Kim Jong Un Rides Horse to Symbolic Peak
North Korean state media released several pictures of the ride. (Korean Central News Agency)
Kim Jong Un rode a horse on October 16 up the slopes of snowy Mount Paektu, North Korea’s highest mountain and a site of sacred significance for the country.
The ride, widely publicized in state media, is a symbolic gesture that Kim has been known to perform before significant announcements. The last occasion, in 2017, immediately preceded his New Year’s address in which he signaled a major thaw in relations with South Korea. During peace talks with the South last year, he unprecedentedly took South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, to the peak.
Mount Paektu is widely revered in the North as the birthplace of Kim Jong Il, the current Kim’s father, and across the peninsula as the birthplace of Dangun, the legendary founder of the first kingdom in Korea. Additionally, Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea, allegedly used the mountain as a hideout while fighting the Japanese in World War II. The Kim family has tied its own genealogy to the legends of Mount Paektu, with state media referring to its heritage as a “Mount Paektu bloodline.”
Kim took the trip in a spirit of reflection, according to North Korean state media. "Sitting on the [sic] horseback atop Mount Paektu, [he] recollected with deep emotion the road of arduous struggle he covered for the great cause of building the most powerful country, with faith and will as firm as [Mount] Paektu," reported Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). "Having witnessed the great moments of his thinking atop Mount Paektu, all the officials accompanying him were convinced with overflowing emotion and joy that there will be a great operation to strike the world with wonder again and make a step forward in the Korean revolution," it continued.
The circumstances under which Kim last went to Mount Paektu have since shifted dramatically. The wording of the KCNA report is especially significant considering the recent resumption of North Korean missile tests, which had been suspended for more than a year. Earlier this month, it test-fired a new type of submarine-launched ballistic missile. That move came immediately after America and North Korea agreed to resume disarmament talks, and represented a further escalation of already-simmering tensions on the peninsula.
Experts have guessed the details of the announcement Kim has planned. "This is a statement, symbolic of defiance," Joshua Pollack, a North Korea researcher at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said to the Washington Post. "The pursuit of sanctions relief is over. Nothing is made explicit here, but it starts to set new expectations about the coming course of policy for 2020."
Others think that the policy shift will explicitly involve the military. "North Korea in 2020 is either going to launch a rocket or announce that they have attained the ability to perform sub-critical nuclear tests," Michael Madden, a North Korea researcher for the Stimson Center, told Business Insider, adding that the trip could be a prelude to one of those moves. Whatever the case, frosty relations with the South and the United States seem likely to become even chillier. "North Korea has massively regressed in the past few months, and I have no idea why," Madden says.