N. Korea Says Dictator, Kim Jong-il, Dies

Kim Jong-il, the reclusive dictator who kept North Korea at the edge of starvation and collapse, banished to gulags citizens deemed disloyal and turned the country into a nuclear weapons state, died Saturday morning, according to an announcement by the North’s official news media on Monday. He was reported to be 69, and had been in ill health since a reported stroke in 2008.

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Times Topics: Kim Jong-il | North Korea

Called the “Dear Leader” by his people, Mr. Kim, the son of North Korea’s founder, remained an unknowable figure. Everything about him was guesswork, from the exact date and place of his birth to the mythologized events of his rise in a country formed by the hasty division of the Korean Peninsula at the end of World War II.

North Koreans heard about him only as their “peerless leader” and “the great successor to the revolutionary cause.” Yet he fostered what was perhaps the last personality cult in the Communist world. His portrait hangs beside that of his father, Kim Il-sung, in every North Korean household and building. Towers, banners and even rock faces across the country bear slogans praising him.

Mr. Kim was a source of fascination inside the Central Intelligence Agency, which interviewed his mistresses, tried to track his whereabouts and psychoanalyzed his motives. And he was an object of parody in American culture.

Short and round, he wore elevator shoes, oversize sunglasses and a bouffant hairdo — a Hollywood stereotype of the wacky post-cold war dictator. Mr. Kim himself was fascinated by film. He orchestrated the kidnapping of an actress and a director, both of them South Koreans, in an effort to build a domestic movie industry. He was said to keep a personal library of 20,000 foreign films, including the complete James Bond series, his favorite. But he rarely saw the outside world, save from the windows of his luxury train, which occasionally took him to China.

He was derided and denounced. President George W. Bush called him a “pygmy” and included his country in the “axis of evil.” Children’s books in South Korea depicted him as a red devil with horns and fangs. Yet those who met him were surprised by his serious demeanor and his knowledge of events beyond the hermit kingdom he controlled.

“He was a very outspoken person,” said Roh Moo-hyun, who as South Korea’s president met Mr. Kim in Pyongyang in 2007. “He was the most flexible man in North Korea.”

Wendy Sherman, who served as counselor to Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, said, “He was smart, engaged, knowledgeable, self-confident, sort of the master-director of all he surveyed.”

Ms. Albright met Mr. Kim in October 2000 in what turned out to be a futile effort to strike a deal with North Korea over limiting its missile program before President Bill Clinton left office.

“There was no denying the dictatorial state that he ruled,” Ms. Sherman said. “There was no denying the freedoms that didn’t exist. But at the time, there were a lot of questions in the U.S. about whether he was really in control, and we left with no doubt that he was.”

When Ms. Albright and Ms. Sherman sat down to talk through a 14-point list of concerns about North Korea’s missile program, “he didn’t know the answers to every question, but he knew a lot more than most leaders would — and he was a conceptual thinker,” Ms. Sherman added.

And though he presided over a country that was starving and broke, he played his one card, his nuclear weapons program, brilliantly, first defying the Bush administration’s efforts to push his country over the brink, then exploiting America’s distraction with the war in Iraq to harvest enough nuclear fuel from his main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon to produce the fuel for six to eight weapons.

A Deal With Washington

President Bush said during his first term in office that he would never tolerate a nuclear North Korea, but as his presidency wound down, many of his aides believed he did exactly that.

It was not until the spring of 2007 that Mr. Bush was told by the Israelis that North Korea was helping Syria build a nuclear reactor; before the Syrians or the North Koreans were confronted with that evidence, Israel sent bombers on a secret mission to destroy the Syrian plant. The North Koreans have never explained their role.

북한 김정일 북한위원장이 사망했다. 김정일 국방위원장이 17일 오전 8시30분 과로로 열차에서 사망했다고 조선중앙통신이 19일 보도했다.

　

중앙통신은 "김 위원장이 2011년 12월17일 8시30분 현지지도의 길을 이어가시다가 겹쌓인 정신육체적 과로로 하여 열차에서 서거하셨다"고 전했다.

김정일은 북한의 최고실력자로 국방위원회 위원장, 조선노동당 중앙위원회 총비서, 조선인민군 최고사령관, 정치국 상무위원, 최고인민회의 제10기 대의원 등의 공식적인 직함을 지녔다. 1994년 아버지 김일성(金日成) 국가주석이 갑작스럽게 사망하자 후계자로서 권력을 승계했다.

1997년 당 총비서가 됐으며 1998년 최고인민회의 10기 1차 회의에서 헌법 개정을 통해 주석제를 폐지하고 권한이 더욱 강화된 국방위원장에 재추대됐다.

1980년 제6차 당대회에서 중앙위원회 위원, 정치국 상무위원, 비서국 비서, 군사위원회 위원으로 선출되면서 공식적인 제2인자의 위치를 굳혔다. 이때부터 '친애하는 지도자 동지'로 호칭이 변경되었다. 1991년 조선인민군 최고사령관, 1993년 국방위원장에 선출되어 군권을 완전 장악하였으며, 1994년 7월 김일성이 죽자 권력을 승계하였다.

1967년 당의 핵심 부서인 조직지도부 과장을 거쳐 1971년 부부장으로 승진했고 1973년 중앙당 문화예술부장을 거쳐 중앙당 조직 및 선동선전담당비서라는 막강한 지위에 올랐다. 1974년 당 정치위원회 위원(현 정치국원)이 되면서 후계자로서의 기반을 다졌다. 이때부터 '지도자동지', '당중앙'이라고 호칭되었으며 1975년 '공화국 영웅' 칭호를 받았다.

김정일은 김일성과 그의 전처인 김정숙 사이에서 장남으로 태어나 평양의 제1초급중학교를 거쳐 1960년 고위층 자제들이 다니는 남산고등중학교를 졸업하였다. 1964년 김일성종합대학 경제학부 정치경제학과를 졸업했다.