Bulletin: As of Sept. 22, the DPRK women’s team beat Japan 1-0 to win the championship.
DPRK women’s soccer team, Cali, Colombia, Sept. 18, 2024. (Credit: Rodong Newspaper)
Women of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) beat the U.S. soccer team 1-0 on Sept. 18 in Cali, Colombia, and won the opportunity to play Japan in the final game of women’s FIFA U-20 (under 20 years of age) world soccer championship tournament in Bogotá, Colombia.
In a tournament with a “losers” bracket, the DPRK women remained undefeated throughout the tournament. Losers bracket refers to a secondary bracket in a double-elimination tournament format where competitors who lose a match in the main bracket are moved to.
The women’s resounding victories, their smiling faces, their strong bodies, their exuberance and excitement show not only their own personal resilience and victory but that of their country and its revolutionary leadership.
Since the founding of the DPRK in 1948, it has been under near total blockade and harsh sanctions by Japan, the United States and its allies.
Japan, with the blessing of the U.S. and the West, ruled all of Korea as a colony from 1910 until its liberation in 1945 by the armies of the still-governing Korean Workers’ Party and the Red Army of the Soviet Union.
During the U.S. war on Korea, 1950-53, Korea was bombed from one end to the other. People by the hundreds of thousands were indiscriminately killed either by bombs or starvation. In the north, every structure of more than two stories was leveled — imagine the devastation and genocide in present-day Gaza on a country-wide scale.