Category: Kim Jong Un

The influence of Kim Jong-un’s wife Ri Sol Ju

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Kim Jong-un’s wife Ri Sol Ju commands a growing following among the wives of North Korean elite while Kim Yo-jong now holds a senior position in the ruling Workers’ Party and serves as an adviser to her brother.

The purge of Jang Song Thaek may have strengthened the hand of Ri with the North Korean elite looking to avoid a similar fate. There are accounts that the wives of North Korean elite used their ties to Ri to “limit the number of officials removed from office due to the Jang purge,” Madden said.

“What we’ll need to watch for is whether Ri Sol Ju becomes Queen Bee among the wives or if that role is assumed by Yo-jong,” he said in an e-mail. “They are a quiet but politically influential cohort in the North Korean elite.”

In public Ri offers a softer side of the Supreme Leader and has been a regular in North Korean propaganda. In 2005, she traveled to South Korea as a teenage cheerleader for North Korean teams at an athletic competition. Seven years later she was revealed as his wife at an appearance with Kim at an amusement park in July 2012.

Still, so little is known about their relationship that it took former NBA star Dennis Rodman to reveal the couple had a child after a trip to Pyongyang in 2013 to play basketball. Rodman told the Guardian newspaper that he held Kim’s daughter Ju-ae and that Kim is a “good dad and has a beautiful family”.

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Kim Jong-un’s sister Kim Yo-jong in her brother’s shadow

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Kim Yo-jong chooses to remain in her brother’s shadow at public events.

Still, Kim Yo-jong “has a lot of control over who has access to her brother, what they say to him, what documents they hand over – in short, she is a combination gatekeeper and traffic cop,” said Michael Madden, editor of the North Korea Leadership Watch blog.

She joined her brother in handing out awards to troops at an air force competition in May and that suggests she commands the party’s Organization and Guidance Department, which handles everything from promotions to purges, Cheong Seong Chang, a senior analyst at the Sejong Institute near Seoul, said in an e-mail.

Kim was born to the same Korean-Japanese dancer, Ko Yong Hui, as Kim Jong-un. In February 2011 South Korean broadcaster KBS showed what it identified as Kim Yo-jong and her other brother, Kim Jong-chol, enjoying an Eric Clapton concert in Singapore.

Yonhap News said January 2 Kim married one of party secretary Choe Ryong Hae’s sons, citing two people in China it didn’t identify and a photo of her wearing a ring. Dong-A Ilbo newspaper rebutted the report days later.

[Washington Post]

Kim Jong Un opens North Korea a crack

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In an evident small-scale relaxing of North Korea’s rigid isolation, young leader Kim Jong Un is allowing new kinds of Western and American pop culture symbols to appear in his country, including Mickey Mouse. The regime is also curbing its harsh intolerance of high-tech gadgets and consumer goods, the possession of which could sometimes mean prison or worse.

Some 2.4 million North Koreans now subscribe to mobile phones according to Orascom Telecom Media & Technology Holding of Egypt, which provides cell service here. Since mid-2014, phones loaded with high tech games and romance novels have arrived in Pyongyang, the capital. North Koreans can now own Google Android smart phones with 30 foreign games included, even as access to the Internet and 3G is still unavailable.

Despite crippling conditions in many places, Kim has expanded the availability of previously forbidden products to a broader swath of the nation’s elite and their offspring in urban areas – partly to placate new generations of Koreans and party to offer perks to regime loyalists the Kim needs support from.

Digital cameras, credit cards, and cosmetics – the basics of Western and Chinese consumer culture — are now showing up in one of the world’s most ideologically rigid states. Previously unavailable foreign products, including German beer, shampoo, toothpaste and Japanese mayonnaise are on the increase. Coffee has become a common drink, and some restaurants even serve espresso from Italian espresso machines.

The message if not the reality is that daily life is improving for those in urban areas.

Yet, food and power shortages remain in much of the country, and a gap has widened between the privileged in the city and those living second-class lives in the countryside. Most ordinary North Koreans can’t afford a camera. Wood-burning steam-powered trucks are still seen running outside Pyongyang. And many people rely on their feet or on hitchhiking for transportation.

