North Korea Leadership Watch

Research and Analysis on the DPRK Leadership

Gen Z’s Volunteer for KPA Service

The DPRK’s university students and other young people are volunteering to join, or rejoin, the Korean People’s Army [KPA] with “800,000 youth league officials and students across the country” on 17 March (Friday) and the numbers “on a steady increase.”  The re-enlistment drive is similar in scope and intensity to one in 2012.  It occurs as during US-ROK joint exercises which DPRK state media describes as “the worst-ever in their aggressive nature and scale and a flagrant violation of the DPRK’s sovereignty, security and interests” and “inching close to the unpardonable red-line.”

The “young vanguard, fully armed with the indomitable will of the Party to deal with the enemies and to settle accounts with the US, have turned our at once in the struggle to defend the country and annihilate the enemy.”

The Youth League organized meetings in Pyongyang and elsewhere in the country to convey “the soaring enthusiasm of young people to join the army” as a “demonstration of the unshakable will of the younger generation to mercilessly wipe out the war maniacs making last-ditch efforts eliminate our precious socialist country, and achieve the great cause of national reunification without fail and a clear manifestation of their ardent patriotism.”

Commanders and personnel of the Paektusan Hero Youth Shock Brigade “made a request for allowing them to take the lead in a great war for national reunification with the spirit of beating down at a single blow the warmongers who are running amuck.”  They were joined by students from Kim Il Sung University and the DPRK’s other institutions of higher learning who “vowed to reliably defend our idea, system and beloved country.”

 

Programming note: North Korea’s generations break out in different cohorts than those in the US, but Gen Z seemed a more appropriate (and contemporary) phrase than “youths.”

An affiliate of 38 North