N.Korea fetes birthday of late Kim
N.Korea fetes birthday of late Kim
Jack Kim, Reuters/Seoul
Excitement and joy reigned in North Korea, official media reported, as the impoverished, secretive state celebrated the 93rd anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung, its founder and eternal president.
Pyongyang was pulling out all the festive stops for Kim's birthday, which it calls "the Day of the Sun".
Former Indonesian president Megawati Soekarnoputri was in the capital to attend the opening of the annual Kimilsungia festival, celebrating the flower named after the late "Great Leader".
Floral tributes were placed beneath Kim's statues across the country, North Korean media said.
Around the world, meanwhile, admirers from Kyrgyzstan to Mongolia and from Congo to Peru were reported to have met to praise the former guerrilla leader's exploits.
Kim died suddenly in 1994 at the age of 82, one month after meeting former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, who had gone to Pyongyang to help broker a deal to end the crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons ambitions.
Born in Pyongyang in 1912, Kim fought in the mountains of Manchuria against colonial Japan. After the Japanese defeat at the end of World War Two, the Soviet Union installed him to rule the northern half of the Korean peninsula.
His rule went unchallenged until his death, when his son Kim Jong-il inherited power as chairman of the powerful National Defense Commission. The junior Kim never took the title of president, in deference to his father.
A television documentary broadcast in North Korea on Friday showed previously unreleased footage of Kim Il-sung giving an impromptu rendition of a song that tells of yearning for one's mother.
"As I was leaving home/Mother stood weeping at the gate/Have a safe trip, she said/Her voice rings in my ears," Kim sings, swinging his fist in time to the music as solemn party officials look on.
The narrator in the documentary, showing Kim in his later years and carried on South Korea's Yonhap news agency Website, said the song was a Kim favorite from his days as an anti- Japanese guerrilla chief.
While North Koreans in their tens of thousands visited Pyongyang landmarks on Friday to pay respects to the dead leader, several million others were believed to be starving in different parts of the country, human rights activists said.
International aid agency Caritas issued an urgent appeal this week for U$$2.5 million in donations to provide food, medical supplies and help for farms in the North.
North Korea did not completely sidestep the problem it has in feeding its people.
It set an October deadline -- when the authorities will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the ruling Workers' Party -- "to bring new exaltation to all parts of the socialist economy, beginning in the agricultural front" so that the October festivities will take place "in joyous atmosphere".
"It was President Kim Il-sung's life-long dream to build the world's strongest nation," Seoul's Yonhap news agency quoted the Workers' Party daily Rodong Sinmun as saying in an editorial.