Tokyo, 9 september, /AJMEDIA/
JUST IN: North Korea staged a military parade in Pyongyang early Thursday to celebrate the 73rd anniversary of the country’s founding, state-run media reported.
The military parade was North Korea’s first since January this year, when the nation held the first congress of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea in nearly five years.
SEOUL/BEIJING – North Korea appears to have staged a military parade in Pyongyang to celebrate the 73rd anniversary of its founding on Thursday, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported, citing a military source.
The development comes at a time when North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been struggling to cope with the nation’s worst food crisis in more than a decade.
“There have been signs that the North carried out a military parade in Pyongyang after midnight. The (South Korean) military is analyzing those signs,” a military source was quoted as saying by Yonhap.
Details were not immediately known, including whether Kim Jong Un attended the event or what kinds of weapons were displayed, the news agency added.
If confirmed, it would become the first North Korean military parade since January this year, when the country held the first congress of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea in nearly five years.
The holding of the Thursday parade may have also stemmed from last month’s South Korea-U.S. joint military exercises that prompted the North to warn of a “serious security crisis.”
Pyongyang has long lambasted military drills between Seoul and Washington as rehearsals for war.
North Korea, meanwhile, said earlier this year in a report to the United Nations that it has suffered from its worst food crisis in over 10 years, with fears mounting that the country’s citizens have encountered difficulties in obtaining daily essentials.
Kim also said in June that the food situation in North Korea was “getting tense” as its agricultural sector was devastated by powerful typhoons and flooding in 2020.
The nuclear-armed nation appears not to have imported food products recently from China, which is known as its closest and most influential ally in economic terms, as it has blocked the border with the neighbor amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Pyongyang claims no infection cases have been found in the country, but it has cut off land traffic to and from China and Russia since early last year to prevent the intrusion of the virus, first detected in China’s central city of Wuhan in late 2019.
North Korea was established on Sept. 9, 1948, backed by the Soviet Union, Russia’s predecessor state.