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Kim Yo Jong: North Korea’s most powerful woman and now ‘de facto second-in-command’
Born in 1988, according to the Unification ministry, Yo Jong is one of three children born to Kim’s predecessor Kim Jong Il.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has made his younger sister Kim Yo Jong as “de facto second-in-command”, according to neighbouring South Korea’s intelligence agency.
The sleuths of the agency said that Kim has delegated responsibility for relations with Seoul and Washington to his sister. The reports emerging from Pyongyang say that the move is directed towards reducing strain on Kim and help him avoid any blame in case of failures.
Ha Tae-keung, an Opposition party lawmaker on parliament’s intelligence committee, told reporters that Kim was helping to run the regime with mandated authority from her brother.
Ha said that Kim still holds the absolute power.
Kim Yo Jong won fame ahead of her brother’s 2019 summit with US President Donald Trump in Vietnam, when her efforts to ensure everything went well included holding an ashtray for the North Korean leader at a train station on his journey.
More authority on economic and military policy has also been delegated to several other senior officials, although at a lower level, South Korean officials said.
Kim Yo Jong’s rising power
Her prominence in the campaign against South Korea this year highlighted a substantive policy role that goes beyond being merely Kim’s assistant, analysts say.
She issued her first public statements to spray criticism at the neighbouring nation, and the North’s state media portrayed her as playing a decision-making role.
In July, she offered personal views on diplomacy with the United States in an unusual statement in state media, saying her brother had given her special permission to watch recordings of that country’s Independence Day celebrations.
Kim’s most trusted advisor
The first statement issued in Kim Yo Jong’s name came only in March this year, but in weeks and months after that, she has been at the forefront of Pyongyang’s denunciations of defectors in the South sending leaflets across the border.
Officially, she is only an alternate member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee, but Kim Yo Jong is one of her brother’s most trusted advisors and among the most powerful women in the isolated regime.
Born in 1988, according to the Unification ministry, Yo Jong is one of three children born to Kim’s predecessor Kim Jong Il and his third known partner, former dancer Ko Yong Hui.
She was educated in Switzerland alongside her brother and rose rapidly up the ranks once he inherited power after their father’s death in 2011.
Her existence was barely known to the wider world until his funeral, when she was seen standing right behind Kim Jong Un on state television, looking tearful and ashen-faced.
But more recently she has seemed to be constantly at her brother’s side.
