SEOUL – The star of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s younger sister has risen so fast and high on the country’s reigning firmament in 2020 that she appears as a replacement for big brother, if not his rival for power. .
At the age of 32, four years younger than Jong Un, Kim Yo Jong has made her presence known through shockingly harsh statements he should have endorsed, but she has clearly written and recommended.
Undoubtedly, her best-known – and most effective – blast was her June charge of North Korean defectors for firing South Korea balloons laden with pamphlets criticizing the North Korean regime.
They were “human scum barely worth their worth as humans,” “few wild animals betraying their own homeland,” she raged. It was’ time to hold their owners to account ‘and’ ask the South Korean authorities if they are willing to take care of the consequences of bad behavior from the junk-like mongrel dogs who had no qualms about vilifying us while she said the “nuclear issue” in the meanest way at the earliest possible moment. “
Kim Yo Jong’s colorful rhetoric – more extreme than anything her brother has publicly proclaimed since taking charge nine years ago after the death of their father, Kim Jong Il, hit a responsive agreement here. South Korea’s National Assembly, dominated by President Moon Jae-in’s ruling party, made it illegal this month to fire not only flyers, but candy bars and dollar bills and USB devices tracing the good life south. from the demilitarized zone to the hunger and poverty-stricken north.
Moon himself took a turnaround policy after North Korean soldiers on June 16, on behalf of Kim Yo Jong, through the military blew up the joint liaison office in the shuttered Kaesong Industrial Complex just north of the DMZ. The explosion, heard for miles around, showed that she meant it when she warned the South Koreans to “get ready” for the “closure” of the office “whose existence is only causing trouble” .
Kim Yo Jong’s harsh criticism was all the more disappointing for Moon, given that just 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 late President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea, he had called on both sides to “move forward step by step on the road to national reconciliation, peace and reunification”.
After Kim Yo Jong called his conciliatory words “ a series of shameless and cheeky words full of incoherence ” and “ shameless treachery, ” Moon left it to a spokesman to call her criticism “ a nonsensical act that fundamentally damages trust, ” supposedly constructed in his four encounters with Kim Jong Un.
The fact that Kim Yo Jong broke that trust so easily means she’s more than just a power behind the throne. As the widely recognized boss of the terrifying Organization and Guidance Department, a mysterious agency that keeps an eye on everything going on in the government, the ruling party, and the highest levels of the military, she has the authority to impose punishments. ranging from exile to small outposts in the countryside to incarceration and death.
Her exact title is the OGD’s first deputy director, said Lee Sung-yoon, a professor at Tuft University’s Fletcher School, “but her blue blood replaces formal titles.” Lee, who is writing a book about her, said, “She is the de facto No. 2 in the DPRK (North Korean) hierarchy and the only true confidant of significance to Kim Jong-un.”
As if that alone weren’t enough, she’s also believed to be the United Front Department’s first deputy director. The title, Lee said, may not seem omnipotent, but the meaning is clear: “By the authority granted by her brother Kim Jong-un, the party and the state, she will henceforth be South Korea, which she called an ‘enemy’. , to punish. . ”
Kim Yo Jong clearly could not have risen to such heights if she hadn’t been Kim Jong Il’s daughter, but she has shown remarkable charm, wit and strength by bypassing other family members.
Another brother, Kim Yong Chol, who is three or four years older than Kim Jong Un, would have been dismissed by their father as “too effeminate” to be a true heir to any position. Photographed several years ago attending Eric Clapton concerts in Singapore and London, he is known as an avid guitarist. He presumably slips away within the hermetically locked doors of one or more of the ruling family sites – no harm done and no threat.
And there was the eldest half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, born of Kim Jong Il’s first mistress, thrown out by their father as too much of a playboy to be his heir and demoted to exile in Macao. Kim Jong Un, who still considered him dangerous, had him literally ripped out by two young massage ladies in 2017 as he was about to fly back to Macao from the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur. 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 that killed him in minutes.
