Defectors from North Korea are hoping that international sanctions will make life so much harder, that the North's elite class will rise up against leader Kim Jong Il and overthrow him, writes the Associated Press.

The AP also writes that the Defectors' Alliance, a group that helps North Korean refugees settle in South Korea, says the surest end to the current crisis "is to decisively eradicate dictator Kim Jong Il and his followers and establish a democratic government for the North Korean people," who the group says will feel the brunt of the suffering caused by the current tensions.

One defector thinks the nuclear test was meant more to be a message to North Koreans than to the rest of the world.

"I believe North Korea's nuclear test was more aimed at its people," said defector Sun Jung Hoon, who fled to Seoul in 2002. "With tighter international sanctions after the test, the North can strengthen its internal propaganda that the economic hardship is all because of outsiders' sanctions."

In an interview with the AP, Hwang Jang Yop, the highest-ranking North Korean official to defect to South Korea, agreed that only Kim's ouster will end the nuclear threat North Korea poses. He added, however, that he doubts the UN sanctions against North Korea will have any effect.

"I don't think his grip on power will be significantly weakened," he said, adding that South Korea continues to give aid to North Korea, while other countries, most notably China and Russia, are opposed to the idea of pressuring the North. ...

He said South Korea, the U.S., China, Russia and Japan should not engage in bargaining with the North. Instead, they should isolate the regime, which he calls an "international criminal organization and the enemy of democracy."

The North's apparent nuclear test last week wasn't Kim's last card and the North Korean leader could still fire more missiles like he did in July and even mount nuclear warheads onto them, Hwang said.

"It is nonsense to urge the North to abandon its nuclear weapons with Kim in place," Hwang said.

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Mr. Hwang, a longtime member of North Korea's elite and friend to the late Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il's father and the founder of North Korea, defected in 1997 during a trip to Beijing, where he sought refuge in the South Korean embassy. He eventually moved to South Korea, where he is under 24-hour police protection to prevent North Korean assassination attempts. Hwang is believed to have been a mentor to Kim Jong Il, and to have been one of the architects of the Juche quasi-religious ideology with which the Kims have ruled.

But while some see Hwang's perspective as a view into the inner workings of North Korea and Kim Jong Il, others suggest that Hwang's advice be taken with a grain of salt. In a 2003 article, Slate called Hwang the North Korean Ahmed Chalabi, a reference to the Iraqi exile whose faulty intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction helped lead to the invasion of Iraq.

...It must be recognized, Hwang was not as much of an insider - nor was his defection as purely moralistic - as many press reports have suggested. He was removed from the chairmanship of the Supreme People's Assembly back in 1983, at which point, as one Korean-American political analyst put it, "Hwang's position deteriorated rapidly." By 1996, Hwang was entirely "out of the loop." At a meeting in July of that year, Kim Jong-il accused him of treachery....

...Once in Seoul, Hwang proved less than useful in his role as defector. Rumors were floated that he had brought with him a "list" of North Korean spies inside Seoul's ruling circles, but the rumor was denied, and nothing came of it. South Korea's National Intelligence Service made Hwang chairman of its Unification Policy Research Institute but sacked him after he complained that the government was holding him prisoner.

The calls by North Korean defectors for Kim Jong Il's ouster are due in large part to his position in Juche ideology. The Christian Science Monitor reported in 2003 that Juche, which was established by Kim Il Sung and maintained by Kim Jong Il, is "a detailed dogma..., with its own dense logic and theology, that is used to control the Korean population."

Under the Juche idea as expounded by the younger Kim, all power and love of the North's people must be given to Kim. Everything from taxes, food, electricity, foreign currency, and work quotas, to education, politics, military, and propaganda perpetuates the idea that Kim is a divine figure to be served.

Closely aligned to Juche is a nearly holy writ that the Kim family must one day rule the Korean peoples on both sides of the demilitarized zone. Koreans in the north are not officially called Koreans, they are called "Kim Il Sung's people." ...

Yet today, most of the North's ruling elite, and Kim himself reportedly, no longer believe in the infallibility of Juche - but feel it is necessary to perpetuate the system.

In an article for Internet newsletter Dissent Voice, Gary Leupp, a professor of history and adjunct professor of comparative religion at Tufts University, writes that it is reasonable to consider North Korea to be a religious state, one inspired by Japan's pre-World-War-II Shintoism.

Growing up under Japanese occupation, Kim Il-song could have observed the usages of a state religion in the service of a hereditary monarchy linked to Heaven. Maybe these observations subconsciously affected the evolution of his thinking. Once in power in North Korea, from 1945, he increasingly built a personality cult, initially modeled after Stalin's but by the 1970s plainly monarchical in nature. It integrated Confucian values of filial piety and obedience, and glorified the entire family of the Great Leader, including especially the crown prince Jong-il. ...

As Hwang Jang Yop, once International Secretary of the Korean Workers' Party, has written, "Kim Jong Il went to great lengths to create the Kim Il Sung personality cult, and Kim Il Sung led the efforts to turn Kim Jong Il into a god."

The threat that the North Korean regime poses is further fueled by what one expert calls Kim's "malign narcissism." The Los Angeles Times reports that psychiatrist and former CIA employee Jerrold Post says this narcissism means "Kim has loyalty only to himself and lacks the ability to consider other people's feelings." Similarly, Merrill Markoe, writing for The Huffington Post, argues that "when one is dealing with a narcissist who is also wielding a nuclear bomb, a little tactical forethought is your best friend."

It's important to understand that a narcissist operates out of only two constantly flip-flopping states of emotional being; grandiosity and humiliation. So, if you are not feeding the grandiosity of someone like Kim Jong Il, than you are humiliating him. Period. Those are your choices. That is the part of this equation you can't change.

Out of those two choices, only the grandiose narcissist is a happy narcissist. A humiliated narcissist is a rigid, non-compliant, revenge seeking nightmare.

...To a narcissist, anything short of being treated like a V.I.P. is not only unacceptible, it is humiliating. And the behavior of a humiliated narcissist is always a vengeful, vindictive tantrum. Always.

Such perceived humiliations may well have been a factor in the precipitation of the current nuclear crisis, reports Newsday.

...In a series of six-nation talks - bringing in China, Russia, South Korea and Japan - the United States and North Korea signed a vaguely worded accord in September 2005 that the North would halt all its nuclear weapons programs in exchange for the United States normalizing relations....

But the Bush administration was deeply divided about the deal, and both Washington and Pyongyang seemed ready to torpedo it. A day after the signing, North Korea demanded that the United States build it a light-water reactor -- something that had been offered in the accord only as a future possibility.

Three days after that, the United States imposed sanctions on bank accounts in Macao that served companies controlled by Kim's inner circle. The North Koreans "perceived this as a direct slap in the face at Kim, and a humiliation," said Bruce Cumings, a Korea specialist at the University of Chicago.

Within months, Pyongyang tried, with mixed results, to display new military muscles.

Newsday reports that in the eyes of one expert, what the crisis may come down to is communication. Michael Breen, author of a biography of Kim Jong Il, warns, "The post-September 11 government in the United States and the isolated government in Pyongyang live on different planets and have no clue what the other wants."

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Feedback appreciated. E-mail Arthur Bright.