DPRK party conference speculation - c'mon people!

It's now the middle of September and still no word from North Korea about whether there has been the long-awaited 3rd Korean Workers Party Conference that I have written about before. With many of the world's major media outlets having their North Asian or Korean correspondents ready to report on the speculated handover of power to the third generation of Kims, the lack of news coming out of Pyongyang is causing these reporters in Seoul, Beijing and Tokyo (note, none in Pyongyang), along with North Korean observers, to conjure up elaborate theories and intrigue worthy of a James Bond novel as to why there has been a delay.

One of the leading North Korean 'experts', Andrei Lankov, has had his speculations reported, via a posting on a blog about DPR Korea, by another blog on the Economist, while AFP likewise is quoting often unreliable (but usually accepted as fact anyway) South Korean and Japanese sources, which is like asking Syrian sources about what is happening in Israel. No source is able to give a consistent start date, reason for the delay, or any other details about the conference. Again, proof that they have no idea what is happening in DPR Korea. Still, this doesn't stop speculation of trouble in the Court of Kim being 'obviously' attributed to complex power struggles within North Korea's elite and Kim Jong-il madness from his (unproven) stroke.

There is one rather important factor curiously missing from these speculations, and there is no excuse of having no idea about this as it was widely reported and well documented with footage: How about that typhoon that devastated the Korean-Chinese border region on 2 September, leaving dozens dead and many more thousands without shelter, food and clean water? This is not some minor incident - it's a major disaster! Now, considering how much will be spent, and that some conference delegates would have been affected by the typhoon and consequent flooding, it would have been poor form of the Korean Workers Party to have gone ahead with the conference. First priority will be to ensure that the people in these devastated areas are attended to before any conference can be held. Now, that would make more sense than pure speculation of unproven power struggles. However, when it comes to North Korea, the West does not apply common sense. There's better luck spreading the lie that Kim Jong-il gave birth to alien puppies with four heads than actually saying something that could actually be real. The power struggle scenarios, consistent with the popular images of the backdoor dealings of evil structures such as the Mafia, better fits in the West's two-dimensional perception of the sinister North Koreans and their evil, non-capitalist system.

So, my word to the experts is: Keep it simple! It's not as complicated or sinister as you make it out to be.