Cruel tyrant and dear leader

Seoul: Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader who died on Saturday, will enter the history books as one of the world's cruellest tyrants, following a reign of terror during which he developed nuclear weapons while his compatriots starved.

The reclusive Kim was often portrayed in the West as a caricature of a mad dictator: a gluttonous playboy who compensated for his short stature with a bouffant hairdo and platform shoes, an internet addict who had more than 20,000 DVDs.

But contrary to the popular impression of Kim as a madman, Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state who met him in Pyongyang in 2000, said that Kim "was not delusional".

"I found him very much on top of his brief," she said in her memoir, Madam Secretary.

Indeed, Kim used calculated brinkmanship to keep the world at bay, while at home he wreaked havoc. He promoted a pervasive personality cult that saw him and his father, the state's founder Kim Il-sung, revered as deities, and used an unimaginable level of fear to keep the populace under control.

Humanitarian disasters

Any misstep — suggesting even to one's wife that Kim's economic policies might not be the best, or watching a South Korean film — could land not just the perpetrator but their entire family in a political prison.

In one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 20th century, Kim allowed as many as three million people — more than ten per cent of the population — to starve to death during the mid-1990s in a famine resulting from decades of economic and agricultural mismanagement. All the while, he was leading a lavish lifestyle.

Konstantin Pulikovsky, a Russian official who accompanied Kim on a train journey to Moscow (Kim was terrified of flying), described how live lobsters and roasted donkey were flown in to supply the train each day.

"I am the object of criticism around the world," Pulikovsky quoted Kim as saying in his book about the journey. "But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track."

According to state propaganda, Kim was born on Mount Paekdu, the spiritual home of the Korean people, underneath a bright star. In reality, he was believed to have been born in 1941 in a Soviet Army camp near Khabarovsk, in the Russian far east, where his father was exiled.

He spent parts of his childhood in China after his father invaded US-backed South Korea, sparking the three-year Korean war in 1950, but later attended Kim Il-sung University, majoring in political science.

In 1991, Kim was put in charge of the military — despite never having served himself — until his father died in 1994.

Kim married four times — first to a woman chosen by his father, with whom he had a daughter. With his second wife he had a son, Kim Jong-nam, now about 37, who was considered the obvious heir until he was caught sneaking into Japan using a false Dominican passport, leading to his falling from favour.

He had two more sons, Kim Jong-chul and Kim Jong-eun, with Ko Young-hee, a dancer who was called his favourite wife but died from cancer in 2006. The same year, Kim married his secretary, more than 20 years his junior.

Over the past year, Kim had been grooming Kim Jong-un to become his successor.

— Financial Times