North Korean leader Kim Jong Un presided over a meeting of senior ruling party officials aimed at rooting out corruption and abuses of power ahead of a major congress to be held in May, its state media reported on Thursday, calling the gathering the first of its kind.
The meeting this week focused on strengthening the ruling party and criticized “the practices of seeking privileges, misuse of authority, abuse of power and bureaucratism,” according to a report by the Korean Central News Agency.
It is unusual for North Korea’s state-controlled media to make note of such problems within the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, which Kim heads and which has been in power since the founding of North Korea in 1948. The two-day meeting, which ended yesterday and was “guided” by Kim, brought together members of the ruling party’s Central Committee and the Party Committee of the Korean People’s Army. Though the article did not elaborate on the problems or suggested solutions, outside experts have long speculated that corruption and power abuse within the party are widespread and have been worsening in recent years amid the growth of a quasi-legal capitalist-style marketization of the North’s officially socialist and centrally-directed economy. In its annual report released last month, North Korea and Somalia were listed at the top of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for the second-straight year as the most corrupt governments in the world.