The Fourth Conference of Primary Officials of Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League is being held when yearnings for the great General Kim Jong Il and the pledge of loyalty to remain steadfast in following the Party are surging in the hearts of young people across the country on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the publication of his letter to the participants in the conference of model primary officials of the youth league.

I extend my warm congratulations to the attendees at this conference and other primary officials of the youth league across the country, who, upholding the Party’s idea of giving prominence to young people, are working with devotion to build up the organizations of the youth league and train young people into the young vanguard that is unfailingly loyal to our Party.

The great Comrades Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il loved young people most and showed great concern for the work with them throughout their lives.

Having started his revolutionary activities by going among young people and rallying them as comrades sharing weal and woe with one another in the struggle, President Kim Il Sung created an original idea of giving prominence to young people and, by applying the idea, prepared them to be a powerful vanguard for the revolution and a reliable reserve force of the Party. General Kim Jong Il carried forward this idea, handing over the torch of the revolution to young people, naming the youth league after him and leading them to fulfil the mission and duty with credit they have assumed for the times and the revolution.

Under the wise leadership of the President and the General and their benevolent care, our young people have traversed a road filled with glory, adorning the decades of the revolution with heroic exploits and proud victories.

The young people of the first generation of the Korean revolution, holding up Comrade Kim Il Sung as the sun of the nation, waged a bloody struggle against the Japanese imperialists and accomplished the historic cause of national liberation; they set a shining example of defending the leader unto death. During the fierce Fatherland Liberation War, which was decisive of the country’s destiny, those who were brought up under his personal care fought heroically shouting “Long live General Kim Il Sung!” thus bringing the victory of July 27. In the postwar period of socialist construction they took the lead in realizing the intentions of their Party and leader and performed world-startling feats in the difficult and demanding sectors, thereby showing the heroic mettle of Chollima Korea. In the years of the Arduous March and forced march our dependable young men and women overcame unprecedented hardships with firm conviction that they would share their destiny

with the General to the last, demonstrating to the whole world the invincible might of Songun Korea in the struggle for safeguarding socialism and the showdown with the United States.

The heroic, immortal exploits our young people performed in the trying decades of the revolution have been recorded in history, illustrating the precious truth that the key to victory in the revolution, national prosperity and worthwhile life of young people lies in holding the leader in high esteem and supporting his ideas and leadership faithfully. The traditions of death-defying defence of the leader and heroic struggle, which our young people created and have upheld in the past decades of the revolution, are an invaluable revolutionary heritage and eternal banner of victory that they should pass on generation after generation.

The present is an era of dynamic struggle, a new era of the Juche revolution, in which all the service personnel and other people under the leadership of our Party have turned out in a general offensive for final victory in the revolution holding aloft the great banner of Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism. Single-heartedly united around the Party, they are vigorously struggling in high spirits to make leaps forward and effect innovations in all sectors of the revolution and construction in order to achieve the goal of developing theirs into a thriving socialist country.

Our Party demands that young people, the successors to the Songun revolution, lead the historic march in the new era.

The youth league is a reliable advance group and wing of our Party in the struggle to carry out the revolutionary cause of Songun. The young people in the present era assume the sacred and honourable duty of flying on the peak of final victory the red flag of the revolution which is permeated with the precious blood and sweat of the revolutionary forerunners and associated with their ennobling desires.

For us, no difficulty is insurmountable and no goal is unattainable when the young people, who have been raised in the embrace of the great leaders and the great Party and tempered in the flames of the Songun revolution, make a breakthrough in the vanguard of the struggle.

They should creditably play their role as the young vanguard of the Party by devoting their youthful strength, wisdom and passion in the ongoing historic march, just as they have always responded heartily to the requirements of the Party and the revolution and the call of the country.

“Young people, be vanguard fighters unfailingly faithful to the Party’s revolutionary cause of Songun!”?this is a militant slogan to be upheld by our young people.

Young people should loyally support the Party’s leadership.

