SEOUL, South Korea — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has made his first public appearance in five weeks, state media reported Tuesday, ending an absence that drove a frenzy of global speculation that something was amiss with the country’s most powerful person.
The sudden resumption of the “field guidance” tours that had been a regular part of Kim’s public persona before he stopped showing up in media reports for 40 days allowed the country’s massive propaganda apparatus to resume doing what it does best – glorify the third generation of the Kim family to rule – and will tamp down, at least for the moment, rumors of coups and serious health problems.
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Kim, shown in the North’s leading newspaper smiling and walking with a cane, toured the newly built Wisong Scientists Residential District and another new institute.
He “took necessary steps with loving care” and vowed to turn the area into a “world-class science city,” a dispatch early Tuesday from the official Korean Central News Agency said in typical fawning style. The North didn’t say when the visit happened, nor did it address the leader’s health.
Before Tuesday’s dispatch, Kim had last been seen in the media at a Sept. 3 concert.
Foreign media had no trouble filling the void that followed. From “Saturday Night Live” spoofs to the wild theories of journalists across the globe trying to parse his growing absence from the public eye, Kim captured nearly as many headlines as he did when he threatened to nuke his enemies last year.
This bewildering ability to command attention by doing nothing says a lot about the North’s propaganda focus on Kim as the center of everything. Remove for 40 days the sun around which that propaganda spins and the international media, both traditional and social, exploded with curiosity.
And while there was plenty of informed analysis from experts and frequent visitors to Pyongyang that said it probably wasn’t anything that serious, there seemed to be even more thinly sourced speculation.
Kim was, by turns, reported to be suffering from gout, from diabetes, from a brain hemorrhage, from a heart ailment, from a leg injury that required surgery from a French doctor, from mental illness or, according to a head-turning British report, from a cheese addiction. There were rumors of coups.
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