Kim Jong Il, the diminutive North Korean dictator whose provocations and brinkmanship confounded three U.S. presidents and raised tension across northeast Asia, has died. He was 69.
KNS via, AFP/Getty ImagesRevered by military: North Korea’s Kim Jong Il inspects a unit of Korean People’s Army in North Korea in this photo released Nov. 2.
KNS via, AFP/Getty Images
Revered by military: North Korea’s Kim Jong Il inspects a unit of Korean People’s Army in North Korea in this photo released Nov. 2.
Kim’s death was announced today by state television from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, the Associated Press said.
Kim is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008 but appeared relatively vigorous in photos and video from recent trips to China and Russia and in numerous trips around the country carefully documented by state media.
His death raises the specter of political chaos in a nuclear-armed hermit country. In September 2010, Kim Jong Il unveiled his third son, Kim Jong Un, as his successor, putting him in high-ranking posts. But it is unclear whether the Swiss-educated, Jong Un, 27, has the skills to stay in power or keep the fragile country from collapse.
Kim Jong Il ruled North Korea with an iron fist for 17 years. No one expected him to last long when he succeeded his father in 1994. The pudgy 5-foot-3 Kim — who favored pompadours and beige jumpsuits — did not cut an imposing figure, and he took power at a treacherous time. The Soviet Union had crumbled three years earlier, depriving North Korea of its closest communist ally and most generous economic benefactor.
The North Korean economy imploded in the 1990s, shrinking nearly 4% a year from 1990 to 1998 and falling far behind rival and one-time peer South Korea. Famine killed as many as 1 million North Koreans from 1995 to 2000. Yet Kim managed to hang on to power, ruthlessly repressing internal dissent with executions and a brutal prison system that holds hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, including children, according to Human Rights Watch.
Kim kept his generals happy by handing them 25% of his country’s budget under a policy of “Military First” that ignored the needs of his hungry, impoverished people. Still, he rallied the public by presenting North Korea as a racially pure state besieged by evil and repulsive foreigners, especially the Americans who kept thousands of troops garrisoned across the Demilitarized Zone in South Korea.
Kim developed a nuclear program — with tests in 2006 and 2009 — that was used as a potential threat to extort aid from his enemies and stoke a xenophobic local pride that kept his people unified and loyal during a period of intense hardship. His brinkmanship with nuclear and missile tests made North Korea a player to be reckoned with — even though it ranks only a pitiful No. 189 in world economic output per capita.
According to North Korean mythology, Kim was born on sacred Mount Paektu in an event marked by the auspicious appearance of a double rainbow and a special star shining in the heavens. In fact, he was likely born in the Russian Far East, according to Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, a history of North Korea’s leaders by journalist Bradley K. Martin.
Kim Jong Il’s father, Kim Il Sung, had led a communist guerrilla force fighting the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula. After World War II, the Soviet-backed Kim Il Sung became North Korea’s leader.
Kim Jong Il’s mother died when he was 7. He worked hard to please his father, even taste-testing his food for poison. He helped purge veteran communists.
The efforts to ingratiate himself worked, allowing Kim Jong Il to outmaneuver a stepmother plotting to put her own son in line to take power.
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