The Party’s leadership is the lifeblood of our young men and women. It is only under the Party’s leadership that they can stoutly carry forward the lineage of Paektu and the revolutionary cause of Juche and successfully fulfil their honourable mission and duty as the young vanguard in the Songun era.

With unshakeable conviction that they support our Party alone, they should trust and follow it with a pure heart and advance vigorously along the road indicated by it.

Young people should become a bulwark and shield that defend our Party unto death. They should glorify every moment of their life on the road of defending the Party at the cost of their lives, following the noble examples of the revolutionary forerunners who sacrificed their youth and life unhesitatingly for the Party and the leader.

They should be vanguard fighters in the campaign to implement the ideas of the Party and champion its policies. They should cherish the ideas and policies of the Party as an element of their firm faith, think and act anytime and anywhere in conformity with the ideas and intentions of the Party, and carry out the Party’s policies in a thoroughgoing way with the spirit of regarding them absolute and implementing them unconditionally. By modelling themselves after the soldier spirit and work style of the People’s Army that executes the Supreme Commander’s orders all at once and at the highest level, they must thoroughly implement the Party’s policies on the schedule set and the level demanded by it.

Young people should be a death-defying corps in defence of socialist country.

National defence is the highest expression of patriotism and the most sacred duty of young people. The young people in the Songun era should regard it as the greatest honour to safeguard with arms the country at the forefront, and perform with credit the duty their generation assumes for the country, as those victors in the great years had defeated the US aggressors by laying down their one and only youth for the sake of their only motherland.

Service personnel of the People’s Army, who, as the soldiers of the Supreme Commander, guard the posts in arms, should make their training more intensive, as the anti-Japanese guerrillas did on Mt. Paektu. By doing so they should prepare themselves into a-match-for-a-hundred combatants who are armed fully with the Juche-oriented military ideas and brimming over with the spirit of general. They should maintain full combat readiness, always thinking of the battlefields, and display to the full the valour of the young people of Songun Korea in the decisive battle against the enemy.

Young people should acquire the traits of loving arms and giving importance to military affairs. All young people, burning their hearts with the will to annihilate the enemy, should participate in military training with all sincerity and make full preparations for combat mobilization, thereby staunchly defending their streets, villages, factories, farms and schools. They should take an active part in physical training for national defence, highly display the traits of aiding the army and give full play to the beautiful traits of respecting and helping the war veterans and disabled soldiers.

They should resolutely smash the imperialist moves for ideological and cultural infiltration. Now the enemy are infiltrating corrupt recordings and publications into our country and widely propagating all sorts of viruses of corrupt ideology in an attempt to make our young people ideologically degenerate and take them away from our Party. The main target of the enemy’s manoeuvres for ideological and cultural infiltration is none other than our young people of a new generation. If the young people are involved in it, it cannot be interpreted otherwise but the acts of betrayal and treachery of turning traitors to the Party and revolution and benefiting the enemy. They should have a clear understanding of the true nature of the enemy’s moves for ideological and cultural infiltration and their danger, never be involved in such acts, and resolutely frustrate any involvement, by always standing alert to them and combating them. They should staunchly oppose and reject

delinquent and all other non-socialist practices that tarnish the image of socialism and undermine our system.

Young people should be a vanguard detachment and a shock force in building a thriving socialist country.

Building a thriving socialist country is a worthwhile struggle to make the country, which has been defended at the cost of blood, more prosperous and translate beautiful ideals of the people into reality, and it is the greatest honour and pride of the young people in the present era to perform proud feats in this struggle.

Young people should be standard-bearers in creating the Korean speed in the effort to build an economic giant. They should volunteer to work at the labour-consuming and difficult sites of the building of an economic giant and make breakthroughs for advance. They should speed up and complete the construction of the Paektusan Songun Youth Power Station and reconstruction of the Northern Railways and perform laudable exploits in several sites of grandiose nature-remaking and construction projects. Young people should regard the national economic plans assigned to them as a combat mission entrusted by the country, implement them at any cost and without fail, and kindle fierce flames of increased production, thus constantly creating new norms and records.

