong Kong has fallen into recession as tourists have fled and as its busy shopping areas become backdrops for street battles between demonstrators and police officers. The world is asking hard questions about what could befall Hong Kong as Beijing further tightens control over a city that is supposed to operate under its own laws.
The most dramatic student-versus-police clash unfolded late Tuesday night at a barricaded bridge leading to the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. For hours, police officers fired hundreds of rounds of tear gas and rubber bullets and students hurled Molotov cocktails and bricks, and practiced firing bows with flaming arrows. More than 100 injured students were brought to a makeshift first-aid clinic in a gym.
By targeting campuses, the police have breached the last refuge of the protesters, a move that brings the violence to the heart of the universities and invokes the pivotal and fraught role of student activism in the global history of democracy movements.
“One thing that people have realized is that the protests, the movement, the conflict, is unavoidable,” Gabriel Fung, a 19-year-old second-year student at the University of Hong Kong, said. “It’s going to reach you wherever you are at some point.”
It is at these universities where young leaders and other students have been organizing revolts against the Chinese Communist Party and spreading the pro-democracy ideas that undergird the protests. And here, too, that the students discuss the wealth inequality and cultural homogenization that have led to visions of a bleak future among many of their generation.
In Hong Kong, university administrators and professors now find themselves in a difficult position, trying to preach tolerance and walk a tightrope of furious demands from students, the police and government officials. Two schools on Wednesday ended their semesters weeks early.
“Not a single place in Hong Kong is exempt from the rule of law, and that includes universities,” John Lee, the secretary for security, said Wednesday at a news conference. “Universities are not supposed to be the breeding ground of violence.”
The showdown has been brewing for years, going back to the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement of 2014. And the roots of the protests in many ways harken back to social movements elsewhere.
On mainland China, students have led campaigns calling for sweeping political change, notably in 1919 and 1989. In the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, violence broke out on campuses during anti-Vietnam War protests, most horrifically at Kent State University in 1970, when Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on students, killing four and injuring nine.
Student activists in Hong Kong have lived by an exhausting weekly rhythm since the movement began in early June: protest on weekends, show up on Mondays for class, study for exams and apply for internships or jobs in between it all. Many argue with parents who disagree with their politics or tactics. Hundreds have been arrested in recent months and quickly released by the police, as required by law.
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It was the death of a university student this month that set off the current round of protests and violence. Chow Tsz-lok, a student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, sustained a fatal injury after falling from a parking garage near a police action on Nov. 4. Thousands attended candlelit memorial rallies last weekend, and his photograph is on posters and makeshift shrines all over campuses, since he is now a martyr for other students.
Roiled by the latest unrest, universities canceled classes from Monday to Friday. That meant protesters have been able to hit the streets at dawn on weekdays after sleeping a few hours. On campus, activists have sprayed fresh graffiti, including phrases cursing administrators.
The fraught situation led police officers on Wednesday to organize an evacuation of dozens of mainland Chinese students across the border to Shenzhen, where hotels offered them free rooms.
One graduate student at the University of Hong Kong said he and others from the mainland still felt safer on campuses than on the streets. He said many students do not openly express pro-Beijing opinions and sometimes avoid speaking loudly in Mandarin, the dominant language back home. (He spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the tensions.)
Some university departments have delayed recruitment drives of mainland and foreign students to come up with new strategies; a drop-off in enrollment by mainland graduate students, who often pay full tuition, would lead to budget problems.
Hong Kong’s public universities, which have more than 86,000 undergraduate and nearly 11,000 graduate students, each have distinct characters. That means the students have occupied different roles in the movement, and the protests have played out in different ways on each campus.
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with 20,000 students, is considered the most radical campus. Most of its students are Cantonese-speaking locals, some of whom live nearby with their parents in dense apartment blocks. And the campus is high in the hills of Sha Tin, isolated from the city center, which is an hour’s ride away by subway.
On Monday, the police arrested five students on the campus’s edge, administrators said. The next morning, the police, still at the border, confronted front line students, and clashes took place over 20 hours. Rocky S. Tuan, the president, who has been known for trying to engage with students during the movement, showed up during a lull in the evening to urge the students to be calm.
“You all should know that I really want to help you. I will do everything within my capability,” he said. “It is the university’s responsibility to maintain peace on campus, not the police.”
But as Mr. Tuan began walking away, the police fired tear gas. Mr. Tuan himself was enveloped in the gas. Students set fires to keep the police from advancing, and scores formed human chains to pass along bricks, umbrellas and bottled water to the front lines. Students sitting on one patch of road made gasoline bombs as if on an assembly line.
“It was a savage move and a type of police violence when they tried to encroach on the university,” said Timothy Chow, 23, an engineering student who graduated in June. “This is why we have to protect our Chinese University of Hong Kong.”
“When I saw our compatriots and Chinese University staff being hurt by the police, I felt particularly furious and wanted to come back to defend our university,” he added.
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At the University of Hong Kong this week, front-line students also set up barricades and, against the advice of professors, threw paving bricks off balconies, even though it is considered the most established of the territory’s schools.
Founded in 1911, it is the territory’s oldest university. Many of its students are foreigners or Hong Kong residents who attended international schools. English is the main language, and the university aims to open a mainland China campus. Among its alumni are many police commanders and Carrie Lam, the territory’s chief executive who is reviled by protesters.
On Monday, the students were on edge in part because the police had taken a student from a dormitory area early that morning.
Two liberal law professors, Hualing Fu and Johannes Chan, urged a group of front-line protesters in masks not to resort to violence and to understand that the struggle for democracy was a lifetime commitment, according to video footage. But one masked woman shouted they had no choice, and asked: “How many people are we going to sacrifice?”
“We are better, we are different,” Mr. Fu said.
“But we shall not forgive,” a young man shouted, “we shall not forget.”
On Monday and Tuesday mornings, police officers arrived at campus entrances to try to clear the barricades. They fired tear gas, but retreated.
Students have called on the president, Xiang Zhang, to forcefully condemn the police, but he has refrained from doing so, and, unlike Mr. Tuan, rarely holds open forums. On occasion, professors have shown up at the front lines to speak to students, as William Hayward, dean of social sciences, did on Tuesday.
“Obviously, as it goes on and as it gets more polarized, this becomes increasingly a challenge,” Mr. Hayward later said of student engagement. “Some of them do really open up, but at the same time, you know, of course they’re trying to figure out — is he on our side or is he trying to silence us?”
As night fell on Tuesday, students traded shifts at the barricades, walking past a famous eight-meter statue of orange corpses, “The Pillar of Shame,” that memorializes the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy students and workers around Tiananmen Square in Beijing by the Chinese government.
Paul Mozur and Katherine Li contributed reporting.
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