Kim Jong Un’s Sister Gets Post At Top North Korean Body
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s influential sister has been appointed to the country’s top government body, the official KCNA press agency reported Thursday.
Kim Yo Jong, a key adviser to her brother, was promoted to an edge on the State Affairs Commission, amid a raft of changes approved by the Supreme People’s Assembly, the rubber-stamp parliament.
No fewer than nine members of the commission were dismissed, including one among its vice-presidents, Pak Pong Ju, and diplomat Choe Son Hui, a rare senior woman within the North’s hierarchy who has played a key role in negotiations with the us .
The official Rodong Sinmun newspaper carried portraits of the eight new appointees on Thursday, Kim Yo Jong standing out among them both for her youth and because the only woman.
She has often been seen in close proximity to her brother — with whom she visited school in Switzerland — including at his summits with then-US president Donald Trump and therefore the South’s leader Moon Jae-in.
Her exact political role has long been the topic of speculation — as has the likelihood that she might at some point succeed her brother, a transition that might give the socially conservative North its first female leader.
She has sometimes made vitriolic denunciations of Washington or Seoul in statements carried by state media, particularly before the North berating a liaison office on its side of the border that the South had built and purchased .
Her relatively junior position as a vice department director of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers’ Party gave those declarations a component of ambiguity, and in some cases, she specifically said she was speaking during a personal capacity.Her official rank has risen and fallen over time, but her new SAC position is far and away the foremost senior post she has held.