Young people should be the vanguard in the effort to go beyond the cutting edge of science and technology. With a great ambition to beat the world as did the scientists who developed artificial satellites and demonstrated the might of Songun Korea, young people should wage a vigorous competition of brains and a competition of technologies, and thereby give a powerful stimulus to the building of a thriving country by means of their excellent achievements in science and technology. They should turn out in the youth science and technology campaign to give full play to their creative intelligence and talents, be well versed in the technologies in their sectors and win the fame of masters of invention and technical conception.

Young people should take an active part in the Songun Youth Torch Prize movement, youth shock brigade movement, youth workteam movement and other mass-based movements and display their youthful resources and gallantry to the full.

They should stand in the vanguard of the struggle to usher in a heyday of a civilized socialist nation.

The young people in the sector of art and literature should give full play to their creativity and conduct intensive activities of revolutionary creation, thus producing a cascade of masterpieces of the era loved by the masses. They should learn after the revolutionary soldier culture so as to establish a noble way of cultural and emotional life and always live in optimism and joy by actively conducting mass-based cultural and artistic activities. They should take the lead in making sports mass-based and part of daily life and, upholding the Party’s plan of building our country into a sports power, sweat more in training in order to bring glory to the country by winning gold medals. Young people should participate with an attitude befitting the master in the effort to establish a cultured way of production and life, thereby improving their workplaces like a palace and their streets and villages like socialist fairyland.

Upholding the slogan of making all people well-informed about science and technology, young people should diligently learn modern science and technology and thus become full-fledged masters of the era of knowledge economy. They should make it a daily routine and habit to read books. All of them should be enthusiastic and diligent learners and read books of various fields including Party literature, books dedicated to revolutionary education and science and technology books. They should read every issue of Chongnyon Jonwi newspaper.

Students are pillars of a prosperous Korea who would take charge of its future as a scientific and technological giant, a powerhouse of talented persons. They should study hard nurturing an ambition to become world-startling scientists and doctors in their twenties and thirties and take an active part in production practice and various socio-political activities, thus fully preparing themselves as competent revolutionary workers possessed of theoretical and practical abilities and versatile skills.

The position and role of the primary organizations of the youth league are very important in making young people creditably fulfil their honourable mission as the young vanguard of the Party in the new era.

The primary organizations of the youth league are the bases of young people’s political life and basic combat units which rally the masses of young people around the Party and organize and mobilize them to the implementation of its policies. Their organizing ability, united force and combat efficiency precisely mean those of the youth league.

They are now failing to discharge their role satisfactorily in line with their important position and mission as the political organizations of young people. Some of them fail to focus on the guidance of their members’ organizational and ideological life, their basic duty, and do not work in conformity with feelings, psychology and sentiments of young people as befitting young people’s organizations.

To strengthen the primary organizations and enhance their role constitutes the first step in consolidating the youth league itself and a major link in the whole chain of developing the youth movement. This is why our Party gives importance to the conference of primary officials of the youth league and expects that the current conference would be an epoch-making occasion in strengthening the grass-roots organizations of the youth league and thus fully training young people into the vanguard who would faithfully support the Party’s Songun-based revolutionary leadership.

By keeping the importance of the work of the youth league and high expectations of the Party deep in their minds, those attending the conference and other officials of the youth league should radically enhance the militant functions and role of the primary organizations of the youth league so as to usher in a new heyday of the youth movement in the Songun era.

The primary organizations of the youth league should intensify their members’ organizational and ideological life as required by the developing revolution.

Whether or not young people are trained into vanguard fighters of the Songun revolution who carry forward the march started from Mt. Paektu arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder with the leader depends entirely on how the primary organizations of the youth league organize and guide their organizational and ideological life. It is of paramount importance that they should direct main efforts to intensifying their members’ organizational and ideological life.

First of all, they should conduct brisk ideological education among young people.

What is important in the ideological education of young people at present is to intensify education in Kim Jong Il’s patriotism, faith, class awareness and morality.

