The "Day of the Sun" is a national holiday in the regime led by his grandson Kim Jong-un. Celebrations include military parades and sporting events, veneration of the golden statue of the founder of the dynasty who has risen to the rank of demi-god. The tension in the peninsula continues unabated.

Seoul (AsiaNews) - North Korea is celebrating the "Day of the Sun", the anniversary of the birth of the founder and "eternal president" Kim Il-sung, amid controversy in the international community for the continued firing of short-range missiles into the Sea of Japan.

With huge military parades and sporting events, the population - at least in Pyongyang - participated in mass festivities: all residents queued from early morning to venerate the golden statue of the founder, in the center of the capital.

The current dictator and grandson of Kim Il-sung, the thirty year old Kim Jong-un, laid a huge wreath of flowers at the foot of the statue, but gave no speech. Images of the grandfather, revered as a demi-god, was on all national media: the radio continuously transmits his recorded speeches, while the Rodong Sinmun editorial (the newspaper of the Workers Party) published a copy of the first article written by the late leader after the division of the peninsula (1953).

In South Korea, the event was remembered last week with a conference, which was attended by experts and witnesses of the creation of North Korea by Kim Il-sung. A South Korean activist for unification, who in 1991 left his country to reach the "workers' paradise" and later fled, recalls: "Instead of an intelligent revolutionary leader I found a ruthless despot. And instead of socialism I saw a hereditary monarchy, where the money ends (then as now) in the dictator’s pockets".

Meanwhile, the international tension over the nation continues unabated. The possible meeting between Kim Jong-un and the president of South Park Geun-hye, which could take place in Moscow in May during the celebrations for the end of World War II, has been ruled out: Park, although invited by Putin in person , will not go.

Pyongyang also continues to shoot short and medium range missiles into the Sea of ​​Japan. The last battery was fired on April 7, two days before the arrival of US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter in Seoul. Commenting on the incident, the same Carter said the launches "remind us of how tense things are on the Korean peninsula."

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• kim
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• dictatorship