A not so rare image anymore. On the night of Wednesday February 8 to Thursday February 9, North Korea organized a new military parade, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the North Korean army. A far cry from nuclear missiles and soldiers, it was a 10-year-old girl who captured much of the observers’ attention. Alongside the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, the girl inspected a guard of honor at the parade.
At the end of 2022, when the test firing of North Korea’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile, Kim Jong Un appeared with his daughter “beloved”, the same one that was seen at the start of 2023. According to the intelligence agency and analysts in Seoul, it is Ju Ae, her second child. This appearance, the latest, has led some international analysts to say that she would have been designated heiress of the regime. It must be said that, for years, vagueness has long reigned around the children of the North Korean leader. According to the South Korean intelligence agency, he has three children with his wife, aged 6 to 13.
Is she the heiress of Kim Jong Un? In any case, this is what several experts believe. North Korea has begun to build a “” around Ju Ae, notes Cheong Seong-chang, a researcher at the Sejong Institute in South Korea. That “reports that she has been designated as successor de factoalthough it does not yet hold official ‘successor’ status”, he believes. In the footage released by state media, Ju Ae is placed in the middle, next to her father and surrounded by the country’s high-ranking officers. “It suggests that Kim Ju Ae will become the supreme commander of the army in the future”adds the expert.