Kim Jong Il’s patriotism is the most valuable nutriment in bringing up new generations as genuine patriots who love the country and the people and a powerful propellant for encouraging young people to strive to build a thriving country. The primary organizations of the youth league should inform young people, through actual facts, of the undying exploits of General Kim Jong Il who, always cherishing the country and the people in his mind, continued to follow the road of love for his country and people throughout his life. By doing so, they should encourage them to cherish Kim Jong Il’s patriotism as an element of their disposition and become true patriots who love their home villages and workplaces and are ready to devote themselves in response to the call of the country and the people.

Revolution precisely means faith and a person devoid of faith cannot become a revolutionary. Only those with firm revolutionary faith can follow the road of revolution to the end and devote themselves to the country and the people. By intensifying education aimed at convincing young people that our Party’s cause is just and we are sure to emerge victorious, the primary organizations of the youth league should encourage all young people to stoutly fight for the victory of the revolutionary cause of Songun, filled with unbreakable faith and will. They should organize visits to revolutionary battle sites and historic sites at regular intervals and in a significant way, so as to induce young people to deeply cherish the greatness of the leaders and their imperishable achievements and glorify their life with pure loyalty to the Party and the leaders by emulating the ennobling examples of loyalty of their revolutionary forerunners.

The reality in which our revolutionary ranks are made mainly of new generations who have a mere story-based knowledge of exploitation and oppression and have never experienced the hardships of war demands that the degree of education in class awareness be raised. By conducting this education in a theoretical and profound way as required by the prevailing situation and the revolution, the primary organizations of the youth league should ensure that young people bitterly hate the imperialists and other class enemies and reliably defend the gains of the revolution won at the cost of blood with a do-or-die determination to fight the enemy to the last.

To intensify education in socialist morality is an urgent demand for further consolidating the single-hearted unity of the revolutionary ranks and making a revolutionary and sound way of life prevail across society. Now some of young people are failing to observe proper decorum in speech and behaviour and public morality, spoiling sound public atmosphere and order. These phenomena are a result of the failure of the youth league to conduct education in morality properly. By regarding education in morality as one of its major tasks and pushing ahead with it persistently, the primary organizations of the youth league should see to it that young people respect their revolutionary forerunners, teachers and seniors and voluntarily observe code of morals.

Ideological education should be conducted in various forms and by various methods and in an effective way.

It is important to run the educational system established in the youth league, including study session to model after General Kim Jong Il and lecture meeting, regularly and effectively. Study sessions and various other meetings of educational significance should be arranged frequently at youth school, the base for education of young people, to make it always enlivened.

Ideological education should be carried on in an original way and in keeping with the sentiment of the advancing times so that it can touch the hearts of young people and lead them along the right path. The primary organizations of the youth league should do away with the practice of filling up the number of ideological education work or sticking to old formality and set pattern out of keeping with the mental qualities of the young people in our times, and steadily improve the form and method of ideological education.

The primary organizations of the youth league should take decisive steps to make young people take an active part in their organizational activities.

They should afford young people a correct understanding of the preciousness of their organizations in order to get them to love and respect the youth league organizations and make conscious efforts to place themselves under organizational education and supervision. They should ensure that all young people are well acquainted with the requirements of the rules and norm of life of the youth league and live and work in line with them, and carry out the decisions and assignments of their organizations without fail and in time. They should also make sure that their members hold efficient meetings for the reviews of their life so that they can be tempered in a revolutionary way in the furnace of organizational life.

In guiding the organizational life of their members they should not leave it to their spontaneous effort alone, but tighten organizational discipline. The primary organizations of the youth league should make increasingly exact demands on their members and tighten organizational discipline, thereby making all of them take part in organizational activities.

They should provide guidance over the organizational life of their members in close combination with the implementation of their major revolutionary assignments so that working youths can overfulfil their technical innovation assignments and national economic plans and students can improve their scholarly performance by studying hard.

The primary organizations should proactively conduct the young vanguard model primary committee movement, young vanguard model primary unit movement and young vanguard model class movement whose validity and vitality are being demonstrated in practice.

Primary officials of the youth league should enhance their responsibility and role.

