North Korean Leader Marries

Korean Central News Agency, via Reuters A woman seen with Kim Jong-un at recent events in Pyongyang was identified as his wife, Ri Sol-ju. 

By CHOE SANG-HUN 

The New York Times

Published: July 25, 2012 

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea’s state-run news media on Wednesday ended weeks of speculation about the identity of the poised young woman seen with the country’s young leader, Kim Jong-un, at various recent public events, announcing that she is his wife.

The North’s Central TV showed Mr. Kim attending a ceremony honoring the completion of an amusement park in the capital, Pyongyang, with the woman, and identified her as “Comrade Ri Sol-ju, wife of Marshal Kim Jong-un,” South Korean officials said.

A North Korean state-run radio station also identified the woman as Mr. Kim’s wife. There were no official accounts, however, of when the marriage took place.

The images were a major shift for North Korea. During the rule of Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, most ordinary North Koreans had never seen their first lady on television; many defectors in that era did not know her name or those of any of the leader’s children Kim Jong-un himself was widely seen for the first time only in 2010, when he was formally introduced as successor to the leadership.

In recent weeks, North Korean media have shown the woman, stylishly dressed and stately in manner, accompanying Mr. Kim to several state functions. She smiled warmly at people cheering at Mr. Kim and looked at ease while she talked to old generals and foreign dignitaries based in Pyongyang.

The couple attended a July 6 concert that featured Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters. They later visited a kindergarten together, and paid respects at the Kumsusan mausoleum where Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, and his grandfather Kim Il-sung, the North Korean founding president, lie in state.

The young leader, still believed to be in his late 20s, took over top leadership in North Korea after his father’s death in December.

He has recently begun projecting himself as self-confident enough to attempt a different ruling style from that of the dour and reclusive Kim Jong-il. North Korean television showed him raising a thumb at a girl group singing the theme song of the iconic American movie “Rocky” during the concert that featured Mickey Mouse.

The first family was not always so opaque, but a veil of privacy descended after Kim Jong-il was designated as his father’s successor in the mid-1970s. Before that, for instance, state media carried reports when Kim Il-sung and his wife, Kim Song-ae, met Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator, and King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia. Kim Song-ae was Kim Jong-il’s stepmother.

But after Kim Jong-il was advanced, his stepmother disappeared from the state media, which instead began building a personality cult around his own mother, Kim Jong-suk. She died in 1949, reportedly during a childbirth.

Kim Jong-il himself had at least three known wives, but none was ever identified as the first lady. After Kim Jong-un’s ascension to top leadership, however, the regime began releasing special documentaries about his mother, Ko Young-hee, eulogizing her as “mother” of all North Koreans and showing her accompanying Kim Jong-il on various visits to farms and military units. Ms. Ko, once a prima donna with Pyongyang’s premier opera company, died in 2004, reportedly of breast cancer.

By revealing Kim Jong-un’s marital status, North Korean media were broadening his appeal and emphasizing his maturity, analysts said.

“Kim Jong-un showing up in public with his wife will appeal well to young North Koreans yearning for change, especially women, who are living in a deeply male-dominated society,” said Cheong Seong-chang, a North Korea analyst at Sejong Institute in South Korea and an expert on the Kim family. He said the reports also worked to mitigate the leader’s youth and relative inexperience.

Mr. Cheong offered a number of details, without revealing his sources. He said he believed that the marriage occurred in 2009 and that the couple may have had a child the following year. He said that Ms. Ri, 27, graduated from the North’s elite Kim Il-sung University.

North Korean television footage available on YouTube showed a woman identified as Ri Sol-ju singing a song with the North’s Unhasu Orchestra.