Pyongyang // North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un cemented control over his ruling Workers’ Party on Monday with a new role seen as a coronation for the young leader.
Thousands of delegates, many in uniform, clapped and cheered enthusiastically as the country’s official head of state, Kim Yong-nam, proclaimed him chairman at the first top-level meeting of the party for 36 years.
For the first time since they arrived last week, foreign journalists were allowed a rare glimpse inside the delegate hall, which was festooned in red and gold banners carrying the party’s logo.
However, a BBC correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes fell foul of the authorities on Monday and was expelled from the country after an eight-hour interrogation.
The congress, which opened on Friday, has given 33-year-old Mr Kim a podium to secure his status as supreme leader and legitimate inheritor of the one-party state founded by his grandfather.
“Kim’s new position makes it very clear that the whole party meeting is only aimed at solidifying his legitimacy as the new leader,” Koh Young-hwan, a former North Korean diplomat who defected to the South in 1991, said from Seoul.
Mr Koh, who is now vice head of the South’s state-run Institute for National Security Strategy, said the rarity of the party congress conferred real authority on the new role.
“All past leaders of the party were named at a party congress ... so this was a perfect coronation.”
Pyongyang spent weeks preparing for the congress, with work crews beautifying the city as it readied for thousands of delegates.
The regime also allowed in dozens of foreign reporters, although it has tightly controlled their movements.
North Korea on Monday expelled three BBC journalists it had detained days earlier for allegedly “insulting the dignity” of the authoritarian country, sending them off on a flight to Beijing.
Correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes and his team had been scheduled to leave Friday after accompanying a group of Nobel laureates on a North Korea trip. Instead, the journalists were stopped at the Pyongyang airport, detained and questioned.
O Ryong-il, secretary-general of the North’s National Peace Committee, said Wingfield-Hayes’ news coverage distorted facts and “spoke ill of the system and the leadership of the country.” He said Wingfield-Hayes wrote an apology, was being expelled Monday and would never be admitted into the country again.
The BBC said Wingfield-Hayes’ producer Maria Byrne and cameraman Matthew Goddard were also detained and expelled.
As well as a chance to confirm Mr Kim as the heir to his father and grandfather, the congress has also been a chance for him to confirm his legacy “byungjin” doctrine of twin economic and nuclear development.
North Korea has carried out two of its four nuclear tests under Mr Kim’s leadership, most recently in January when it claimed to have tried out a powerful hydrogen bomb – a claim experts have disputed.
There has been growing concern that Pyongyang may be on the verge of conducting a fifth test, with satellite imagery showing activity at the North’s Punggye-ri nuclear test site.
Delegates to what is technically North Korea’s top decision-making body on Sunday adopted his motion to “boost self-defensive nuclear force, both in quality and quantity”.
The meeting also enshrined a policy of not using nuclear weapons unless the country’s sovereignty is threatened by another nuclear power, and of working towards the reunification of the divided Korean peninsula.
“But if the South Korean authorities opt for a war... we will turn out in the just war to mercilessly wipe out the anti-reunification forces,” said a document published by the North’s official KCNA news agency.
* Agence France-Presse and Associated Press
