SEOUL, South Korea — In the most dramatic fall from power North Korea has ever revealed, its government on Monday televised images of Jang Song-thaek, the once-influential uncle of the leader Kim Jong-un, being escorted out of a party meeting in which he was stripped of all titles of power and expelled from the ruling Workers’ Party.
Mr. Jang’s purge was highly unusual for North Korea not only because its victim was a man long considered a core member of Mr. Kim’s inner circle but also because of the way the regime abandoned its customary secrecy about internal politics and publicized the purge — through front-page coverage in the North’s state-run newspapers and through the televised spectacle of party secretaries, some tearfully, attacking a man who was until recently the North’s second most powerful figure.
In an unusual and extended Sunday meeting of the Political Bureau of the Party Central Committee presided over by his nephew, Mr. Jang was condemned for womanizing, drug abuse, “wining and dining at back parlors of deluxe restaurants,” gambling in foreign casinos at the party’s expense, and above all, nurturing his “politically motivated ambition” by building up a “faction” to challenge against Mr. Kim as the “unitary center” of the ruling party, state media reported.
Images released Monday by the North’s Korean Central Television showed two uniformed officers from the Ministry of People’s Security, an agency once said to be loyal to Mr. Jang, escorting the disgraced official from the meeting.
He had been seen as a regent for a young nephew who was catapulted into the top leadership following the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, in late 2011. Mr. Kim’s rise coincided with a seemingly unbridled expansion of power for Mr. Jang, whose posts included a seat on the Political Bureau and vice chairmanships of the Central Military Commission and the top government organ, the National Defense Commission.
Political purges are common in North Korea, where Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, and his grandfather, the North’s founding president, Kim Il-sung, used them to remove potential threats to their power and intimidate the elite.
But these often bloody machinations almost always take place behind the scenes, and it was highly unusual for the North’s leaders to convene an extended party meeting on a Sunday to condemn the victim and immediately publicize his “crimes,” analysts said.
“Kim Jong-un was declaring at home and abroad that he is now the truly one and only leader in the North, that he will not tolerate a No. 2,” said Yang Moo-jin, an analyst at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.
By removing his uncle, long considered his caretaker, and openly conducting his regime’s biggest political purge, Mr. Kim was “demonstrating his confidence that he can stand alone without help,” said Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea analyst at Dongguk University in Seoul.
Mr. Kim, 30, has been consolidating his power faster than most analysts had expected. But in Pyongyang’s opaque political world, cloaked in secrecy and often fertile ground for speculation, things are often not as they appear, analysts said.
If the charges against Mr. Jang are true, they essentially mean that Mr. Jang was able to build his own faction unchecked in the supposedly monolithic leadership. Alternatively, Mr. Jang may have lost a power struggle within Mr. Kim’s inner circle — a confrontation serious enough to compel Mr. Kim to publicize Mr. Jang’s ouster as a warning to the rest of the elite, rather than send him into silent isolation.
“What we can say, by North Korea’s own admission, is that there have been serious power struggles since the death of Kim Jong-il and that the apparently rather smooth transition has been anything but at the highest levels of leadership,” said John Delury, a North Korea expert at Yonsei University in Seoul.
