Kim Jong Il’s Life: Myth, Mystery and Mayhem
In the West he was mocked for his bouffant, his pudgy belly and his platform shoes. U.S. President George W. Bush called him a pygmy. He was even parodied in the puppet movie “Team America: World Police,” a dictator who walked around his empty palace singing about his loneliness.
But the ridicule could not conceal that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, who died at age 69 on Dec. 17, was able to maneuver his small, totalitarian nation into a force that compelled deep concern and even fear from among the world’s powers. He did so at a great cost to his people, millions of whom died in famines in the 1990s and hundreds of thousands who are enslaved in prison camps. But in North Korea he was called the “Dear Leader” and, more recently, the “Supreme Leader.” He sits at the pinnacle of state-enforced adulation in North Korea, below only his father, Kim Il Sung, alongside whom he will be buried in the Kumsusan Mausoleum on Dec. 29.
Official North Korean reports say that he died of “fatigue” while on a train ride. Kim, who reportedly feared flying and traveled by personal armored train, had suffered a stroke in 2008. He had been reported in better health in recent months, having cut down on his appetite for cognac and cigars.
Like much of his life, Kim’s birth was shrouded in mystery. According to North Korean state propaganda, Kim’s birth on the sacred Mount Paekdu in 1942 was accompanied by auspicious symbols including a new star in the sky, a double rainbow and a swallow. In truth he was born in an anti-Japanese rebel camp in Siberia. After World War II, his father became the leader of Soviet-administered North Korea, which he led during its three-year war with U.S.-aligned South Korea. That war killed an estimate four million, and the standoff between the two sides continues today along the Demilitarized Zone, the most highly fortified border in the world, a legacy of a conflict that ended in a bitter truce in 1953.
Unlike the current transition, which was only started following Kim’s 2008 stroke, he was well-groomed to take power when his father died in 1994. As “the General,” one of the many names he is called by within North Korea, Kim led his country on an erratic course. He promoted attacks on South Korea, including the 1987 downing of a Korean Air flight and an 1983 attack on South Korean officials in Burma.