SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea will hold its biggest political meeting in 30 years next week, state media said Tuesday, as observers watch for signs that the secretive regime’s aging leader will appoint his son to succeed him.
Now 68, and reportedly in poor health two years after suffering a stroke, Kim Jong Il is believed to be setting in motion a plan to tap a son to take the Kim dynasty into a third generation by appointing his heir to top party posts at the Workers’ Party convention.
Delegates will meet Sept. 28 to elect new party leaders, the official Korean Central News Agency said in a dispatch from Pyongyang.
The report did not explain why the meeting, initially set for “early September,” had been postponed. North Korea has been struggling to cope with devastating flooding and a typhoon that killed dozens of people and destroyed roads, railways and homes earlier this month, according to state media.
Delegates across the country were appointed “against the background of a high-pitched drive for effecting a new great revolutionary surge now under way on all fronts for building a thriving nation with the historic conference,” the KCNA report said.
State media have been building up the rhetoric ahead of the conference, the first major Workers’ Party gathering since the landmark 1980 congress where Kim Jong Il, then 38, made his political debut, in an appearance seen as confirmation that he would eventually succeed his father, North Korea founder Kim Il Sung.
Kim Jong Il took over in 1994 when his father died of heart failure in what was communism’s first hereditary transfer of power.
Now, he seems to prepping his son for a similar transition. Little is known about the son widely believed to be his father’s favourite. Kim Jong Un, said to be in his late 20s and schooled in Switzerland, has never been mentioned in state media, and there are no confirmed photos of him as an adult.
South Korean intelligence officers believe Pyongyang has launched a propaganda campaign promoting the son, including songs and poems praising the junior Kim. North Korean soldiers and workers reportedly pledged allegiance to the son on his birthday in January.
North Korea’s state propaganda machine has also been churning out commentaries calling for loyalty to the Kim family, an apparent effort to set to the stage for a smooth power transition.
Delegates are expected to elect new party leaders to fill spots left vacant for years. It’s not known what party position Kim Jong Un might be granted in what would be his first official job.
Keen attention is also focused on Kim Jong Il’s only sister, Kim Kyong Hui, who in the past two years has been a frequent companion to the leader on field trips to army bases and factories. She currently serves as the political party’s department chief for light industry.
Her husband, Jang Song Thaek, has also been rising in stature. Jang was promoted in June to a vice chairman of the powerful National Defence Commission, making him the No. 2 official to Kim Jong Il on the regime’s top state organ.
The conference is being held amid preparations for the milestone 65th anniversary of the founding of the Workers’ Party on Oct. 10, improving relations with Seoul, and attempts by diplomats from neighbouring nations to revive dormant six-nation disarmament negotiations on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
North Korea walked away from the talks last year in protest over U.N. Security Council condemnation for launching a long-range rocket, widely seen as a test of its missile technology. Pyongyang followed that act of defiance by testing a nuclear bomb weeks later.
In March, a South Korean warship went down in the waters near the Koreas’ western maritime border, and an international team of investigators blamed a North Korean torpedo for ripping apart the Cheonan and killing 46 sailors.
But after months of tensions, there have been signs of a thaw in relations recently, with Seoul announcing a shipment of emergency flooding aid to North Korea and the two Koreas agreeing to hold military talks.
———
Associated Press writer Jean H. Lee contributed to this report.