ALONE: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s younger sister’s star has risen so fast and high in the country’s ruling firmament in 2020 to make her appear as a replacement for her older brother, if not her rival for power.
At 32, four years younger than Jong Un, Kim Yo Jong has made her presence known through some shockingly harsh statements he should have passed, but she clearly wrote and recommended.
Undoubtedly, his most famous — and most effective — explosion was his June denunciation of North Korean deserters for firing South Korean balloons laden with pamphlets criticizing the North Korean regime.
It was a “human scum that is hardly worth its value as human beings,” “little less than wild animals that betrayed their own homeland,” he said. It was “time to hold their owners accountable” and ask South Korean authorities (sic) if they are prepared to take care of the consequences of the misconduct of litter-like crossbreed dogs who took no scruples to defame – us while accusing the “nuclear issue” in the most evil way at the most untimely moment. “
Kim Yo Jong’s colorful rhetoric — more extreme than anything her brother has publicly published since taking the reins after the death of her father, Kim Jong Il, nine years ago — touched a sensitive chord here. South Korea’s national assembly, dominated by President Moon Jae-in’s ruling party, this month banned the launch not only of leaflets, but also of candy bars, dollar bills and USB devices that bore the mark of goodwill. life in the south of the demilitarized zone the north affected by hunger and poverty.
Moon himself adopted a policy of change of face after North Korean soldiers on June 16, at the urging of Kim Yo Jong, through the army, blew up the joint liaison office at the Kaesong Industrial Complex. , closed north of the DMZ. The blast, which was heard for many miles, proved he had meant it when he warned South Koreans to “prepare” for the “closure” of the “office” whose existence only poses problems. “.
Kim Yo Jong’s harsh criticism was even more disappointing for Moon, as 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 the late South Korean President Kim Dae Jung had called on both sides “to move forward, step by step, on the path of national reconciliation, peace and reunification.”
After Kim Yo Jong called his conciliatory words “a chain of brazen and impudent words full of inconsistency” and “blatant treachery,” Moon let a spokesman call his criticism “an insensitive act that fundamentally damages trust.” “allegedly accumulated in his four meetings with Kim Jong Un.
The fact that Kim Yo Jong so easily violated that trust means he is more than a power behind the throne. As a widely recognized head of the formidable Department of Organization and Guidance, a mysterious agency that monitors everything that happens in government, the ruling party and the highest levels of the army, has the authority to demand sanctions ranging from exile to minor charges. in the field to prison and death.
His exact title is first OGD deputy director, said Lee Sung-yoon, a professor at Tuft University’s Fletcher School, “but his blue blood replaces formal titles.” Lee, who is writing a book about her, said that “she is the de facto number 2 in the DPRK (North Korea) hierarchy and the only true confidant of consequences for Kim Jong Un.”
As if that wasn’t enough, she is also believed to be the first deputy director of the United Front Department. The title, Lee said, may not seem entirely powerful, but the meaning is clear: “By the authority granted by his brother Kim Jong Un, the party and the state will punish South Korea from now on. who designated enemy “.”
Kim Yo Jong obviously would not have been able to rise to such a height if she had not been the daughter of Kim Jong Il, but she has shown remarkable charm, wit, and strength in overlooking family members.
Another brother, Kim Yong Chol, who is three or four years older than Kim Jong Un, is said to have ruled out his father being “too effeminate” to be a suitable heir to any office. Photographed a few years ago attending Eric Clapton’s concerts in Singapore and London, he is known to be an avid guitarist himself. Inside the tightly closed doors of one or more of the compounds of the ruling family, he is allegedly escaping, unharmed or threatened.
And there was the older half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, born of Kim Jong Il’s first lover, discarded by his father for being a playboy for being his heir and relegated to exile in Macau. Still seeing him as dangerous, Kim Jong Un in 2017 had him eliminated, literally, by two young masseurs when he was about to return to Macau from the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur. The North Korean saboteurs had paid the poor women, from Indonesia and Vietnam, to smear a liquid on his face that turned out to be a VX chemical agent that killed him in a matter of minutes.
Can Kim Yo Jong, possibly too cunning for his own good, risk a similar fate? Despite his best efforts, he cannot help but arouse concern that sooner or later the older brother will decide that he has had enough and will isolate him or even get rid of her, as he has done with other members. of his own family.
