BEIJING, Nov. 16 (UPI) -- A North Korean official has denied reports his country has launched a campaign to remove portraits of its leader, Kim Jong-il.
"This is not true, and everything remains the same in Pyongyang," the official, a North Korean diplomat in Beijing told the Interfax-China news agency Tuesday.
The North Korean embassy in Beijing had "noticed such reports by certain media outlets," the official told the news agency.
The reclusive Kim Jong-il has ruled isolated North Korea, known as "the Hermit Kingdom" for the extreme degree to which it is shut off from the outside world since the death of his father, the communist state's founder Kim Il-sung in 1994. During that time he presided over a terrible famine in which at least 2 million people starved to death and hundreds of thousands more fled as impoverished refugees into northeastern China.
