Kim Yong-nam, North Korea’s longtime former ceremonial head of state whose loyalty shielded him from frequent political purges and enabled him to serve the country’s ruling family for three generations, died on Monday.
He was 97 and died of multiple organ failure caused by cancer, the country’s official Korean Central News Agency reported on Tuesday. North Korea’s top leader, Kim Jong-un, visited Mr. Kim’s bier early Tuesday to lay a wreath and express deep condolences, the news agency said.
Mr. Kim stood apart for his ability to stay in favor of the ruling Kim family, to which he was not related and which has ruled North Korea as a totalitarian dictatorship since its founding at the end of World War II. Mr. Kim served on the ruling Workers’ Party’s Politburo from 1978 to 2019, when he retired from public service.
His career spanned the governments of Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea; his son, Kim Jong-il; and his grandson, Kim Jong-un. Mr. Kim’s longevity was even more remarkable because in the monolithic tenure of the ruling family, senior officials outside the top leader’s immediate kin are ultimately considered expendable and are frequently purged and sent to labor camps.
By the time he retired in 2019, Kim Yong-nam had also served as president of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly, North Korea’s rubber-stamp parliament, for 21 years.
That post made Mr. Kim the ceremonial head of state for North Korea. During the reign of the reclusive Kim Jong-il, who was North Korea’s top leader from 1994 until his death in 2011, he often led government delegates overseas. He also received credentials from foreign diplomats newly posted to Pyongyang. When the then-South Korean president, Roh Moo-hyun, visited North Korea in 2007, he and Mr. Roh rode through central Pyongyang in an open limousine, as hundreds of thousands of spectators were mobilized to line the streets waving paper flowers and shouting “Hurray!”
But Mr. Kim always operated in the shadow of the ruling Kim family. His behavior offered a model for North Korean officialdom, according to defectors from the county.
In 2018, he appeared openly deferential to a junior colleague — Kim Yo-jong, the influential sister of Kim Jong-un — while he was leading a North Korean delegation to South Korea to attend the Winter Olympics. He was seen asking Ms. Kim to sit on a sofa in an airport V.I.P. lounge before he did. He sat first only after Ms. Kim, 60 years his junior, indicated that he could do so.
“I found Kim Yong-nam a puzzling figure. In greetings before business began, he was cordial and relaxed, but once at work, he relentlessly followed his script,” Don Oberdorfer, the late American journalist who had met Mr. Kim, wrote in his book “The Two Koreas.”
Mr. Oberdorfer quoted a former North Korean diplomat as saying, “If Kim Il-sung was pointing to a wall and said there is a door, Kim Yong-nam would believe that and try to go through it.”
“Yet by all accounts,” Mr. Oberdorfer wrote, “he is highly intelligent and, due to his high position and prestige within the system, an important behind-the-scenes figure in Pyongyang.”
Mr. Kim was born in 1928, when Korea was still a colony of Japan. He joined North Korea’s foreign service in the 1950s after studying in Moscow. He rose through the ranks of the party, becoming party secretary for international affairs in 1975 and foreign minister in 1983. He survived many crises in North Korean diplomacy, including the Russian and Chinese decisions to establish diplomatic ties with rival South Korea in the early 1990s.
He helped Kim Jong-un establish his leadership in the wake of his father’s death. When he read a eulogy at the funeral of Kim Jong-il in 2011, he urged North Koreans to rally around the dead leader’s son. Later that year at a huge rally in Pyongyang, it was Mr. Kim who announced that Kim Jong-un was the new “supreme leader of our party, military and people.”
When he led the North Korean delegation to the 2018 Winter Olympics, Mr. Kim became the highest-ranking North Korean official to visit the South at the time. His trip helped thaw inter-Korean relations, which lay the groundwork for Kim Jong-un’s meetings with the former South Korean leader, Moon Jae-in, in 2018 and President Trump in 2019, for which the North Korean leader stepped onto South Korean soil.
“Comrade Kim Yong-nam lived a life of glory and honor in the bosom of the party, and the leader and his life shined with clean loyalty and high competence,” state media said on Tuesday.
Choe Sang-Hun is the lead reporter for The Times in Seoul, covering South and North Korea.
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