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Kim Jong-il obituary

12.01.2012

Kim Jong-il, who died aged 69 after a heart attack, was the general secretary of the Workers' party of Korea and head of the military in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). He was one of the most reclusive and widely condemned national leaders of the late 20th and early 21st century, and left his country diplomatically isolated, economically broken and divided from South Korea.

Kim's early life was spent in the shadows of his father Kim Il-sung, who returned to Korea in 1945 after independence from Japan, and established, initially with Soviet and Chinese support, the DPRK. He was to witness the Korean war from 1950 to 1953, in which hundreds of thousands of Koreans, Chinese and Americans as part of a UN force fought across the country, returning almost to the point at which they had started. The armistice signed in 1953 settled the border between South and North Korea at the 38th Parallel.

With the arrival of the cold war, relations between the two countries were almost completely broken off, with whole families split for the ensuing decades, some for ever. This event led to the creation of the wholly unprecedented worship of Kim Il-sung.

Kim Jong-il was educated at the newly founded university in Pyongyang, graduating in 1964. The 1960s and early 1970s were the golden years for the DPRK. It undertook rapid industrialisation, economically outstripped its southern competitor and enjoyed the support of both the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union. A state ideology, mixing nationalism and basic Marxist economics, going under the name "Juche", was constructed, and Kim Il-sung effectively silenced, disposed of and cleared away any opposition, isolating the country and exercising an iron grip on the military, the state media, the government and party apparatus.

In 1973 he became party secretary of the propaganda department, and, in 1974, was designated his father's successor, creating in effect the world's first communist family succession. In 1980 he was elevated to the Politburo, and was granted the title "Dear Leader", as opposed to "Great Leader", which had been granted by his father to himself. In 1991, he was named commander of the DPRK armed forces. The death of his father in 1994 led to his being appointed general secretary of the Workers' party, the ultimate seat of power. 

Kim inherited the very worst legacy of the cold war, a country torn apart by colonisation and war. The economic template for the country had been set in the 1950s and 1960s, long before he had any say. Its unsustainability only became clear in the very final years of Kim Il-sung's life. Kim Jong-il finally had to deal with a complex network of interests in the army and party after his father's death, something which, combined with the immediate impact of bad harvests, created the terrible famines that claimed up to a million North Korean lives from 1995 until 1999. North Korea progressed towards its own nuclear programme in 2003. The election of Barack Obama as US president in 2008 served to provoke a period of harsh rhetoric, nuclear testing, missile launches, and diplomatic aggression. 

International politicians who met him were impressed by his memory for facts and his quick and easy wit. But there is little dispute about his responsibility for a system that saw widespread human rights abuses and perhaps the worst record for press freedom and government transparency in the world.

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