SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Kim Yong Nam, a quintessential North Korean bureaucrat whose lifelong loyalty to the ruling allowed him to serve as the country’s ceremonial head of state for two decades, has died, North Korea’s state media reported Tuesday.
The Korean Central News Agency said Tuesday that Kim Yong Nam, former president of the Presidium of North Korea’s rubber-stamp Supreme People’s Assembly, died Monday at the age of 97.
KCNA said that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visited the bier of Kim Yong Nam on Tuesday to express deep condolences over his death.
Kim Yong Nam served as head of the Supreme People’s Assembly from 1998 to April 2019. That post is North Korea’s nominal head of state, though the true power was held by the Kim family that has ruled the North since its formal foundation in 1948.
Kim Yong Nam regularly gave propaganda-filled speeches with a deep, booming voice at key state events and appeared in state media greeting visiting foreign dignitaries on behalf of current leader Kim Jong Un and his late father Kim Jong Il.
In February 2018, he traveled to South Korea with Kim Jong Un’s influential sister, Kim Yo Jong, to attend the opening ceremony of the Pyeongchang Olympics as Pyongyang sought better ties with Seoul and Washington after a year of heightened animosities on the Korean Peninsula.
The trip made Kim Yong Nam the highest-level North Korean official to visit South Korea since Kim Jong Un sent a top military officer to attend the closing ceremony of the 2014 Asian Games in Incheon, South Korea.
At the Pyeongchang opening ceremony, Kim Yong Nam and Kim Yo Jong sat within the feet of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence though the two sides made no apparent contact.
North Korea’s brief period of diplomatic openness peaked with the summits between Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump in 2018 and 2019, but Kim Yong Nam did not attend them and his influence was seen as waning due to his age.
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