PYONGYANG, North Korea (Reuters) — North Korea held a mass rally on Thursday (February 25) in Pyongyang, to affirm party loyalty ahead of a rare ruling party conference.
Video provided by North Korea’s official news agency KCNA, which Reuters cannot independently verify, showed thousands of people including senior officials gathering at Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang.
During the rally, people marched down a street, chanting and holding banners, one of them saying “Let’s safeguard Central Committee of Workers’ Party of Korea headed by great comrade Kim Jong Un.”
North Korea is planning to hold the seventh Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) in early May, according to KCNA.
North Korea launched a long-range rocket called Kwangmyongsong-4, on February 7 carrying what it said was a satellite, drawing renewed international condemnation just weeks after it carried out a nuclear test on January 6.
South Korea and the United States said the North’s rocket launch was a long-range missile test and violated U.N. Security Council resolutions that ban the use of ballistic missile technology by the isolated state.
The U.S. and South Korea are expected to begin large-scale annual military drills in early March, which the North calls preparations for war and routinely vows retaliation.
“We will surely smash down the hostile and provocative manoeuvres of U.S. imperialists and South Korean puppet regime. And we will also respect our supreme headquarters, it is our our destiny, we will build up a thriving and enviable socialist state,” North Korean resident, Choe Song Hyok, said before the rally.
“(U.S. and South Korea) They are talking about pre-emptive strikes. How can we tolerate them? For crazy dogs, we have to beat them to death with a club. Wiping out these psychos from the face of the earth will be in my mind as I do my best to wage the 70-day campaign to thoroughly accomplish the tasks given to us in the railway and transportation sector. So I will contribute to achieving success in the struggle to greet the Seventh Party Congress with great victory,” North Korean resident, Kim Dok Chol, added.
The Workers’ Party Congress, once a regular event, was last held in 1980.
When the last party congress took place over four days in 1980 at Pyongyang’s February 8th House of Culture, a monolithic concrete pillar-fronted building since renamed the April 25th House of Culture, it was open to foreign delegations from countries friendly to North Korea.
It was then that Kim Jong Il was controversially anointed successor to his father, Kim Il Sung, creating the communist world’s first hereditary dynasty when its founder died in 1994.