Kim Yong-nam, North Korea's Former Ceremonial Head, Dies at 97

Kim Yong-nam, North Korea’s former ceremonial head of state, has died at the age of 97. His unwavering loyalty protected him from political purges and allowed him to serve the country's ruling family across three generations.

He passed away on Monday from multiple organ failure caused by cancer, according to the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Tuesday. North Korea's top leader, Kim Jong-un, visited the bier early on Tuesday to lay a wreath and offer deep condolences, the KCNA reported.

Mr Kim was unique for maintaining favour with the ruling Kim family—to whom he was not related—who have led North Korea as a totalitarian dictatorship since the end of the Second World War. Mr Kim was a member of the ruling Workers’ Party’s Politburo from 1978 until his retirement from public service in 2019.

Mr. Kim's career remarkably spanned the reigns of three generations of the ruling family: Kim Il-sung, North Korea's founder; his son, Kim Jong-il; and his grandson, Kim Jong-un.

His longevity was particularly striking because, under the ruling family's monolithic control, senior officials who are not direct kin to the top leader are typically seen as expendable. They are frequently purged and often sent to labour camps, making Mr. Kim's decades of service all the more remarkable.

By the time Kim Yong-nam retired in 2019, he had served for 21 years as the president of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly—North Korea's rubber-stamp parliament.

This position made him the country's ceremonial head of state. During the secretive rule of Kim Jong-il (who led North Korea from 1994 to 2011), Mr. Kim frequently led government delegations abroad. He was also responsible for formally receiving credentials from new foreign diplomats posted to Pyongyang. For example, when the then-South Korean President, Roh Moo-hyun, visited North Korea in 2007, Mr. Kim accompanied him in an open limousine through central Pyongyang. Hundreds of thousands of spectators were mobilised to line the streets, waving paper flowers and shouting "Hurray!"

Despite his high-profile role, Mr. Kim always operated in the shadow of the ruling Kim family. His conduct was viewed by North Korean defectors as a model for how officials should behave.

A clear example of this came in 2018 when he led a delegation to South Korea for the Winter Olympics. He was openly deferential to a much younger colleague: Kim Yo-jong, the influential sister of Kim Jong-un. He was seen asking Ms. Kim to sit on a sofa in an airport VIP lounge before he would sit himself. He only took a seat after Ms. Kim, who was 60 years his junior, indicated that he could do so.

“I found Kim Yong-nam a puzzling figure. In greetings before business began, he was cordial and relaxed, but once at work, he relentlessly followed his script,” Don Oberdorfer, the late American journalist who had met Mr. Kim, wrote in his book “The Two Koreas.”

Mr. Oberdorfer quoted a former North Korean diplomat as saying, “If Kim Il-sung was pointing to a wall and said there is a door, Kim Yong-nam would believe that and try to go through it.”

“Yet by all accounts,” Mr. Oberdorfer wrote, “he is highly intelligent and, due to his high position and prestige within the system, an important behind-the-scenes figure in Pyongyang.”

Mr. Kim was born in 1928 when Korea was still under Japanese colonial rule. After studying in Moscow, he joined North Korea’s foreign service in the 1950s. He quickly rose through the ranks, becoming the party secretary for international affairs in 1975 and the foreign minister in 1983. He successfully navigated many diplomatic crises, including when Russia and China decided to establish ties with rival South Korea in the early 1990s.

He was instrumental in helping Kim Jong-un secure leadership following his father’s death. At Kim Jong-il’s funeral in 2011, Mr. Kim read the eulogy, urging North Koreans to support the dead leader’s son. Later that year, at a large rally in Pyongyang, it was Mr. Kim who declared Kim Jong-un the new “supreme leader of our party, military and people.”

When he led the North Korean delegation to the 2018 Winter Olympics, Mr. Kim became the highest-ranking official from the North to visit the South at that time. His trip helped improve relations between the two Koreas, which ultimately paved the way for Kim Jong-un's meetings with the then-South Korean leader, Moon Jae-in, in 2018, and President Trump in 2019. During one of those meetings, the North Korean leader stepped onto South Korean soil.

State media paid tribute to him on Tuesday, saying: “Comrade Kim Yong-nam lived a life of glory and honour in the bosom of the party, and the leader and his life shone with clean loyalty and high competence.”