North Korea Releases First Photo of Kim’s Heir (original) (raw)
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Kim Jong-un, left, the youngest son of Kim Jong-il, posed with newly elected members of Workers’ Party of Korea.Credit...Korea Central News Agency, via Reuters
- Sept. 30, 2010
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korean state media released a photograph and video of Kim Jong-un, the son and presumed heir of the ailing dictator, Kim Jong-il, the first verified images of the young man as an adult.
The photo was published in the Thursday issue of North Korea’s main newspaper, Rodong Shinmun, and showed him in a dark suit with his father and a large group of senior Workers’ Party officials. He bears a strong resemblance to his father and, some thought, his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s founder.
Video broadcast on television showed Kim Jong-un sitting in the front row of the Workers Party meeting this week, among a group of senior leaders.
This week, at a landmark meeting of the Workers’ Party in the capital, Pyongyang, the younger Mr. Kim, who is believed to be 27 or 28, was given the rank of four-star general in the People’s Army and was named a deputy chairman of the party’s military commission. He also became a member of the party’s Central Committee, an ideological and policy-making post.
In the photograph, Kim Jong-un, chubby and looking somewhat older than his years, was seated two spots to his father’s right and next to another rising star, Vice Marshal Ri Yong-ho, seated between them.
Mr. Ri, 67, whose military rank as vice marshal places him over Kim Jong-un, was named to the country’s powerful Politburo this week and also was made a deputy chairman of the party’s military commission. The vice marshal, who has served as chief of the army general staff, is seen as a seasoned officer with substantial field experience. South Korean news media reports have suggested that he guided Kim Jong-un in his fast-track military training over the last year and he is expected to be Mr. Kim’s tutor and guide in political and military matters.
Analysts and diplomats in Washington will be watching for “the gradual insertion of the Young General into the policy and decision-making apparatus,” said Evans J. R. Revere, a longtime United States diplomat in South Korea and Asia who is diplomat in residence and lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. Young General is a title used by North Korean news media to refer to the younger Mr. Kim.
“There have been several reports that he had been given a lower-level position in the National Defense Commission some months back,” Mr. Revere said, “and I expect that there have been similar efforts to expose him to the government, military and party decision-making process over the past two years.”
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Kim Jong-un, center, the youngest son of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, attended a meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party in Pyongyang on Tuesday.Credit...Reuters Television
The new North Korean appointments seemed not to have any immediate effect on North-South relations, which have been strained by the sinking in March of the South Korean warship Cheonan. While the two sides’ militaries met for the first time in two years on Thursday, the talks ended with no apparent progress and no new meetings scheduled, according to an official with South Korea’s Defense Ministry.
The talks began at 10 a.m. in the border village of Panmunjom and adjourned at 11:45 a.m., said the Defense Ministry official, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. He declined to discuss the mood of the meeting.
He said South Korea demanded an apology for the Cheonan sinking, which Seoul has attributed to a North Korean torpedo attack. The sinking, which occurred along the two Koreas’ disputed western sea border, killed 46 South Korean sailors.
The North has denied any involvement in the Cheonan sinking and on Thursday proposed that South Korea accept a team of investigators from the North. The South refused the request, the defense official said.
A statement by the United Nations Security Council in July expressed “deep concern” over the Cheonan sinking, but did not find North Korea culpable. The North Korean ambassador to the United Nations told reporters at the time that the finding was “a great diplomatic victory.”
Lee Sung-yoon, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, said North Korea “has closed the chapter on the Cheonan,” citing the United Nations statement. “They’re saying, ‘Let’s move on,’ ” he said.
The renewal of working-level military talks was proposed this month by the North Koreans, apparently to focus on preventing naval clashes along the disputed sea border, known as the Northern Limit Line. The North has also been angered by airborne leaflets sent across the border by South Korean activists. The leaflets, which criticize and ridicule Kim Jong-il, call on North Koreans to rise up against his government.
Political analysts in Seoul were reluctant to connect the sudden resumption of military negotiations to what appeared to be the emergence of Kim Jong-un as the eventual successor to his father.
The North’s official Korean Central News Agency also on Thursday released a new list of the rosters of various party organizations, along with the appointments made at the Workers’ Party meeting this week in Pyongyang.
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