‘Dear Leader’ an enigma throughout career

KIM JONG IL, North Korea’s mercurial and enigmatic long-time leader, was reputed to have a taste for cigars, cognac and gourmet cuisine.

State media said he died of a heart attack.

He is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008 but he had appeared relatively vigorous in photos and video from recent trips to China and Russia and in numerous trips around the country carefully documented by state media.

French neurosurgeon, Dr Francois-Xavier Roux, who says his medical treatment brought Kim Jong Il out of a coma following a debilitating 2008 stroke has suggested the secretive North Korean leader was living on borrowed time. Kim was believed to have had diabetes and heart disease.

Few firm facts are available about North Korea, and not much is clear about the man known as the “Dear Leader”.

North Korean legend has it that Kim was born on Mount Paekdu, one of Korea’s most cherished sites, in 1942, a birth heralded in the heavens by a pair of rainbows and a brilliant new star. Soviet records, however, indicate he was born in Siberia in 1941.

His father, Kim Il Sung, emerged as a communist leader after returning to Korea in 1945 after Japan was defeated in the Second World War.

With the peninsula divided between the Soviet-administered North and the US-administered South, Kim Il Sung rose to power as North Korea’s first leader in 1948.

The North invaded the South in 1950, sparking a war that would last for three years, kill millions of civilians and leave the peninsula divided by a demilitarised zone that today remains one of the world’s most heavily fortified.

In the North, Kim Il Sung meshed Stalinist ideology with a cult of personality that encompassed him and his son. Their portraits hang in every building in North Korea and on the lapels of every dutiful North Korean.

South Korea has accused Kim of masterminding a 1983 bombing that killed 17 South Korean officials visiting Burma. In 1987, the bombing of a Korean Air Flight killed all 115 people on board. A North Korean agent who confessed to planting the device said Kim ordered the downing of the plane.

Kim Jong Il was 33 when his father anointed him his eventual successor. He took over after his father died in 1994, eventually taking the posts of chairman of the National Defence Commission, commander of the Korean People’s Army and head of the ruling Worker’s Party while his father remained as North Korea’s “eternal president”.

He faithfully carried out his father’s policy of “military first”, devoting much of the country’s scarce resources to its troops — even as his people suffered from a prolonged famine — and built the world’s fifth-largest military.

Kim also sought to build up the country’s nuclear arms arsenal, which culminated in North Korea’s first nuclear test explosion, an underground blast conducted in October 2006. Another test came in 2009.

Alarmed, regional leaders negotiated a disarmament- for-aid pact that the North signed in 2007. However, the process continues to be stalled, even as diplomats work to restart negotiations.

North Korea, long hampered by sanctions and unable to feed its own people, is desperate for aid. Flooding in the 1990s that destroyed the largely mountainous country’s arable land left millions hungry.

Following the famine, the number of North Koreans fleeing the country through China rose dramatically, with many telling tales of hunger, political persecution and rights abuses that officials in Pyongyang emphatically denied.

Kim often blamed the US for his country’s troubles and routinely derided South Korea as a “puppet” of the Western superpower.

George Bush, on taking office in 2002, denounced North Korea as a member of an “axis of evil” that also included Iran and Iraq.

Disputing accounts that Kim was “peculiar”, former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright characterised him as intelligent and well-informed during her visits to Pyongyang.

Kim cut a distinctive, if oft ridiculed, figure. Short and pudgy at 5ft 3in, he wore platform shoes and sported a permed bouffant hairdo. His trademark attire jumpsuits and sunglasses was mocked in such films as Team America: World Police.

Kim was said to have cultivated wide interests, including professional basketball, cars and foreign films.

He is believed to have married once and had at least three sons with two women, as well as a daughter by a third.

His eldest son, Kim Jong Nam, 38, is believed to have fallen out of favour with his father after he was caught trying to enter Japan on a fake passport in 2001 saying he wanted to visit Disney’s Tokyo resort.