Would Kim Yo Jong – perhaps too smart for her own good – risk a similar fate? Despite her best efforts, she can’t help but worry that sooner or later the big brother will decide that he’s had enough of her and will isolate or even lose her, as he has done with other members of his own family.
Kim Jong Un “wouldn’t want the outside media to characterize him as potentially dead or dying and his sister as a possible replacement,” said Bruce Bennett, Korea expert at Rand. “That could undermine his position in North Korea.” Still, “she may have functioned well in North Korea,” dealing with internal affairs while her brother works to “reclaim the outside media attention for himself.”
So how does she get away with becoming a star power in the galaxy of North Korean leadership without getting into deep trouble with her brother so far?
If Jong Un isn’t thrilled to see Yo Jong speak as much as a strong force, he still needs her. At over 300 pounds on his 5-foot-7-inch frame, he’s battling covert conditions believed to range from diabetes to heart disease. There is even speculation that he may have contracted some COVID-19 – enough to keep him out of sight for quite long periods.
The little sister has also been out of the spotlight for weeks on end, adding to the impression of repression. She is becoming increasingly important and knows how to keep her head bowed. A sure way to disappear would be to undermine a paranoid character who can’t stand real competition, but isn’t always physically fit.
President Moon’s special adviser for 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 looked “humble,” Moon told the Daily Beast. “She was well mannered … She didn’t speak much.”
Never mind that her position on her brother’s side would seem positive evidence of her upward trajectory in the hierarchy. Moon is a strong believer in accommodation in the North and does not agree that her attendance at such important gatherings is evidence of her dramatic rise.
“In North Korea, there is only one leader,” said Moon, a retired professor who is courting influential Americans and holding conferences seeking support for President Moon’s soft touch. “She was a driving force in improving relations between North and South Korea, but the term ‘second in power’ is a bias.”
Evans Revere, former top diplomat from the US embassy here, understands the game she’s playing. “Kim Jong-un doesn’t seem to see her as a threat,” he said. “She has made sure not to overshadow 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 her international debut at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in Korea in February 2018, attending the opening ceremony in the VIP box behind Vice President Mike Pence and then an invitation from her big brother from President Moon to gather.
The image at the Olympics was that of a polite, serious middleman, but at the beginning of this year, after becoming a deputy member of the ruling Workers’ Party’s politburo, of which her brother is of course chairman, she really started performing in public.
She dropped all semblance of courtesy and condemned the Moon government in Seoul for disapproving North Korean missile launches, saying that “such a gangster-like claim can never be expected from people of normal thinking.” No, she made sure not to mention Moon by name, but said the Blue House, the presidential residence and office complex, was behaving in a way that was “utterly silly.” The response of Moon’s inner circle, she teased, was like ‘a child afraid of fire’.
She recently showed her public face again, saying she ‘would never forget’ how South Korea’s Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha had said North Korea’s claims that there were no cases of COVID-19 were ‘hard to believe’. Kang, she warned gravely, “may have to pay dearly” for uttering such words.
Kim Yo Jong’s greatest success, however, was that Moon and the majority of his party’s National Assembly stopped the balloonists despite criticism from both political enemies here and human rights activists abroad, even though Moon’s popularity fell below 40 percent.
Secretary of State Kang, in an interview with CNN, defended the anti-balloon law as justified in a “very militarily tense area where everything can go wrong and lead to even greater clashes,” but John Sifton, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch said. New York called it “a great disservice” to the people of both Koreas. South Korea, he said, “appears to be more interested in keeping Kim Jong Un happy than letting its own citizens exercise their basic rights on behalf of their northern neighbors.”
The real test of Kim Yo Jong’s influence can come in dealing with the incoming Biden government. She once “rejected the likelihood or need for further US-North Korean dialogue,” recalls Bruce Klingner, Asia expert at the Heritage Foundation, but “left the door open when Washington capitulated to Pyongyang’s demands. “
Formal titles aside, she is “probably the second most powerful person in North Korea” – the one her brother “trusts most,” Klingner said. Whether she “would become leader if her brother died suddenly remains unknown, but that’s certainly a much stronger possibility than just a few years ago.”