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Asia Pacific|Kim Yong-nam, Longtime Ceremonial Leader of North Korea, Dead at 97
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/world/asia/nkorea-kim-yongnam-president.html
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In a country where political purges are frequent, Mr. Kim was a notable exception and served three generations of its dynastic rulers.
Nov. 4, 2025, 1:27 a.m. ET
Kim Yong-nam, North Korea’s longtime former ceremonial head of state whose loyalty shielded him from frequent political purges and enabled him to serve the country’s ruling family for three generations, died on Monday.
He was 97 and died of multiple organ failure caused by cancer, the country’s official Korean Central News Agency reported on Tuesday. North Korea’s top leader, Kim Jong-un, visited Mr. Kim’s bier early Tuesday to lay a wreath and express deep condolences, the news agency said.
Mr. Kim stood apart for his ability to stay in favor of the ruling Kim family, to which he was not related and which has ruled North Korea as a totalitarian dictatorship since its founding at the end of World War II. Mr. Kim served on the ruling Workers’ Party’s Politburo from 1978 to 2019, when he retired from public service.
His career spanned the governments of Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea; his son, Kim Jong-il; and his grandson, Kim Jong-un. Mr. Kim’s longevity was even more remarkable because in the monolithic tenure of the ruling family, senior officials outside the top leader’s immediate kin are ultimately considered expendable and are frequently purged and sent to labor camps.
By the time he retired in 2019, Kim Yong-nam had also served as president of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly, North Korea’s rubber-stamp parliament, for 21 years.
That post made Mr. Kim the ceremonial head of state for North Korea. During the reign of the reclusive Kim Jong-il, who was North Korea’s top leader from 1994 until his death in 2011, he often led government delegates overseas. He also received credentials from foreign diplomats newly posted to Pyongyang. When the then-South Korean president, Roh Moo-hyun, visited North Korea in 2007, he and Mr. Roh rode through central Pyongyang in an open limousine, as hundreds of thousands of spectators were mobilized to line the streets waving paper flowers and shouting “Hurray!”
