Kim vents stage-managed anger at delays to modernisation efforts
NORTH KOREA has shown Kim Jongun berating officials in public over delays to key infrastructure projects.
In what has been interpreted as a signal to the outside world that he is serious about accelerating the country’s modernisation programme after his meeting with Donald Trump, the US president, in Singapore last month, Kim has been shown on state media giving “on-the-spot guidance” to attentive officials at half finished power plants, holiday camps and factories.
In a moment of rare publicity, North Korea’s official news agency KCNA reported that Kim was “so appalled as to be left speechless” at delays to the Orangchon power station, which is only 70 per cent complete despite being planned in the Eighties.
After his meeting with Mr Trump and overtures to neighbours about security on the Korean peninsula, analysts said Kim was attempting to show strong leadership to audiences at home and abroad. “To the people, he is projecting an image as a leader caring for their livelihood,” said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies. “To the outside world, he is sending a signal that he is serious in his promise to denuclearise.”
Criticism of officials is not unknown on his field guidance trips, but the terms and scale of yesterday’s denunciations were unusual. Since taking power when his dictator father Kim Jong-il died in 2011, Kim, 34, has promised to boost living standards and sought to project an image of youth and modernity while pushing to build North Korea’s nuclear capability.
The carefully choreographed state coverage came as North Korea dismissed reports of a covert uranium enrichment facility on the outskirts of Pyongyang as a “deliberate provocation” designed to derail efforts to cool regional tensions after The Diplomat magazine published satellite photos of a facility that a US government source confirmed was “the covert enrichment site referred to as Kangson”.
The allegations come at a critical time, as the attempts at denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula had been strongly promoted at the US and North Korea summit.
Pyongyang’s denials coincide with a report in a Japanese newspaper that hinted at growing disquiet in Washington at Pyongyang’s commitment to abolishing its nuclear weapons.