They should be the engines that take the lead in supporting the Party’s Songun-based revolutionary leadership and guide young people to advance straightforward following the Party.

They should conduct all work as befitting young people with unabated, vigorous energy and mettle. They should plan work in an innovative manner, conduct it conspicuously and, once they have started it, finish it all at once.

They should lead their members in the van of the ranks by setting practical examples. Practical examples are the most powerful motivation. They should buckle down to difficult and labour-consuming work ahead of others, influence their members by practice, not by words, and arouse them to struggle and feats. They should be a good example for the members to emulate in all aspects of work and life.

They should treasure and love their members like their own brothers and sisters, and join their minds and unite in one body in their work and life. They should know the mental agony of their members before anybody else, take care of them in every aspect of work and life and serve as a foundation for their growth and development. They should grieve over the mistakes of their members like their own and train all young people to be fine young vanguard by admonishing them even ten times or a hundred times, if once is insufficient. They should always receive them politely with a bright look, discover the best way to overcome difficulties in their strength and wisdom and build up primary organizations into harmonious collectives, sharing joy and sorrow with them.

The primary officials should have high political and practical qualifications.

They should be firmly equipped with the great Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism and fully conversant with our Party’s ideas and policies of youth movement, making them an article of their faith. They should not only be proficient in the practical work of the youth league and at a high level in political and theoretical qualifications and knowledge of modern science and technology, but also be well versed in the situation and knowledge of many other fields. They should be versatile mass workers who know how to mix themselves among the members unceremoniously and move them as they sing and dance well, play musical instruments skilfully and make stirring speeches.

The youth league committees at all levels should guide primary organizations in a responsible manner and render them positive assistance.

When they neglect the work with the primary organizations, the latter will grow weak and fail to play their role properly. This will result in the youth league turning inefficient as a whole.

The youth league committees at all levels should get rid of the outdated patterns and armchair style of work in their work with the primary organizations and take decisive measures to intensify their guidance and assistance of the organizations. It is of particular importance to enhance the role of the city and county youth league committees which are its lowest-level units of guidance and deal mainly with the primary organizations.

The officials of the youth league committees at all levels should make it a rule to go down on a regular basis to the primary organizations and help them. They should frequently visit the primary organizations to learn in detail about their state of affairs and help them solve any knotty problems. In this way they should encourage the primary officials and help them in a substantial way.

It is important to qualitatively strengthen the ranks of primary officials of the youth league. They should be built up with the young men and women who are loyal to the Party, sound both mentally and morally, and exemplary in organizational life and implementation of their revolutionary tasks. It is also necessary to effectively conduct the work of improving their qualifications.

Party guidance over the work of the youth league should be strengthened.

Our Party regards the work of the youth league as no less important than Party work. Giving prominence to young people is our Party’s consistent policy and eternal strategic line.

Party organizations should pay close concern to the work with the youth league organizations as part of their Party work. They should acquaint themselves with the work of the youth league organizations on a regular basis, correct deviations in their work and solve problems in a responsible manner.

They should encourage independence and creativity of the primary organizations of the youth league. They should promptly inform them of the Party’s policies for each period, so that the officials of the latter can draw up their work plans and carry them out in a proactive manner as intended by the Party. They should be bold and assign huge tasks to the primary organizations of the youth league and inspire them to carry them through by relying entirely on their own efforts. And they should actively support the creative opinions of the young people and help them translate them into reality. They should also provide the primary organizations with adequate conditions for their independent activities.

They should give prominence to the primary officials of the youth league so that they can work with a high sense of honour and pride, and meet them often to educate them in a revolutionary way and train them in practical work. They should admit to the Party the excellent officials who are exemplary in the work of the youth league and bring them up into Party officials.

As we have a large contingent of successors who are faithful to the Party’s ideas and will and steadfast in following the Party, firmly united around it, we have nothing to be afraid of and impossible to do, and we are certain to achieve final victory.

I firmly believe that all our young people will fully demonstrate their heroic mettle as the young vanguard on the historic onward march for accomplishing the revolutionary cause of Songun under the leadership of the Party.