North Korean Supreme Leader’s Secret Wedding

North Korea’s Supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, is married. The announcement came on Wednesday on official media there. His bride is a young woman named Ri Sol-ju. Nothing is known about her outside North Korea’s inner circle. The announcement prompted these thoughts from the World’s news editor, Chris Woolf.

I love a good wedding.

Sadly I didn’t get an invite to the wedding of North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un.

But then, almost nobody did.

The Supreme Leader was apparently married recently in a stealth ceremony.

There was no fanfare from the big day, just a short news note on North Korean TV bulletin on Wednesday.

“While a song of acclamation was echoing throughout the place, the supreme leader of our party and people, Dear Marshal Kim Jong-Un, entered the completion ceremony for the Nungna People’s Pleasure Ground with his wife, comrade Ri Sol Ju”.

So that’s it. No wedding pics, just a note on the opening of an amusement park that the Supreme Leader was accompanied by his wife.

The lucky bride is a smartly-dressed, short-haired young woman.

She had recently been photographed with Kim Jong-Un at public engagements, but North Korean media hadn’t identified her until now.

Rumors swirled after she was seen with Kim two weeks ago, but North Korea is so secretive, nobody knew if she was wife, lover, or sister.

Now the pundits who watch North Korea are reading all kinds of signals into Wednesday’s announcement; that perhaps Kim is adopting a much more open and relaxed approach than his father, who passed away last December.

Or that he’s empowering women, or signalling change.

Me, I think he’s just being a normal guy getting out from under his father’s shadow.

For North Korea, maybe that is change.