[Read full article in The Christian Science Monitor]

Kim Jong Un may make first foreign trip to Moscow

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Kim Jong Un is likely to make his first foreign trip on May 9 as North Korean leader to Moscow where he will be part of Russian celebrations for the 70th anniversary of World War II victory.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday that North Korea had given a “positive”, response “as a first signal” to an invitation for Kim to attend the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany.

Lavrov told reporters that invitations had been sent “to heads of lots of foreign states, including the Commonwealth of Independent States, BRICS, Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, European Union, member states of the anti-Hitler coalition, heads of international and regional organizations”.

South Korean President Park Geun Hye has also been invited and but it remains unclear if she will visit Moscow.

If Park and Kim both attend the ceremony in Moscow, the possibility of a meeting between the two archrivals could not be ruled, according to Yonhap news agency.

Kim in his New Year speech said he was open to the “highest-level” meeting with South Korea. The peace gesture was reciprocated by Park saying that she was willing to meet with Kim without preconditions while urging North Korea to drop its nuclear pursuit in order for any meeting to produce meaningful progress.

Kim has never met any head of state or made foreign trips since he took power after his father, Kim Jong Il, died at the end of 2011.

‘The Interview’ movie not well-received by North Koreans

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According to North Korean defectors, “The Interview,” the Sony Pictures comedy about a fictional CIA plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un, is not going over well with North Korean viewers, even among people who oppose the country’s dictatorship.

Several democracy activists with contacts in the North said the North Koreans they spoke with reacted to the film first with fear of punishment for watching it, but also with derision and wounded feelings over the depiction of their country. Some of the activists said it was unlikely that many people would risk watching it.

To put it simply, national pride trumped their dislike for Kim Jong-un, their country’s young and often ruthless leader.

“They cursed at the movie,” said Chung Kwang-il, a North Korean defector and democracy activist in South Korea who said that his associates in China had smuggled digital copies of the movie into the North and that he had since spoken by cellphone with eight people who surreptitiously watched it. “They were angry it depicted North Koreans as a bunch of idiots,” he said. “Now, these are not people worshiping Kim Jong-un; they are ones who wish he were gone.”

Kim Sung-min, a North Korean defector who runs Free North Korea Radio, a Seoul-based website, wrote there that he spoke to two North Korean viewers and one of them said that he was thrilled by the scene in which an American talk-show host visiting Pyongyang asked the Kim Jong-un character why he was starving his people. Nonetheless, Mr. Kim quoted the viewer as saying that “the movie will only increase animosity among us because it not only failed to understand our feelings, but didn’t even try to.”

[NY Times]

Talks coming between North and South Korea?

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In a New Year’s press conference Monday, South Korean President Park Geun-hye made an overture to North Korea, extending an offer to hold talks without any preconditions. “My position is that to ease the pain of division and to accomplish peaceful unification, I am willing to meet with anyone,” Park said in her speech. “If it is helpful, I am up for a summit meeting with the North. There is no pre-condition.”

Geun-hye’s remarks are in part a reaction to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un conceding that he would be willing to hold a summit with the South under certain conditions, says Charles Armstrong, a professor of Korean Studies at Columbia University.

“If the atmosphere and environment is there, there is no reason not to hold a high-level summit [with South Korea],” Kim Jong Un said in a speech broadcast on state media January 1. However, Pyongyang has not acquiesced to recent requests to resume negotiations with South Korea on human rights and other matters.

Amstrong says that “both sides are sending signals to the other that they are ready to open dialogue.”

The Wall Street Journal’s bureau chief in Korea is less optimistic about the possibility for talks, saying that “there are always unpalatable preconditions in inter-Korean talks even if one side says there aren’t.”

The two countries have been divided since the end of World War II. The Korean War that followed ended in a truce rather than a peace treaty, thus North and South Korea have technically been at war for more than six decades. Reunification has been a goal for both states, but they lie on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of political ideology.

[Newsweek]

Chinese annoyance with North Korea bubbles to the surface

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When a retired Chinese general with impeccable Communist Party credentials recently wrote a scathing account of North Korea, as a recalcitrant ally headed for collapse and unworthy of support, he exposed a roiling debate in China about how to deal with the country’s young leader, Kim Jong-un.

