STR / AFP
The “North Korean Goebbels” is best known for heading North Korea’s Agitation and Propaganda Department from 1989 to 2017, after serving as editor-in-chief of the state newspaper Rodong Sinmun in the 1970s.
North Korea’s former propaganda chief, Kim Ki Nam, considered the mastermind of the cult of personality around the Kim dynasty, died Tuesday at the age of 94, announced Wednesday official agency KCNA.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un paid his respects in silence early Wednesday morning in front of the coffin “with bitter sorrow at the loss of a veteran revolutionary who remained unfailingly loyal” to the diet, KCNA reported.
Kim Ki Nam, hospitalized since 2022, died due to his old age and a “multiple organ dysfunction”the agency said.
Kim Ki Nam is best known for heading North Korea’s Agitation and Propaganda Department from 1989 to 2017, after serving as the editor-in-chief of the state newspaper Rodong Sinmun in the 1970s. He also served as vice-president of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), and ambassador to Beijing in the 1950s.
After studying in the Soviet Union, he began his career under Kim Il-sung, in power in Pyongyang from the end of the Japanese occupation in 1948 until his death in 1994, and was considered a close friend of his son. and successor Kim Jong-il (1994-2011), Kim Jong-un’s father.
“North Korean Goebbels”
He was the author of the main slogans of the regime and the speeches of its leaders. He is also considered the architect of the personality cult established around the Kim dynasty, which has ruled North Korea with an iron fist for three generations. He had actively supported the hereditary transmission of power from Kim Il-sung to Kim Jong-il, then to Kim Jong-un.
The Kim family is revered almost religiously in North Korea as the “Paektu lineage”named after the highest mountain in the country, officially the birthplace of Kim Jong-il.
Kim Ki Nam “is the North Korean equivalent of Paul Joseph Goebbels”the head of Nazi propaganda, Ahn Chan-il, head of the World Institute for North Korean Studies in Seoul, told AFP. “It can be said with certainty that all the propaganda and agitation strategies of the Kim dynasty were germinated in his brain”added this researcher, a former North Korean defector.
“Veteran of the revolution” –
KCNA described it on Wednesday as “a veteran of our party and the revolution, a prestigious theoretician and a leading political activist”.
In 2015, images broadcast by state media showed the late senior official, in his eighties at the time, diligently taking notes in front of Kim Jong-un, around fifty years his junior.
An image published Wednesday by the Rodong Sinmun shows Kim Jong-un, dressed in a dark suit, paying tribute alongside senior party and military officials in front of a coffin decorated with flowers, while a military orchestra plays at the bottom of the room.
After the retirement of Kim Ki Nam, the role of grand propaganda chief of the regime was finally given to Kim Jong-un’s powerful sister, Kim Yo Jong, in 2018.
In 2009, Kim Ki Nam led a North Korean delegation to South Korea to attend the funeral of former President Kim Dae-jung, a supporter of dialogue with the North and who made a historic visit to Pyongyang in 2000. He had, on this occasion, met the president in office in Seoul Lee Myung-bak.
He had been under sanctions by the United States Treasury Department since 2016, along with Kim Jong-un and other leaders, “for their links to notorious human rights violations in North Korea”.