North Korea celebrates Kim Jong-il’s birthday

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un led an outdoor rally in sub-zero temperatures to mark his late father’s birthday in the town that is at the heart of the family cult.

The excitement was near fever-pitch when these North Korean officials visited Kim Jong-il's ‘birthplace’ on the 80th anniversary of his birth, in Baekdusan. Picture: AFP

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un led an outdoor rally in sub-zero temperatures to mark his late father’s birthday in the town that is at the heart of the family cult.

Senior military officers and civilian leaders, including Kim’s younger sister, Kim Yo-jong, gathered for the event in Samjiyon Wednesday, marking what would have been the 80th birthday of Kim Jong-il, who died in 2011.

Reports by state media said that the main speech was given by Ri Il-hwan, a member of the Politburo, and that Kim was present although he apparently did not give a speech.

“When the respected general secretary appeared, all the participants burst into stormy cheers [of] ‘hurrah!’ upon him who has put the might of socialist Korea, the highest patriotic heritage of the chairman, and its position on the highest level with his ceaseless revolutionary leadership,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said.

Samjiyon, near the northern border with China, is the closest large town to Mount Paektu, where according to North Korean accounts Kim Jong-il was born in 1942, the son of the country’s founding president, Kim Il-sung, who was then a partisan fighting the occupying Japanese.

Independent historians have found Soviet records that show that Kim Jong-il was born the previous year in Manchuria, but this has not prevented the official hagiographers creating a myth that associates the ruling family with a mountain that has long been sacred to Koreans.

Kim has put great emphasis on developing Samjiyon as a “socialist utopia” with new apartment blocks, hotels, a ski resort and modern commercial, cultural and medical facilities. Thousands of workers and students have been mobilised as “volunteers” to work on the construction.

“Samjiyon has turned into an example of a mountainous modern city under socialism and a standard of rural development thanks to the workers’ steadfast struggle despite the unfavourable northern environment,” he was quoted as saying on one a visit in November.

The Day of the Shining Star, as Kim Jong-il’s birthday is called, was marked with a firework display in the capital, Pyongyang, and by a concert in Samjiyon featuring a dramatic performance and a choral rendering of the song Oh Party, It’s Thanks to Your Care.

North Korea watchers noted the absence of the North’s top military official, Marshal Pak Jong-chon, who also missed a gathering of North Korea’s tame parliament. It will prompt speculation that he may have fallen victim to the rolling purges of senior figures that have marked Kim’s decade in power.

The Times