For decades China has stood by North Korea, and though at times the relationship has soured, it has rarely reached such a low point, Chinese analysts say. The fact that the commentary by Lt. Gen. Wang Hongguang, a former deputy commander of an important military region, was published in a state-run newspaper and then posted on an official People’s Liberation Army website attested to how much the relationship had deteriorated, the analysts say.

“China has cleaned up the D.P.R.K.’s mess too many times,” General Wang wrote in The Global Times. Of the government in North Korea, he said: “If an administration isn’t supported by the people, ‘collapse’ is just a matter of time.” Moreover, North Korea had violated the spirit of the mutual defense treaty with China, he said, by failing to consult China on its nuclear weapons program, which has created instability in Northeast Asia.

A Chinese official who is closely involved in China’s diplomacy with North Korea said that General Wang’s disparaging attitude was more prevalent in the Chinese military today than in any previous period. “General Wang’s views really reflect the views of many Chinese—and within the military views are varied,” said the official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

[NY Times]

Jong Un’s sister marries son of top North Korean official

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The sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has married the son of one of the country’s most powerful officials, Yonhap news agency reported on Friday, citing unnamed sources.

north-korean-kim-yo-JongKim Yo Jong, who is 27 or 28, was said by state media late last year to have assumed a senior position in the ruling Workers’ Party. She is the only other member of the ruling Kim family known to have an official job within the government.

“As far as I know, Kim Yo Jong, deputy director of the Workers’ Party, got married to a son of the party secretary Choe Ryong Hae,” the South Korean news agency quoted a China-based source as saying.

A second source identified Kim Yo Jong’s husband as Choe’s second son, Choe Song, Yonhap reported.

The senior Choe is a high-ranking member of the ruling Workers’ Party widely seen as a close confidant of Kim, the isolated country’s third-generation leader.

Kim Yo Jong was seen wearing what appears to be a wedding ring in a photo released by the reclusive North’s official KCNA news agency on Friday.

[Reuters]

Kim Jong Un indicates openness to summit with South Korea

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said in New Year’s speech Thursday that he is open to more talks with Seoul or even a summit with his South Korean counterpart, but stressed North Korea will continue to strengthen its military amid an atmosphere of distrust and tension while trying to diversify its economy and raise the national standard of living.

Kim’s call for improving inter-Korea relations comes as Pyongyang is facing heightened criticism over its human rights record and souring ties with Washington over allegations it was involved in the massive hacking attack on Sony Pictures. (North Korea has denied involvement, but said the hack was a “righteous deed” and suggested it might have been carried out by sympathizers or supporters abroad.)

“We believe we can resume suspended senior-level talks and hold other talks on specific issues if South Korea sincerely has a position that it wants to improve North-South relations through a dialogue,” Kim said in the nationally televised speech. “And there is no reason not to hold the highest-level talks if the atmosphere and conditions are met.”

Meeting such conditions has proven to be virtually impossible in the past. The two countries have not held a summit since 2007 and, despite Kim’s remarks, the likelihood of one happening again soon is very low given the deep distrust that remains between the two countries.

[Associated Press]

White House focuses on North Korea

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The United States is weighing the possibility of a “proportional response” to the cyber-attack on Sony Pictures that prompted the cancellation of the release of the $44 million-dollar film The Interview. U.S. officials believe that North Korea was a key player in the cyberattack, believed to be a retaliation to the satirical picture about the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. President Obama has reportedly made the issue a top priority.

While the Obama administration believes the attack originated in North Korea, some cyber security experts remain skeptical, citing the exhaustive inside knowledge the hackers appeared to have on Sony’s internal architecture. The Guardians of Peace, the group taking credit for the attack, has released thousands of emails between studio executives and producers, as well as some 47,000 social security numbers. The group sent news outlets an email on Tuesday threatening to attack theaters that screened The Interview, which led Sony to cancel its release the next day.

Given the uncertainty over exactly who perpetrated the attack, it remains unclear exactly how the United States might respond, and whether such a response would provoke or deter another attack. “It’s a new area, and we’re in uncharted territory,” said Scott Snyder, a senior fellow for Korea studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s hard to know at this point if there are other options that might be less visible.”

[Foreign Policy]