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Kim Jong-il

February 16, 1941 – December 17, 2011

Kim Jong-il (1941 or 1942–2011) was a North Korean politician who was the second supreme leader of North Korea, ruling from the death of his father Kim Il-sung in 1994 until his own death in 2011. He was posthumously declared an eternal leader of the Workers' Party of Korea.

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Biography

Kim Jong Il, the son of Kim Il Sung, was born in the Soviet Far East in 1941 or 1942 and moved to Pyongyang in 1945 after the end of Japanese rule. He studied at Kim Il Sung University, joined the Workers' Party of Korea in 1961, and in 1966 entered its Propaganda and Agitation Department, which he headed from 1973.

He took part in the purge after the Kapsan faction incident of 1967 and built up the cult of his father, the Juche ideology and the Monolithic Ideological System, while taking a close interest in film and the arts. He was named successor in 1974 and confirmed publicly at the party's Sixth Congress in 1980. He became supreme commander of the army in 1991 and chairman of the National Defence Commission in 1993.

After Kim Il Sung's death in 1994 he took over a country in economic collapse, and a famine in the 1990s killed large numbers of people. He became party general secretary in 1997 and ruled through his 'military-first' policy, with tentative economic openings such as the Kaesong industrial zone. He held the first inter-Korean summit with Kim Dae-jung in 2000 and a second with Roh Moo-hyun in 2007, and in 2002 admitted to Japan that North Korea had abducted Japanese citizens.

Under his rule North Korea carried out its first nuclear test in 2006 and a second in 2009, bringing international sanctions. He died in December 2011 and was succeeded by his son Kim Jong Un.