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The BBC reported that its correspondent, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, who had arrived with a delegation of Nobel laureates before the congress, was detained on Friday and questioned for eight hours before being made to sign a statement.
O Ryong Il, the secretary general of the North’s National Peace Committee, said that Mr. Wingfield-Hayes’s coverage had distorted facts and “spoke ill of the system and the leadership,” The Associated Press reported.
A producer, Maria Byrne, and a cameraman, Matthew Goddard, were also being expelled on Monday, the BBC said. They, along with Mr. Wingfield-Hayes, were stopped on Friday as they were trying to leave the country.
In one of his reports, Mr. Wingfield-Hayes said that his team was “in trouble” after shooting a segment in front of a statue of the North’s founding president, Kim Il-sung, in which he said something on camera that he said government minders deemed disrespectful. He said the officials demanded that the video be erased. Mr. Wingfield-Hayes did not elaborate on what he had said.
Mr. Wingfield-Hayes described North Korea in one report as “one of the most isolated, impoverished and repressive places on earth.” He later expressed frustration that North Koreans he wanted to interview ran away when he approached and that “everything we see looks like a setup.”
Before its four-day session ended on Monday, the congress bestowed Kim Jong-un with a new top title, chairman of the Workers’ Party, after he called for a more vigorous development of nuclear weapons and missiles, state-run news media reported. The announcement was made during the 10 minutes that a small group of foreign journalists was allowed, for the first time, to watch the meeting, The A.P. reported from Pyongyang, the North’s capital.
The congress also elevated two of Mr. Kim’s closest aides — the party secretary, Choe Ryong-hae, and Pak Pong-ju, the prime minister and chief economic official — to join the presidium of the party’s Politburo. Mr. Kim leads the presidium, which has two other members: Kim Yong-nam, the head of Parliament, and Hwang Pyong-so, the chief political officer of the military.
Mr. Kim, the third-generation leader in his family’s dynastic rule of North Korea, had been widely expected to use the congress to cement his grip on power and have his crucial policies, including the so-called byungjin policy of increasing a nuclear arsenal while rebuilding the economy, adopted as official party lines.
The party meeting took place shortly after the United Nations Security Council imposed a new round of tougher sanctions to punish the North for its recent nuclear and long-range rocket tests. But the decision adopted by the congress upheld Mr. Kim’s campaign to expand his country’s nuclear arsenal “both in quality and quantity” by producing more diverse and smaller nuclear warheads.
It also said the country should launch more satellites. The United Nations has condemned the North’s satellite program as a cover for developing an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Mr. Kim also said that his country proudly stuck fast to its “socialist path of our own choosing” by successfully repelling “the confusing winds of bourgeois liberalization, reform and openness from around us.”
In its decision, the congress also said that North Korea would act like a “responsible nuclear power,” would not share its nuclear knowledge abroad and would work for “the denuclearization of the world.” It said it would improve ties with other countries, including South Korea, if they respected the North.
But the North made no commitment to denuclearizing itself. Instead, it demanded that the United States prove that it is no longer hostile by stopping its annual joint military drills with South Korea, withdrawing its troops from the peninsula and signing a peace treaty.
South Korea dismissed the overture as propaganda, saying that dialogue was possible only when the North convinced the South that it was ready to give up its nuclear weapons.
Source: www.nytimes.com
Photo source: www.digi24.ro
