Kim Jong-un shows off new terminal at Pyongyang airport

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with his wife Ri Sol Ju walking through the new terminal of Pyongyang International Airport. He is smiling. He does that a lot, probably because he is excited about the chocolate fondue. Source: Picture Media

THE lights are on but no one is there.

Welcome to Pyongyang International Airport, the place where no one leaves and barely anyone arrives.
Of course we could be wrong, but North Korea isn’t exactly on top of any must-do travel list.
So one has to wonder why North Korea would spend so much money beautifying a terminal when its citizens aren’t exactly free to travel, and no one wants to visit.
But then again why does North Korea do anything then boast about it.
Oh yeah that’s right, it wants us to believe this secretive dictatorship, which regularly threatens The West, is prospering and not crumbling under the brutal regime.

According to a recent United Nations report, around two million North Koreans receive help from the UN World Food Program, a third of children under five are stunted by malnutrition and around 20 per cent of breastfeeding and pregnant women are malnourished.
But that’s OK because North Korea now has an international airport worthy of praise.
According to an unverified press release issued by the country’s state owned Korean Central News Agency, visitors to the airport will soon be able to buy designer shirts, duty free watches and cosmetics as well as chocolate fondue. Oh goodie, fondue!
Leader Kim Jong-un took a tour of the newly completed terminal with his wife Ri Sol-ju - her second public appearance this year after she watched a soccer match with her rotund husband in April - and younger sister Kim Yo-jong this week and was said to be impressed.

The unveiling of the new terminal comes days after former North Korean national Hyeonseo Lee released her autobiography, The Girl with Seven Names, which details her escape and defection to South Korea and her horrific childhood in which she witnessed her first execution at age seven.
She tells The Times viewing executions is mandatory for schoolchildren in North Korea but in recent years it has worsened.
“Now they shoot people dead, just like that, in the middle of the day,” she says in the interview. “He’s (Kim Jong-un) murdered horribly to show the people: ‘Don’t treat me like a young kid.’ Killing people is propaganda.”
Lee says brainwashing begins from the moment you are born and children grow up believing the prison camps, public executions and that the Korean War started by “American bastards” who attacked North Korea “in the middle of the night, at 3am, while the North Koreans were asleep”.
She also says she thinks Kim Jong-un is worse than his father and longs for the day that he will die.
Until then, North Koreans will be able to admire their country’s new airport terminal from afar. It is supposed to open on July 1.