North Korea’s official agency, KCNA, announced this Wednesday, May 8, 2024, in a press release, the death of the country’s former propaganda chief, Kim Ki Nam. Died at the age of 94, he is considered the mastermind of the cult of personality around the Kim dynasty. According to KCNA, Kim Ki Nam died due to his old age and a “multiple organ dysfunction”.
The agency specifies that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, prayed in silence Wednesday morning in front of his coffin “with bitter sorrow at the loss of a veteran revolutionary who remained unfailingly loyal” on a diet.
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Former Vice Chairman of the PTC and longtime propagandist
Although he was, for a time, vice-president of the Workers’ Party of Korea (the WPK, the ruling party, Editor’s note) and ambassador to Beijing in the 1950s, Kim Ki Nam spent most of his career in state media and the country’s propaganda.
Editor-in-chief of the state newspaper Rodong Sinmun in the 1970s, he then headed North Korea’s agitation and propaganda department from 1989 to 2017.
Close friend of Kim Jong Un’s father
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), the father of Kim Jong Un.
Kim Ki Nam notably wrote 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 quasi-religiously in North Korea as the “Paektu Lineage”, named after the country’s highest mountain, officially the birthplace of Kim Jong Il.
“The North Korean equivalent of Goebbels”
Contacted by Agence France Presse, the head of the Global Institute for North Korean Studies in Seoul (South Korea), believes that Kim Ki Nam is “the North Korean equivalent of Paul Joseph Goebbels”, the head propaganda from Nazi Germany.
“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.
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.
Replaced by Kim Jong Un’s sister in 2018
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 band plays in the background 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.”
