North Korean leader Kim Jong Un hailed the country’s recent nuclear test and satellite launch as he opened the Workers’ Party congress.
Advertisement
There was no live coverage on state television, which devoted its programming to archive material, films and patriotic concerts.
Pyongyang, the capital city of North Korea, spent weeks preparing for the 7 Workers’ Party Congress, the first of its kind in almost 36 years. More than 100 foreign journalists – brought in to give the event a global audience – were bused to the venue but were allowed to view it only from outside.
After leading foreign media on tours of beautified sites across the capital earlier in the week, authorities kept reporters hundreds of meters away from the April 25 House of Culture as the meeting got underway.
It’s unclear how long the current congress event will last, though the last one in 1980 took five days.
At the 7th congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has noted what he described as the country’s “unprecedented successes”.
North Korea announced that it had tested a nuclear weapon this year and sent a rocket into space. A dispatch from the state news agency on Friday said Mr. Kim’s guidance of the Workers’ Party had shown his “warm love for the people”.
Kim has aggressively pursued nuclear weapons and missile technology.
Giant neighbour China, the North’s lone major ally, backed the resolutions, growing frustrated over its nuclear tests. Delegates applaud at the event. However, military power remains a key strategic tool for North Korea to pressure other nations and to rally support for the leadership at home.
Chinese experts say China’s absence from the congress has highlighted the deteriorating relations between China and North Korea following China’s support of a United Nations sanction against North Korea in March.
“North Korea wants to maintain its independent stance”, Zheng Jiyong, director of the Center for Korean Studies at Fudan University told the newspaper.
North Korean soldiers cheers Kim Jong-un. Kim meets with nuclear scientists and technicians in this undated photo.
Pollack believes that it is likely that North Korea will engage in its fifth nuclear test around the same time the congress convenes, fulfilling a promise he made in March.
A total of 177 delegates from 118 countries including China and Russian Federation attended the sixth party congress decades earlier, South Korea’s unification ministry said.
“And the worldwide community is serious about holding North Korea to account for their destabilizing and provocative behavior”, he said.
Kim took over North Korea after his father Kim Jong-il died in December 2011.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Thursday said that it had no relevant information on whether Pyongyang had extended an invitation to Beijing to attend the congress. Beijing has previously emphasized that the North’s party congress is a “domestic political event”.
Today, the North Korean state still provides rations – one of the government minders, deployed to watch and control the invited foreign media, tells me the allowance is now 650 grams of maize, rice and meat a day, a higher quantity than some recent foreign newspaper reports suggest.
Advertisement
“Miraculous results were produced”, KCNA said, touting production in the industrial sector that achieved 144 percent of the target and electricity generation 110 percent, although the actual targets were not given.
