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 Kim's bier early Tuesday to lay a wreath and express deep condolences, the news agency said.
Kim stood apart for his ability to stay in favour 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. 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. 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 labour 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 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 Roh rode through central Pyongyang in an open limousine, as hundreds of thousands of spectators were mobilised to line the streets waving paper flowers and shouting "Hurray!"
But Kim always operated in the shadow of the ruling Kim family. His behaviour offered a model for North Korean officialdom, according to defectors from the county.
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.
New York Times News Service