Kim Jong Un “would not like the outside media to characterize him as potentially dead or dying and his sister as a possible replacement,” said Bruce Bennett, an expert on Rand Korea. “This could undermine its position in North Korea.” Still, “he may have worked hard in North Korea,” dealing with internal affairs while his brother works to “regain the focus of external media on his own.”
So how does he manage to get out with the stellar power in the galaxy of North Korean leadership without, so far, having deep issues with his brother?
If Jong Un isn’t so happy to see Yo Jong talk about it as much as a strong force, he still needs it. Packing more than 300 pounds in its 5-foot, 7-inch frame, it fights undisclosed diseases that are believed to range from diabetes to heart disease. It is even speculated that he may have contracted, who knows, a touch of COVID-19, enough to keep him out of sight for quite long periods.
The little sister has also been out of focus for weeks at a time, contributing to the impression of repression. Increasing in importance, he knows how to keep his head down. One surefire way to disappear would be to undermine a paranoid character who can’t stand real competition, but who isn’t always physically up to the task.
President Moon’s special adviser on foreign affairs, Moon Chung-in, had the rare opportunity to see Kim Yo Jong in person at two summits with her brother in Pyongyang. She was “humble-looking,” Moon told the Daily Beast. “She was well-mannered … She didn’t talk much.”
It doesn’t matter that his position alongside his brother seems like a positive test of his upward trajectory in the hierarchy. A longtime advocate of accommodation with the north, Moon disagrees that her presence at such vital meetings demonstrates her dramatic rise.
“There is only one leader in North Korea,” said Moon, a retired professor who wooed influential Americans and organizes conferences in search of support for President Moon’s soft-line approach. “It was an engine to improve relations between North Korea and South Korea, but the term ‘second in power’ is a distortion.”
Evans Revere, a former U.S. embassy graduate here, understands the game he’s playing. “Obviously, Kim Jong Un doesn’t see her as a threat,” he said. “He has been careful not to obscure KJU and has cultivated the image of someone who is clearly subordinate to him.”
Yo Jong must have had a strong background role for some time before making his international debut at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in Korea in February 2018, watching the opening ceremony at the VIP box behind Vice President Mike Pence and then received an invitation from his older brother of President Moon to meet.
The image during the Olympics was that of a polite and serious intermediary, but earlier this year, after she was made an alternate member of the politburo of the ruling Labor Party, of which her brother is, of course, president. , started really acting in public.
Abandoning all pretensions of courtesy, he denounced the Moon government in Seoul for hoaxing the hoop on North Korean missile launches, saying “a gangster-like statement can never be expected from those who have a normal way of thinking “. No, he was careful not to refer to Moon by his name, but he said the Blue House, the presidential residence and office complex, behaved in a “perfectly silly” way. Moon’s inner circle response, he mocked, was like “a child who fears fire.”
More recently, he again showed his public face, saying he would “never forget” how South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha had said North Korea’s claims about any COVID- case. 19 were “hard to believe.” Kang, he brutally warned, “might have to pay dearly” for uttering those words.
Kim Yo Jong’s biggest success, however, was getting Moon and most of his party’s national assembly to shut down globalists in the face of criticism from political enemies here and human rights activists abroad. and that Moon’s popularity rating would drop by 40 percent.
Foreign Minister Kang, in a CNN interview, defended the anti-balloon law as justified in a “very militarily tense area where anything can go wrong, which can lead to even bigger clashes,” but John Sifton, defending Asian director of Human Rights Watch in New York, called it “a great bad service” for the people of the two Koreas. South Korea, he said, “seems more interested in keeping Kim Jong Un happy than letting his own citizens exercise their basic rights on behalf of their northern neighbors.”
The real proof of Kim Yo Jong’s influence may come down to the incoming Biden administration. He once “dismissed the likelihood or need for a new US-North Korea dialogue,” recalled Bruce Klingner, an Asian expert at the Heritage Foundation, but left the door open if Washington capitulated to the demands. of Pyongyang “.
Aside from formal titles, he is “probably the second most powerful person in North Korea,” the one his brother “trusts the most,” Klingner said. It is unknown if “he will become a leader if his brother dies suddenly,” but it is certainly a much stronger possibility than just a few years ago. “