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Post by Admin on Aug 27, 2020 18:57:43 GMT
Kim Jong Un’s younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, has vanished from public view in what could be another sign that she’s taken more control in the regime, an expert said. The North Korean despot’s sister, who not been spotted since July 27, may be lying low to offset speculation that he ceded some of his authority to her, the South Korean outlet Chosun Ilbo reported. Her absence comes as South Korean spies revealed that she now serves as his “de facto second-in-command,” though she has not been designated his successor. “In the past, anyone was deprived of their position the moment they were described as the No. 2 person in the North,” Korea University Professor Nam Sung-wook told the newspaper. “There must be a semblance of checks and balances, although Kim Yo Jong is a family member.” She was last seen when she stood beside the Hermit Kingdom honcho last month as he gave commemorative pistols to military leaders on the 67th anniversary of the Korean War armistice. But she didn’t appear in state-sanctioned photos released Tuesday of Kim at a high-level meeting to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic and prepare for a typhoon.
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Post by Admin on Dec 29, 2020 7:13:16 GMT
The star of the younger sister of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un has risen so fast and high in the country’s ruling firmament in 2020 as to make her appear as a stand-in for big brother if not his rival for power. At 32, four years younger than Jong Un, Kim Yo Jong has made her presence known through shockingly tough statements that he had to have endorsed but she clearly wrote and recommended. Undoubtedly her most famous—and most effective—blast was her denunciation in June of North Korean defectors for firing off balloons from South Korea laden with leaflets criticizing the North Korean regime. They were “human scum hardly worth their value as human beings,” “little short of wild animals who betrayed their own homeland,” she raged. It was “time to bring their owners to account” and ask “south (sic) Korean authorities if they are ready to take care of the consequences of evil conduct by the rubbish-like mongrel dogs who took no scruple to slander us while faulting the ‘nuclear issue’ in the meanest way at the most untimely time.” Kim Yo Jong’s colorful rhetoric—more extreme than anything her brother has put out publicly since taking the reins after the death of their father, Kim Jong Il, nine years ago—struck a responsive chord here. South Korea’s national assembly, dominated by the ruling party of President Moon Jae-in, this month made it illegal to fire off not only leaflets but also candy bars and dollar bills and USB devices bringing traces of the good life south of the demilitarized zone to the hunger- and poverty-stricken North. Moon himself adopted a turn-the-other-cheek policy after North Korean soldiers on June 16, at the behest of Kim Yo Jong, via the army, blew up the joint liaison office in the shuttered Kaesong Industrial Complex just north of the DMZ. The blast, heard for miles around, showed she had meant it when she warned South Koreans to “get themselves ready” for “shutdown” of the office “whose existence only adds to trouble.” Kim Yo Jong’s harsh criticism was all the more disappointing for Moon considering that only the day before the explosion, on the 20th anniversary of the signing of a joint North-South agreement in Pyongyang between Kim Jong Il and South Korea’s late President Kim Dae Jung, he had called on both sides “to move forward, one step at a time, down the road to national reconciliation, peace, and reunification.”
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Post by Admin on Jan 14, 2021 4:04:55 GMT
Kim Yo Jong, the kid sister of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un, is riding high again after issuing one of her most bizarre attacks on South Korea at the culmination of Pyongyang’s big Workers’ Party jamboree. Just as eyebrows were raised when her name was excluded from the new politburo of the ruling Workers’ Party, Yo Jong came forcefully to the fore once again. She accompanied her brother on a visit to the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun to pay respects before the glass-encased bodies of their grandfather, Kim Il Sung, who founded the ruling regime, and their father, Kim Jong Il. After a salute to the dynasty, it was Yo Jong who unleashed the fieriest rhetoric of a week-long ruling party congress, which was last held in 2016. Kim Yo Jong took verbal potshots at the South’s military chieftains, claiming they had utterly failed to predict how the congress would unfold north of the border. “What is weird,” said Yo Jong, “is that the joint chiefs of staff of South Korea made a senseless statement that they [spotted] the north opening a military parade at midnight on Jan. 10.” According to the state media, Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, Yo Jong found it hysterical that these South Korean generals thought they could tell what was going on thanks to their aerial surveillance.
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