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North Korea To Send Hundreds Of Cheerleaders To Olympics, Possibly To Convince The World It’s Not A Nutty Nuclear Nightmare

REUTERS/Zainal Abd Halim

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Ryan Pickrell China/Asia Pacific Reporter
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North Korea is sending more than 500 people to the Olympics, and the vast majority of them are cheerleaders.

North Korea will send 230 cheerleaders to South Korea for the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, according to the Korea Times, citing a joint statement released in the wake of bilateral talks at the border Wednesday.

South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency asserts that the North Korean cheerleaders may be leading the charge on a new “charm offensive” to improve North Korea’s international image. The specific details for the North Korean cheerleaders have yet to be released, but the North is expected to send its so-called “army of beauties.”

“As the Olympics is an event that draws the world’s attention, North Korea may want to imprint a positive image through visual effects,” Kim Young-soo, a North Korea expert at Sogang University in Seoul, explained to Yonhap News Agency, which reports that the North’s cheerleaders have traditionally wowed with their “good looks, charming demeanors and well choreographed moves.”

North Korea has sent cheerleaders to South Korea for three separate sporting events, namely the 2002 Asian Games in Busan, the 2003 Summer Universiade in Daegu and the 2005 Asian Athletics Championships in Incheon.

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Kim Jong Un’s wife Ri Sol Ju was reportedly among the cheerleaders who visited South Korea in 2005. Twenty-one of the hundreds of cheerleaders who visited the South that year reportedly wound up in prison for talking about what they had seen in the South, the Associated Press reported over a decade ago.

The women are hand-picked based on their physical appearance, loyalty to the North Korean regime, entertainment skills, and family background.

“They must be over 163cm (5’4″) tall and come from good families,” An Chan-il, a North Korean defector who now heads the World Institute for North Korea Studies told AFP. “As well as being young, tall and beautiful, they train extremely hard so that they don’t put a foot wrong,” Jiro Ishimaru, a Japanese documentary filmmaker with a network of informants inside North Korea, told the Guardian, adding, “They’re out to impress people, particularly South Koreans.”

The purpose of these cheerleaders is not just to provide applause for athletes that might face severe punishments if they let down the regime, but also to show the world that North Korea is not a broken country, even if it is.

While North Korea is expected to send its army of beautiful young women to the Olympics, there is a possibility that the North could send a mixture of middle-aged men and women, as it did for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

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